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What do they got in here, King Kong? [Jurassic World]
Cristoval
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Richard Attenborough owns an island, off the coast of Costa Rica...
...Welcome to Jurassic Park and/or World.
The sequel to one of the greatest movies ever conceived comes out today and probably warrants some discussion, if early reviews are to be believed. So let's discuss all things Jurassic Park related like how the book was awful (it was) or how Ariana Richards being covered in Brachiosaurus snot kicked off one of my weirdest first crushes ever.
Oh yeah, and dinosaaawwwwrrrrs!
BOOM!
BAM!
POW!
GET OUT OF HERE, YOU!
That's better...
I have yet to see it but will post some impressions later. For those new to this wonderful world of island attractions, Lindy West's run down on the first film is the best place to start!
Hold on to your butts etc!
...Welcome to Jurassic Park and/or World.
The sequel to one of the greatest movies ever conceived comes out today and probably warrants some discussion, if early reviews are to be believed. So let's discuss all things Jurassic Park related like how the book was awful (it was) or how Ariana Richards being covered in Brachiosaurus snot kicked off one of my weirdest first crushes ever.
Oh yeah, and dinosaaawwwwrrrrs!
BOOM!
BAM!
POW!
GET OUT OF HERE, YOU!
That's better...
I have yet to see it but will post some impressions later. For those new to this wonderful world of island attractions, Lindy West's run down on the first film is the best place to start!
Hold on to your butts etc!
Cristoval on
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Edit: Jurassic park was one of three movies I've seen more than once in the theaters
And a copy paste of my thoughts from the movie thread!
A lot of the stupider looking elements from the trailer are manufactured too. The I.Rex does not talk to the Pteradons, for instance. The escape and rampage are a lot more sensible than I expected. It even nicely lampshades some of those goofy rumours that circulated a few years ago, about hybrid dino human soldiers.
Speaking of, the I.Rex is great. It was something I was apprehensive about, that it'd feel too artificially threatening. Nah. That thing is fucking scary. They do a fair amount of hyping it up, but it earns it. If I have one criticism of it, its that it doesn't have a distinct roar like the T.Rex or the raptors. It loses a little character here, feels like a missed opportunity. Godzilla 2014 got the roar right - you can still make new scary noises!
For critiques of the movie overall... I guess the start of Act 3 is a little slow? It was definitely feeling overly long at that point, but the climax made up for it.
There was also an underdeveloped sub plot involving Henry Wu and D'Onofrio's character Hoskins. It just sorta boop, appears outta nowhere and ends on a confusing note. Didn't even feel like a sequel hook or anything. Just a weird extra thing, yknow?
Surprise highlight - the kids. I liked the Iron Man 3 kid. Older kid was a prick, but a genuine one. Very well written characters. Cared about em a whole lot more than Chris Pratt or Bryce Dallace Howards characters. Those 2 were... OK. Chris was a little one note, tho fun. Bryce was more interesting, IMO she was the real hero character.
Overall, great movie. It ain't flawless, it has goofy moments, but it is a worthy sequel to Jurassic Park. Easily better than 2 or 3. Definitely worth watching!
Ugh.
I didn't enjoy it, but I'm glad it exists only that we got a film out of it.
Don't let me down hollywood, I've got childhood nostalgia on the line here
Maybe I'll go at like 1PM on a Tuesday two weeks from now.
I want Starlord playing with dinosaurs. Will I get Starlord playing with dinosaurs?
Claire is actually a lot more enjoyable to watch.
Also, one part reminded me of that joke from Plinkett's Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull review - where they used the worst possible take of Ford saying 'part time' and that there was a better version in the trailer. Same deal here! The bit where
In the movie he kinda stumbles all over that line, like he rushes through it. Really fucking weird, cause it sounded fine in the trailer. :P
Hm, that definitely doesn't get me excited for the movie, that's for sure. If Jurassic Park has made the final decision to completely abandon its kind of groundbreaking roots from the first movie and is dead set on using ugly-ass, aged-leather dinosaurs, I wanna see them go whole hog and just give reality the middle finger. Have Chris Pratt rock kick-ass jumps off of stegosauruses on his dirtbike while his vicious raptor gang helps him fight crime or whatever. Just really go for it.
Is it possible for those who have seen a few blockbusters in the past 2 years to kind of place it on their own personal ranking list? Is it in the Kingsman area, more the Thor 2 area, etc?
I dunno how to rank it compared to other stuff. I'm a massive Jurassic Park fan, and I loved it. I'd say it wasn't as good as Fury Road (also a faithful sequel to a decades old action movie!) but it comes close.
Having read the book first, I think the book is a lot better than the movie.
It's probably just one of those things.
Like others are saying, he does fine but he doesn't have a lot to work with.
And the trailer somewhat misrepresents him. A lot of his quotes are spliced in from different contexts.
Right off the boat I was filled with the same sense of wonder I haven't felt since we first saw the park back in '93. If there's one thing I've loved it has been the absolute detail put into the world building leading up to the film, with special kudos to whichever marketing team put together the awesome JurassicWorld.com site. Jurassic World looks and feels like an actual functioning park. It is the Disney World to Jurassic Park's Disneyland, without being too fantastical. They do get a liiiittle carried away with the touch-screens and wam-pow future tech, but for the most part it's believable that holograms and the dumb-over cluttered tablet UI (which seems par for the course these days), are a "right around the corner" technology that InGen or Masrani could easily afford. A lot of the utilitarian-ness in the behind the scenes workings of the park are kept in, and I'm glad they didn't feel the need to cover everything in a streamlined Apple-esque design. I said before that I would rather have a movie that deals with the day-to-day of a functioning dinosaur park, and really would have no problem if the first 20 minutes of the film were all that there is to it. Manufactured drama be damned.
Bryce Dallas Howard's character is definitely the standout of this movie, and is given the most to do. I was going into this movie expecting to hate her, but did a nice 180 turn by the end. On the opposite side of the coin I kept expecting Pratt's character (man, what his name?) to get increasingly better, but he just got worse, or at best, stayed as boring as the movie went on. Vincent D'onofrio's baddie was just the shittiest. Every second he was on screen was just a damn drain, and man, what hell did they do to Dr. Wu? Since when did he become such a morally bankrupt, money driven scientist? I know he didn't have the most rounded character in the first movie, but he definitely wasn't.... this. There was literally no reason to take him in the direction they did. Also, Dark Raven X mentioned a weird plot thread between him and D'onofio that kind of goes nowhere and... yeah that was weird.
Whoops, trying to mention pros!
The kids were fine. Their bonding was a little forced but, eh, I bought it. Uh... I enjoyed how they weren't entertained at all by Jimmy Fallon's antics. Very realistic.
The last half was the best part of the movie, and once things finally got dark (The majority of the film shouldn't take place during the day!) it started to feel like a proper, intense Jurassic Park film—but this brings me unfortunately to the cons:
Tone! The tone of this damn film was all over the damn place, dammit! It starts off with the ooh's and aah's, as you do, but by the time it gets to the running and the screaming things are generally PG. Deaths are kept off camera and your mind is left to fill in the gruesome details, which is standard fare for this franchise. However there is one death of an ancillary character that is.... whoof, it's rough. It's something more at home in an episode of Game of Thrones than JP. Oddly, most victims aren't paid much mind and kind of waved off with humour, which doesn't lend much levity to any of the action scenes to begin with, but that all gets turned on it's head when the camera follows the terrifying ordeal of a character getting tossed around by pteranodons, drowned multiple times, and then ultimately devoured. It's as if the director is trying to make it in good fun, like he knows this is what we want to see, but ultimately it's just horrifying, which would have been fine if the mood was on the level of the original film, but yikes. When it's over the characters immediately go back to cracking wise which again, is just fucked up. Did anyone else have this reaction? Really curious.
Ultimately the feeling I couldn't shake is the disingenuous tone of this film. It's awash with a snarky, ironic, "god forbid we convey anything with genuine emotion" vibe. When shit went awry at Jurassic Park, people actually panicked and showed true initiative to get out of their current situation, and even though the majority of them were stock characters, we still felt for them. Here, a fatality at the park is followed with a snide comment by a mustachio'd hipster in a meta t-shirt who is maybe supposed to represent this movie's target audience; the arrested development man-child? I don't know. I don't need any meta commentary, Colin Trevorrow! Stop hanging around Mark Duplass! JW even has the audacity to try and have it both ways by having Hipster-mustache point out "Haha, isn't commercialization ruining everything??" when I just ate a fucking DQ Jurassic Smash Blizzard before watching the stupid thing.
By the time we reach the climax (which is kind of rad. I'm not completely dead inside) it does start to creep into internet meme-fodder territory. Like the script writer was just throwing random shit out there "RAPTORS! MOTORBIKE! T-REX! MOSASAURUS! BACON!" and knowing we would eat it up. AND I DID! It was awesome and compared to everything that came before it, but it would have been absolutely spectacular in a film which actually deserved the pay-off (another dino movie which comes to mind).
However it also helped that it read as a giant "fuck you" to Jurassic Park III's treatment of T-rex, so yeah.
In the end it really made me appreciate how Jurassic Park ended itself on the perfect line and didn't let the characters speak a word thereafter.
All in all, you know what? Yeah it is one of the most enjoyable sequels, it's just too bad you have to shut off so much of your brain, instead of letting all that awesome wonder wash over it with open arms.
No, that would be too interesting.
She's been kind of a comic, throwaway nothing character for her entire time in the film. So, when she gets grabbed by a pteranodon it's a shock, but not a particular surprise. The instant she is grabbed we know she is going to die. But she doesn't.
She gets carried up, then dropped and we think this is it, it'll cut away just before she hits the ground.
But she gets caught by another, and carried even higher. Now we start to worry another one is going to come up and grab her and they'll tear her apart or something, because this scene has been going on for a while, what are they planning? Thankfully that doesn't happen, at least. Instead she gets dropped again, into the water of the Mosasaur enclosure. That's it, then, we think. It's going to loom out of the murky water and the camera will cut away just before it chomps her.
But then the pteranodons start diving into the water after her, and she is pulled out then dropped in again several times before being carried up in the air again.
Finally the mosasaur shows up, bursting out of the water aimed right at the pteranodon carrying her. We watch in slow motion as its jaws open wide, her struggling body gently getting surrounded by its teeth before they snap shut onto the pteranodon. But not onto her, oh no. The positioning was such that she's probably still alive in its mouth, she'll most likely suffocate or drown inside of it once it swallows.
It just went on, and on, and on. The entire time she's screaming and struggling and trying to save herself from this situation. It was ridiculous how gratuitous it was. A death sequence that over-the-top is usually reserved for chief henchmen villains, if not the main villain themselves, and here they are doing it to a woman who was just a nothing throwaway character trying to do her job.
Possibly the most mean-spirited thing I've seen in a movie in years.
Ok good, I'm glad I wasn't just being overly sensitive. That scene was sickeningly out of place, especially for being in a god-damn movie about dinosaurs eating people.
It violates the structure of how all the other deaths are handled in the series. At least, those I can recall. I've blocked out most of 3 from my memory.
There aren't really any spoilers in this next part, I just want to be careful.
Put another way, yes it's a movie about dinosaurs eating people. That scene was dinosaurs torturing a person and that's why it was out of place.
Oh yeah, that scene. That was fucked up.
Maybe it would work fine without Zara's death, but I see why its there. Didn't need to go on as long as it did tho.
The I.Rex killing the Asset Containment Unit was much scarier IMO. We got quick flashes of each death, then cuts to each soldier's flatline. WOOF.
I like both, but I don't think the movie is a good representation of the book. They're basically two separate Jurassic Parks with a few similar plot points.
In terms of that critique:
I'm pretty sure the book was written well before any intention of having a screenplay (at least, no moreso than usual since his stuff developed a propensity to become movies). The worst offender is Prey, which reads like a script (but coincidentally never became a movie).
Muldoon basically explains that his weapon choice was limited by two primary factors: Hammond didn't want him to have any weapons (so no one could harm 'his dinosaurs'), and the Crichton dinosaurs (at least the raptors in particular) have distributed nervous systems, so a rocket launcher makes more sense than a gun. It's somewhat important to remember that Hammond (and hence his employees) were working from the assumption they could treat the park like it was a typical zoo, despite harboring creatures from what is essentially a different world.
I mostly agree about the Grant thing. Ostensibly it's a good idea to have a dinosaur expert working around a dinosaur nest to make sure everything is accounted for, but what they do has no real payoff for the story (no cross checking the nest numbers with the computer or notifying the Costa Rican military about unaccounted animals). The ending feels very rushed once they get the power back up.
It mostly became my favorite book because of the dinosaurs and being able to read a book that had swears in it when I was like 10. Over time I've become a bit more critical of the writing style, characterization (especially Lex, who literally does nothing but annoy the other characters), Malcolm preachiness and generally strange decision-making by some of the characters. But it somehow manages to still be pretty on-point about humanity's lack of respect for genetic power and the illusion of control over nature.
Plus it has dinosaurs eating people.
I'm not even sure what I expect from Jurassic World. I haven't even seen the trailer, but I plan on seeing the movie over the weekend.
It shouldn't have happened at all, at least not entirely to one person. Spreading out the various things that happen to that character to multiple people over that segment would have filled that same role w/r/t setups.
That was Iron Man 3 Kid? Didn't notice because he wasn't as insufferable.
The guy that brought us Pvt. Lawrence, Edgar from MIB, and Detective Goren, and this is the best we get from him?
Also, saw it 3D. It was mostly sufficient, with none of the over the top zooming at your face shots. And maybe it was just me, but was the scale of some of the shots just off? The helicopter seemed too small when set against the trees and scenic vistas. And when it landed, it just looked silly, like a zoomed in perspective shot of an RC helicopter.
It's like everyone was expecting poor CGI, then projected that onto the actual real stuff?
I think there was too much lighting.
No, it's fundamentally about the same thing as Jurassic Park.
Man makes dinosaur. Dinosaur eats man. Woman inherits the Earth.
I'm more concerned in terms of not showing people what we currently think dinosaurs were actually like, in favor of just having them be the generic scaly monsters everyone expects.
And then they go ahead and make a fake dinosaur, because the series apparently didn't have enough of them already.