Jurassic World

Jurassic_World_posterI do not know how I really feel about this movie. I definitely liked it, much more than Lost World (which was not as bad as people like to pretend) and Jurassic Park III (which was pretty terrible). Yet there were a few things that bothered me and I just could not get past them. So let me start with the things I liked: (umm, spoilers)

-Chris Pratt. He is funny, charming, believable as a whatever it is he does. I loved the part when the two kids say that they want to stay with them, and Bryce Dallas Howard is like “I will never leave you” and they are both like “we meant Owen.” Chris Pratt is just cool and we all want to hang out with him.

-The story. We have this giant amusement park (I read somewhere that this film is pretending the second two movies never happened) that is built upon the disaster that was Jurassic Park. And we get to see what it would be like with 20,000 people at the park. Picture Disney World, but with scary, extinct monsters roaming around. It was something that was totally believable. That is how I would picture it, especially with the sponsors/investors lining up to get their name on a new dinosaur.

Plus, this desire from marketing departments to want a bigger, badder dinosaur leads to the creation of weird hybrids. Again, all of the things we hear from these people sound like things actual marketing people would say. So for me, it is not all that crazy.

-I also enjoyed that they had a little throwaway line about how the park wanted the dinosaurs to look a certain way so that is how they engineered them. It was nice because as paleontologists continue to learn more, it looks like many of our thoughts on dinosaurs turned out to be wrong and other stuff is highly debated. So for example, did raptors have a weird fur, well you have some paleontologists who say yes and some who say no. This way, no one can really say “hey, these are not accurate” since the movie is clear these are not supposed to be exactly how they were 65,000,000 years ago.hqdefault

-The bond between the brothers. There was the line about how the older brother can be really mean to the younger one, but when all the chips were on the table, he stepped up and protected him. I got a little tear in the eye when he gives the speech about how they are brothers and that will never change.

-The suspense in the movie was great. Once the attacks started, I was pretty much on the edge of my seat the entire time. Also, it was pretty intense in some of the kill scenes. Like it should be! I want to see a dinosaur bite a guy in half.

Okay, so those are the things I liked. Let me explain what I did not like.

-Chris Pratt. This is my fault. I recently watched the entire run of Parks & Rec and now Lindsey is watching it. So it is really hard for me to see Chris Pratt and not think of Andy Dwyer. But seriously, he was in the Navy and when gets out, he takes a job for InGen, or Jurassic World? He then starts training velociraptors (how does one get that job?). Is he a biologist (someone mentioned his study)? jurassic-world-super-bowl-13

-Bryce Dallas Howard. Could they have made a more generic character? She is a cold, joyless, numbers only park manager. She does not see these things as animals, instead they are assets. I feel like this character has been in at least a thousand other movies.

-And why did we need a romance angle? Totally unnecessary.

-Speaking of unnecessary. Did we really need the mom/dad divorce subplot? That seemed a bit dumb. Also, the two kids would start talking about it at very odd times. In fact, they did not seem to have the appropriate amount of terror for two kids being chased by some genetically modified killing machine. After the Indominus Rex breaks their gyrosphere and they jump the waterfall, they climb onto the shore and just start laughing. Seriously? You were almost eaten.

-And the last thing that really bothered me was the ending. Okay, so we established early in the movie that Chris Pratt has trained the raptors to follow some basic commands, but even he is a bit scared of them (his control is based on them viewing him as the Alpha at all times). We see that in the early scene where the guy falls in the pit and Pratt tells the guy to close the gate and as it shuts, he dives under it and the raptors attack and almost get him.

Then when they are all sent out to kill the Indominus Rex, the raptors realize that Rex is the new alpha, since he is part raptor and can talk to them. They turn on Chris, but then a little later, Chris is able to convince them to join his side. Okay, I know that dino-experts think that velociraptors were very intelligent, but do you really think they would overcome that base instinct to just eat the guy especially when their other option is to be eaten by a much bigger guy? Remember, early on they were pretty close to eating Pratt.bryce-dallas-howard-jurassic-world

And then for some reason when they release the T-Rex from her cage, she attacks the Indominus Rex (I-Rex) and once the sea dinosaur shows up to eat I-Rex, the T-Rex just looks around and heads off to relax, after giving a nice nod to his new raptor pal. Ummmmmmm, what? I am pretty sure a T-Rex would just eat the raptor and then be like “hmm, human, I haven’t had that in a long time!” Is this the same T-Rex from the first movie?

The entire movie preached how these are animals and they cannot be controlled. And yet at the end of the movie, Bryce controls the T-Rex by getting it to follow the flare. You know, because that was how they told it to come get the goat early in the movie. It would have been much more awesome if she would have tossed the flare and the T-Rex just looked at it, then turned back and ate her. There shitty aunt, remember your nephew’s ages now.

Chris Pratt constantly tells Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) that you could not use raptors as weapons. You could not point them at a target and expect them to just kill on command. But, isn’t that what he does? He stares into Blue’s eyes and then points to I-Rex and the raptors change teams and attack the big monster.

The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get. jurassic-world-super-bowl-10At the end of the day though, it was a summer action movie with dinosaurs, can you really complain too much?

 

Author: Ngewo