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The Contrarian Reviews Jurassic World

I was a Dinosaur freak for the first 14 years of my life, and the original Jurassic Park movie is certainly the best Dinosaur movie in history for practically any true Dinosaur fan. But Jurassic World is just stupid!

Much has changed both in my life and the paleontological regarding Dinosaurs. I still occasionally dedicate a few hours every few months to read up on new Dinosaur discoveries and new evidence that confirms or dispels previous data about these magnificent ancient creatures. In the paleontological world, many of my favorite Dinosaur species from my childhood now look more like chickens—as this new ‘many Dinosaurs sported feathers in some shape or form’ hypothesis gains more weight with emerging evidence.

Bluntly put, even the casual viewer of a Sunday afternoon Dinosaur documentaries is aware that the textbook image of Dinosaurs being scaly lizards is being erased and recolored with feathery creatures that look more like emus on steroids. That is ok, because the evidence belies this artistic re-rendition of Dinosaur illustrations.

Unfortunately, despite all this evolution in our understanding of Dinosaurs, how they looked, how they behaved, Jurassic World lifts its enormous three-toed corporate leg and pisses all over new evidence and emerging data.

A prime example is the prominent Velociraptors (show in all of the films), which were much smaller in real life than what the movies depict them as; and there is no longer any doubt that Velociraptors were covered almost entirely in feathers. Velociraptors really looked like toothed turkeys with clawed wings, and the only speculation left is the actual color of the Velociraptor’s plumage. The entire Jurassic Park franchise has been stubbornly pumping air into and ripping the feathers off of various Dinosaurs specie to make them look more like the commercial and outdated images we owe to the assumptions from paleontologists from the 1800s—nostalgia over scientific accuracy being the norm with Hollywood Dinosaur films.

The movie does try to retcon (patching a plot hole in later episodes) this issue by having the lead Ingen scientist claim that the patchwork done to the Dinosaur gene code—where strings of genes are taken from modern animals to fill the gaps in the Dinosaur genomes—produced Dinosaurs that look different from their original form. This is a rather subtle, but one I appreciated.

I know I’m watching fictional movies (not scientific documentaries), and little exaggeration is expected and even ok. I dare say, the original movie might not have been the hit that it is had it portrayed the reality. But Jurassic World took it to a level with the leaping Mosasaur in the pool snapping up a 15-20ft great white shark as a 6ft crocodile would a chicken that I saw as a firmly erected middle finger from the new, young (thus stupid and inexperienced) director that supposedly got his orders from the movie’s executive producer, Steven Spielberg.

I remember a time when you could watch any new Steven Spielberg title (either directed or produced by the man) and expect as well as receive pure cinematic brilliance!

Clearly the man is no longer motivated by money, his reputation, or the art form, because that Mosasaurs has been calculated by some people to be about 600ft in length! The real creature was a mere 59ft in length (and that is from the biggest specimen ever found). Now 10+ TIMES FUCKING BIGGER is not enhancement, its blasphemy and shows the Delian the directed has the audience’s intellectual fortitude!

Jurassic World’s small-dicked director clearly was not going to be outdone by recent monster movies (Pacific Rim, Godzilla, etc.) which all have bigger monsters than any Jurassic Park movie ever could.

In interviews, Jurassic World’s director kept dropping the line that ‘he wanted to make adults feel like kids again when they see this movie.’ CLEARLY! I felt like a kid, because my intellect was completely disregarded when I was shown bullshit to sell more popcorn!

Clearly, no Jurassic ‘anything’ movie will ever match the original Jurassic Park movie magic, awe, and believability—not to mention rewatchability. I personally think Steven Spielberg should go into retirement and keep his senile ambitions to himself. He is becoming like George Lucas when he decided to do the prequel trilogy for Star Wars, i.e., nothing but a whore for more money driven by an ego that does not listen to fair criticism. People were too scared to interject when George Lucas made glaring mistakes, and thus the STAR WARS prequel trilogy is what it is.

But back to the Jurassic World movie review, where the remainder of it is green-screen-grade acting melded with over-the-top action scenes—because we all know that the first thing Pterodactyls do when they escape from their enclosure en masse is to swoop down collectively from the sky and kamikaze (that means suicide-style) attack every human on the ground!

Then there is the shopworn theme of scientists genetically engineering a Dinosaurs in the park to AGAIN played god and create an uncontrollable monster. This sort of flippancy and disregard ensures that Jurassic World will fade into history as more evidence that, more often than not, sequels suck!

I don’t know any of the actors in the movie, and their performances were so candid that I can’t even be bothered to look their names up. I also find it somewhat insulting that John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) did not even feature in the movie as a spiritual embodiment with the man saying a few words about Jurassic World, even as a projected holographic image (because, yes, the man is dead not just in the movie but also the real world). Jurassic ‘Anything’ without John Hammond’s face appearing somewhere is like Superman without a cape!

Even today, when I watch the original Jurassic Park movie, I’m on the verge of tears by just how magical it is and how it perfectly delivers what any Dinosaur nut would expect were they ever to see a real-life Dinosaur!

How the hell then does Spielberg go from such genius to such platitude within 22 years? It’s as bad as James Cameron’s Terminator 2 to Avatar plunge! (And who says the mind (and its productions) does not decline with age at the same rate as the rest of the body?)

But it need not be so. Mad Max was a classic car chase, steam punkish, and post-apocalyptic thriller. And the director who directed that great film directed the latest and arguably best film in the franchise, Mad Max Fury Road. That guy is George Miller, and yes, he is old—so it can be done!

I can’t find much to recommend about Jurassic World. It has some awesome scenery and rides/attractions that certainly deliver a special theme park feel, but all of the Dinosaurs look as if they were considered secondary attractions to actual scenery and architecture of the park that enclosed them.

I loved the hamster ball cart, and sadly, they had to turn it into this movie’s ‘people trapped in a car while an angry Dinosaur tears it apart’ scene. This is not continuation of style; this is invoking clichés to avoid having to THINK about crafting original action scenes with Dinosaurs in them. Just go for whatever the public is used to, and leave it at that.

And so ends an era. Unlike Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and several other franchises—which all ended on a high note—Jurassic Park/World leapt from the highest high and plummeted to its lowest low.

In a counterintuitive way, I can’t encourage Dinosaur fans to see this movie—certainly not if they want to see awesome Dinosaurs. I can, perhaps, recommend this movie to the average action film fan, that is to say the type of person who likes to eat their popcorn and sip their slushy with flashes of light and loud noises as accompaniment.

In some parts, the special effects are just insultingly bad. The dying sauropod scene shows a synthetic looking concoction with bad animatronics. It was painful to watch because the scene was supposed to be tragic and mimic the sick Triceratops scene of the original movie—where the Dinosaur (with 22+ year old technology to put it into the movie) actually looked REAL! What the hell is going on with this new movie?

The director also stated that he is done with making any Jurassic Park movies. If only he had that level of wisdom going into this project as he now has having left it, then maybe, Jurassic World would have been a movie worthy of some praise!

Summed Up

The financial crises and declining public interest that the fictional Jurassic Park resort faces is, perhaps, representative to the declining fame of the Jurassic Park franchise in the real world. And just as in the movie itself, the brand owners manage to cock up in the most spectacular ways possible at the most crucial moments imaginable.

I have come to expect some slap-dash work from Hollywood, but this is a particularly painful slap in the face, considering the fact that I was once a Dinosaur nut and the original Jurassic Park movie captivated my mind like nothing else on earth had before or since.

 Final Score

Two thumbs down—one for the childish director, and another for the indifferent (and senile) executive producer, Steven Spielberg. Those two have combined their ineptitude and ran this franchise into the ground (albeit making a billion dollars at the box office won’t convince them of such misdemeanor)! Most b-rated Dinosaur movies are more interesting to watch than this multi-million-dollar screwup of a flick.

The visuals are a mix of overdone CGI and pathetic 80s-style puppetry, and as such, no scene looks believable. The original movie did blend CGI and puppetry, but it did so believably, and actually looks more realistic than the latest movie.

Regarding the plot . . . there is not plot! It’s a monster movie using Dinosaurs and our hopes and dreams as Jurassic Park fans to relive our childhood wonderment when we have, in the meantime, become grown adults.

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