TREVORROW,
Colin (Dir.), “Jurassic
World”, Universal
Pictures/Amblin Entertainment/Legendary Pictures Inc., 2015.
“Beware
the second head of Science, Arthur – it bites!”
-The
Tick vs. Dinosaur Neil
The
way I remember all the movies in this franchise goes something like
this: there’s the one with the two annoying brats; the one with the
irritating (yet strangely effective) brat (in which Richard Schiff
gets unfairly disposed of); and the one with the brat with the even
more annoying parents. It seems that, Ourobouros-like, we’ve
arrived back at the beginning, and I will now have to think of this
instalment as “the other
one with the two annoying brats”. Irritating, poorly-behaved
children, it seems, is what Spielberg does best, and the only point
on which I’d cut these infants any slack is that their adult
mentors are no better behaved.
It’s
a truism on either Isla Nublar, or Isla Sorna, that if someone says
“do as I say”, or “do as you’re told”, the imperative is to
do the exact opposite. In any other franchise, the moment someone
disobeys a direct order, that’s when they pay the piper. Not in
this series. Here, bad behaviour pays dividends. It’s a crap lesson
and it bugs the hell out of me.
The
two brats in this show are a case in point. One of them – you’ll
be devastated to know – is the little upstart urchin from “Iron
Man 3” and unbelievably,
between that show and this, no-one has bothered to give him a
haircut. Is it just me? This fellow is the oddest-looking moppet I’ve
seen on film in recent years. Every time he’s required to plaster
on an expression of wonder or amazement, I have Mythos flashbacks:
seriously, the next time he mugs for the camera in this way,
freeze-frame and pull out your copy of Chaosium’s “The
Complete Dreamlands”.
Compare and contrast the kid with Geier’s illustration of the
Haemophore with its odd, W-shaped mouth - you’ll see what I mean.
His
brother, the social butterfly Zach, is hardly better. Seriously, did
we learn nothing after Freddy Prinze Jr.? This child is a sleazy,
lacklustre, wannabe-Lothario who, we’re explicitly told, indulges
in acts of emotional cruelty against his younger brother, Gray (the
afore-mentioned moppet). It’s hardly surprising that he takes the
movie’s implicit championing of the ill-behaved and runs a mile
with it. Unfortunately, he gets away with everything. Moving on.
Our
heroes for this instalment (because, as we’ll see, there’s always
a conflict of ideals versus expediency in these flicks and both sides
need advocates) are the brats’ aunt Claire and her potential new
boyfriend Owen “Dances with Raptors” Grady. She’s the Executive
Officer on deck at Jurassic
World, wheeling and dealing
with Big Industry for endorsement of the latest attractions and
managing the daily throughput of over 20,000 visitors to the toothy
theme park. He is a touchy-feely ex-Navy Velociraptor handler trying
to communicate with a pod of these carnivores – a “Dinosaur
Whisperer” if you will. She calls the monsters “assets”; he
champions their right to be treated with respect as living beings.
We’re told early on that these two went out on a date at one point
but clearly things did not work out. It’s easy to see why.
Claire
(no last name – there’s a reason) is presented to us visually as
an unearthly being. This is partly because Bryce Dallas Howard is a
somewhat elfin-looking woman anyway, but she spends the entirety of
this film doing battle with wardrobe and makeup to try and appear
halfway normal. In most of the scenes her face looks weirdly
skull-like, or flushed, which – along with the helmet-hair –
makes her look like another botched side project of Hydra’s
super-soldier efforts. The rest of the time she vaguely resembles the
robot lady from “Metropolis”.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that, in Costa Rica, she’s
wearing hosiery for the entire film. In previous instalments, the
lead women have all been practical and no-nonsense; this character is
a glaring exception to that rule.
Which
brings us to Chris Pratt. I’ve tried to like this guy; I’ve not
seen his televisual efforts, but I genuinely tried to like him in
“Guardians of the Galaxy”
- I found him wanting. Every time he walks on stage I hear Jimmy
Buffett playing “Margaritaville”
in the background. No matter what he’s overtly wearing, he’s
always got an implicit Hawaiian shirt and a pair of boardies on
underneath. It’s not that he’s ineffective in his roles, it’s
just that he’s not credible. No matter how ‘Clint Eastwood
squinty’ he gets, he’s still a stoner goofball. And, like Claire,
his character in this film is a departure from the template which the
other films established.
In
the previous movies, tough guys with guns get nowhere; victory comes
to the brainy dudes who can think their way around the obstacles.
Here we see the opposite of that: both Claire and Owen win through by
grabbing big guns and turning to the ‘kill switch’ technology.
Owen, as Zach notes, is a “badass”, and this makes him the hero.
Our brainy tech characters are relegated to second-string (if they
aren’t active baddies) whereas before, they were lovable saints. I
wonder, with Spielberg the Executive Producer of these movies, why
the template has been allowed to buckle so dramatically? After all,
if it isn’t broken, as they say – and these films are serious
bread-and-butter rent-payers for Spielberg – why mess with it?
Peculiar.
There’s
another way to read this movie too, which is probably incidental, but
I found it interesting. Those people who have only one name are the
“good guys”, in that they are single-focus beings with no hidden
agendas; those whose single name is a surname
are baddies with an overt negative agenda. Thus we have “Claire”
and “Zach” and “Gray” and their parents (“Karen” and
“Thingummy”) as the dyed-in-the-wool innocents and Vincent
d’Onofrio’s “Hoskins” as the ‘let’s breed dinosaurs for
military purposes’ bad guy - did he not watch the “Aliens”
movies? “Barry”, Owen’s partner in ‘raptor-training is also a
good guy (although every time he said “merde!”
and the sub-titles translated this as “[speaks French]” I had an
inadvertent chuckle). Those characters with two names are compromised
and cross over the moral boundaries: thus “Owen Grady” is
compromised because his Velociraptor project is funded by Hoskins’
InGen
cronies with military financing; “Frank Lowery” the goofy
tech-head is cynically wise to Jurassic
World’s deep issues and must
be prodded to rise to heroism; “Simon Masrani”, the billionaire
owner of the park and inheritor of Hammond’s vision, shoots himself
in the foot by asking for “thrills” in dino-development rather
than being content with “wonder”; and “Henry Wu” (B.D. Wong,
whom I always fondly remember from the X-Files’
“Hell Money”) is the
geneticist who compromises safety with expediency in the race to
create more exciting monsters. This pattern falls down in spots
(“Zara” the British P.A. for instance), but it’s concrete
enough to give a sense that this signalling system is what they’re
going for.
This
entire franchise has been – for me at least – a kind of Chinese
puzzle in terms of screenplay writing. It feels as if there were so
many good ideas that were thrown into the writing of the first film
that no-one was willing to cut anything out, or to truly let anything
go. It feels as if the intention all along was to make sequels, and
that anything that couldn’t be squeezed into one film would fall
handily into the next. Thus, we couldn’t have a Pteranodon
encounter in the first film along with all the rest of the mayhem,
despite the fact that there’s that shot of a flock of them flying
away from the island at the end. Don’t worry, their presence is
explained in film three. In film two, Julianne Moore’s character
has a “lucky backpack” which serves no coherent purpose; never
mind, it’s a crucial prop in film three and there’s an echo of it
in the fourth instalment too, as Gray has a “dork bag” with him,
stuffed full of all sorts of useful things, like matches. On a
writing level, it seems that nothing is ever really cut from the
scripts which these screenwriters come up with – it all just gets
relegated to the next blockbuster. I wonder if there are any more
McGuffins, plotlines, set pieces, or favourite dinosaurs left in the
tool-box? Personally I was grateful to see the Ankylosaurs at last –
a favourite dino of mine.
Echoes
are a big part of this film: every so often we get a spoken reference
or a visual cue to previous episodes, in particular a set piece in
the abandoned original visitors’ centre from the first movie.
Unlike Peter Jackson’s heavy-handed “Hobbit”
hark-backs, these are elegantly handled and work fairly well,
although I still feel that they short-change an inexperienced
audience. Maybe this old set was still standing somewhere and needed
to be trashed, kind of like King Kong’s wall getting burnt down as
part of Atlanta in “Gone with
the Wind”? Perhaps the
presence of such material signals the end of the goodies in the
Jurassic tool-box?
The
premise of this film is that, in order to secure more funding and
thrills for paying attendees, new dinosaurs are being cobbled
together through hybridisation and gene-splicing. The ethics of this
work is discussed at length, as is the decision to treat such
creatures as commodities rather than as entities. Again, we learn the
price of “playing God” when the fabricated Indominus Rex gets
loose and goes on a rampage. It’s a T-Rex/Velociraptor mash-up
built with chameleon genes - to allow it to camouflage itself – and
tree frog DNA – which allows it to thermo-regulate, thus bypassing
infrared detection. I found suspension of disbelief being somewhat
stretched as these revelations fell into place: who would’ve
thought that any of this was a Good Idea? And having built this
horror, how would it be remotely possible to put it on display for
the punters? Obviously the boffins at Jurassic
World are clever, just not
very smart.
Towards
the end of the flick the dino-aviary gets trashed (again!) and the
Birdie-saurs all get loose. I had to wonder why – once the glass
cage broke – did all of these beasties go on a rampage, chewing up
the tourists (for other than the obvious reasons)? I mean, if they
were so hungry, wouldn’t they just have eaten each
other while still in their
gilded cage? Hmmm. It’s hard to get too worked up about the logic
blips though – these films are here for one purpose and the movie
adequately lives up to its raison-d’être.
With the Mosasaurus getting a moment in the spotlight however –
ticking off the box of aquatic dinosaurs that the Spinosaurus
aegypticus only inadequately accomplished – I’m left wondering if
there will be a “Jurassic
Park V”.
At
the end of the film, as in all of the others, we are shown that
dinosaurs cannot be effectively put in a box and displayed to a
paying public. It is demonstrated adequately that ethical science is
the only way forward and that we mustn’t traffic with hubris
in our grand designs. Most of all, in the final analysis, it’s good
to bask in the power that dinosaurs have to heal family rifts, to
strengthen bonds of human feeling, and to make better people of us
all.
(Puke
now.)
Two-and-a-half
Tentacled Horrors.
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