One of the most important laws of physics discovered by Isaac Newton in the 17th century is “Any film with dinosaurs in it is a good film”. Entire disciplines in science have been built on this law. Space exploration would not be possible without it. Cities would fall to the ground if we paid no attention to this truth. Whole skins would jump from their owners and run floppily to the sea without this binding certainty. And that’s what makes Jurassic World so shocking. Because Jurassic World is not a good film. Jurassic World is, despite featuring at least four different dinosaurs, fucking rubbish.
There’s going to be spoilers in this appraisal because I don’t think I can rip into it in the way I feel I deserve without dropping a few, so if you want to watch the film and experience the same level of disappointment I did then please, violently eject your internet-carrying device from the nearest window.
Anyway. To begin.
Title: Jurassic World
Set In: DinoEarth
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, A Pervading Sense of Despair
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 3.5 Stars
The Plot:
Urgh. The plot. The plot is the film equivalent of a stress dream. WELL. Firstly what’s obvious within the first half an hour is that around 15 writers were employed in putting together the script, and each of these writers was locked in a solitary confinement and not at any point allowed to interact with each other. We begin with literally the worst children on earth going on holiday to Jurassic World, where their aunt (Bryce Dallas Howard) has a super-whizz-job and killer haircut. Their mother cries, as she does in every scene she is featured in for the rest of the film.
The older child, good looking a way that no teenager has ever managed to achieve since the dawn of time, has a girlfriend. The minute spent establishing this seems fairly redundant as it’s never mentioned again. The smaller child is upset because his parents are getting a divorce, apparently. It’s no problem though, as this isn’t mentioned again either.
Anyway, they get to the dinosaur park. And the dinosaur park is AWESOME. I’m glad they spent a gazillion pounds on all the CGI for this bit, because it’s more amazing than finding the queen crouching in your fridge. But to show that people have become jaded by the sight of too many dinosaurs (not going to happen), the teenage boy spends all the time staring at girls in a manner that suggests that he’s not long for the sex offenders register. I’m not sure what they wanted to achieve by showing how much he fancies girls (were they cementing a No Homo theme early on?) but whatever it was they sure do spend a long time not achieving it.
Anyway the younger child is duly impressed by the fact that there’s DINOSAURS EVERYWHERE. LIKE LITERALLY ALL OVER THE PLACE. But there is a fly in the ointment! Their hair-on-point aunt hasn’t come down to see them, because her ovaries and natural feminine feelings have been high-jacked by her USELESS career running a PARK FILLED WITH DINOSAURS. Instead she sends her overworked British assistant, from which the shitty kids run away very quickly.
In another part of the park Chris Pratt is displaying his absolutely massive balls by getting in a pen with velociraptors and confirming his place as the ALPHA of their pack. He’s trained them not to eat him immediately, and understands that dinosaurs are animals, not monsters. I like Chris Pratt a lot for intellectual reasons.
But even the strength of my scholarly appreciation isn’t enough to pretend that he’s mustered even a smidgen of his usual charm in this film. There’s a military guy who’s interested in Chris’s skills. This military guy, it emerges, wants to militarise the raptors because that isn’t a fucking stupid idea that no one would ever consider and the American army has a proud history of turning predators into weapons, which is why you hear about deployments of wolves savaging ISIS all the time. And it turns out that Chris Pratt lives in a shack (???) and dated Byrce Dallas Howard once but he was just too much of an awesome super fun guy for her. He turned up for their date in shorts! And as everyone knows women (especially women who work RUNNING A PARK FILLED WITH DINOSAURS) are physically incapable of experiencing humour or joy.
You know that Bryce is all wrong because she calls the dinosaurs “assets” rather than “these fascinating animals that I love and respect”. She’s into marketing. She’s helping them make a new super scary hybrid dinosaur to bump up the profits. And that’s where the main thrust of the film lies. This new super scary hybrid dinosaur escapes!! It causes havoc! Firstly those shitty kids get hunted by it, but unfortunately neither of them dies. Bryce realises she’s been a withered-womb mega-bitch and goes to save them with Chris. Some fat guy gets killed, but hey, he’s fat! “WHO CARES!” the movie cries.
They send out a deployment of fighting chaps to capture the hybrid dinosaur but they all get killed. Very quickly the park descends into chaos and attempts to protect the thousands of visitors seem haphazard at best. Which is weird, because in an overarching storyline where the first attempt at this dinosaur theme park led to many deaths before it even opened, and the second with a T-REX BEING ACCIDENTALLY SHIPPED TO AMERICA WHERE IT KILLED LOADS OF PEOPLE, that their security would be a tad tighter. But who am I to say!
Bryce Dallas Howard runs about in high heels because YOU GO GUUURL and her assistant (who maybe we are meant to hate? Because she tried to look after the terrible horrors this film calls “children”?) gets really horribly killed over the course of about 5 minutes by loads of different dinosaurs. This is all displayed with relish, to the point that I’m surprised one of the children don’t shout “die you stupid bitch!”. I’m not sure why she has to suffer so much, but maybe it doesn’t matter because no one seems to care that she died and I don’t think anyone bothered informing her family.
Chris Pratt decides to use his raptor-family to kill the big evil dinosaur. This is so incredibly stupid I don’t even know where to start, but if the raptors high-fived Chris before producing a machine gun and mowing down the hybrid it could not be more shit. In fact, that would have been a lot better. It turns out that Henry Wu (YES! HENRY! Look how much of a baby he was in the first film compared to now).
Aw! Anyway. He’s been working with the military guy and the hybrid super-dinosaur was in fact intended as a military weapon *places head in hands and starts screaming*
In the end, Bryce Dallas Howard lets the T-Rex out of it’s cage and with the help of the raptors it kills the hybrid, because teamwork is important. The military guy gets eaten. Henry Wu gets away. Chris Pratt rides around on a motorbike a lot and and one of the children says “Your boyfriend is a badass!” to Bryce and she realises that yes, indeed, he is a badass, and in living the feminist dream of pretending she didn’t need an alpha male in her life she had left herself open to being eaten by dinosaurs. And she wasn’t going to let that happen again! So they get together and everything’s brilliant, as if loads of innocent people, including her assistant, hadn’t JUST DIED HORRIFICALLY.
The Verdict
That seems like a convoluted plot doesn’t it? But don’t worry! I left loads of it out! There is so much more stupid plot than that. The thing is, I was entertained by Jurassic World. It was entertaining. But when the first Jurassic Park film exists, an example of perfect cinema, velociraptor bro-mances and lazy sexism makes me sad. There’s going to be a sequel, if we allow it. I say we shouldn’t allow it.
This was originally posted on shellsuitzombie.co.uk
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