tl;dr - a competent summer blockbuster wrapped around a core of intriguingly nihilistic self-awareness
Saw Jurassic World. In IMAX 3D, tho honestly I don’t think that added much.
(It did give me my first noticed 3D goof, when an unremarkable clump of vegetation flickered through visual planes. So it came closer on the Z axis without either taking up any more of my field of view or at all changing its X/Y relationships to adjacent scenery. “Geometry suddenly works wrong” is textbook Lovecraft uncanny.)
It was basically some good action sequences pasted together by mechanical and emotional arcs, in summer blockbuster tradition. The dinosaurs looked nice but no longer novel, Chris Pratt finishes his upgrade from “poor man’s Chris Hemsworth” to Cera/Eisenberg-style doppling, everyone else is fine.
(though on “Poor Man’s X” note, they seemed to be styling and directing Lauren Lapkus as Kristen Schaal, BD Wong as John Cho playing a younger George Takei, and Bryce Dallas Howard as… I’ll get to that)
And the nice thing about seeing Steven Spielberg’s name on one of these things, you know the pasting-together will be competent, which you can’t always assume.
So keep in mind, whatever I bring up in the rest of this aren’t flaws. They didn’t detract from my enjoyment or take me out of the experience. They aren’t plot holes, they aren’t the result of bad acting, writing, or directing, or the awkward remnants of plot lines that got scrapped in editing. A lot of this stuff you could only stick in there just so with a natural, you might say Spielbergian, mastery of the form. They aren’t flaws.
Which is almost a shame, because then they might be comprehensible.
* * *
So the thing about Jurassic World is it’s densely referential.
Some of it is straight-up nice. Like, did you wonder how a series that sold itself on dino verisimilitude will deal with the way their dinos were lizard-model and since then the world’s gone bird-?
Well, the plot opens with a visual joke about this, and it’s acknowledged in background dialogue, but it’s never directly addressed. There IS an in-character answer to another question that serves to explain it, with the delightfully meta reasoning that they’d always played a little fast and loose with appearances and that was what 1992 thought badass dinosaurs looked like.
Then there’s references to the franchise. Some scenes - the aviary and the waterfall - seem to be referencing the books, which is nice. But more the movies - one plot thread takes a 4-scene detour to show off some props and sets from the first film, Mr. DNA makes a cameo, the iconic theme plays and the gate from the original Jurassic Park shows up.
Now here’s the thing - the gate shows up in the context of a tour guide inviting his audience, and by extension us, to look at the gate and experience a sense of wonder, and did you know this is the gate from the original Jurassic Park?
There’s a bit where one character recruits another to sneak embryos off the island that so echoes the Nedry plotline of JP that I started to wonder whether this counted as a sequel or a reboot. Except the result is that he promptly, safely, with no difficulty does in maybe 10 seconds, and you’re like wait, is that what that scene was for? Is that what that plot was for? Is that what that character was for?
The final showdown starts off as a reference to the final showdown of JP, but then there’s a twist - which is not only also a reference to the final showdown from JP but kind of the same reference - then there’s another twist, which is again THE SAME REFERENCE.
And the damnedest thing is, it works.
And broader than just that, there are a lot of references to other blockbusters of… the “long ‘80s”? “High Spielbergian Era”? Back when movies were being explicitly designed as tentpole blockbusters but not yet as “pilots” for multi-film franchises, possibly as “reboots” from series where a one-off success inspired ad-hoc sequels.
(I do kind of question that popular chronology, I think that the ensemble disaster films of the early ‘70s were a prototype for blockbusters, and the slasher boom of the ‘80s-'90s precedent for franchisecrafting.)
Like, the Big Bad is explicitly set up as an analogy for blockbustercrafting-by-Hollywood-plagiarism: they needed to make something bigger, scarier, more intense to please an increasingly jaded public, and did it by scavenging bits from previous successes and pasting it all together.
Past that there’s a lot of explicit references to other action movies that became franchises - I counted several scenes, shots, or bits of set design that were clearly invoking Aliens or Predator - or to other Spielberg movies - Goonies, not to mention Indiana Jones and Jaws, which were both, the latter having invented the concept of the summer blockbuster.
Even more though, it just plays with tropes and themes common in the era. But “plays” is the sense. It doesn’t subvert them, or use them to wield the audience’s genre savviness against it Whedon-style, so much as set them up and then stubbornly refuse to follow through. The ruined orgasm of filmgoing.
Like, there are two responsible business authority figures who are set up in the '80s villain role and ultimately get killed, but they aren't… really… bad.
The CEO type ultimately responsible for creating the Big Bad for reasons of profit is actually quite ethical and sets out to put himself in harm’s way to save people, at the expense of damaging his brand.
The military type who wants to weaponize the monsters - characters accuse him of engineering the crisis for his own ends, but he didn’t! He tries to seize power, but once he has it he makes the right decisions - use lethal force, including raptors - and brings the heroes along by not-entirely-cynically appealing to their selflessness.
Really the accusation against him - “you want to use these perfect killing machines as perfect killing machines” is silly, doubly so coming from another military guy whose moral authority ultimately comes from just being better at using them.
That’s really the thing with their deaths - they’re structured according to the standard comeuppance theme but they’re not. They don’t die as a result of their greed or hubris or ultimate cowardice, but in the course of doing the right thing, just not skillfully enough.
And the sexual politics themes—
I’ve mentioned before, a lot of '80s movies (and mass culture generally) were actually quite reactionary, especially by comparison to what had come shortly before. The later Rambo movies are so known for their macho steroidal revanchist-nationalist aesthetic that a lot of people don’t realize the series started as a longhaired PTSD drifter standing up for freedom by going VC and shooting cops. ('Nam vet fights the man" was actually a pretty respectable subgenre.)
On the domestic front, you went from Kramer vs. Kramer’s “Divorce. Man, sometimes you wonder whether it’s really worth it. ::sigh::” to The War of The Roses’ “no of course it isn’t, also you look ridiculous”, passing through both Die Hard and Fatal Attraction’s takes on “lethal violence is proper, necessary, and sufficient to reassert the integrity of the patriarchal nuclear family”.
Now those are kind of blatant examples, other movies were more subtle, Spielberg could be downright elegiac about family dissolution as a wrongness and threat.
But if you’ve seen many '80s movies you realize that as Jurassic World starts they’re laying the foundations for a few classic themes.
There’s “the careerist bitch who needs to get taken down a peg and get in touch with her true destiny as nurturing mother”. There’s “the divorcing parents who need the specter of external threat to the family to force them back together, where they recommit to family”.
The older brother, ignoring his sibling to check out girls as soon as he’s away from his devoted girlfriend promises kind of a JV “taming of the rake” arc, which was also a thing.
(Pretty Woman was not just about how a masculine man’s assertiveness (and, let’s be honest, earning potential - she has to go shopping now) can tame a sexually mercenary woman into wife material, but how a feminine woman’s nurturing (and let’s be honest, sex) can tame an economically mercenary man into an upholder of stable order. They were such similar creatures.)
But the weird thing is these tropes are invoked, the plots set up and then not followed through, not even subverted, but just ignored.
In reverse order, the younger brother ends the skirt-chasing plot *by pointing out the stakes don’t really matter*, and while the two are closer towards the end than the beginning that’s clearly situational and not fundamental. The elder doesn’t grow or change because he doesn’t have to, the scene of emotional bonding that “should” be the turning point is him putting their experience in the context of an established, supportive relationship.
The divorcing parents turn out to be basically a frame story, and don’t reunite. When I talk about how this stuff is the product not of incompetence but its opposite, I mean things like the direction in the reunion scene, the perfectly done body language - the way they never quite hug all together, the way each parent pays attention to each child, and each child to the parents together, but neither parent seems to instinctively consider the other part of their family - that establishes that yes, they’ve both been shaken, yes, they appreciate family anew in the aftermath, no, they’re not hostile, but for all that they’re no closer to each other.
One weird thing - and honestly I think it’s supposed to stand out - is when the younger brother says, just before the plot is dropped, “all my friends’ parents are divorced”. The thing being that I could see that as late as the original JP, but coming from a professional-class elementary schooler in 2015, it’s just intuitively wrong.
Finally the career shrike thing seems to get diverted into the related but distinct Romancing the Stone/Crocodile Dundee “sassy city girl comes to appreciate the virtues, possessors of virile outdoorsy manliness” plot. That’s the closest to an honest take on these things, because I guess they needed some character through-line.
Even then they seem to be fucking around with it. Like the last line of the movie, it’s textbook way to cap these things off. Looking into each other’s eyes, making a callback to a line from their earlier adventures that, recontextualized, is about the promise of their romantic future. Except for the fact that the actual line, in its actual context, MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE.
Or consider how Claire’s appearance is used as metaphor for her character development. For one, talking poor men, her initial look - all white outfit, severe red bob - looks so familiar I know it must be from somewhere, but towards the end TRY to tell me she’s not being styled as Resident Evil-era Milla Jovovich.
For two, one of the tropes of this plot is the girl’s pristine fashionable, nonfunctional attire representing her lack of earthiness. And so when it comes time for dude to do the angry “you are in no way prepared to function in my world” bit and cite her outfit, she immediately alters her clothes to look more sporty, and then explicitly states that the point is to signal she is now ready for adventure.
BUT, that’s not what he complained about. He cited her shoes, 3 inch spike heels completely unsuitable for any physical activity, let alone jungle trekking. And she never takes them off. There is a shot of her running in the final chaos that only exists to point out she’s still wearing them. Never took them off, never lost or even dirtied them, never trip her up, never set up to be some badass for doing this all in heels.
THE ENTIRE PAYOFF OF THE SHOES BIT IS TO POINT OUT THAT THE SHOES BIT NEVER PAID OFF.
Also there’s a one-off scene with minor characters that’s a cute little bit about how “finding courage and stepping up as a hero” and “getting the girl” are so firmly linked in movies and culture that if you separate them, everyone awkwardly realizes they have no cultural script to work off.
* * *
So. You can see why this is catnip to pattern recognition types like me - lots of stuff that clearly isn’t random noise, it’s deliberate, structured, chosen with an eye on how it relates to the other parts and to other texts, but damned if I can make it add up to anything.
Well no, looking back on all this there is ONE way I could understand this, as a rebuttal from Spielberg to an imagined cynical critic of modern blockbusters.
The cynic says “Oh, another Jurassic Park. So is this a fourquel or a reboot? Time to refresh the brand, start a new franchise? You unoriginal goddamned hacks.”
And Spielberg says “Listen here I invented blockbusters. And they’ve never been original. Film serials, pulp fiction, the fears and dreams of a nation fed back to them. And that’s never kept them from being good.
May not be a Tarantino-style showoff about it, maybe you didn’t recognize the sources. So here. You’ll recognize all the parts of this pastiche. I won’t even try to fit them together right, I’ll intentionally sabotage the thematic coherence, I’ll call all my shots then bunt them. And it’ll still be great, and you’ll still love it. Because you’re not hungry for originality, you’re just hungry for quality.”
* * *
Two minor notes, both about vehicles. First, this is the only depiction I can remember of someone flying a helicopter competently but not smoothly, which is oddly endearing. Second, okay maybe it’s a scrambler, but I don’t care how knobby the tires on that Triumph are, you’ll get further through the jungle in spike heels.