That's not hyperbole, and it's not me reading too far into it (though, let's be honest, it might be): Jurassic World has an open contempt for its audience, whomever you may be. Are you, like me, still desperately in love with the film you remember seeing for the first time in 1993? Fuck you. Are you someone who thinks of Jurassic Park as a film that shows its age, and are more interested in seeing what newer, cooler things Hollywood can think of? Fuck you too. There's a scene early in the film that demonstrates this. Jurassic World's operations manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), drops by the control booth to see how things are going. Resident hipster Lowery (Jake Johnson), sporting a moustache and a desk covered in dinosaur toys, has just bought a new shirt off eBay for a ridiculous sum of money: a Jurassic Park t-shirt. He's supposed to represent me and all of you like me; the 'fans' of the original, the "everything was cooler back then, man" generation. Claire tells him never to wear it to work again, because heaven help him if he reminds anyone of a time when things really were cooler. This is just before she debuts, and I quote, "Verizon presents the Indominus Rex." Lowery rolls his eyes at the name and quips, "What's next? The Dorito-saurus?" before promptly being told to shut up if he wants to keep getting paid. Outside in the park, the John Hammond memorial building is preceded by Samsung, everyone drives a Mercedes, there's a Starbucks on every corner, along with Pandora and Margaritaville. I've covered this before in my The Secret Life of Walter Mitty review, but the artifice of name dropping corporations to comment on corporate sponsorship is that money still needs to be exchanged for the mention and display of them. To make matters worse, it seems like Jurassic World thinks you'll be fine with it if it just acknowledges its existence with a sly wink. Because it thinks that'll be enough for a fucking moron like you.
In the same way Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship while happily taking money for it, it approaches shameless reboots of old movies with the same sneering spitefulness. I'm tempted to cite the prime example of this as John William's iconic score making its triumphant return as a child runs through a Hilton hotel room, camera tracking along before exiting out the window to a glory shot of the park with not a single fucking dinosaur in sight, but I can get a little more analytical than that. Let's return to the reveal of the Indominus Rex. You're not going to find that name in your science books, kids. It seems focus testing has revealed that people are bored with dinosaurs, now that the initial excitement of their resurrection has died down. And like any live-action adaptation of a Hanna-Barbera property (and because genetic experimentation and modification is totally ducky), the words scarier, bigger, and cooler got thrown into a blender and out popped the Indominus Rex, a super dinosaur that inevitably escapes and punishes everyone who thought creating it was a good idea. What a clever skewering of audience's current reactions to summer blockbusters, right? Except it's using this as a solution to a problem that I don't think exists. Claire claims that people aren't wowed by dinosaurs anymore, and Lowery agrees, effectively making the argument for both of the aforementioned audience members. But I respectfully disagree with that sentiment. I made an argument that supports this back in May when I reviewed Godzilla, a film that understood the reason Jurassic Park still looks better than most big-budget productions is because it knew where the camera had to be, and knew when practical effects would work better, to instill a sense of awe. When the dinosaurs are first revealed in Jurassic Park, consider where the camera sits. It's not right there in the thick of the action. It's far away from it, so as to display the scale of these animals, but also to hide its falsity. When the camera is up close, we're looking at animatronics, so that the characters can react to something they can actually see. Compare the reactions of the children in the T-Rex attack on the Jeep to the reactions of the children in the Indominus Rex attack on the big hamster ball. It's painfully aware which one seems more realistic, because there was something on set that was real. And when the third act all-out brawl hits, the magic camera swoops, dips and soars around the monsters as they tear through each other, with zero consideration for the fact that this shit looks fake. And you can call me a grumpy old man and ask me how we can't be using these advances in technology to make action scenes look better. My response is that maybe if we can't make the majority of the scene feel real, we shouldn't be making it in the first place.
While we're on that final fight, let's talk about its rhetoric. The chips are well and truly down at this point. The Indominus Rex has led a trail of carnage and destruction from the back end of the park to the front gates. Everyone has had a go at taking it down, including a pack of Velociratpors, to no avail. How are you supposed to destroy a monster that seems to grow every superpower as soon as it needs it (heat-signature masking, intelligence, camouflage and part-raptor are those that we hear of)? Claire has an epiphany, sprints off to a big gate with a flare in hand and demands that Lowery open the door. In a shot that, granted, is pretty fucking great, she lights the flare and creates a bright red beacon that gets reflected in two distant eyes high above her. The familiar face of the Tyrannosaurus Rex lumbers out of the darkness, and Claire leads it back to the Indominus Rex to do its duty and save the day just like it did in the first film. Now, this would be a nice, if hamfisted, throwback to the legacy of these films if it weren't also completely undermining the point of the T-Rex saving the day in the first place. In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex technically saves the day. Alan, Ellie, Lex, and Tim are cornered by the velociraptors, and in the moment before death, the Teus-Rex Machina swoops out of nowhere to attack the raptors and create a diversion for the humans to bail. In doing so, it proves Ian Malcom's chaos theory. How could the T-Rex have gotten into the building without making a sound? How could it have gotten in at all? How could it have known the perfect moment to make itself known? It's convenient, but it's still chaos. It's not there to save them, it's there to be an animal. They didn't bring it there, it simply found a way (sorry). In Jurassic World, Claire enlists the T-Rex to do its duty. This is a foe big and bad enough that the T-Rex even needs to share a look with a Velociraptor to communicate, "Yes, we will lay down our differences to tackle the greater evil." On top of that, this mightiest of allegiances still isn't enough, and it's not until the Indominus Rex is tackled close enough to the water's edge to be within range of the Mosasaur (big underwater dinosaur) to do its duty of jumping out of the water and pulling things in, that the day is truly saved. But remember that the battle doesn't really end in Jurassic Park. It's never explicitly stated that the T-Rex kills each Velociraptor. In a way, it feels like the humans are bailing from a fight that will go on forever. The heroes and villains were only technical, and interchangeable, because they were based on our need to prescribe higher meaning to simple animal nature. Jurassic World thinks that's about as dumb as you are, too.
There's a scene about halfway through Jurassic World that sums up my feelings for it pretty well. The aviary has been destroyed, and a flock of Pteradons are descending on the park. Magic cameras swoop among the carnage, as people are lifted and thrown about. Claire's assistant, Zara (Katie McGrath), was assigned to look after the aforementioned irritating children, who she subsequently lost sight of, and has now found again. She runs toward them, and is picked up by a Pteradon. What follows is a 45-second scene of torture, as the magic camera follows Zara being thrown between dinosaurs, dunked repeatedly into water, screaming in terror and pain the entire time, before being eaten along with the Pteradon by the aforementioned big underwater dinosaur of narrative convenience. This is a death scene that seems particularly cruel in a film with a body count higher than any Jurassic Park before it. Why? Well, there's a few reasons. First, it's included in a list of the bizarre gender politics this film seems to have, but that could be an essay in its own right. Read this to get an understanding. It seems to be trying to echo the death of Gennaro, the lawyer in Jurassic Park, whose contemptuous negligence of the children led to him being eaten on a toilet. But Gennaro deserved it in a way. What's Zara's crime? Spending too much time on her phone, and not being interesting enough to warrant surviving. You could say it's instead trying to invoke the death of Eddie in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, in which he's torn in half whilst trying to save the rest of the heroes, but in that instance, his death was reflected on the faces of those heroes, who are devastated by their loss. In Jurassic World, Zara is scooped up and removed from the action, to the point that none of the main characters witness her demise. On top of that, her death is immediately followed by the film's two heroes experiencing a personal victory and admitting their feelings for each other with a hug and a kiss. Even the film's human villain, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) is granted the respect of an off-screen death, making the glorification of Zara's seem all the more troubling. So we have an exploitative torture scene that serves to insult the memories its invoking, whilst also delivering a cooler, more exciting technical experience that shames you for thinking this is what you wanted. Its narrative inconsistencies serve this bizarre motivation as well. The voice of reason adamantly stresses that dinosaurs cannot be controlled, that the bond he and them share is out of mutual respect. This aligns and even evolves, to a point, the argument of Jurassic Park, until the script decides the dinosaurs can in fact be controlled, and are. John Hammond's replacement, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), echoes his former by endorsing his oft-used phrase, "Spare no expense", until the thought of terminating the Indominus Rex comes up, at which point he says it's too expensive. Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship and shameless reboots, while doing nothing to be anything other than that. You can ask me why I so vehemently denounce this film while giving Jurassic Park 3 a pass. The difference between the two is that Jurassic Park 3 isn't trying to comment on Jurassic Park. It just wants to be the goofy fun time that it is. Jurassic World, on the other hand, has something to say, and it's that you're a fucking idiot for thinking that you wanted this. It's wrong, though. It came to that conclusion by assuming that we couldn't still be wowed by the techniques of that which came before it. Godzilla proved that not to be the case, as did Mad Max: Fury Road. But hey, maybe it isn't wrong. Maybe I am. It's certainly not struggling to fill seats. Maybe what people want from movies really is changing. All I really know is that if you put Chris Pratt in the lead role of your film, and drain all of his charisma and wit to the point that in a 2400 word essay, I don't feel the need to mention his name once, and people still rush to see it, then maybe we've entered an age where people appreciate a film that hates them.
