#i remember hearing about a woman attacked by a moose in her own back yard. it gored and stomped her then left back into the woods
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frogspawned · 4 months ago
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pet peeve is when a story tells us something is aberrant, but it seems to matter more about who does the behavior than the behavior itself. rorschach in snyder's watchmen isn't going too far; we watch nite owl and silk spectre ii snap necks and arms with gleeful, loving abandon, in slow motion no less, while they lecture the audience about rorschach's violence. heroes frequently torture the plot contrivance out of a villain and then moralize to the camera when the villains do the same. indominus rex's killing spree doesn't shock or appall me; all the jurassic world dinosaurs act like mindless killing machines, and the camera lingers, rapturous, on their cruelty. it's not an outlier. there's nothing interesting about it beyond as a set piece.
in a better script, the indominus rex would have had pathos; a chimera made for entertainment, for profit, stitched together with no regard for itself and placed in a lonely box. a freak among freaks. of course it would be mad. but the film wasn't interested in it as an animal, or a character, only as a moving piece of scenery for people to scream at or breathe tensely while it can clearly smell and reach them but doesn't, because it isn't a character and doesn't have motivations.
it's just sort of boring, i suppose. it tries like all other empty drab things do to cover it with bombast and roaring and soaring brassy scores but it's just sort of dull. a sprawl of nothing.
conversely peele's nope is a transcendent monster movie, imo, because it thinks about the the whys and hows, how jean jacket perceives the world, how the world perceives her, and lets that shape the narrative as much as jupe or emerald or gordy. they consulted biologists and behaviorists, digging into the meat of it. the creature as a camera as an animal as a device. nope has layers. it takes its own insane premise seriously, and has something to say, and is a goddamn good movie. i forgot where i was going with this.
#always rattling that quote from peele about the difference between horror and comedy being a matter of timing#creature horror is my favorite horror and most of it is Bad but i love it. sometimes you strike genuine gold and other times. well.#drives me crazy when monsters behave only in ways meant to be scary rather than how a real living thing would act. you can do both.#i remember hearing about a woman attacked by a moose in her own back yard. it gored and stomped her then left back into the woods#a few minutes later as she tried to crawl away it came back and attacked her again. terrifying! for no purpose!#a prey animal attack is often more frightening and vicious than a predator's imo#because to be eaten -- that carries its own logic. a prey animal though holds fear and rage and desperation in the core of it. it Knows.#a lion is a simple creature compared to a beef bull who just managed to corner the farmer against the fence#unlike say movie monsters continuing to chase and kill and attack while a volcano goes off around them and literally burns them to death#don't get me started on the icy swimming feathered raptor#also the goddamn dimetrodon in the caves like. i have never seen a beast less suited for a goddamn cave. why is it acting like that.#the book jurassic park goes into the behaviors and dynamics and such of the dinosaurs and what it means that we made them and why#using the cutting edge of science to craft both story and its monsters#but the franchise is dreadfully incurious#as many franchises end up being in the end#frog croaks#i guess i wanted to complain about the jurassic world franchise specifically actually#i haven't read crichton since high school. maybe i should revisit and see if my opinion holds lol
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