<<The one thing they SHOULD have had were armored doors and panic rooms everywhere. That central corridor of the park was one big kill zone.>>
Well whatdoya know. I'm reading Jurassic Park the novel right now and when Grant gets to his hotel room there's a heavy metal door, thick iron bars over the skylight, and the windows are tiny reinforced glass. And the hotel is hidden behind a vast fence of twelve foot tall iron bars.
I guess Michael Crichton is smarter than most screenwriters.
I should get around to reading the books some time. I've only ever read one of Crichton's novels (
Rising Sun) but I really liked it. He has a fast, punchy writing style that really makes the story move, even when it's loaded with technical details.
Eh, I like almost all his books, but the Jurassic Park movie fixed at least as many problems as it caused. For instance, in the book the park actually gets fixed halfway through, then breaks down a second time because no one noticed that main power was never restored, so the whole park was running on auxiliary. The park is said to have permanent life signs scans on all the dinosaurs, yet completely fails to recognize that the dinosaurs are breeding (because some bozo in IT set the scans to count up to the number of dinosaurs that were supposed to be there and then stop). And the urgency of the story is based around the idea that Raptors (some of whom have been loose on the island the whole time) have stowed away aboard the last transport that left for the mainland and the ship has to be warned so it can turn around and come back before the raptors escape into the wild (because apparently raptors don't attack people if they know they're taking them some place nice).
In this particular case, I would say that going over the hotels, etc, would've been too much extraneous screen time for not nearly enough added plot value. Grant and Muldoon already did a good enough job making everyone nervous about the Raptors.
Jurassic World
My grade: B+
The movie is not without its flaws but it does manage to deliver in many of the ways the other sequels didn't mostly in showcasing the animals in much more... "romantic" way and treating them as animals rather than as typical movie monsters. There's a touching scene in the first movie where Dr. Grant marvels over a sick Triceratops prone on the ground, there's a similar scene here where Owen soothes a mortally wounded brachiosaurus.
I found this one of the most lacking aspects of the movie, actually. The first two films really treated the dinosaurs like animals. The third one put far less emphasis on that, but the dinosaurs still mostly acted like wild animals.
This movie is pretty much unequivocally a monster movie. I Rex is specifically stated as being designed to kill. And even the other more natural dinosaurs behave in ways that are just bizarre.
The Pterasaurs, for instance - I get that they're very territorial and like to attack people, but they just got kicked out of their nest (the only home they've ever known) by a massive, terrifying predator they've never seen before, plus a completely unnatural explosion, and yet their first instinct is to fly directly to the nearest group of humans and start attacking everyone? They should be seeking safety and security, not playing catch with baby triceratops.
That entire sequence made me feel like all of a sudden I was watching some 50s b movie horror flick - Invaders from the Sky! Especially when an obviously fish-eating animal with teeth that are clearly incapable of chewing started trying to eat people who are just as big as it was.
I really didn't like most of the human characters. I only felt sad when the raptors died.
The thing is that the dinosaurs have always been the stars of this franchise. The human characters are just there to move the plot along, or get eaten.
That's the thing though - in the original movie, the characters were clearly defined, memorable, had a great effect on how you saw the dinosaurs and they were almost all perfectly placed to help move the plot along.
Here the characters are nebulous and ill-defined, have very little impact on our view of the animals (there are really only 2 points of view shown - that they're living things worthy of consideration and that they're just animals to be exploited, all the other possible points of view, like Muldoon who respected the animals but also feared them, are just missing) and often seem to serve almost no purpose at all in the story.
Why did we even need to see the kids' parents at all? What did those scenes add to the movie, other than the one 'touching' (but entirely insignificant) fact that the kids' parents are getting a divorce? What purpose does Claire's assistant serve other than being eaten? What is the point of Masrani's rambling philosophising when he ultimately just dies in a helicopter crash without getting anywhere near any kind of closure? Why do we care that Wu is so unscrupulous and unethical when he ultimately just disappears from the movie?
Basically, the only characters that were actually important in this movie where Owen and Claire and the military guy (in a much smaller capacity). Even the kids barely had any impact on the plot, although they were much better than most previous kids in the franchise.
And of those important characters, Claire is the one that gets almost all the definition, and it's almost all bad. She's actually one of the most annoying movie characters I've seen in a long time. There's no reason whatsoever why she acts the way she does, the movie tries to imply that she overcomes it, but it's never really earned. All she really does is determine not to let the kids die and give in to Owen's romantic advances (which aren't even all that convincing). Then at the end, after reuniting the kids with their parents and receiving her sister's forgiveness for being a jerk, she immediately walks off into the sunset with her new boyfriend. Almost no arc whatsoever.
Owen, of course, doesn't change at all and is never really defined in the first place. He's entertaining to watch, but his only real character trait is that he just sort of knows stuff - no idea HOW he knows any of this, though. Has he studied animals? Worked with them before? What makes him qualified to predict the Indominus' behavior, especially when he doesn't even know what kind of animal he's talking about? And if his knowledge is based on natural behavior patterns as the movie sort of vaguely seems to suggest, why is he proven correct when it's revealed that I Rex doesn't have natural behavior patterns (It was just bred to kill)?
Overall, I'd give it a C, maybe a C+. It looked nice (though I'd hoped for better), but the characters were massively disappointing, the dinosaurs themselves were less interesting than all the other films (I Rex was not at all impressive, and the Raptors being trained killed their menace - all other dinosaurs were bit players at best), the story was far too obsessed with callbacks to the previous movies (look, product placement! Gas Jeeps! A woman randomly screaming to attract lethal dinosaurs! The gate opening! Comforting a sick dinosaur!... sigh) and repeating the same old formula is getting really old. Why does a JP movie HAVE to have kids in danger? Why does it HAVE to take place on an island? Why does the main danger HAVE to be a big giant dinosaur, instead of smaller, deadlier ones?
Honestly, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, but I don't get the love for this one at all. No better than JP3.
