The Weekend Review: Jurassic World

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It may have taken 22 years and $150 million dollars, but we finally have a good sequel to 1993's Jurassic Park.  More than good, actually.  Thanks to Universal finally realizing what made the first movie so great to begin with, this may very well be the best Jurassic Park we've ever seen.

Years after the abject failure of the first park, Hammond's successor has succeeded in creating an actual, functioning Dinosaur Zoo.  The new park - named Jurassic World - has learned from the mistakes of its previous iteration.  Walls are built higher, surveillance is constant and Wayne Knight isn't allowed anywhere near the control room.

The problem is, however, that it's been so successful for so long that the public's interest has started to wane, causing the higher-ups to panic and look for ways to up the "wow factor."  Their solution?  Genetic hybrids that combine the DNA from multiple dinosaurs.

The new dinosaur - fittingly named the Indominus Rex - is larger than a T-Rex, smarter than a Raptor, has thermal and visual camouflage and can sense heat signatures like a snake.  You can't run from it.  You can't hide from it.  And now it's loose on an island with the population of a small city.

The best part about Jurassic World - other than Chris Pratt leading a pack of Raptors into battle like he's some kind of pre-historic Star Lord - is the fact that it understands that it's an unnecessary sequel to a franchise from three decades ago.  More than just acknowledging that fact, it owns it: creating a meta-textual link to the first movie in a way that the "too serious for their own good" sequels never could have accomplished.

When Claire explains the Indominus' origins as their attempt to up the park's wow factor, Owen succinctly points out that "They're dinosaurs.  Wow enough."  When he points out how ridiculous the name Indominus Rex is, Claire asks him if he'd ever heard a kid try to say the dinos' actual names.  After all, Huehuecanauhtlus is a mouthful for just about anybody.

What's more is that we got all of this without having to sit through Jeff Goldblum's manic stuttering.  I know that the man - and in particular, his character - has his fans, but I always thought that he was a poor choice for Ian Malcolm in the first movie and found his insistent inclusion in its sequel despite dying in the first novel just short of insufferable.

Thanks to the upped stakes of a working park and more than two decades' advancement in CGI, the action scenes have never looked better.  The introduction to the Park - through the eyes of an pint-sized dinophile - is nothing short of the realization of Hammond's dream from the first movie.  The scenes spent varyingly hunting and running from the Indominus in the park are exceptional and the final, midnight confrontation between the Indominus, a pack of Raptors a T-Rex and an underwater behemoth whose name I can't even begin to pronounce is nothing short of spectacular.  It's Jaws with scales and every last second of it is fantastic to watch.

For as brilliant as the dino-side of the movie is, its human characters do noticeably pale when compared to the first's eclectic cast of characters.  Chris Pratt is basically just regurgitating his Guardians of the Galaxy performance, which loses a bit of its luster out of context and the second time around.  Although he and Claire are supposed to be the driving adult force of the film, the two lack convincing enough chemistry to justify their romantic entanglement.

The brothers themselves lack a complete arc and are there only to give Owen and Claire a reason to venture into danger that they would otherwise be running from (or helping alleviate behind the scenes).  For as much as I rag on Golblum's Ian Malcom, he at least had a noticeable personality and you cared about ever (potential) death in the film (okay, maybe not the lawyer).

Still, that's a drop in the water when compared to what the film gets right.  It's a powerfully entertaining, beautifully realized film that gave the franchise the shot in the arm that it needed in order to stay relevant in the 21st century.  While I have my doubts about where Universal can take the franchise from here, they have my attention, and I have absolutely no problem shelling out $10 a ticket to find out.

So what did you think about Jurassic World?  Was it as good as Jurassic Park?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Lady's Choice: Top Dino Movies!

Guess who's taking over!

I cannot stop thinking about dinosaurs! Brian and I went to see Jurassic World opening weekend, and now I want to ride a motorcycle with a pack of velociraptors. This isn't a huge surprise for me though. I've been a huge fan of dinosaurs since I was little and checked out all of the dino books from the public library. I used to be able to name all of the dinosaurs that they showed in the original Jurassic Park.

So with with Jurassic World dominating the box office this weekend, I thought that I'd give my top 5 dinosaur movies. This was actually harder than I originally thought. There are a lot of bad dinosaur movies out, most I don't even want to see, so those don't get counted
. Now, I also am not counting movies like Godzilla because I consider them firmly in the kaiju or monster movie category. So without further a do:


5) We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993)

Now, about half the people that I have mentioned this movie to have never seen it or even heard of it. In fact, after the first time I saw it, I wasn't entirely sure if I hadn't dreamt it. This animated movie (based on the children's book by the same name) is in some ways if Jurassic Park didn't end in death and closure. Rex (guess what dinosaur he is) and a hand full of other dinosaurs are brought to the future by Captain Neweyes. He's force fed Brain Cereal that transforms him from ferocious, pre-historic killer to a lovable guy who is just looking to have a good time. Everyone is transported to the future, a.k.a. 1993 New York City, to bring wonder to children. They are given some rules, including staying away from Professor Screweyes who wants to reverse the dinos back to their terrifying states to scare children. Add into the mix two kids, Louie and Cecilia, who are both in need of some friends, and you have a 72 minute dinosaur adventure.

4) Dinosaur (2000)

Now, I know for a fact that Brian is not a fan of this 2000 Disney movie. I, on the other hand, really do like this movie.  Due to a series of events an Iguanadon egg finds its way to an island that is inhabited by lemurs, who adopt the baby Iguanadon and name him Aladar. Years later, Aladar and his family have to escape a meteor by heading to the mainland. Once there, they quickly learn that they need a herd to  survive. Aladar meets Neera who is the sister of the herd leader Kron as they are heading to the herd's mating grounds. Kron is all about survival of the fittest, including letting members of the herd die to the horror of Aladar. I'm pretty sure you can see where this movie is going. I think that this movie, while not Disney's best, is still a good watch for the family and even have it as part of my movie collection.

3) Jurassic World (2015)

I saw Jurassic World opening night with Brian and a friend. We had to sit in the front rows of the theater to watch it, but it was so totally worth it. I wanted a dinosaur leaving that movie. Brian's got the full review of the movie for you, so I will try to keep this brief. Jurassic World is the sequel to the first Jurassic Park. As far as I can tell, this movie ignores the other sequels, which (spoiler alert) will not be making this list at all. This movie still brought up the question of whether humans should be messing around with dinosaur DNA but without rehashing it in the same exact way. The park is up and working with 20+ species of dinosaurs including velociraptors. I think they learned some lessons from the first attempt. For example, the raptors are kept away from visitors because they are considered too dangerous. That's where Chris Pratt's character steps in. He was brought in when the raptors where hatched, imprinted on him, and have been trying to train them to follow commands from him. The investors want bigger attractions to increase attendants and profits, thus leading to the genetically modified Indominus Rex. This movie is full of the scares of being chased by dinosaurs but also those touching moments that make you think of the dinosaurs as more than just "scary monsters." I can't wait to see this movie again.

2) The Land Before Time (1988)

This is the last animated movie on the list. From the animation to the script to the music, the movie had just the right balance of wonder, adventure, and little bit of fright. I can't remember a time when my family didn't own The Land Before Time, or as my sister called them: "The Littlefoot Movies." This movie is at heart a kids movie from the simplification of the names of the dinosaurs (Long Neck, Three Horn, Spike Tail, etc.) to stating the moral and the epilogue at the end of the movie. Little Foot, the little Long Neck, is traveling with his mother and grandparents to the Great Valley, a place of abundance and no predators (Sharp Teeth). He wants to make friends with others but is told that different kinds of herds stick to their own kind. After the death of his mother by a T-Rex and a cataclysmic earthquake, Little Foot has to make his way to the Great Valley. Along the way, he makes friends with other young dinosaurs, and they have to work together to make it past the obsticales in their way to make it to the Great Valley. Brian and I quote this movie often. I can't imagine not showing The Land Before Time to my children.

1) Jurassic Park (1993)

If you were wondering where Jurassic Park was on my list, you've found it. Yep. My top dinosaur movie is the original Jurassic Park. While I didn't see this one until it was out on VHS (I was like 3 when it hit the theaters), I remember my grandmother worrying about if it would give me nightmares. It didn't. It sparked my love afair with dinosaurs. I love the mix of different visual effects in the movie. Your eyes never get to seeing one giving this movie a lot of visual longevity. All of the sound effects combined with the amazing soundtrack make for an emmersive experience. All of the actors give spectacular performances, making me actually feel the excitement of first seeing the dinosaurs to the terror of running from them. This movie is the standard for live action dinosaur movies. As for the following two sequels, don't bother with them. They aren't any where near as good. Watch Jurassic Park and jump straight to Jurassic World.

BONUS!!!
There is another dinosaur movie coming to theaters later this year from Disney, and that is The Good Dinosaur. A young dinosaur named Arlo lives in a world that was never struck by astroid that killed all the dinosaurs. Arlo gets swept away in a river and has to find his way back home. On the way, he finds a little human boy and names him Spot. Its being released on November 15, 2015, and I can't wait to see it.

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The Weekend Forecast: Welcome Back to the Park

In which I predict that big winners (and losers) at the box office this weekend.

It should really come as a surprise to nobody at this point that Jurassic World is set to be the big box office winner over this weekend.  It has absolutely nothing new running against it and, as the latest in a long line of successful - albeit increasingly blase - action movies, it has a generationally loyal following that's incredibly eager to take another tour of Jurassic Park.

It's benefiting from what can best be described as Avengers syndrome.  Nobody wants to compete against it, so it pretty much has full reign over movie-goers for the weekend.  At worst, it will have to compete with non-factors like broadened releases for movies like Love & Mercy, which were never going to bring in the crowds to any significant degree.

And while I will have my review of the film up on Monday, let it suffice for now that Jurassic World is nothing short of a must-see.  I saw it in an absolutely packed theater last night and liked it least of the group I was with, and I still thought that it was awesome!  It's easily the best film in the franchise since the first movie, and even gives that one a good run for its money.

By now, the series understands what its money-shots are.  While it does dabble in dinosaur breeds that are obscure and difficult to pronounce, it keeps the focus on the classics: Raptors and T-Rexes.  And while there is a badass monster cooked up in a lab with bits and pieces of all the best dinosaurs - basically the Cell of Jurassic Park - it never fully supplants the supremacy of the "originals" (such as they are).  It only took them three decades and four movies to do it, but Universal finally figured out why the original was so great to begin with.

So what movie are you planning on watching in theaters this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Trailer Park: Jurassic World's Second Trailer

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

With everything awesome coming out of the Hollywood marketing machine in recent weeks, it's easy enough to forget that Jurassic World is still a thing.  And that's really more the shame, because it actually looks really good.  That goes double for the new trailer that came out over the weekend, which you can see here:

So we're starting to get a better idea of what we're up against as all of the pieces start coming together.  Growing concerned over public ennui and falling park attendance, the owners of Jurassic Park pushed for producing genetically modified hybrid dinosaurs that never existed in nature in any form.  It's bigger than a T-Rex, smarter than a Raptor and hunts purely for sport.

The movie seems to be doing everything it can to make us forget about the last two movies in the franchise, and I'm more than happy to chomp at the bit.  BD Wong's back in his old role and Star Lord  Chris Pratt's character looks to be about as much immature fun as her was in Guardians of the Galaxy.  And that's not even mentioning how awesome it's going to be to finally see a functional, tourist-populated Park in the franchise.

While the trailer doesn't spoil too much of the movie (unlike some movies that I could mention), I do feel like it gives away a few too many set pieces.  We see the destruction of the Pterodactyl habitat that results on them picking off tourists from the first trailer.  We see more trained raptor action and theme park exhibits.  It connects just enough narrative dots for us that I would have preferred to remain in the dark about for a while longer (even if nothing that they revealed was ever too much).

I have to admit that the trailer has me pretty stoked about the movie, which ultimately the reason why they make these in the first place.  They have a great cast (something old, something new), great effects and a story that I can get well and truly excited about.  Here's to hoping that the movie will live up to its promise.

So are you looking forward to seeing Jurassic World in theaters?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: The Retro Blockbusters of 2015

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Is it just me, or do all of the films that are coming out this year look really familiar?  This isn’t me whining about how Hollywood’s running out of ideas, nor about how there are too many sequels or remakes or reboots.  I like sequels, or at least the good ones.  While the first film of a franchise is generally worried about laying out the ground rules and setting up the world, sequels are free to bend (and sometimes break) those rules and explore those worlds.  Even reviled sequels (like Alien 3) usually bear at least some worthy fruit (like the Xenomorph’s ability to appropriate physiological traits from those it impregnates). 

I’m commenting on the oddly specific type of sequels and remakes that are coming out in 2015: developing on or revisiting the same group of Generation X blockbusters that were ubiquitous throughout my and many others’ childhoods.  We’ve gotten latter day Star Wars, tired Jurassic Parks and increasingly convoluted Terminators before, but never quite like this and certainly never all at once.  They all seem less concerned with moving their various franchises forward as much as they are about returning to square one: exploiting what made the original films so appealing to begin with.

Take Jurassic World, for instance.  The series’ first film presented the absolute marvel of genetically engineering dinosaurs and putting them together in a high tech zoo.  Sure, there was corporate espionage and chaos theory thrown in for good measure, but the soul of the film was the simultaneous wonder and terror of bringing Earth’s most ancient monsters into the 20th Century.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park‘s concern wasn’t so much replicating the success of Jurassic Park, but on-upping it.  It wasn’t enough to revisit the theme park, they had to bring them to the mainland and let them run amok in downtown San Diego.  Despite its better intentions, Jurassic Park III was born of the same “one-up the original” mindset (although let’s face it, the God-awful script didn’t do it any favors).  It wasn’t enough to have the Tyrannosaurus Rex – an animal whose name translates into “Tyrant Lizard King” – as monster to beat.  They instead had to go with the Spinosaurus, a dinosaur that few people knew, let alone cared, about.

While it might appear on the surface to be following the exact same pattern of “Jurassic Park, only better” that the other sequels went with, what we actually see is a return to form for the series.  Despite their names, what was the one thing that none of the other sequels had?  A park.

Jurassic World begins with a functional, sustainable, dinosaur-laden theme park that has been around for so long that the novelty of its existence has worn off.

The eventual result of this – that the corporate powers that be engineer hybridized, designer dinosaurs – is more in line with the spirit of the first film than either of the sequels.  The reason why the dinosaurs were able to break free and terrorize the film’s protagonists was that splicing dinosaur DNA with sex-changing frogs resulted in giant, carnivorous lizards to spontaneously change their sex in order to reproduce at an unregulated rate.  Purposefully making them more dangerous is simply the next step in human stupidity.

While the problems with the Star Wars prequel trilogy are far too numerous to address here, suffice it to say that they largely boil down to the same general point: the films did not resemble the originals.  The set and ship designs were too slick, the CG too obvious, the action too omnipresent and the characters too obnoxious.  It was so focused on what it could do with modern special effects that it forgot what it was supposed to be doing with it: telling a compelling story with likable characters.

If the series’ creator couldn’t do Episodes 4-6 justice, what chance do a bunch of Disney executives looking to make back the more than $4 billion investment that they made on the franchise?  As it turns out, a really good one.  It’s easy to forget that between the billions spent to buy the rights to the series and the hundreds of millions spent to produce, advertise and distribute each film, Disney won’t make anything back if people do not like the movies enough to sit through all of the sequels and spin-offs that they have planned.

As a result, Disney has been hell-bent on making a product that people not just want to see, but will pay through the nose in order to do so (in many cases two and three and four times).  That’s why the film (and its surrounding marketing) have gone back to the series’ basics.  The trailer prominently features Tatooine; the ships and droids very closely resemble what were in the first films; the last twenty-odd seconds was completely devoted to an aerial dog-fight between Tie Fighters and the Millennium Falcon.

Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker are all reprising their roles from Episodes 4-6 and Abrams has been a broken record about the use of puppets and physical props throughout The Force Awakens‘ highly publicized production.  Disney knows exactly what Star Wars fans want to see and has no problem selling it to them at $10 a ticket.

The Terminator franchise has been so focused on moving the story of John Connor into the future that its creators seemingly forgot that series owes its whole existence to time travel.  Why have a lone robotic assassin attack one person along a linear timeline when you can send the second (or third, or fourth) one(s) to reinforce the initial one whose mission failed?  Why not send it back to just after the events of the first movie, when Sarah Connor is weak, alone and pregnant?  Why not revisit the same night again and again and again, like every Back to the Future film seems to revolve around November 5, 1955 in Hill Valley.

Obviously there are very good reasons to not do this, but my point remains: if your central premise is something as wibbly-wobbly as time travel, why not bend the franchise back in on itself?  Why not make it entirely about its own existence?  After the disappointing reception of Terminator Salvation, the stewards of the franchise must have finally asked themselves this same question.

Terminator Genisys turns the franchise into a temporal ouroboros: taking the present-day timeline (now the post-apocalyptic future of the first film) and bringing it back to that fateful night when Kyle Reese landed in 1984, only things aren’t quite how we remember it.  Something went wonky in the timeline, so now Sarah Connor is already the badass that she would become in Terminator 2,  with the Schwarzenegger Terminator in tow, and the T-1000 (or at least some approximation of it) is the opponent that they have to square off against.  It’s basically the premise of the first film meets the characters from the second one which, from the outside looking in, looks to be all kinds of awesome.

2015’s blockbusters aren’t concerned building off of the past successes of their franchises as much as they are about outright reliving it (literally, in Terminator Genisys‘ case).  It’s not about being the next film in the series, but about keeping as closely to the first as possible.  It remains to be seen exactly how well this year’s trend will pan out, but I expect that we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the summers to come.

So what summer blockbuster are you most looking forward to this year?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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