In Spielberg-land, the price of divorce is that your kids get eaten alive (or almost) by dinosaurs. Sent of to an amusement park near Costa Rica to avoid the emotional trauma of their parents divorce, two cute boys end up being chased up and down a tropical island by ravenous dinosaurs. Spoiler alert: despite their best efforts, the dinos don't manager to chow down on the boys. Of course, with this movie, Jurassic World, you don't really need spoiler alerts because there is nothing new or different in this movie, nothing surprising, no plot twists that you can't intuit far in advance, no suspense and no thrills. Certain rules apply in Jurassic World -- fat guys are always evil villains or negligent fools, but they end up eaten by dinosaurs so it doesn't really matter in the end; you can typically predict the fate of a character applying the old Star Trek test -- people of color tend to be expendable (there's one exception to this rule in Jurassic World, but the Jamaican or African who survives the dinosaur assault, despite being a major minor character is simply forgotten about when the monsters fail to eat him -- in other words, he's out of the movie without the dignity of being devoured alive.) As the film progresses, the heroine will lose more and more of her clothing so as to better display her pneumatic figure, but, in the end, she will still face down the most vicious of the dinosaurs in her high heels -- the actress trapped in this thankless role, and cursed with the worst hairdo ever seen in a big-budget movie is Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard's daughter; the robot chick in Ex Machina is warmer and more appealing than she is allowed to be in this movie. And, of course, the last 25% of the film will be shot in bluish-green darkness to conceal the shabby special effects -- in the last part of the movie, the big battle between equally matched carnivorous dinosaurs is only a slight advance over similar scenes in old Godzilla monsters: despite all the CGI, it still looks like guys in rubber suits battering one another. (And one of the raptors in the last part of the film is very obviously a hand-puppet.)
Every hoary stereotype imaginable is reprised in Jurassic World -- the problem is that all of this was all done better and with far greater wit and elan in Jurassic Park more than 20 years ago. Genetically modified dinosaurs are bad; dinosaurs with natural genetics -- whatever that means in this context -- are good. The military industrial complex remains, as always, up to its old tricks. Although the genetically engineered dinosaur is supposed to be much larger and more vicious than the other monsters, the film doesn't provide any meaningful standard of comparison. In fact, the more feral genetically modified monster merely has a few more stylish spikes and scales on his body -- very much like the forest of radioactive excrescences growing from Godzilla's back. The end of the film is choreographed so poorly that we can't tell which dinosaur wins the battle or which big feller is snarfed down by the huge aquatic dragon. In fact, the climax of dinosaur-on-dinosaur action relies upon a deus ex machina or deus ex Tyrannosaurus Rex, suddenly bringing that creature into the action when there has been no reference whatsoever to the animal before the final titanic (and unconvincing) battle.
Chris Pratt, an extraordinarily likeable actor, is wholly wasted in the film. And, if I'm not mistaken, Pratt has lost some weight and, unfortunately, has seems to have learned the classic, patronizing sneer of a typical movie action hero. He no longer is the resourceful, comic, slightly overweight Everyman that audiences appreciated in Guardians of the Galaxy. With a few more trips to the gym, Pratt will start to resemble the beefed-up Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis kind of super-hero -- and, accordingly, will entirely lose his charm. (It reminds me of the ludicrous Jeff Goldblum required to appear in action films with his body encased in Schwartzenegger-like muscles -- the actor's unique qualities were utterly obscured by casting him in roles of that kind to the extent that his career completely collapsed. The studios could put muscle mass on Jeff's arms and pectorals but couldn't do anything about his bulging Talmud-scholar compound eyes and nerdy features.) The female lead with her pert upthrust breasts, high-heels, and skin-tight garments seems directed to put feminism back, at least, forty years -- she acts like a character in a low-budget 1950's monster movie. The film, not exactly a mess and, probably, respectably made in some ways, was directed by Colin Trevorrow. You get your money's worth, although I spent a lot of time wondering how much longer the increasingly absurd and poorly staged chase scenes could last. (The movie feels much longer than its two-hour running time.) The best scene in the film involves a pterodactyl attack on the crowded theme-park. It's in the sequence that the film makers show their contempt for the audience that has parted with their money to see the movie. The pterodactyls plunge out of the sky and savage the white middle-class people with their smug, pampered children, the same Orange county suburbanites imagined, I suppose, as the film's target audience -- an anonymous woman with a movie-star figure and movie-star clothes gets picked up by a pterodactyl who passes her to his buddies swooping nearby; the flying monsters hurl her from beak to beak as if she were a basketball in a Harlem globetrotter's game and, when she finally falls into the big Sea World tank, aquatic monsters dribble her up and down the court until she's gobbled up by the biggest sea monster of them all. It's a sequence of breathtaking cruelty and clearly intended as rebuke to the audience -- take that, you pathetic fools! After expending all the film's budget and ingenuity in the pterodactyl-attack sequence, the movie is left with a 30 minute climax filed in the blue-green murk. After the anonymous woman's comeuppance, it's pretty clear that the director has lost all interest in the film.
Why can't you hear a pterodactyl urinate? Because the "p" is silent.
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