Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Jurassic World (Universal, Amblin Entertainment, Legendary, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on our “feature” and ran it from 8 to 10 p.m.: Jurassic World, which I had picked up from the DVD discount counter at Big Lots under the impression that it was the third in the Jurassic Park series from Universal, Amblin Entertainment (Steven Spielberg’s personal production company) and Legendary Pictures. Actually it was Jurassic Park #4, though it was presented as a direct sequel to Jurassic Park #1 (which I also bought a DVD of at Big Lots) set 20 years later (and made 22 years later, in 2015) on the original island of Isla Nublar off the coast of Costa Rica, where Jeffrey Hammond (Richard Attenborough) had first set up his theme park of genetically engineered dinosaurs back in the 1993 film. Now the park is known as Jurassic World and it’s owned by a super-rich and surprisingly young-looking guy named Masrani (Irrfan Khan) and is actually a going concern which has operated for at least a year already without any untoward incidents of the “assets” — as the revivified dinosaurs are referred to — eating or otherwise knocking off any of the guests. Alas, attendance at Jurassic World is trending down because audiences are getting bored with the dinosaurs, and so Masrani orders his principal geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu (B. D. Wong, real-life Gay actor from M. Butterfly and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) to create an entirely new gene-spliced dinosaur, Indominus rex, which is bigger, nastier and scarier than Tyrannosaurus rex — and also, of course, far more dangerous than its once genuinely extant prototype. The heroine is Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose sister Zara (Katie McGrath) is going through a divorce and has entrusted the care of her two sons, teenager Zach (Nick Robinson) and pre-teen Gray (Ty Simpkins, whose current imdb.com head shot makes him look considerably sexier than he does in the movie — but then he is three years older now, at an age where that’s pretty crucial), to Claire as she goes on a business trip to Jurassic World to find out why attendance is down and what she and the other officials of Masrani’s company InGen can do to get it up again (so to speak). The moment we meet Zach and Gray, the typical obnoxious movie kids, we hope forlornly that they’ll end up as dino-food sometime during the movie — alas, they’re still alive at the fade-out and Claire seems romantically paired up with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, top-billed, playing the same sort of taciturn, matter-of-fact action hero Gerard Butler played in the … Has Fallen movies). 

Owen is a preposterous character who’s sort of a “Raptor Whisperer” — he’s assigned himself the task of bonding with four Velociraptors (you remember, the relatively small but super-intelligent dinosaurs from the first film who, among other feats, figured out how to open doors — which put off my then-roommate no end when he first saw the film on VHS with me: “How could a dinosaur open a door? It’s stupid!”) and treating them much the way a real-life lion tamer treats his or her charges. Other people in the dramatis personae include Larry (Jake Johnson), a member of the Jurassic World office staff who keeps toy dinosaurs on his desk and seems to have been intended by the writing committee (Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, the last of whom also directed) as an equivalent to the Rick Moranis character in the first film; and Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio — so this cast unites actors who played in different series within the Law and Order franchise), InGen’s head of security and an ex-servicemember who’s obsessed with the idea that the genetically re-engineered dinosaurs could be useful in war because they’re excellent attack weapons and can also be used to reconnoiter enemy positions without the problem with drones that they can be hacked. The plot gimmick is that just when they’re about to loose Indominus rex on Jurassic World’s paying public, it jumps the gun and escapes its paddock, chews off the radio-signal implant that’s supposed to let the keepers of Jurassic World know where it is, runs amok and eats a few of the park’s security people as well as the paying guests in what’s the equivalent of the “red shirts” on Star Trek. Hoskins has the “brilliant” idea of setting Owen’s four sort-of trained raptors loose to hunt down Indominus, but instead Indominus exerts influence over the raptors and becomes their “alpha,” and together the five dinosaurs hunt down the various people in the park and ultimately knock off Hoskins (the scene of a raptor literally chewing off Hoskins’ hand before finishing him off completely is the grossest shot in a film otherwise surprisingly low on outright gore) while Claire, Owen, those obnoxious kids and most of Jurassic World’s paying public are successfully evacuated by being flown by helicopter to waiting ships in scenes oddly reminiscent of the real-life U.S. evacuation of Saigon in 1975. 

Jurassic World has already generated a sequel — this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — and a third is planned for 2021, and one can see why: it’s a coolly efficient movie that makes some pretty preposterous plot devices seem credible (director Trevorrow has said one of the things he likes about filmmaking is you can get an audience to believe some really ridiculously impossible things for two hours) and delivers the goods. We want to see both cool dinosaurs interacting with people and evoking the sense of wonder we got from the first film — at least in the two scenes of dinosaur eggs hatching and the Brontosauri raising their heads over the trees in a forest — and not-so-cool dinosaurs fighting each other and taking out a few of the minor characters. I especially liked the one scene in which the keepers of Jurassic World feed the aquatic dinosaur Masosaurus (who comes in at the end as a sort of dino ex machina to fight off the Indominus) by lowering the carcass of a shark over its tank so the Masosaurus will leap up and give the spectators a thrill as it eats, sort of like the way Sea World used to feed its killer whales during performances — it almost seems as if Colin Trevorrow and his writers were saying to Steven Spielberg, “You think sharks are so scary? Take that!” Jurassic World is an O.K. adventure in the modern manner, with state-of-the-art computer-generated special effects that make the dinosaurs absolutely credible as living beings (though there are a few scenes in which the different registrations in different levels of action give them away as computer-generated digital composites) but a pretty routine plot line that gives the audience the expected thrills but little more than that — and as both Charles and an imdb.com reviewer noted, the film suffers from its characters’ preposterous tendency to run outside when allegedly fleeing danger, and thereby make themselves more vulnerable, not less, instead of seeking safer shelter inside the park’s structures.