Jurassic World
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
In a time when CG was a new development and good stories sold tickets, the world experienced the original Jurassic Park and fell in love with it's simplicity, and it's complexity at the same time. Now, when every movie is over-saturated by special effects and the story has taken a back seat to expensive spectacles and cheap thrills, Jurassic World entertained but didn't satisfy.
For anyone who hasn't seen Safety Not Guaranteed, please go watch it and fall in love with the small-time director that is Colin Trevorrow. That movie will show what kind of great storyteller this guy really is. When I heard he was going to direct Jurassic World shortly after finishing Safety, I was really excited to see Universal/Amblin Pictures hire someone so new to a huge franchise. A lot of blockbuster films have recently been hiring smaller (cheaper) directors in the hope that ushering in fresh blood will bring new ideas and revitalize the industry. It has largely been successful as far as the box office has shown, but creatively I haven't seen much difference. We keep seeing extremely simple stories overloaded by unnecessary special effects. But who am I kidding. These big budgeted movies aren't meant for the artsy-fartsy crowds that fill in old dusty theaters showing Sundance films. Jurassic World has beautiful special effects and fast paced action that keeps the characters moving forward. Sometimes we don't need complex story lines to keep audiences attention. At the same time though, we do need to have compelling characters to cheer for, and that is definitely lacking here. Why can't we have both anymore? Can't we find a peaceful middle ground? Like Mad Max did?
Jurassic World doesn't offer much in the "interesting character" department. The main characters don't develop beyond who they were in the beginning. They all go on a life-changing adventure and still not much changes. Except for the dinosaurs. If you don't believe me, watch the movie again! None of the humans really make any big character leaps, but it's the velociraptors that grow the most. I don't think this was done on purpose but in the end I didn't really care about any of the humans. Sure Chris Pratt is funny and it's great seeing him in a tough guy role, and Bryce Dallas Howard is a fantastic actress but when they kiss in the end (not much of a spoiler there...) they don't deserve it. I was just annoyed that they tried to force a relationship between these two people when they really didn't have anything in common besides not wanting to be eaten.
You can have all sorts of special effects, plot holes and cheesy dialogue and still make a good movie if you have compelling characters, and they have some sort of arc. It almost seemed like Jurassic World tried to keep their characters as stoic as possible so they can keep playing the same games with the dinosaurs. Hide and run. Hide and run. SHOOT!! Hide and run. Hide and run. After a while it started getting boring watching people try to figure out a smart dinosaur, so they had dinosaurs fight each other. You would think having giant dinosaurs fighting would be great, but it actually wasn't all that epic.
In all reality, I had some fun watching this movie. Not a lot, but enough. Even though I laughed at some really awful dialogue and was disappointed with story plot lines, it was fun to watch. Maybe that was because I was in a theater with an audience that absolutely loved the movie or maybe it was because even with all of the disappointments, the highs were somewhat high and the low's weren't so terribly low. I'm not certain which is which. What I am certain of is that it doesn't deserve the billion dollars it's earned in the box office. It's nowhere near that good. That should be reserved for something as glorious as Star Wars Episode VII, because we all know that will set the new standard for everything good in this world.
To close, I would like to quote one of my best friends on his thoughts after walking out of the theater:
