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.
