#literally it makes zero sense for him to die in the helicopter crash

[tachiguin]

reasons why I believe Fyodor isn't dead:

We never got to know the details of his ability

He never came close to achieving his goal of eliminating all ability users

We also never learned why he wants to eliminate ability users or any sort of backstory info on him

Asagiri has been building Fyodor up for over 3 story arcs by now, why would he suddenly kill him off without any closure to his arc?

[niartnithoughts]

on Jurassic World

bitterandcurt

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the film.

Hah I’m sure I must have ranted a little bit about it back when it came out. But I can always rant about it more because man is it bad.

Main categories of badness:

Stuff about the humans

Stuff about the creatures

also

There’s other bad stuff like the overall story and plot points, and the heavy product placement, which is not nearly as bad as the other two categories but is still not good. Lots of scenes where you better make sure the logo on the front of a car gets in the center of the frame before panning to the actual characters.

Ironically I always, without exception, bought Original-style Barbasol Shaving Cream because of its prominent appearance in the first Jurassic Park, so I am a huge hypocrite and apparently product placement in beloved movies absolutely works. They’ve since however updated the design of the label so it’s no longer identical to the one in Jurassic Park (which came out 24 years ago), so my brand loyalty has pretty much been eroded.

I won’t flesh this out further because I haven’t watched it in 1.5 years, but, on the humans:

Claire Dearing was already an impressive, competent, motivated person at the start. The idea that she needed to stop being so uptight, unbutton her business attire and learn to appreciate kids and rugged men as the movie’s main (only?) character development felt p sexist. Also she’s totally going to jail right after the movie, not having a happy family ending. And then of course Owen doesn’t need to develop because his brand of all-American masculinity already makes him perfect duh. (Probably this is an intentional flip of JP1 where Dr. Sattler is perfect from the get-go and Dr. Grant needs to learn to love kids, but that doesn’t make it better)

The movie awards its most horrifying, drawn-out death sequence to Claire’s assistant minor character, Zara (picked up and flung around the air, half-drowned and tormented by Pteranodons while screaming, and finally being eaten whole by the Mosasaurus).

At the franchise’s roots should be a Spielbergian sense of justice, where the characters who are the most selfish, cowardly, evil, w/e are punished by letting the audience revel voyeuristically in seeing them die painfully as a result of their hubris. Like the lawyer being eaten for abandoning children to the T. Rex, or Nedry being blinded and eaten alive for sabotaging everything for financial gain in JP1. Or, even more obviously, the Nazis having their faces melted off and exploding in Indiana Jones for being evil Nazis and daring to presume they could co-opt God’s power. That one would be totally horrifying except instead it’s extremely satisfying to watch because it’s divine retribution. Obviously other movies know how to do this too, if some incredibly minor one-scene character is going to die horribly, they always make sure we know they’re an asshole first, so we don’t feel too bad for them. Like the abusive security guard in Terminator 2, or, I don’t know, they’ll have them kick a dog or something. But Jurassic World gives it’s most horrible death to Zara, who literally never had any selfish motivation and was just trying to do her job. Claire tells her to chaperone the two kids, but because they’re kids in a crowded theme park they manage to give her the slip. She’s worried sick and desperately tries to find them, and then is rewarded with an incredibly long, drawn-out horrible death. Yay!

The only thing I can think is that the stupid writers/directors must have thought we would relate to the kids so much that Zara’s attempts to chaperone them would have made her into something of a minor antagonist, as she was clearly an obstacle to them having more fun, before all the animals got loose and shit went down. So maybe if I were a selfish little kid I would have... cheered for her horrible death? I still don’t think so. I was uncomfortable with this scene in the theater. It would have been fine if other, more-deserving characters had gotten worse death scenes, but hers is the most horrifying by far. And then (IIRC) no one ever mentions her again, she could at least be used in the script later to make the characters who were responsible for the park’s horrible lack of safety precautions feel guilty.

The kids aren’t compelling and who cares about whether or not their parents who aren’t even in 99% of the movie get divorced and then get back together in the last scene because they realized how important family is even though they weren’t in the movie. I guess the kids in the 1st movie might also have sucked if they were just alone with each other for most of the time, they worked well because so many of their scenes were about how the adult main characters interacted with and had to plan around them. Instead J:W has a lot more 2 boring kids being together and then Claire and Owen being together, separately.

Could have used more diversity. The resort is off of Costa Rica, and don’t tell me it’s 98% Americans who want to either visit or work at the one place in the world that has fuckin’ dinosaurs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having the main characters be a white family + Andy Dwyer, but like, they’re such boring boys, too. Yeah you have Dr. Wu having just as small a role as he had in JP1, you have Irrfan Khan as the underprepared CEO, and then Omar Sy as Owen’s raptor training buddy whose name was apparently Barry, those are all fine. And then you have a couple unnamed extras like the Asian security/special forces-looking officer who gets killed by the I. Rex. But yeah throw in some hispanic characters at the very least. Were there any women of color in the movie?

On the dinosaurs/creatures

Half of everything sucks

The Pterosaur (those flying ones) attack scene is idiotic enough to make me angry. In it, about a hundred of two kinds, large Pteranodons (who are here fictionally strong enough to lift humans off the ground) and smaller Dimorphodons, we’re talking like slightly larger than an eagle at most, are all broken/driven out of their enclosure by a helicopter crash. Freedom! Also scary explosions! It makes perfect sense that they’d all stream out of their cage and fly free, that part’s great. But then why the fuck would they all immediately fly directly over to the visitor center/main welcome area and all swoop down and all start attacking humans? Stupid as fuck, that’s not a thing any animal would do. They still could have had an attack sequence, but those Dimorphodons are small and fragile, how the hell are they going to kill a human? It’s not like it shows them working together in packs or anything, they just all attack mindlessly and rabidly without an ounce of self preservation. They could have had the larger Pteranodons going for people (still stupid, but w/e) and the smaller ones taking advantage of the confusion to like steal people’s cotton candy, or eat someone’s pet parrot or something. It would have been exactly their kind of comic relief. Meanwhile really they all should have just flown off to literally anywhere else on the island and like just chilled and hunted some fish or whatever. There’s absolutely zero animal motivation given to all of them to single-mindedly go on a human-attacking rampage.

Contrast this with the first film, where they tried to treat the dinosaurs as plausible animals. Sure, the raptors deliberately hunted the humans, but they specifically show the raptors as being extremely intelligent and being mistreated (put in small cages, repeatedly shocked with cattle prods), so it’s at least built up to be plausible they would want some form of revenge. Plus humans are actually a good size for something like a raptor to eat. (Compare with the T. Rex in JP1, who is perfectly content to leave the humans alone if there’s regular dinosaur prey around.) (Also compare with Jurassic Park 2′s Compys, where a guy throws a rock and some dirt at some little dinosaurs and they scatter and back up, because wow that looks like some realistic animal behavior and makes the dinosaurs more believable, which is something Jurassic World’s creators know nothing about.

A lot of the dinosaurs just don’t look great. Also not scientifically accurate, which is a whole ‘nother thing, but even ignoring that a lot of them just don’t look good. Maybe it’s because of weird lighting? It’s not like they didn’t put a lot of time and effort into making them, but they didn’t come out good. And I don’t think it’s because they all but abandoned the first movie’s animatronics and puppets in favor of nearly all CGI— by Jurassic Park III (2001) I thought the CG dinosaurs looked better than the animatronics they were still using because the animatronics (especially the arms and hands) would stand still and not move as fluidly. Somehow the raptor designs look worse than the previous movies. The angles of the design have just been blunted and rounded in ways that look less cool. In every promo image they just look odd and lumpy, which is really weird since this time around they’re doing all this sophisticated CG skeleton and musclestructure simulation. I think in the original they may have just tried to shoot the raptor heads from the side whenever they could because it’s a more flattering angle, but either way, J:W has lots of angles that make their dinos look more rounded and dumb.

Look at this big ol’ thick-necked raptor:

The main antagonist, the “Indominus Rex” wasn’t great. It didn’t have a good visual design, and it was stupid that they would introduce these undiscovered abilities it had one by one (ability to regulate its body temperature to hide from thermal vision, ability to camouflage its skin to blend in with the jungle, etc.) and then have it never use them again.

They scaled up the sizes of some of the creatures during the making of the movie because they figured the actual sizes weren’t impressive enough. Like the Apatosaurus (long-necked one that dies while they hold it), the producers wanted it redone bigger during preproduction, and the Mosasaurus (the aquatic one) was way bigger than it actually was in real life. I know they address this in the movie explicitly, by saying the Park’s geneticists intentionally mess around to make the dinosaurs bigger and more impressive to keep that tourist money flowing. But I personally don’t like it, I came to watch a movie with realistic dinosaurs in it, not just any monster movie.

I guess that’s also why the ‘not acting like animals’ thing bothers me so much, if I had just wanted to see any monster movie I wouldn’t have cared.

The Indominus talking to the raptors and all that was silly.

That said the Mosasaurus, and how it is the ultimate power on the island was cool and good and well-used in the movie. Set up and then brought back without being overused.

That’s enough for now, plus I can’t remember every specific. It’s not like the original movie is flawless either, and it’s sequels definitely aren’t (J:W may be a better movie than Jurassic Park III). But then also the original is such a huge special effects milestone, and Jurassic World has basically nothing new to show us.