Post by Harkovast on Jul 11, 2020 20:04:38 GMT
Duh-duh-duh dur dur.
Duh-duh-duh dur dur
Duh-duh-dur, duh dur, DUH DUR
Sorry I just singing the Jurassic Park Theme tune.
I guess it doesn’t work as well in text form.
The first Jurassic Park was good, everything after that is shit.
You know it, I know it. It’s a scientific fact.
But how shit can we get?
How far can this kingdom fall?
(See what I did there?)
A few years have passed since the Park in Jurassic World went crazy and the dinosaurs started murdering everyone.
Now I come to type it out, it’s weird that Jurassic World was about a park rather than a world…but I digress.
The dinosaur island is now threatened by a volcano that will kill all the dinosaurs.
My first reaction was “who cares?”
I mean the dinosaurs went completely kill-crazy in the last movie. As soon as they got free, they went all out to wipe out as many humans as they could.
Pterodactyls were dive- bombing and carrying people up into the air for some weird reason.
Sorry, I’m getting side tracked on how bad the LAST movie was. Gotta focus!
Other than being horrible monsters, way back in Jurassic Park 1, we brought dinosaurs back from extinction. So if we are really worried about it we can just remake them again. What’s the problem?
Jeff Goldblum is back! He was in the first two, then not the next two, but now they’ve brought him back in again.
Now I love me a bit of Goldblum, as all right- thinking, God fearing people do.
But his inclusion in this film is laughable.
He doesn’t appear with any of the other actors, only in a separate court room scene where he passes grave commentary on the folly of man and the dangers of dinosaurs.
He very obviously showed up for one day’s work for a hefty pay cheque and did as little as possible. He doesn’t stand up at any point film!
So after that pointless cameo we catch up with the heroes of the last film, the woman whose name I can’t remember, so I’m going to call her Ginger Bird, and Chris Pratt. I actually do remember Chris Pratt’s character’s name, but I’m going to call him Chris Pratt because he’s pretty much abandoned even the pretence of this being a character and is just playing himself. Remember how in the first film Chris Pratt made a really half-hearted stab at doing a deep south drawl? Well if you do, that’s more than the film makers remember, because he’s just talking in his normal voice.
Maybe he’s just Star Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy who got stuck here through a space portal. Might as well be for all the effort Chris is making.
In the first film, Ginger Bird was a business woman with no interest in the dinosaurs as living creatures and then spent the whole film with them trying to kill her, slaughtering everyone around her and forcing her to run in high heels.
So naturally now she loves dinosaurs and has become an eco- activist trying to save them.
Meanwhile, Chris Pratt, who trained the raptors in the last film and was the top dino expert who didn’t want to see them exploited…now doesn’t care about them and is totally indifferent to their fate. Even Blue, the raptor he hand reared from an egg.
He’s literally living in the woods building a log cabin when we first see him.
Ginger Bird is contacted by a Corporate Douche Bag who wants her help to use the tracking chips in the dinosaurs to find them, capture them and take them to the new safe haven.
She agrees to help the Corporate Douche and persuades Chris Pratt to come out of retirement as well.
Her meeting with Chris involves some horrible dialogue where they recount their relationship not working out in between films for the benefit of the audience.
They set out to the island along with an army of mercenaries led by Big White Hunter.
I’m calling this character Big White Hunter because that is literally what he gets called in the movie.
After being introduced with a close up where he makes an evil sneer at the camera and then Chris Pratt says “So you’re the Big White Hunter?”
Hunting is bad I guess? Considering all the characters are there to hunt dinosaurs, this seems a very strange objection, but I guess it’s so we can know who the baddies are.
Ooops! Sorry what a spoiler! I let slip that Big White Hunter is a bad guy.
I just hope I don’t give away Corporate Douche Bag’s real intentions before the big twist!
Also along for the ride are two wonderful stereotypes.
We have a sassy young scientific girl who is always talking about science, being empowered, not needing no man, giving smug comebacks and being horribly irritating.
The other one is a dorky nerd who is scared of everything, including flying to the island and dinosaurs. He spends the entire movies complaining and screeching in terror.
We’ll call these two Tumblr Girl and Nerd Boy.
I don’t want to get your hopes up so I will tell you up front that the dinosaurs don’t eat either of these two. So disappointing.
Our intrepid crew head to the island where they manage to activate the tracking devices and find Blue, the raptor from the first film.
Blue’s safety and survival in this film is a big point of drama so if you don’t care about the fate of this vicious, man-eating genetic monster, you might not be super invested.
Chris Pratt uses his raptor training skills to calm Blue down, but then one of the mercenaries shoots Blue with a tranquiliser dart. Chris shouts that he told them to wait for his signal, but they shoot Blue again, causing Blue to run at one of them, who fires a pistol, wounded her and disabling her.
Chris Pratt is angry at them for not sticking to the plan and runs at Big White Hunter, presumably intending to kick his ass.
Big White Hunter shoots Chris with a dart, causing him to collapse as well.
Now things take a weird turn.
Tumblr girl grabs a dropped pistol and stands over Chris Pratt, pointing the gun at the mercs, who point their guns at her.
Why?
Why does she do this?
The Mercs haven’t declared an intention to kill Chris, betray the plan or really do anything. They were just over eager in how they captured Blue and darted Chris as he was going to attack one of them.
Tumblr Girl then says that they need her to treat the wounded raptor with her sassy girl science skills, so if they kill her, the raptor will die.
What….what is she talking about?
She pulled a gun on THEM!
The only reason she is being threatened is because she started threatening the mercenaries.
Remember that scene in Blazing Saddles when Black Bart takes himself hostage?
This scene seems to run on the same logic.
The mercs seem to agree to this (as the mayor in Blazing Saddles said “Hold it men! He’s not bluffing!”) and lower their guns.
So then she lowers her gun, and they capture her.
This movie always makes me think that it was written by some kind of computer.
It has elements of movies that are recognisable, but they are flung together in a weird, meaningless way, like the one putting them together is imitating a movie rather than understanding what a movie should actually be.
There is a bit of dialogue early on between Chris and Nerd Boy that demonstrates this pretty well. It is spoken as the characters get onto the plane to leave.
Chris – “don’t like flying?”
Nerd boy –“Would you want to ride on a thousand pound horse that has been mistreated all its life?”
Chris “I used to ride a motor bike through the jungle with raptors”
Nerd boy “We are not compatible.”
You see this sort of makes sense. We can kind of tell what they are saying, but it’s all a bit weird and disjointed.
How disjointed?
Look at this conversation I just put together.”
Chris “I used to ride a motorbike though the jungle with raptors”
Nerd Boy “We are not compatible”
Chris “Don’t like flying?”
Nerd “Would you want to ride on a thousand pound horse that has been mistreated all its life?”
My version makes as much sense as the original. I shouldn’t be able to reshuffle the dialogue and not affect how much meaning is conveyed!
”We are not compatible”
”I used to ride a motorbike through the jungle with raptors”
”Would you want to ride a on a thousand pound horse that has been mistreated all its life?”
”Don’t like flying?”
That time I just did it at random and it’s still only a little bit less coherent!
I’ve checked the wiki and it claims real humans wrote this, so I guess they are keeping the script writing AI under wraps for now.
The mercs take Tumblr Girl but leave Chris, Nerd Boy and Ginger Bird to die on the exploding island….and I have no idea why.
Was this part of the bad guys’ plan?
Why wouldn’t they take the heroes back to the main land, thank them for their help, pay them and send them on their way?
So far the bad guys haven’t deviated from the actual plan of capturing dinos.
Our heroes have to escape various goofy CGI perils on the Island including lava that falls on a dinosaur but the dino brushes it off and is okay (five second rule I guess?) and a T rex that comes to the rescue by suddenly appearing just outside of the camera frame and killing the bad dinosaur just in time. How the T-Rex, a 50 foot tall monster that shakes the ground when it walks can get within ten feet in front of someone in an open field without being noticed, I don’t know. I’m also not sure how or when the T-Rex became a good guy in these movies, but in these Jurassic world films it now only eats evil dinosaurs and humans. Though to be honest, in this case it didn’t even eat the bad dinosaur, it just kills it and walks off. I guess it just wanted to save Chris Pratt. How kind of it!
Our heroes manage to catch up with the mercs, who are being rough with the captured dinosaurs, pulling them with ropes to move them.
I guess this means they are bad guys now?
Big White Hunter isn’t sure we got the message so he goes over and uses some pliers to pull out a captured dinosaur’s tooth as a trophy.
Bit of a meaningless souvenir as he is taking them from all the dinosaurs and he didn’t personally capture most of them. He’s just scavenging them from other people’s hunts at this point. I mean I guess he can lie and say he hunted them personally…but why not just get some other animal teeth off ebay if you are going to do that?
Anyway, our heroes drive a truck off a pier into the bad guys’ boat.
Fortunately the mercs don’t notice this and our heroes are able to hide out on the boat. Sure, why not?
They find Blue bound ands still injured.
Chris Pratt says that because of how they are treating her they clearly don’t intend to take her to a sanctuary, but intend to sell her.
What…what does that mean?
Why does how they treat the animals tell you what they want them for?
Why would they mistreat an animal they want to sell? They can’t sell a dead or injured raptor, surely?
But Chris can tell they want to sell the dinosaurs and that’s bad…I guess?
We do all remember that both versions of the dinosaur parks, the originals and Jurassic World remakes, were all about monetising dinosaurs as a product.
That’s what they were created for.
Why is selling them now suddenly some great evil I should care about?
I mean yeah it’s shitty our heroes were lied to about the mission, but as the audience, why should I be bothered about this outcome?
We’re also supposed to be really upset about Blue bleeding to death. But fear not, our heroes have a plan!
Tumblr Girl explains that they can do a blood transfusion from a similar animal.
In her own words “Anything with three toes”.
So they decide to do a blood transfusion from the bound T Rex the bad guys captured (though the time frame for how the T Rex managed to rescue our heroes and then get captured right away afterwards and put onto the boat is pretty confusing. And yes, it’s the same animal.)
You know when a human is injured and doctors go “well any primate will do. Get some baboon blood in here. Hell, a cat will do, that’s got hair, its close enough!”
It’s a shame the characters weren’t eating KFC at the time, they could have just used some of the Colonel’s delicious chicken gravy and poured that in the raptor’s veins.
With blood transfusions the rule is always “Eh, close enough.”
The bad guys head back to the manor house where Corporate Douche Bag is planning to auction the dinosaurs to make money because money is evil and the people behind this film gave all the proceeds to charity…right?
The mansion is owned by Corporate Douche Bag’s boss, an old white guy with a walking stick that is tipped with an insect in amber.
”Oh,” you might be thinking “You mean the old guy from Jurassic Park 1? John Hammond? Played by the wonderful Richard Attenborough?”
No, not him.
Richard Attenborough sadly passed away, so now we have a NEW old guy, who is revealed to be a partner and best friend of John Hammond. We’ve never seen him before and he was never mentioned, but he’s meant to be very important. (Incidentally, he’s the actor who plays the intrepid farmer in Babe)
He says that John Hammond never wanted to exploit dinosaurs for money (suggesting maybe he really didn’t know Hammond or watch the first film. Hammond wanted to make Dinosaurs into a really tacky theme park! Exploiting them for money was his life’s work!)
Corporate Douche Bag turns against him and murders him by smothering him with a pillow, with a dramatic shot of the walking stick falling on the floor and breaking. The walking stick, we must assume, this guy got left by John Hammond in his will.
I think he was actually written to be John Hammond but they changed their mind because having another actor would be confusing, so made him a new but very similar character.
He has a daughter who sneaks around the mansion listening to the bad guys give elaborate exposition to each other about their plans, making sure that the audience understands what’s supposed to be happening (at least as far as they can with this nonsense.)
They have created a new kind of super raptor, from DNA recovered from the big evil dinosaur in the last movie. This one is called the Indoraptor.
It’s like a raptor, but a bit bigger.
They’ve trained it so that if you shine a laser dot on someone, the Indoraptor will attack them. Yes, like a cat.
This is supposed to be the next stage of military technology.
So to use this creature, you have to point a laser dot at your enemy, then release your dinosaur and wait while it runs over and rips the target to bits.
It’s a shame humans haven’t invented anything that you can point at people, and then they die. Something where you put the laser sight on them and then hit the point the laser sight is on with a projectile, thus immediately killing that person.
But since that kind of thing is impossible, I guess releasing a giant trained animal is the best we can hope for.
The Jurassic World films really want to have a moral message about the events they portray, but seem to really struggle to decide exactly what that message should be.
All the characters engage in monetising dinosaurs, but then monetising them is declared to be a bad thing. Bringing dinosaurs back to life seems like it turned into a bad thing, but letting the dinosaurs go extinct again would also be a bad thing. Recreating dinosaurs with frog DNA was good I guess, but taking that any further to make new hybrids is a bad thing.
The movie even features an odd reference to Donald Trump, because seemingly it has to be 2016 for the rest of human history now.
Referring to Tumblr Girl, Big White Hunter says “What a nasty woman!” --obviously quoting Trumps insult to Hillary Clinton.
It’s a weird line because its not really an attack on Trump, and the bad guy isn’t like Trump (he’s the evil hunter, not the evil business man or evil politician.)
People who support Trump will probably be annoyed at seeing his words in the mouth of the bad guy.
But people who hate Trump won’t get anything out this either. It’s a completely toothless, meaningless comment that just reminds you that you are watching a movie and Hollywood really doesn’t like the Trumpster. If anything, it might serve to remind Trump detractors of the fact he won, which will put them in a bad mood too.
Like everything in this film, it acts as if it is saying something, but ends up saying nothing at all.
These movies also really struggle to explain WHY dinosaurs are important. They keep doing some weird concept of dinosaurs being used by the army, or not being exploited for money…but then why are we creating them? Just for yucks? Seemed like something to do at the time?
They are just big animals. They seem like they would be pretty easy to get rid of if we don’t want them anymore. In the real world humans have to make a special effort NOT to make other animals go extinct, I don’t think dinos would stand much chance with us around.
Lots of evil business types show for an auction at the manor house, wanting to buy the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are being stored, experimented on and created in a secret lab under the mansion, accessed by a secret elevator. It’s very nice of the bad guys to put everything of any importance to the plot in the same building. That makes things a lot easier when we are wrapping up the second half of the movie.
I’m not really sure why all these rich evil people want dinosaurs, or even who they actually are. I think it’s some sort of military thing, but what the dinosaurs do in a battlefield situation I have no idea. It’s definitely a bad thing they are doing and we should want our heroes to stop it.
Unfortunately, the good guys get captured by the mercs and put in prison. The bad guys in this movie love failing to kill the heroes when they have the opportunity. They didn’t finish them off on the island and now put them in a prison cell under the mansion. I assume they are just planning to hold them here indefinitely, since they are no longer of any use to the bad guys, and they can’t ever let them go as they will reveal what the bad guys are doing.
Strangely, the bad guys actually draw attention to this fact, flat out stating that everyone thinks the heroes died on the island. But rather than just machine-gunning them, they just leave them there in the cell.
You will be shocked to learn that our heroes escape and move to thwart the bad guys’ plans. What are the odds?
At the auction the indoraptor fills everyone with dread and terror and the bad business people are willing to pay even more money for that than the other dinosaurs.
I can’t really understand why. It’s just a bigger raptor, it’s not even the biggest dinosaur ever, but for some reason it inspires them to bid loads of cash for it.
We are just told it’s big and scary and everyone wants it.
It’s so scary that Chris Pratt says that it mustn’t be allowed to leave the mansion…for some reason. This film is very bad at conveying why I should care about anything that is happening.
Chris Pratt sets dinosaurs loose, who then attack the evil rich people and stop the evil auction.
After the people flee, Big White Hunter comes in asking when he will get “his bonus” (this is such a strange line…is he expecting to be handed a big sack of money with a dollar sign on?) Seeing the indoraptor he darts it and goes in to take one of its teeth.
Unfortunately the indoraptor is crafty and pretends to be asleep. Then when he comes in to get its tooth, it opens one eye and smiles at the camera when he isn’t looking.
No I’m not joking.
It kills him and then gets loose.
The movie now becomes a sort of haunted house situation where the indoraptor chases our heroes and the little girl around the place.
Oh and it is revealed the little girl isn’t really the Old Man’s grand daughter.
She is actually (wait for it) a CLONE of his daughter who died! Dun dun dur!
I strongly suspect that this was written when the old guy was supposed to be John Hammond so the reveal might have been more meaningful. But instead it’s some old guy we don’t know or care about, whose daughter is a clone. Who gives a fuck about any of this? Why does that matter? It’s the least interesting reveal imaginable!
Though it also highlights a problem with all this Jurassic bullshit.
Why do we keep using this advanced genetic science stuff to make dinosaurs? Couldn’t we cure cancer or something instead? Why are dinosaurs the part everyone focuses on? I mean perfect human cloning seems more useful than making a slightly larger raptor? Why aren’t they selling that technology rather than stupid dinosaurs?
Another villain in these Jurassic World films is an evil Asian Scientist guy. He was a very minor part in the very first Jurassic Park film, but now he’s treated as a main villain, doing evil villainous science stuff.
Though in the actual plot of the films he doesn’t seem to actually do a great deal or have much screen time.
This time out he wants to take some of Blue’s Blood for more of his evil science but then Tumblr Girl says that Blue’s blood is tainted, because she gave him a T-Rex blood transfusion. She describes its blood as being “like a sock drawer.”
This is how blood transfusions work.
Nerd Boy and Tumblr Girl set Blue free who starts killing all the guards. The guards are specially trained to run within five feet of Blue before trying to fire their guns, thus allowing themselves to get eaten.
Blue sets off a gas leak and has to leap through a window like an action movie hero to escape the explosion. Blue, like a bad ass, does not look back.
Yes this really happens.
I guess we are cheering for Blue now.
Indoraptor proves to be bullet-proof, because sure why not? This means Chris Pratt is in a lot of trouble but Blue comes to the rescue, sending the evil Indoraptor (because this movie makes moral judgements about which man- eating monsters are good and which are bad I guess) plunging to its death.
Corporate Douche Bag seems like he will escape, when T Rex suddenly appears and eats him.
Somehow, for the second time in the movie, a T Rex sneaks up across the open, through someone’s field of vision and saves the day.
Once it has done this, it starts roaring and shaking the ground, so I guess it turned off its stealth mode.
The dinosaurs get set loose from the mansion, and have soon spread out all over America, or the world or wherever.
We then go back to Goldblum, who is still in the same court room, wearing the same clothes with everyone else sat in the same spots they were before.
He’s talking about new events that happened after the ones he talked about earlier in the film, so clearly time has passed.
I’m not sure why the film makers decided that Goldblum and the people in the court would remain the same despite it being several days since we last saw them.
It’s almost like they only had Goldblum for one day’s filming because he didn’t give a fuck, and they just used the footage they had without caring.
If I didn’t know better I would say Goldblum was added to the film later on in production so they could bookend it with him, to put him in the trailer to sell tickets. It’s lucky I am not the kind of cynical asshole who would suggest such a thing.
He warns that we are now living in….JURASSIC WORLD!
This movie is a wonderful, horrendous, nonsensical mess.
However, as much as I might mock it, it also made over a billion dollars at the box office, so people love this shit.
Since I don’t think most people are watching it as some kind of ironic comedy, I don’t think this says good things about the state of cinema.
Maybe this was all an experiment to see how bad a movie with Jurassic Park on the logo can be and still make a fuck tonne of cash.
In which case….mission accomplished!
