Review - "Jurassic World"

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.