Review: Jurassic World

1993. 4-year-old me had never even seen a movie theater before—I'm pretty sure. For the sake of the story, let's say I hadn't—but I still remember that rush. The giddy excitement of seeing DINOSAURS moving around, interacting with each other, interacting with real humans who I wanted to believe in. The soaring vistas, the somber moments, the tense moments; even tiny stupid baby me was awe-struck. I think. I vaguely remember shouting at people and laughing when Samuel L. Jackson said the word butt. It was a different time. Regardless, Jurassic Park is more than just a film to me: it's an experience. I go back to that movie as often as I can and every time I find something new to love. The sequels...well, I liked The Lost World when it came out. Same reason as the Star Wars prequels: children like seeing flashy lights and dumb action. Going back to that sequel now isn't so great, and I haven't even watched 3 since the first time I watched it in theaters. The less said about it, the better. So like an idiot, Jurassic World lured me in with its promise of riches, a return to greatness for a franchise that so desperately needed an injection of life. Life finds a way after all, right?

The Premise

Two decades have passed since the incident at Isla Nublar, and Jurassic Park has become a legendary attraction, now renamed Jurassic World: after the death of John Hammond, the rights to the park have been bought by Simon Masrani, who has turned the island into the park Hammond might have imagined. Zack and Gray, nephews of the park's director Claire, are invited to a week at the island while their parents finalize their divorce. Meanwhile, Ingen's new military division wants to militarize the velociraptors raised at Jurassic World, leading to a dispute with the raptor trainer, Owen Grady. In a shocking twist, the genetically engineered Indominus Rex, a mixture of several dinosaurs and modern animals, tricks the foolish park workers into allowing it to escape and wreak havoc.

Did none of that sound particularly compelling or make much sense? Don't worry, it isn't and it doesn't!

Objectively...

Nearly everything about this movie seems to have some completely baffling flaw from the writing, the score, the cinematography, even down to the acting and casting of the main roles. Nothing makes sense, and almost every iconic scene is a cheap call-back to Jurassic Park. When it's not doing that, it's either failing miserably or stealthily taking plot points from the other films in the series. Even 3, an undisputed trainwreck. Looking at a purely objective stand-point, there are details that are simply inexcusable for a movie with such a long filming period and with such a massive budget.

Where to begin? I'll save the writing for later, so let's look first at the cinematography. For the most part, nearly every scene is either a wide-shot or completely plain at a safe distance from the actors. Dinosaur reveals are often completely ruined by this, as chunks of the bigger dinosaurs just bob in and out of shots that should hide them from the audience—imagine if Jaws just constantly had the shark occasionally peeking out of the water. Another odd technique that occurs a few times is this weird, panicky camera work that can only be described as "I guess it's a handy cam now." The same kind of handy cam you'd see in found footage movies like Cloverfield: rapid, out-of-focus zoom-ins which randomly intercut the typical action scenes. I'll gripe about this in the second half of the review, but even looking at it objectively the effect is ugly, too rare of an occurrence to be a necessity, and overall kills the tone of a scene. Either film an entire scene in a found footage style or don't.

Other scenes in the movie are wide-shots where every little detail, every actor and every screeching CGI dinosaur, is put into focus. That would be fine if not for the fact that these action scenes are so safe. We're never given a reason to really care about the 20,000+ park-goers; in fact, some shots make a large chunk of the population seem like the true villains of the film: greedy consumers lapping up the shameless excess that Jurassic World has become.

Which leads me to another very big problem I have with Jurassic World: because the shots are typically so bland, the soundtrack takes a big hit because it's almost entirely the soundtrack from the original film. Those big swells in the score; the bombastic theme; those tender, quiet moments are all ripped from a much better movie to tug on your heart-strings, and the result is something that seems more like a bootleg than a sequel or even a loving homage. For example, take the first big reveal of the brachiosaurus—really, just take it all in and listen to the score.

The epic swells in the music are accompanied by such an awe-inspiring scale that cannot really be put into words, especially on a first viewing. You're totally immersed, and when it crashes down to a thundering roar the music is right there with it. And it keeps going further in the scene as the herd is revealed, when the gravitas of Jurassic Park, both the park and the film, finally hits. "They finally did it," Ian whispers in disbelief, horror, and awe.

The same music is used in Jurassic World near the beginning when the kids enter the welcome center. The swell in the music happens exactly as the camera focuses on an escalator, of all things. Then it swells again when we finally see the tourist center, but honestly, what's impressive about that? It's a building. We've seen buildings. I'm sitting in a building right now as I stew over writing about this disaster.

The acting isn't so great, either. The two kids' mother overacts like crazy, emoting so many times in a single minute you'd wonder what the script was even supposed to convey. Completely stone-faced love to her kid leading directly into face-contorting heavy crying? Is that an emotion? She's not the only one to overact, though. Near the beginning, Claire flings herself around the helicopter over a small amount of turbulence in such a way you'd expect her to simply leap out of it. Worse, this scene is clearly a nod to the helicopter scene near the beginning. You know, the one with the still-debated moment where Alan Grant "finds a way" with the seatbelts? Yeah, that one. They even use the same music when the camera pans over the waterfall! Only this time there's a person losing her mind over what looks like nothing at all, most likely causing more problems for Masrani than intended, and there's absolutely no subtlety or symbolism—just like the rest of the movie. It's obnoxious and cheapens an already cheap call-back to the original film.

And what was the deal with the characters pausing between dialogue? There was an actually well-written part acted out so bad I can't help but wonder if it was intentional.

"Can't you track them by scent?"
-pause-
"I'm from the Navy, not from the Navajo!"
-pause-

It was like watching a sitcom. Like the director told them to just wait for a second, the audience is still catching their breath. I get the joke, it's pretty clever (if not out of place), but seriously, what is even happening here? And no, this isn't the only problem with the acting. The child actors cry and whine and over-emote and honestly it reminds me exactly of why people hated Anakin in The Phantom Menace. I get it, you need kids for the obvious call-back to the first film, but those kids were supporting roles and these are introduced as if they're the protagonists. And why is Vincent D'onofrio slurring so badly? Were those the first takes? Could they not slap the bottle from his hands for ten minutes?

But that's all to be expected, given the quality of the writing. I don't even think I need to really go into it; just go Google "Jurassic World plotholes." If you're too lazy, well, I'll dump a spoiler into the second half of the review. I'll just say this though: A T-Rex that can keep up with—and even briefly hit—a Jeep until it eventually gets tired and gives up. This same T-Rex apparently cannot chase a person wearing heels at a maintained speed over a pretty large distance. That's simply a plot hole and it's been making me so unbelievably angry that I can't think straight. It's been bothering me since I saw the film opening night. I could go on, and on, and on, and on about the problems with the story from an objective point of view, but honestly, there's too much to list without getting into spoilers. I will say this though: you cannot outrun a T-Rex. You can't, I can't, no actual human in this movie should possibly be able to do such a thing.

It didn't take long to find this clip, but I should note I didn't upload it and I don't own the footage blah blah blah, I'm linking to it for educational purposes.

The T-Rex very nearly catches up with the Jeep in what appears to be at least second gear. In fact, near the beginning (in the first linked video, even) Hammond casually mentions the T-Rex was clocked at speeds of 32 miles per hour. Taking that into consideration, the world's fastest runner was clocked running at speeds of about 28 miles per hour. If, say, you were wearing heels, it would be less time than that: in fact, after a bit of research, the fastest clocked speed of a person wearing high heels was 100 meters in a little under 15 seconds—about 24 miles per hour.

Even at a sustained speed right out of the gate, a human being cannot objectively outpace the established speed of Jurassic Park/World's T-Rex. Even the most physically fit athlete in the world would be chased down and turned into a big pasty blob of food within seconds. Objectively. It cannot be argued. Yet this is the logic Jurassic World attempts to push on its poor, helpless viewer. When looking at an inconsistency it's typical to point out plot holes that creep into a movie—this is a matter of shattering one's suspension of disbelief so drastic it makes the existence of fifty-foot-long dinosaurs seem trivial in comparison.

Another glaring fault of Jurassic World is the bizarre mishandling of the film's main theme of rampant, out of control consumerism. This issue, however, I will admit is more...

Subjectively...

I can't wrap my head around whether or not the product placement in Jurassic World is intentional. Some parts are charming: the massive "SAMSUNG INNOVATION CENTER" is so tongue-in-cheek that it made me legitimately turn around on my intense dislike for the film's opening. Characters deride all the product placement in the park: "Just imagine, Verizon presents the Pepsisaurus." It seems charming at first, and it's a fairly interesting theme.

The consumerist theme gets a bit muddled when immediately after this characters interact with their Samsung™ Galaxy© phones, typically shown in crisp detail. There are scenes in this movie where the entire screen is taken up entirely by phones. Phones on dashboards, phones in hand, phones everywhere, all Samsung brand with the phone's front display garishly splayed out. A character screams bloody murder...when she sees her family member's cracked phone on the ground.

And it's not just that, although the Samsung marketing is extremely jarring. Characters walk around with their Starbucks cups so the logo shows completely. One character says something like "we need to get a fast ride," followed immediately by a shot of some Mercedes SUV with the logo so prominent I thought it was a commercial. The teenage boy is constantly shown with his Beats by Dre in such a way that you'd think he was averting his gaze completely from the camera—how else would we know exactly what sick beats he's enjoying his music with? Chris Pratt even has a close-up where he wipes sweat from his brow and takes a deep swig of Coca-Cola from a glass bottle, the logo displayed directly across the center of the screen. The only thing missing would be for him to wink at the audience and say "refreshing!" Why is there a Pandora's Jewelry in an amusement park?

I can appreciate jabs at consumerism, but being so tone-deaf as to mix the criticism directly into product placement is not only a missed opportunity as much as it is insulting to the audience. It's like the movie's glaring use of CG: the audience is expected to have their eyes gaze over and just enjoy the mindless action (A VELOCIRAPTOR IS THROWN BY THE I-REX AND JUST EXPLODES!), but it's just not working on me. I don't appreciate the product placement. I don't appreciate replacing practical dinosaur models entirely with floppy CG monsters.

With the CG, though, I'll admit that it's more disappointment coming straight from the recent Mad Max. That movie is full of so many amazing practical effects that it comes off as simply classy movie-making. Jurassic World...not so much.

Verdict:

I don't expect much from movies. If you're just an action movie, impress me with the action, Show me some scale that really makes me gasp, have some practical effects that make me question "How is that actor not dead?" Jurassic World stands on the shoulders of greatness and just middles around with the sequels of the first film. It might be the best sequel to the original, but when over half the film is shameless product placement, lame jokes and lazy call-backs to one of the best films of all time, it feels more like I'm being sold a pitch for a sequel—and don't you worry, Jurassic World sets up what will likely be a massive franchise of the same drivel. But look at those box office returns: it might not be what I wanted, but audiences most certainly did. I'll be skipping the next Jurassic Whatever.

Heavily Flawed