#i genuinely dislike 99% of horror comedies

[tyrantisterror]

Scattered Thoughts from a Second Viewing of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Part 2 of ??? for today’s Jurassic Park thoughts.  Part 1 is here.

Aw yeah, it’s a scattered thoughts post!  That’s like a review, except lazier and harder to make sense of!  YAY

I’m gonna break this down into the Good, the Bad, and the Unnecessary Headcanons.  I’m also going to put a break because 1. this will probably get long and 2. THIS DEFINITELY CONTAINS SPOILERS

SPOILERS BELOW!  YOU WERE WARNED!  TWICE!

The Good

I should note that most of these positive points have an implied “...but...” at the end that will connect to points in The Bad.  I’m not going to put those “but”s in, though, because I don’t want to undermine the fact that these positives DO exist.

This movie is pretty solid if you only focus on Blue’s arc.  She is by far the most consistent character in the film, and is at least tied for the strongest character arc if not the outright winner.  Great for fans of monsters-as-characters. 

Maisie, the little girl, is possibly tied with Blue for best character in the film, or at least a close second.  She’s both consistent in her characterization AND develops as a character as the story goes on - something no other human character in the movie can claim!  I’d say she’s the best child character in the franchise, but that’s such a depressingly low bar that it would feel like damning with faint praise (but she is though).  So instead I’ll say that she’s one of the best child characters in film.  That’s a big statement to make, but dammit that child actress deserves some fucking props.

They rerailed Owen Grady’s character a bit - he’s much more Goofy Fun Loving Chris Pratt this time around, and much less Super Macho Tough Guy Army Man Who Trains Dinosaurs.  It makes him a bit of a mess of the character, but if we view the Owen Grady of this movie as a completely different character from the Owen Grady of Jurassic World, he’s actually pretty likable.

The cinematography and the editing of this movie is, as I said before, absolutely fucking stellar.  The chase scenes are both beautifully and creatively shot, doing great work at making dinosaurs both terrifying and wondrous to behold in a day and age where it’s very hard to wow people with special effects.  The action scenes are both interesting AND easy to follow - most movies these days have to choose one or the other.  Even the quiet moments are well shot and edited, held back only by, y’know, the dialogue.  And the characters.  And the plot.  It’s still a mess, but it’s a mess that was directed well.

There are so many clever homages to past horror films in this flick - not just the Jurassic Park movies, either.  The Indoraptor’s chase of Maisie references both Nosferatu and The Haunting (1963), for example, and while I never would have expected those movies to be referenced in a Jurassic Park movie... it actually works?  Like, really well?  It’s great and creative.  There is a genuine artistic spark behind a lot of the things in this movie and that has to be acknowledged.

That Brachiosaurus scene has immense emotional power.  If you weren’t emotionally moved by it to some degree, either 1. you hated this movie before it even began and refused to allow it even the slightest chance of being good, or 2. you’re some sort of heartless monster who feels nothing for animals.

The Indoraptor is sort of like Emperor Palpatine, in that he’s a flat character whose only motivation seems to be “I really love doing evil things,” and yet that somehow... works?  Like, the execution takes that flimsy motivation and makes something really compelling.  He’s a flat villain, but he’s so delighted by his explicitly evil actions that you can’t help but be charmed.  The Indoraptor is probably the most straight forwardly-evil character in the entire franchise, and it’s delightful to watch.

The lady playing the Paleo-Veterinarian gave a very good snarky performance despite the limitations of the writing.  I would like to see that actress in more things.

Rexie got several chances to punish the wicked, and that makes the child in me happy.

I got to see a lot of scenes of dinosaurs fighting each other and killing evil rich people, and that was satisfying on a primal level.

There are two excellent story concepts in this movie that could each make one really unique movie if they were given focus.  A movie about people rescuing dinosaurs from an exploding island has an inherent drama to it and would be like no film I can think of before.  A movie about people running from an escaped dinosaur in a spooky old mansion also has an inherent drama to it and is unlike any film I can think of.  These two concepts could each individually make for a really great movie.

The Bad

There’s a Red Letter Media video about the Alien prequel film Prometheus that just consists of one of the reviewers asking a long list of questions raised by sloppy, inconsistent, and overall bad storytelling that hampers that movie despite its fairly decent direction.  It’s really funny if you’ve seen the movie, and you can find it here.  I mention it because a voice in the back of my head was slowly assembling my own version of that video while I was giving this movie my second watch because... because damn, dude, this script is just ridiculously sloppy.

You could also... man, fuck me, but you could actually make a Cinema Sins style takedown of this movie without having to make shit up and willfully misinterpret the film like they do in 99% of their videos.  And you all know how much I fucking hate Cinema Sins, so when I say their style of criticism/”humor” can actually work here, you know I’m not speaking lightly.

I’m not going to do either of those things but I do want to focus on a couple examples of this movie’s sloppy writing because, like, it NEEDS to be addressed in detail, y’know?  Or at least I feel the need to address it.

I mean a lot of things when I say it’s “sloppy,” but the jist is that it often has characters behave not according to their own motivations, personalities, etc., but according to the needs of the plot.  So too does, like, everything else - dinosaurs, the volcano, physics, lava, you name it.  The villains get probably the worst of it, but Claire Dearing and Comedy Relief IT Guy get it pretty bad too.

Ok, so, like, Zia is a Paleo-Veterinarian, right?  What the hell makes that different than a normal Veterinarian?  It can’t be that you exclusively work with dinosaurs, because Zia explicitly says she has never seen a dinosaur in person.  Wouldn’t... wouldn’t that make her just a normal veterinarian, then?  How can she know how to heal these animals without ever, like, studying one in person?  It’s like they wanted to do some world building and so wrote that Paleo-Veterinarians are, like, a thing, but also wanted to give a heroic character a moment where they look at dinosaurs for the first time with awe, and decided to do both moments with the same character.  Like, they couldn’t do it with Comedy Relief IT Guy because his whole schtick is that he’s desperately afraid of literally everything and everyone, because a guy who’s scared of things is funny (?).  They couldn’t do it with Claire because she’s seen fucking dinosaurs before, and so has Owen.  They don’t bring Maisie to the island so she’s out, and everyone else is evil, so Paleo-Vet gets the “Holy Fucking Shit It’s a Dinosaur” moment, even though giving her that moment makes no fucking sense for a person who’s whole reason for being here is that she knows how to heal dinosaurs, which is probably pretty fucking hard to do if you’ve never fucking seen a dinosaur before.  You see?  You see what I mean when I say the characters have no consistency, that they do things as the plot demands, even when it makes no sense for their character?  This is but one of many examples.

And it’s sadly the same for the dinosaurs.  Look, I love seeing dinosaurs eat people because I’m a little demented, and I know most of you do too, because all humans have at least a small desire to see wild animals eat people we dislike.  It’s our nature.  But the emotional core of this movie’s premise is the idea that we should want to see these creatures alive - that for all the danger they present, they are worth saving.  This film needed to establish that these creatures are worthy of our sympathy.  It’s pretty sad, then, that so much of the movie shows the dinosaurs as being bloodthirsty monsters whose primary desire - ranked even above their own self preservation - is to kill and eat during every waking moment of their lives.

Take the Baryonyx’s big scene - the Baryonyx, Claire, and Comedy Relief IT Guy are trapped in a building as fucking lava drips down around them.  This would be a great moment to establish these animals are living creatures who enjoy living.  A real animal would not spend its time trying to eat two humans here - it would try to escape the room filling with FUCKING LAVA that it’s trapped in.  And that’s what should have happened, both logically AND thematically.  Our heroes see this big carnivorous dinosaur enter and are worried, but instead of attacking it tries to claw its way out of the room.  It’s as scared as they are, and even shoots them a desperate, pleading glance when they find an exit that’s too small for it to fit through.  It would establish that, terrifying as these dinosaurs are, they just want to live.  We would then feel justified in siding with the people risking their lives to save these creatures.  INSTEAD, the Baryonyx spends the whole scene trying to murder them even when there are clearly other problems that should take priority over that, namely the fact that it’s trapped in a room FUCKING FILLED WITH LAVA.

Almost immediately after this is a scene where a bunch of herbivores stampede past our heroes, with a Carnotaurus stopping mid-flight to try and eat the humans.  PRIORITIES, Carnotaurus!  The Carnotaurus then stops mid-pursuit to inexplicably attack another fleeing dinosaur, which shakes him off, and then goes back to menacing our heroes while the lava grows EVER CLOSER.  This... this isn’t how animals fucking behave, dudes.  This is a textbook case of treating a monster as a plot device rather than a character - there is no reason, not plausible motivation for the Carnotaurus to menace our heroes at this time.  It is a menace because the plot demanded it.  Why the fuck would you save creatures that would prefer to slaughter humans at the cost of dying in fucking lava mere seconds afterwards?

Also the T.rex then pops out of nowhere to kick the shit out of the Carnotaurus and save the heroes, again, WHILE LAVA IS MERE SECONDS AWAY FROM THEM.  To people who aren’t like me and thus don’t think of Rexie as a character, this would seem to be another example of dinosaurs in this movie being suicidally violent.

Later, after escaping Rexie and the Carnotaurus just in time for the fucking lava to almost catch up to them, our heroes join the stampeding dinosaurs.  An allosaurus is among them and inexplicably tries to attack out heroes and gets killed by a falling rock as a result of its inexplicable decision to pause in its escape for the sake of killing people.  FUCKING HELL.

Like... this isn’t just me nitpicking.  This actively undermines the entire fucking story.  Even Jurassic Park III gave its dinosaurs consistent goddamn motives.  Jesus Christ, this movie’s writing made me cite Jurassic Park III as a positive example!

Colin Trevorrow was clearly pissed that people rightly noted the weird and extremely prevalent sexism of both Jurassic World (which he wrote and directed) and The Book of Henry (which he only directed), because he threw in some of the clunkiest “Girl Power!” performative feminism moments I have ever seen in this movie.  And before you say “Colin Trevorrow didn’t direct this one though!” please check IMDB because while he didn’t direct it he still wrote the fucking screenplay.  The moments that “address the criticism” he received are so blatant and ham-fisted that they feel like something an Anti-SJW blogger would point out to prove that Political Correctness is killing our culture.  They’re sort of equivalent to a “I’m not racist!  I have black friends!” argument - “I’m not sexist - look, I had this character tell a man how capable is after he lightly brought up how this might be dangerous for her!”  There’s a moment like that in Jurassic Park too, to be fair, but it’s fucking subtle and understated by comparison.

There are so many great scenes and monster designs in this movie, and there are two plot concepts that would make for SUCH GOOD films if they were properly developed, and the director had a clear love for them all as well as the artistic skill to back it up. J.A. Bayona deserved to make a great Jurassic Park movie.  That Brachiosaurus death scene deserved to be in a great Jurassic Park movie.  Blue, the Indoraptor, Maisie, and the actress who played Zia deserve to be in a great Jurassic Park movie.  So much of this film deserved the right to be lauded and praised.  So it’s so, so, SO frustrating that the whole of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom falls utterly short of the sum of its parts.

The Unnecessary Headcanons

I’ve seen some people try to explain the flaws in this movie away with their headcanon interpretations and, like... that’s not how stories work, though?  Like, that doesn’t remove the flaws that exist - at best all it does is show that the flaws could have been fixed with some thoughtful revision.  It reinforced the fact that this movie, taken on its own, needs to be fixed.

That said, here are my headcanons for some of the weird shit that happens in this movie.

We’re, like, 99% of the way to having the text of this series explicitly state that T.rexes can smell out evil and intentionally seek to destroy it.  Almost every scene Rexie has in this movie shows her coming out of nowhere to punish the wicked and inadvertently save the righteous.  It’s still in the realm of subtext but, like, if it keeps happening we’re going to have to declare Rexie a literal agent of a higher cosmic power.  Jurassic Park T.rexes can smell the sin on you.

I’m pretty sure the nonsensical blood transfusion that made Blue’s blood “impure” and thus kept Dr. Wu from using her for gene splicing also gave her Rexie’s action hero powers, like how getting bit by a spider turned Peter Parker into a superhero.  That’s why Blue instinctively knew how to safely survive an explosion via turning her back to it, and also why she got to do the Rexie thing and heroically save the humans from the evil dinosaur at the last minute.

Considering the fact that the Indoraptor is just, like, Explicitly Evil, I think Dr. Wu’s motivations may be less about weaponizing dinosaurs and making money, and more about trying to isolate the Evil Gene, a gene that makes things evil.  Sadly, the only people with money to finance this project have the Evil Gene as well, and so Dr. Wu is forced to make all these dinosaurs and monsters while secretly researching the Evil Gene on the side.  He hopes that in time he will be able to destroy the Evil Gene, and it clearly involves finding its opposite - hence the Evil Destroying T.rexes and the obsession with raising a hybrid based off of the Explicitly Benevolent velociraptor Blue.  Dr. Wu dreams of literally curing evil, and dinosaurs are the method he has been forced to use to pursue this dream.

#Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom #Jurassic Park