What could be more fun?
I watched the latest installment of dinosaurs running amok last night. It was exactly what I hoped it would be: ridiculous, over the top fun with Chris Pratt, who is quickly climbing my list of favorite actors.
I’m a fan of Michael Crichton’s work. He was a good story teller. Not all of his stuff is great, some of it is just silly fun but in the last decade or so of his career, he had some important things to say.
Jurassic Park is a classic monster movie and it holds up really well after two decades but the book is really a modern classic about the hubris of scientists. The heart of the tale is a dire warning to heed the law of unintended consequences. Not everything we can do are things we should do. The dinosaurs are just the chocolate coating that helps it go down easier.
The follow up to Jurassic Park, the Lost World, is equally as good . The book is a modern take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, warning of the dangers of abandoning the things we create. To create is to take responsibility and responsibility is something modern culture strives to avoid at all costs. The cost, unfortunately, could be civilization itself.
The movie that Steven Spielberg made based on Crichton’s second dinosaur fantasy completely missed the point. Oh, the movie employs a few of the scenes of high action taken directly from Crichton’s work but the heart of the story is excised so thoroughly you can’t tell it was ever there.
Jurassic Park 3 was just an excuse to use the monster scenes from the books that hadn’t made it into either of the movies.
But Jurassic World, as fun as it is, actually revisits the theme from the book The Lost World.
Chris Pratt plays Owen, a former Navy Seal who now works as a trainer, raising, studying and (to a degree) training the four velociraptors on the Island. Part of the problems that form the heart of the book The Lost World, occurred because the animals that survived the destruction of the initial theme park were simply abandoned. There they were, equipped with the instincts of pack animals, with no parent generation to teach them how to survive as a pack. Instead of simply being wild, as opposed to domesticated animals, they became feral, lacking even the social skills they needed to get along with each other. The title of the book refers as much to these poor animals, as lost as the Lost Boys of Neverland as to the abandoned island inhabited by creatures resurrected millions of years out of their time.
In Jurassic World, the new generation of raptors are treated like the wild animals they are, but imprinted on Owen when they’re hatched and carefully raised as a pack in which Owen is the Alpha.
When Owen is informed of the creation of a new, bigger, super predator, he’s appalled as much by the hubris of the insane scientists who thought it was a good idea to make a Turbo T-Rex as he is by the fact that once they’d designed the poor thing, they’d raised it in isolation, away from even the idea of the outside world and other creatures as anything but food.
So when it inevitably escapes, it kills everything it comes across. Naturally.
After that one scene, the movie eschews the larger issues dealt with in Crichton’s books and gets right to the business of colorfully killing people via dinosaurs.
We get to see people get stomped on, bitten in half, swallowed whole, pierced with beaks of pterodactyls…it’s great.
Unlike the first movie, I was never at all concerned for the fate of the two kids stranded alone in the park. I also felt no compassion for the assistant who had been tasked with keeping an eye on the boys when she was plucked into the air by a dactyl and eventually swallowed whole by the sea monster. The sleazy lawyer from JPI who got eaten off the toilet by the T-Rex was a far more human character than she was. I felt his fear and pain. She was just a cardboard cut out.
Watching this movie, you know from the moment they mention the new giant superpredator that it’s going to escape its bonds and run amok. What could possibly be worse than a Super Rex loose on the Island, leaving a trail of dead dinos in its wake as it rampages closer and closer to the resort full of people? Well, how about adding the velociraptors to the mix, thinking that somehow, if we set them free, they’ll hunt down the Super Rex?
No one, not even Owen, although he does protest the plan, thinks to ask “what do we do then? Even if they kill it, we’ll have a bunch of raptors loose on the island. How is that better?”
So now there’s a Super Rex and a pack of raptors loose on the island.
Hmmm. Would adding a T-Rex to this mix make things better, or worse?
I’m thinking that letting out the T-Rex is the last thing I’d want to do in this situation. But hey, I guess that’s why I’m not writing dinosaur fantasies.
Not only does The Girl let out the T-Rex, she also manages to outrun it in stilettoes. Just in case you forgot for an instant that this is a really dumb movie.
In keeping with that point, the monsters conveniently decide to ignore all the tasty, defenseless little people huddling nearby and fight each other instead, allowing the people to crawl to safety.
I don’t know; somewhere with doors that have knobs, not handles.
All I know is that one minute the giant predators are all fighting each other and the next, the surviving tourists are on what must be an air craft carrier that somehow materialized offshore.
The final rule of really dumb movies is not to sweat the details.
What I took away from Jurassic World was that even with all the best intentions and what you think are impregnable defenses, it’s a terrible idea to release a horde of alien creatures you don’t understand into your society.
Hmmm…maybe Jurassic World isn’t as dumb a movie as it seems.