Franchise Friday: Jurassic World (2015)

Stupid finds a way.

Seeing Jurassic Park in 1993 was a formative moviegoing experience. 

I was fresh out of middle school and about to embark on life as a high schooler. I’d read Michael Crichton’s best-seller a year or two prior, and was pumped about the possibility of Steven Spielberg, one of the few directors who was a recognizable name to me, bringing the terror and adventure to life. 

I was already a burgeoning movie geek by that point, and in the leadup to Jurassic Park’s release, I devoured every magazine article and making-of special I could about how Spielberg and his army of FX geniuses were preparing a movie that looked and sounded like no other. A full week before the film’s release, I begged my mom to drive to our local theater and purchase tickets for that Saturday morning’s first screening, and then made sure my best friend and I arrived to the theater 30 minutes before showtime to get a good seat. 

Jurassic Park blew my young mind. From the moment that first brachiosaur appeared, through the T-Rex attack that rumbled our theater, and past the raptor chase that made me dig my fingernails into the armrest, it was an experience I’d never before had at the movies. I knew exactly how they pulled off every technical feat, but I didn’t care; those dinosaurs were real. I believed every minute. I went back to see it six times in theaters that summer. I’ve seen it countless times since. Jurassic Park is a great movie. 

And I wish we were talking about that instead of Jurassic World. 

It’s my fault. I knew I wanted to do something on the Jurassic franchise as we lead up to the release of Jurassic World: Dominion next weekend (my plan is to review Dominion for CinemaNerdz and then do a full, spoiler-filled Franchise Friday on it here on June 17). But I didn’t want to sit through five weeks of Jurassic Park movies, especially when most of them are terrible. It’s my intention to return to my Spielberg retrospective this fall, and it won’t be long before I have time to tackle the original film (and, sigh, The Lost World) there. And so, I decided to focus this Franchise Friday miniseries on the latest iteration of the saga. 

In the immortal words of Gob Bluth, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” 

Back to Jurassic Park 

We are now firmly in the age of the “legacyquel,”  in which it’s common to revisit beloved franchises, telling new stories while key members of the original franchise saunter in to help a new generation. This past weekend, Top Gun: Maverick proved to be one of the better approaches to this concept, respecting the original and its characters while finding interesting new directions to take its protagonist.

You can probably reach back to 1986’s The Color of Money (also starring Tom Cruise) as the original legacyquel, and you can’t go through a blockbuster season without hitting one these days — Paramount alone has released Scream, Jackass Forever and Top Gun: Maverick just this year. But 2015 was really the year the legacyquel hit with a vengeance, giving us the biggest box office hit of the bunch with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and perhaps the objectively best legacyquel of all time with Creed. 

Might I humbly suggest Jurassic World as one of the worst? 

Colin Trevorrow, coming off his likable and quirky indie debut, Safety Not Guaranteed, stumbles on to Isla Nublar, hoping to wow us with big dinos with big teeth, but the effect is a charmless and mind-numblingly idiotic mess that squanders its one good idea, abandons us with unlikable characters, and never recaptures a second of the tension or thrills of Spielberg’s original. The only way it’s a good movie is if you compare it to all other Jurassic Park sequels, and even then you have to squint (it’s better than 1997’s truly wretched The Lost World, but at least the insipid Jurassic Park III gets in and out in just over 90 minutes and has a few fun set pieces; I have not seen Fallen Kingdom). 

Trevorrow, who co-wrote the script with Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly, starts off with an admittedly interesting idea: what if everyone ignored the events of the previous movies and decided to finish John Hammond’s work and open an amusement park with dinosaurs? He checks in with the park several years after its successful opening, when (presumably very rich) people pay enormous sums of money to vacation on Isla Nublar and see prehistoric beasts. 

It’s an idea I’m sure most Jurassic Park fans have considered. And I have to admit: if an amusement park full of genetically resurrected dinosaurs opened, I’d be finding a way to save up the cash to go, even if I knew they nibbled on a few lawyers during the soft opening. And Trevorrow shows our visit to Jurassic World through the eyes of two brothers (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson). It’s a smart move, allowing the film to capture both the excitement of the younger brother and the blase attitude of the elder, who’s more interested in chatting with girls than admiring T-Rexes. And then, of course, everything goes haywire, and the boys need to survive as the dinos rampage. 

I don’t necessarily think it’s the structure to hang a great Jurassic Park film on, but it’s serviceable and could have led to a fun, lean creature feature. Instead, Jurassic World quickly leaves the boys to explore other, much dumber, ideas and characters. 

Overly crowded 

As with most legacyquels, Jurassic World exists to be in awe of the original movie. There are constant references to the original film; one character mentions that the “original park was legit” and sports the old-school JP logo on his shirt. There are callbacks to Mr. DNA and other tropes, and late in the film everything from the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner to the eye goggles and Ranger Rover from the first film show up. Like most legacyquels, Jurassic World doesn’t have Easter eggs; it makes a whole damn omelet. And the nods to the original grow tiresome and wearying the more we realize they’re papering over the fact that the film just isn’t that good, and we could’ve just been watching Jurassic Park for our fiftieth time instead. . 

Trevorrow attempts to toss some meta commentary into the mix by suggesting that park attendees are bored with the same-old dinosaurs and constantly craving “more teeth,” a reference to how unimpressed most viewers have become with CGI imagery in the years since Jurassic Park revolutionized the industry. Jurassic World builds on this by including a plot where the park’s scientists have mixed and matched DNA to make scarier, more vicious dinosaurs to give them a “wow factor” (“they’re dinosaurs; wow enough,” one character says in a rare clever line). As with the initial entry point to the story with the kids, it’s interesting, as is the idea of companies vying for the chance to name the park’s latest attraction, and it creates a threat in the creation of the Indominous Rex, a genetically modified hybrid monster dinosaur. 

But Trevorrow’s big problem is that he never delivers the “wow factor” he promises, and can’t cover up the fact that he’s doing the same thing he chastises the characters for. Jurassic World simply throws more computer animated images at the screen and amps up the volume, but it never thrills, scares or delights.

First off, the Indominous Rex isn’t cool. Honestly, I don’t know that I could tell you what the difference is between this and the much-hyped Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III (some fins, perhaps?) Visually, it lacks the personality and iconography of the T-Rex, and its “features” are never truly defined, mainly because they seem to change based on the whims of the plot and how much ludicrousness it can get away with.  At one point, it not only knows where a tracking device has been embedded in its skin, it apparently knows what the device does, so it chews it out so no one can follow it. It can seemingly turn on and off its thermo signal and blend into the scenery at different times, which are helpfully waved away with a “we combined its DNA with something else” explanation. It’s later revealed that it has raptor DNA; this realization happens when the Indominous Rex stops to have a parley with raptors sent to hunt it, and it then communicates that the raptors should turn on their human handlers. Elsewhere, when it’s announced the Indominous Rex is “killing for sport,” I half-expected it to be revealed it had part human DNA, but I guess they had to save something for the sequels.

The human characters don’t fare much better. I’ve enjoyed Chris Pratt in numerous projects; he was a highlight of the Parks and Recreation cast, which itself was composed of comedic titans. I think the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are the best films in the MCU. Pratt can be charming, funny and likable, but so much of that appeal depends on him being an underdog, the kind of guy who comes through even though he’s too clueless, selfish and out of his league to be a hero. But Owen Grady is a badass raptor handler, a tough-talkin’ man’s man who is the only hope those stranded on Isla Nublar have. Platt comes off as bland and boring, his charisma hidden under a shallow cut and paste protagonist. 

But he comes off so much better than Bryce Dallas Howard, who does what she can with a character I’m pretty sure the film hates.  Claire is supposedly a successful and driven go-getter, but there’s unintentional humor in how blind she seems to be toward her cravenness and disregard for safety or taste. The film chastises her for her ambition, with her sister (an utterly wasted Judy Greer) telling her it’s not “if” she’ll have kids that matter, it’s “when.” 

Howard and Pratt have no spark or chemistry, which doesn’t go long toward selling them as a romantic item. It’s not helped by the film’s weirdly outdated gender dynamics. In addition to making Owen the rugged, ready-for-anything hero, the film constantly reminds audiences that Claire is a girl who’s too prissy for the jungle, running around in high heels and showing her preparation for adventure by…pulling off her blazer so she can show more skin? It’s supposed to be a character flaw that she won’t loosen up and succumb to Owen’s charms, but those charms involve him just being sexually aggressive and refusing to take no for an answer. In a sequence I can’t believe made it to the final cut, Owen and Claire rescue the two boys, who could care less about their own aunt and instead want Owen to save them (“your boyfriend’s a badass,” they say, and the film lingers on Howard smiling, almost as if to say, see? His sexually aggressive come-ons worked). 

And I haven’t even mentioned the subplot involving Vincent D’ Onofrio as a mysterious InGen employee who wants to…use raptors to help the Army? And he’s in league with Dr. Wu (BD Wong, reprising his role from the first film) to…do something sinister, which I assume is followed up on in the sequels? 

Jurassic World can’t heed Owen’s (one piece of) good advice: dinosaurs are wow enough. It loads on corporate satire that has no teeth, a ludicrous Army subplot, satire in a film otherwise devoid of humor, and … something involving Irrfan Khan as a billionaire investor who…wants to shoot down the dinosaur he demanded they make? And domestic drama about two parents who…sent their kids away so they can get divorced?  It’s a lot of ideas crammed in to just over two hours of run time; and while some of these could be interesting on their own, they never develop into a coherent, engaging or smart story, and instead feel like a mishmash of half-baked concepts that were never refined in the writing stage. 

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Is any of this good? 

I know Jurassic World has its defenders. When it was released, I wrote it off as very stupid, but fun in its own way. But I’ve revisited twice since then, and both times it’s been a deflating experience. 

See, here’s the issue with legacyquels: they are so in love with the original and concerned with respecting it, that they can’t help but remind you of what those predecessors did so right the first time. With a good legacyquel, that’s not an issue; Top Gun: Maverick builds on the vibe of the first one but creates new and engaging emotional stakes. Creed weaponizes our fondness for Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed to heighten our investment in Adonis’ story. 

But Jurassic World constantly uses John Williams’ original store, iconography from the 1993 film and even the return of the original animatronic T-Rex to remind us how good that original movie was. But that backfires, because the film that exists can in no way match the thrills and wonder of Spielberg’s first dino movie. 

Remember the suspense of that first T-Rex attack? The way Spielberg played with sound and perspective, holding off on the reveal of the Rex before the attack was under way? There’s almost nothing like that here, aside from one clever use of a reflection in a gyrosphere before the Indominous Rex attacks the two boys. Instead of the delicious tension of the raptor kitchen chase, there’s a CGI-heavy Pteranodon attack that’s punctuated with one of the meanest kills I’ve seen (which would be fine if the movie had a Gremlins-esque playful/mischievous streak). The final rumble involving the Indominous Rex, some raptors, a T-Rex and a mosasaurus is fun in theory, but falls apart quickly if you think about what’s happening (somehow, different species are strategizing and forming loyalties on the fly). 

Jurassic Park also worked because it leaned into something that Spielberg does better than any other filmmaker: combining wonder and terror. There were scary dinosaur chases, sure, but there were also long shots staring in awe at the creatures. Spielberg treated them not as monsters but as animals, and it was the human interlopers who got in their way (this is a big part of why The Lost World doesn’t work; Spielberg wants to make it a monster movie). The view of Jurassic World’s crew is the same as Jurassic World’s misguided scientists – it views these as attractions, monsters it can trot out for a scene of suspense (aside from moment of sentimentality when a brachiosaur dies – and yes, sigh, it’s the same brachiosaur animatronic as in the first movie). And Spielberg’s film, despite the advances it made in computer-generated imagery, was also a perfect balance of practical and visual effects, giving it an unmistakably tactile feel. Jurassic World, like most other modern blockbusters, swallows its characters up in CGI, to the point where there are no stakes because I never believe for a second that any of it is real. 

Listen, I know about the Thumper Doctrine: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing’ at all. And there are brief moments I like in Jurassic World. I like the relationship between the two brothers, whose horrible parents abandoned them with a horrible aunt who abandoned them with a horrible babysitter; I wish that was the center of the movie. I like whatever the hell Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus are doing in the control room, even if it’s ported in from a totally different movie. And I like the brief weird glimpses of the park in action – the crowd being lowered down to watch the mosasaur feed, the cheesy Jimmy Fallon safety video, and the proof that no matter how much you spend to go on a classy vacation, someone will still plop a damn Margaritaville there. 

But oof, this movie hurts the brain and, aside from some very small surface thrills, offers nothing at all that you can’t get ten times better in the first Jurassic Park. 

Last March, my wife and I went to Universal Studios Orlando and rode the Velocicoaster, which is obviously based on this movie. To its credit, I’ll say this movie inspired the best roller coaster I’ve ever ridden. But I’ll also say that the purposefully cheesy pre-show that plays in the queue and features Pratt and Howard is twice as funny, engaging and clever than anything in this movie. 

We’ll see if anything improves next week, when I finally get around to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.