Predictions for Jurassic World
The trailer for Jurassic
World hit this week—the long awaited sequel/reboot to the Jurassic Park franchise—and it got a
mixed reaction from fans and newcomers to the series (if you haven’t seen the
trailer yet, go watch it before reading any more).
I am what you could consider a super fan of all three films
in the Jurassic Park series, and as a
huge fan, I have not been terribly excited by the direction this reboot-ish
sequel has been taking from day one of its announcement. I guess my biggest
issue comes down to premise and title. Dropping “Park” and adding “World”
instantly gives it a different flavour than the previous films. The premise now
is, instead of a park that experiences issues and unleashes dinosaurs and
people get eaten (or in the case of 2 and 3, people going to the island with
the un-caged dinos when they really shouldn’t be and getting eaten), the park
works. Yep, there are no problems. Yet.
Given what was shown in the trailer, I’m somewhat more hopeful
that this film will deliver. Obviously it’s a little early to start picking
apart what have essentially only been teases of things to come, but regardless
of how the movie turns out, it will never
ever top the original Jurassic Park.
That is just a fact.
Having said all that, there were more than a few things that
got my hopes up, and then a few that brought them back down, leaving me at a
cautiously optimistic though still heavily pessimistic place of mind. Let me
start with a major positive. To begin with, dinosaurs. Enough said. But
seriously, when dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of
evolution, are just suddenly thrown back into the mix together, how can we
possibly have even the slightest idea what to expect? Oh wait, because we’ve
seen it three times now (don’t take that as a negative, because there could
never be too many movies with dinosaurs in them), so everyone knows going into Jurassic World that dinosaurs chasing
people around and chasing each other around is going to be awesome. Honestly,
though it’s something that could potentially be screwed up, I think the
filmmakers will ace it.
And speaking of filmmakers, that’s another thing that really
got me worried about Jurassic World
coming right out of the gate (“What do they got back there, King Kong?”). Who the hell is this
no-name director? Colin Trevorrow is only known for directing Safety Not Guaranteed. I’ve never seen
it so I can’t say how well made it is, but I know two things about it. 1. It’s
something of a cult hit. 2. It has no big action set pieces, no big name
actors, and most importantly, no dinosaurs. #1 is a plus, #2 is a minus. Now I’m
not saying this unknown director doesn’t have what it takes to pull off Jurassic World—from what I’ve heard him
say about his concepts and direction for the film in interviews, it sounds like
he’s a fan interested in making a film that both pays respects to the original
and takes it in a slightly new direction—but putting the future of not only my
personal favourite film franchise, but a franchise with as much gravitas and as
much complexity as Jurassic Park in
the hands of someone who’s made only one film, is more than a little
disconcerting. Even though Steven Spielberg didn’t direct Jurassic Park III, they at least got a director (Joe Johnstone) who
had handled big budget blockbusters before and was as passionate about the
franchise as he was. Spielberg is back to executive produce like he did for Jurassic Park III, and though it’s great
to have him still attached to the franchise he so successfully launched, it
really won’t have a huge bearing on whether or not the film succeeds.
Let me talk about the original three films a bit before I
get any further into this new one. The first Jurassic Park needs no introduction. Over 20 years later, it’s
still one of the most exciting, groundbreaking, timeless adventures of all-time.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park gets a
mixed reaction from fans of the first. It was the obligatory sequel that got
bigger and bolder, but also a little dumber and less original. Jurassic Park III has an even more divisive
rep. I’ll admit, the second and third films are guilty pleasures, but the third
is an especially guilty pleasure. The biggest issues with Jurassic Park III reside in the general plot structure and
depiction of the dinos. Jurassic Park
was a perfectly paced film, epic but not overly self indulgent, had strong
characters, incredibly realized dinosaurs, swift action, and the list goes on.
With The Lost World, the characters
weren’t as strong and plot was less focused, but it still has more than a few
memorable action sequences and the effect are every bit as good. Jurassic Park III is a B-movie with
B-grade movie monsters instead of dinosaurs. Even though The Lost World pales in comparison to the original, it at least got
the dinosaurs right and had them behaving menacingly, but not just for the sake
of being menacing. They still acted like realistic animals. The T-Rex parents
just wanted their infant back, the trapped dinosaurs that are supposed to be
shipped to the main land just wanted to be free. In Jurassic Park III, the Spinosaurus replaced T-Rex as the main
villain (a problem within itself, but I won’t get into that) and pursued the
group of humans for no real reason other than it made for exciting action. Yes,
the Velociraptors were trying to get their eggs back, which is logical, but
that came secondary to the Spinosaurus’ ridiculous antics that included ripping
through a plane just to get at tiny human morsels and smashing through a giant
fence head-first (again, just to eat those little humans. Even if he ate all of
them, he would still be hungry). The other problem with Jurassic Park III is the plot in general. Compared to building a
park with dinosaurs that run amok or trying to bring dinos to a park on the
main land and having a T-Rex stomp through San Diego like Godzilla, saving some
lost kid with Dr. Grant from the first film leading the way just doesn’t hold
the same significance or excitement, and made for an underwhelming (and way too
short) sequel.
With that out of the way, back to Jurassic World. What the trailer and premise are trying to get at
is, in this film, which takes place in the same timeline as the first three, Jurassic World is a success and things
go well.
The main thing skeptics are saying is, “DO THESE PEOPLE NOT
LEARN?!”
It’s a legitimate question. To me, this isn’t an issue. Let’s
not forget something important. In the first film, Jurassic Park wasn’t open to the public yet. In fact, as far as I
can tell, no one had even heard anything about it at all. Dr. Grant and Dr.
Sadler have no idea what they’re getting into when they go to tour the island
in a sort of test-run scenario before being open to the public. Of course
things go wrong, people die (though not very many, only five) and word gets out
that the park is a failure and John Hammond’s dream has been crushed. Then in The Lost World, Hammond’s nephew seizes
control of the company that created the dinos and tries to get the ones on Site
B (the other island that’s more like a wild life reserve than a zoo) off the
island to another park on the main land, but of course that goes bad too, more
people die, and a T-Rex runs rampant through the city. At that point, a lot of
people knew dinosaurs were very much alive and as dangerous as ever. Jurassic Park III reiterates the hazards
of visiting Site B, but we never find out what happened to Isla Nublar (the
first island). In the novel, the island and all the dinosaurs are destroyed.
From what I’ve read, another company is behind the creation of the new park.
Whether it was built upon the ashes of the original or the original park was
transformed into what we’ve glimpsed in the trailer is yet to be seen, and may or
may not be confirmed at all over the course of the film.
My point here is, although people know dinosaurs are
dangerous and all that jazz, they might not fully understand just how dangerous they are or can be.
Assuming Dr. Grant and company didn’t talk to the public much about the events
of Jurassic Park III, all anyone
knows is there were problems on the original island, but they might not know
exactly what problems or how many people died or what went wrong in the first
place. The events of The Lost World
had nothing to do with the original island—that was all thanks to Hammond’s
crackpot nephew. So if you’re a person living in the year 2005 (the year
Jurassic World was opened to the public, according to the website), and you
knew a bit about what went down in the past with dinos running amok, yeah you
might be hesitant to go and visit the same island which has dinos on it once
again. BUT, if you’re like me, you would risk death to see the most incredible
spectacle of all-time and go to Jurassic World.
I don’t have a big problem with this idea of people wanting
to go to a Disneyland-or-Universal Studios-type theme park to see living
dinosaurs even after the events of the previous three films, but what I do have
a problem with is the proposed plot for the film. People go to the island.
Unlike the first film, it’s open for business. Things go wrong. Dinosaurs get
out and kill people. That sounds an awful lot like what happened the first time.
The added twist they’re really pushing in the trailer is that people have
gotten bored with Jurassic World and their mundane dinos—the park is suffering
from a been there done that vibe—so they’ve taken their DNA sequencing a step
further and started not just cloning dinos but creating hybrids, and this new
hybrid of what I think will be a T-Rex and Velociraptor (and maybe some other
dangerous creature) will get out, cause mayhem, then have to be stopped. This
is the central point I want to discuss, but there’s some other smaller things I
want to get into first.
One scene that a lot of people were excited to see was a
crowd sitting around a jumbo Sea World tank with a Great White Shark being
dangled over it. A gigantic Mosasaur (imagine T-Rex with four flippers) jumps
out and eats the shark in one bite, to which everyone cheers. This pissed me
off more than anything. First of all, how did a mosquito manage to bite this
fully aquatic creature and then be caught in amber and dug up by miners and
brought to a lab and have the blood extracted? This is something they could
address in a semi-logical way. Given the DNA splicing that’s going on, it is possible that someone made a T-Rex genetically
designed to live in water. But given what the director has said in response to
this creature, I don’t see that explanation happening. Mr. Trevorrow responded
to the Mosasaur eating the shark with this...
“I thought it would be cool
if we had this massive animal and the park used one of our most fearsome modern
predators as food. There could be a whole other facility where they used shark
DNA to mass-produce them to feed the bigger beast. It’s a bonkers idea, but I’m
comfortable going to Crazytown, because I used to live there when I was a kid.”
(Quote courtesy of ComingSoon.net)
That doesn’t sound promising at all. As crazy
as cloning dinosaurs and putting them in a theme park is, “Crazytown” is not
somewhere that should ever be close to Jurassic Park, or Jurassic World, or the
actual Jurassic Period. The thing Michael Crichton did so well when he first
wrote Jurassic Park was make this absolutely outlandish idea seem
completely believable. This Mosasaur concept alone completely kills the believability.
The whole nod to Jaws with the shark being devoured was a little too on
the nose for me, and not to mention, the cgi for that whole thing was terrible.
The visual effects have been a major
controversy since the trailer’s release. It was made clear early on the
director would be pushing for practical effects instead of cgi. What we got in
the trailer was a whole lot of cgi, ranging from good to downright dreadful,
and no hint of practical effects. Even the gate, which was real and operational
in the original film, was a poor cgi imitation with an even faker looking monorail
going through it. Is it too early to attack the quality of the visuals? Yes. We
are still half a year away from the release of this film. The post production
is still in progress. The cgi could still have a long way to go (and at this
point it does because everything looks fake and none of the dinos look anywhere
near as realistic as the cgi in the first film) and it could be they just haven’t
shown any of the practical effects yet. There is still hope the visual effects
will be better in the final product.
For those of you uncertain about what I refer
to when I say practical effects, let me quickly explain. In the original film,
the cgi was used for those impossible full shots of the dinosaurs in action.
However, a lot of people don’t realize, the majority of the dinos were depicted
using advanced animatronics created by Stan Winston (who also created the Predator,
the Queen Alien, and the Terminator). For The Lost World and Jurassic
Park III, the animatronics were still used, though both films used a lot
more cgi. Somehow, some way, no other film series has ever been able to create
as convincing dinosaur effects as those from Jurassic Park. Even though
cgi has improved vastly since 1993, it still isn’t as convincing as an actual
animatronic dinosaur in front of the camera, and the Jurassic World
trailer exemplifies this. A major concern of mine was the director might choose
to use only cgi, even in close ups, and hope it looks good. I won’t be able
to fully critique this aspect until I see the full movie.
95 % of the time, child actors are awful. With
that established, it’s a worrying sign that the trailer opens with a kid, and
closes with that same kid. He is clearly a main character, and that could be a
big problem. With the first film, it was a fluke that the kids weren’t that
annoying. With The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, they weren’t
so lucky with the casting, and even though I liked the sequels, I did not
like the kids in them. My theory for why a kid was included as a main character
is they wanted to appeal to the younger audience that will be going with their
parents (likely big fans of the original) and it’s another nod to the original
trilogy. As an adult, I don’t want to see little kids in this movie, and I don’t
want them to reference the originals in that way. There is still hope he gets
devoured in the first act, which would be awesome.
Now on to the star attraction of the trailer: this
new hybrid dinosaur and Star Lord himself, Chris Pratt, hunting it down. Chris
Pratt’s character seems to be very Muldoon-esque (who’s he? “Clever girl” ring any
bells?) and I trust Chris Pratt will do well in the role. What I don’t trust is
the decision to have him leading a pack of Velociraptors on a motorbike. In
response to this, the director said his relationship with the raptors is not as
straight forward as everyone (including myself) first suspected. It sounds like
they’re going to still be dangerous, and who knows, maybe the raptors will go
rogue by the end and return to their former ferocity. But having someone in the
presence of the Velociraptors who isn’t about to pee their pants isn’t as cool
as it sounds. In fact, up to that final part of the trailer, I was starting to
get pretty pumped for Jurassic World, and then I saw that and went, “Oh....um....hmmm.....ok.....”
While T-Rex was the big bad in 1 and 2 and Spinosaurus was in 3, no one could
forget how terrifying the Velociraptors were in all of the films—it’s even
debatable that the raptors were more frightening than T-Rex in the first
film, thanks to their cunning intelligence (of course that didn’t save them at
the end when T-Rex destroyed them). But to have someone train the raptors, or
even just condition them, kind of undermines all the work done in the original
and the sequels to set them up as intelligent killers. In the words of Dr.
Grant, “Were it not for the cataclysmic events that wiped out the dinosaurs, it’s
entirely possible that raptors, rather than humans would have become the
dominant species.”
The idea of having a hybrid dinosaur doesn’t
excite me at all. I find it preposterous that people could ever become bored
with living dinosaurs, let alone in the short span of ten years (Jurassic World
opens in 2005, then ten years later, everyone says, living dinos? Meh, that’s
cool I guess.) It’s been pointed out by other fans that this unnatural creature
is supposed to be hated, because it’s showing that the scientists are
stupid for doing such a thing in the first place and the original true dinos
are what people should want to see and Chris Pratt and his Raptors and probably
the original T-Rex are going to have to hunt it down and kill it.
I think this is a terrible idea. There are so,
so, so, so, so, many kinds of dinosaurs out there, the fact that the filmmakers
think people want to see a made up one is actually insulting to true dinosaur
fans. I get that this isn’t a dinosaur documentary (trust me, the dinos are extremely
inaccurate in all of the movies) but the idea of creating a fake monstrosity of
a dinosaur just seems like a desperate attempt to add a new dimension to the
film, and almost seems lazy. Instead of researching up-to-date science and
talking to real life paleontologists, let’s just come up with some super freaky
Franken-Dino and use that. It’s almost like going back to what made Jurassic
Park III bad by making them theme park monsters instead of life-like animals.
Michael Crichton’s goal with Jurassic Park was to tell a story about
dinosaurs with the most realistic approach possible, and Spielberg managed to
maintain this despite toning down tons of the scientific content. On the
optimistic side of things, it might be cool to see the original T-Rex
reinstated to her former glory and have this hybrid thing fight her and get its
ass kicked.
One final problem I haven’t talked about yet
is the general look and vibe I got from the trailer. It felt like they were
trying very hard to replicate the feel of the first film, what with the arrival
to the island on the ferry, the opening of the gates, the herd of giant Sauropods
(no, they weren’t Brachiosaurs like in the first and third films, but I’m sure
everyone knew that), but it didn’t work for me. Jurassic Park had a certain
grittiness and wilderness to it despite being a theme park. Jurassic World
looks too pristine and too artificial, and whether or not that’s the feel and
look they’re going for, I don’t like it. The first film, despite being over 20
years old, doesn’t even feel outdated (with the exception of the computer
stuff, obviously) but the high tech monorail and gyrosphere thing going through
the field look not only generic, but unrealistic compared to simple jeeps on a
track. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it! Well, I guess those jeeps did get
pretty broken in the first movie, but they didn’t have to go out and replace
them with human-sized hamster balls for the Triceratops’ to play soccer with
once they break down.
Will I be seeing Jurassic World when it
comes out? Of course! The trailer could have shown Chris Pratt riding on the
back of a Velociraptor which is holding a machine gun with skis attached to its
feet and I would still want to see it. Whether or not it will be a worthy
sequel to my favourite film franchise ever is definitely still up in the air.
It could go many different ways. It could be too scientifically oriented with
trying to explain away all the technicalities like how they got the park up and
running and how the hybrid works and how Chris Pratt trained the raptors, or it
could have too much dumb action and no explanations whatsoever. It could be an
imperfect imitation of the first film, or it could be too far away from what
the franchise is at its core. It could be amazing and “...spare no expense.” Or
end up being “...one big pile of shit.”
Jurassic World comes out in theaters in 3D and 2D June 12th,
2015.
