JURASSIC WORLD - What's Behind Padlock 9? A Bad Movie

[AndyDursin]

Well I did see -- most of -- JURASSIC WORLD tonight. However there's a major disclaimer involved -- we were at a drive-in here in Central Pennsylvania that was quite bad, with a screen so dim it was hard to make a lot of the action sequences out, especially towards the end. There was also a persistent buzz on the soundtrack, which of course, did not help either. The sad part, however, is that I actually don't think it was going to make a difference one way or the other.

Overall, I did not care for the film at all. In fact, the more I thought about it afterwards, the film is really an insult to Michael Chricton's original novel and also to the kind of cinematic sci-fi that Steven Spielberg was making with the original JURASSIC PARK. While that film was flawed, it had an elegance to its set-pieces, an honest attempt at crafting a story with believable enough science that it was not simply a cartoon on the screen.

For all intents and purposes, that's what JURASSIC WORLD is: a two hour cartoon (not to mention an ad for Comcast and its products, Verizon Wireless, IMAX, and other companies who get their names plastered on-screen at various times throughout). It's colorful, it's loud, it has effects jamming one second of the picture to the next -- but it's hollow, empty, dumb, poorly written and every bit the kind of brainless summer fare studios now crank out all year long. It has no sense of pacing or suspense -- the characters are thinly drawn, the performances mostly vacant. The "genetically engineered" monsters now possess no surprise or interest on-screen. Any connection to real science or the history of the dinosaurs themselves is thrown out the window for a series of set-pieces that range from fairly effective to almost laugh out loud dumb, culminating in the much-talked about "fan service" ending that, beyond its "emotional resonance", was so stupid words can't even describe it (for one thing, why wasn't "whatever was behind Padlock 9" just roaming around the island to begin with? Wouldn't that have been a better idea, to have the "bad dinosaur" run into "what was left behind" and been unable to handle it?).

Director Colin Trevvorrow's script -- which curiously possesses elements from the discarded, much derided John Sayles draft from years back involving the "militarization" of the dinosaurs (apparently a story element Spielberg liked) -- never bothers to stick to one plot thread long enough for any of them to connect. I laughed outloud at Vincent D'Onofrio's stock villainy (not to mention his demise) as well as Michael Giacchino's awful, grotesquely bombastic score (in hindsight, he could have done John Williams a favor by not referencing his themes at all); I was immediately uninterested in the divorce of the central kids' parents (like MJ said, WHY do they need to be divorcing? WHO cares? We've seen this already!); and Chris Pratt...sorry ladies, I didn't buy him for a second in this film. And to be honest, as much as I've killed Bryce Dallas Howard at times before, I liked her a lot more in this movie than Pratt. At least her character had an arc, and I felt I could believe her in that part -- someone else might've been better, true, but at least she tried. Pratt, on the other hand, looked like he was posturing at every second. I never bought him in this part at all, and didn't think he held the screen down to any degree. Also, why did the film need the Judy Greer role (as the brothers' mom) in the first place? All of her scenes could've hit the cutting room floor, to no detriment to the rest of the picture.

The picture is a mess, but to nobody's surprise, it's making a fortune because kids love dinosaurs, people loved the original, and Hollywood has nothing else to fall back on as they desperately try to feed the sequel/remake machine. What's sad is that its success is only going to fuel more of these films, with the picture hinting that more genetically-enhanced monsters will be on tap in the next one. I'll try to contain my excitement.