“Jurassic World” Review: A Disappointing Devolution
Ah, that winning Jurassic Park formula: endless exposition, unrepentant sexism, nudging self-references, deaths of faceless innocents… Yes, it’s good to be back in the magical world of…
Wait, what?
Jurassic World has taken the island, the vehicles, the props, and the skeletal plot structure of the first movie. But if you want the heart, the conscience, the three-dimensional characters, the quotability – oh, the quotability! – don’t look for them here. They died with John Hammond’s beautiful dream.
B.D. Wong’s Henry Wu is a friendly face from the past
There is no Hammond, no mad visionary, behind “Jurassic World,” a destination theme park on a restored Isla Nublar sometime in the near future. The InGen corporate flowchart in this movie is a little vague, but at the top seems to be the nattily-tailored Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), a South Asian magnate whose worldview is inconsistent at best. He spends most of his time flying helicopters, but he has also given his geneticist Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong reprises the small role from the first film, but with new ethnic signifiers) carte blanche to engineer a super-dinosaur. Evidently Simon did this rather absentmindedly, because when Wu explains it to him at length (an hour after other characters have explained it to the audience at length) Simon seems surprised and outraged.
Beneath the distractible and ultimately inconsequential Simon is Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who oversees the financial and public relations aspects of the park. She is prissy and uber-femme, and the script spends as much time criticizing her sex life and careerism as Wu’s Frankenstein experiments. Joss Whedon was wrong: this movie is not “70s sexism” bad, because the ‘70s weren’t this bad. Claire’s shrieking, trembling, and back-arching action poses are found in bad movies in every decade, and good movies in no decade. Her dramatic arc, like everything else about the film, is predictable from the beginning when we learn that she is to be the reluctant babysitter of her sister’s two sons on their visit to the theme park.
A creative and exciting moment; how’d it get into this movie?
The boys, Zach and Gray, are a likable enough pair who hew closely to older sibling/younger sibling stereotypes and mirror the original movie’s Lex and Tim in all but Lex’s gender and computer skills. The highlight of Jurassic World comes when they enjoy one of the park’s rides, a human-sized hamster ball, in a field of herbivorous giants. Unfortunately, the boys have nothing to do when Chris Pratt is on-screen except to pile on his supposedly-charming haranguing of their aunt.
Pratt’s alpha male character – his words – takes finger-in-face browbeating to places it hasn’t been since Harrison Ford was a box office staple. Dinosaur trainer Owen Grady is clearly patterned after Muldoon, the big game hunter from Jurassic Park. The differences between the two brawny men, however, reveal how little Jurassic World’s writers comprehend what makes the first movie, and movies generally, good. Muldoon’s past is summed up in his evocative line, “I’ve hunted most things that can hunt you.” His relationship with the raptors is one of respect and fear, and is encapsulated in his parting tip-of-the-hat, “Clever girl.” Owen’s past, by contrast, is spelled out in needless detail by a mustache-twirling baddie who reminds him that “we hired you out of the Navy.” In case you didn’t catch it, Owen later reminds Claire of the fact. The information doesn’t come into play. Repetition and extraneous information were alien to the taciturn Muldoon and to the Jurassic Park script.
Like Muldoon, Owen is soberly moralistic about the propriety of dinosaur breeding, but his complicity in making raptors serve human needs runs far deeper and culminates in an outrageously improbable yet thoroughly predictable climax already largely spoiled by the movie’s advertising.
Pratt and Howard’s characters have an awkward and unpleasant relationship
The biggest departure from the first film, which Jurassic World compulsively references long after it stops being cute, is the faceless Navy Seal security team stationed on the island. They could have been a James Cameron-like ensemble of colorful cannon fodder, but color isn’t a strength of Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow. The security personnel are voiceless and indistinguishable, and exist simply to raise the body count without incurring consequences. Bizarrely, the most gruesome deaths in the movie are reserved not for them, or for the villains, but for people who are practically bystanders.
Visually, the dinosaurs here are less convincing than their predecessors. The flying ones appear to vary in scale from shot to shot, the plant-eaters still seem unreal, and the chief carnivore is a ridiculous-looking hybrid creation. The raptors are halfway decent if you can ignore the racing stripes.
Jurassic World is a bad taste in the mouth that won’t go away until you’ve rewatched the original and remembered what it’s like to feel happiness and excitement.
That said, is it better or worse than the other two sequels?
Jurassic World vs. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Fossil fuels
Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) goes from celebrity mathematician to action hero in this Spielberg-directed disappointment. Its enduring image is the T-Rex at the swimming pool, but that is less powerful (if no less silly) than the hamster ball and the motorcycle that the Jurassic World commercials have teased. Jurassic World wins the matchup for these and for its many aesthetic debts to the original, however much it suffers from that comparison.
Winner: Jurassic World
Jurassic World vs. Jurassic Park III
Part of JPIII’s ensemble cast
JPIII showcased flying dinosaurs, which World gets some mileage from as well. Sam Neill and William H. Macy are better actors than Pratt (who, true to form, isn’t as bad as his character) and the rest of the World cast. The mere presence of Neill and Laura Dern are enough to raise the forgettable third movie over the hopefully-forgettable fourth.
Winner: Jurassic Park III
I just assumed Pratt’s character was there because if he quit he would have to go back to jail, or they would kill his daughter. Something silly like that. Don’t make us send you back to the Navy where your odds of dying would go down dramatically.
I want to see it, but sounds not great.
I’m planning to see this Saturday or Monday…haven’t decided. Though I’m not quite sure what to expect now after having read this review. I vastly preferred Jurassic 2 over number 3…since you seem to prefer those two movies in the opposite order, it’s left me curious how I’ll enjoy Jurassic World. Either way, it was interesting to read this and I’m going to have to come back and give it a second read-through after I see the movie.
Aaaaand that was the wrong account to post from. Whoops. Note to self: in future check which wordpress account I’m commenting with since they both share the same picture but only one of them has my actual name. Or maybe one account is mine and one account is the horse’s. Who knows. Maybe Cody is just an avid Jurassic Park fan and she’s never told me ;-)
My apparent preference of 3 over 2 is mostly illusory. I could be argued out of it pretty easily, but my overall impression is that 2, 3, and 4 are all on the same low tier. I think a lot of people are arguing, with reason, that 4 is better than 2 and 3 because it’s purposefully silly and self-aware of its B-movie nature. My counterpoint to that is that it’s full of tiresome, conventional exposition, flat, tone-deaf characters, and misdirected violence, three things I wouldn’t want in a gleeful, silly popcorn movie. Its level of failure is perhaps less striking under a so-bad-it’s-good rubric than my it-should-be-good rubric, but I think it’s a big fail under both rubrics.
Still, lots of people are enjoying it and I hope you will.
please don’t see this, just watched some of it on watch 32, and it’s horrible, that goddamn woman with the Frankie Heck from NBC’S The Middle hairdo was a pathetic human lover, every scene, going off on her goddamn, oh human life is more important then your stupid animals rant, and I don’t care for them, then she gets emotional and cries when a plant eater dies? what the fuck? that made no sense! and if you hate the dinosaurs so much, then why the fuck do you work there?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and the kids were as stupid as stupid does, and clichés to a T, the older one cared about getting pussy then his brother or what was going on around him, like give me a fucking break, your around dinosaurs and all you care about is getting your dick wet in a stupid bush? pathetic movie, don’t waste your time on this, if it was written by only a man and not a fucking woman then it could of been awesome, but no, let a airhead fucking co write it so we get the stupidest things imaginable, jesus Christ, go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwhich, whore!!!!!!!!!! fucking feminist movie, I don’t need this bullshit in a Jurassic park wanna be movie, I get enough of that shit on tv, I think they should shut up about it already, it’s getting old, hell even in the 50’s nobody gave a shit, and they sure as hell don’t now. men are better, sorry but they are. fuck you feminsts, lesbians with 50 fucking cats. ugh.please don’t watch this, and what the hell was with jimmy fallons camo in the stupid hamster ball? that part was just ridicioulus! just avoid this like the plague and find something better to watch, cant believe I wasted time on this turd, when I could of been doing something else, I know my sister is gonna hate me for not liking this, but big deal, so I didn’t like it, big shit!
it’s not like she made it! and even then I wouldn’t like it, I would be like, i’m so fucking embarrassed! it was worse then that gotham show, if that’s fucking possible, that was horrible too! yeah, you can outrun a fucking t rex or whatever the fuck it is by wearing high heels through a jungle, without falling or snapping your ankle, give me a goddamn break here! avoid this at all costs, I would rather see Max, the dog movie anyways, which is about a dog that helps soldiers in the Iraq war, then becomes guardian to a young boy, now that is something I would rush to the movies to see, not this piece of crap, there’s not much to choose from this summer, is there? it’s all shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and the dinos looked like crap, that cloned t rex raptor thing looked retarded, and how could anyone think that chris pratt is hot? I didn’t find him too appealing, plus his ass looked huge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! stick with the other ones, or even just the first one, it took it’s time and didn’t feel rushed, unlike this abomination. should of been aborted. that would of made things a whole lot better!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fuck this!
I don’t know if you’re being a troll or whether this comment reflects your actual thoughts (which by the way are abhorrent), but the movie is absolutely not feminist. That’s one of the biggest problems with it. It’s the most sexist mainstream movie I can remember since Temple of Doom. It has one female writer credit based on very old work from when the movie was first in pre-production.