osprey_archer: (kitty)
osprey_archer ([personal profile] osprey_archer) wrote2017-02-06 12:20 am

Jurassic World

We kicked off the month with Jurassic World, and….eh. It’s one of those movies that is entertaining enough when you’re watching it, but more or less immediately after it was over we started picking the world-building apart, which I think is always a bad sign. Any theme park is going to make “keep the guests safe” its first priority, even if that means shooting the super expensive escaped dinosaur, because the lost revenue from the dead dinosaur is as nothing compared to the lost revenue from closing the entire park forever after the firestorm of bad publicity when dozens of guests are killed by pterodactyls.

Also, I don’t understand why the pterodactyls erupted from their geodesic dome with no intent but to find as many humans as possible and slaughter them all. I feel like the animal behavior in this movie was guided 100% by rule of cool rather than what actual animals might actually do and eventually this makes it hard to take any of this seriously.

Especially given that all of these dinosaurs seem to be essentially impervious to bullets, which ought to make them scarier but somehow makes them less scary? I think it’s because their invulnerability means they never feel quite real. The CGI is very well done, but even so the dinosaurs don’t have the sense of weight and therefore scariness that they do in Jurassic Park.

Also, the romance was tacked on, and I found it especially irritating after the first trilogy mostly steered clear of silly survival romances. (Hell, Ellie even ended up with someone who was not Alan, despite the fact that they nearly got eaten by velociraptors together.)

Also, the female lead wore high heels throughout the entire film and it was distractingly ludicrous. Especially during the scene where she’s being chased by the T. Rex (which she is leading with a flare - which, okay, the concept of this scene is super cool, which makes this even more frustrating) - and the camera actually gives us a close up of her running in her stupid high heeled shoes which have somehow made it through this entire terrible day not only intact, but unspattered by mud.

In conclusion, this movie would have been much better if Chris Pratt had spent a large proportion of it shirtless, or at least in the ragged tatters of a shirt that had nearly been torn off by a velociraptor. It would have been about as silly as the high heels but would have distracted us from the more general silliness of the film in a good way.

[identity profile] lycoris.livejournal.com 2017-02-06 11:45 am (UTC)(link)
May I present ... Jurassic Park, the High Heels edition! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RZi6NCuLbQ) I haven't actually seen Jurassic World but I laughed at a lot at this. Some of these people look surprisingly good in high heels ...

Yeah, everything you have said about Jurassic World is why I just don't think I can watch it. I think it's all the things that I don't care about in movies and nothing that I liked in the first one ...

[identity profile] osprey-archer.livejournal.com 2017-02-06 03:57 pm (UTC)(link)
IAN MALCOLM'S HIGH HEELED BOOTS. Dying over here, those are so perfect, totally vote for him to wear them forever and ever.

I think Jurassic World is a classic example of a sequel misunderstanding what made the original great. Yes, we all enjoyed the dinosaur fights, but they wouldn't have been nearly as meaningful and scary without all the build-up of the characters beforehand or the attention to making the dinosaurs feel like real animals rather than human-murdering machines.