Reviewing - The Jurassic Park Franchise
Dinosaurs. There's literally nothing more that this franchise needs to give me to earn my undying loyalty...but on occasion they go above and beyond and give us great characters, meaningful discussions on modern science and commercialism, and stunning action pieces. Let's hope life always finds a way for one more movie.
Jurassic Park (*****)
They have a T-Rex!
This movie is just as exciting and relevant today as it was when it was released over 25 years ago. First off, this movie has freaking dinosaurs in it. That automatically bumps it up five notches in my book. Secondly, the effects on these dinosaurs still hold up. It may not be the level of complexity that we’re used to a quarter of a century later, but that first shot of the Brachiosaurus still takes my breath away. Thirdly, this movie has a T-Rex. I know, that’s a dinosaur and we’ve already covered that. But come on! There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex in this movie. That’s awesome!!
As much as I’d just like to talk about how great each dinosaur is in this film and how impressive the special effects are (the blend of animatronics and CGI is terrific), this movie has a whole lot going for it beyond its prehistoric stars. One of the greatest scenes in this whole movie is the ‘lunch scene’ where the main characters all debate the moral justifiability of both reincarnating an extinct species and then showing them to the public as an ‘attraction’. The first thing to love about it is that it’s an intelligent conversation, which is more than we can usually expect from films where mad scientists go against the laws of nature. There are good points raised on both sides, and moreover, the characters are delivering these points in a realistic and believable way. There’s always a guy in these kinds of movies who yells “You morons are gonna die if you keep tampering with the laws of nature”, but that line has become as cliché as the mad scientists it rages against. Instead, we have characters pointing out different possible consequences of pursuing this new development: fantastic opportunities for new research, a burgeoning god complex, lots of money, the total collapse of morality in science…and of course, people getting eaten.
To that end, the various characters are all great. I love John Hammond, the optimistic Santa-Claus-esque man who just wants people to get to see dinosaurs. As misguided as he may be, he’s honestly just trying to make the world a better place. Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are totally fine as our lead characters, but Jeff Goldblum steals the show as Ian Malcolm. Then there’s Muldoon (the “clever girl” guy), Nedry (the “ah ah ah, you didn’t say the magic word” guy), and the inimitable Samuel L Jackson as Mr. Arnold (the “hold onto your butts” guy). Each of them are terrific characters who bring their own charm and flavour to the film. I especially love the scene when we watch the raptors get fed, and Muldoon walks into the scene declaring “They should all be destroyed!” How can you not love that?!
One last thing I wanted to point out before I wrap up: there’s this brilliant moment of foreshadowing early on in the film that I didn’t notice for years until someone else pointed it out to me. When Dr. Grant and the others are on the helicopter as it descends into Jurassic Park, they’re told to fasten their seatbelts. Grant reaches for his seatbelt, but realizes that he’s holding two ends that don’t click together. Everyone else has the part that sticks into the other part, but Grant has two stick-out parts instead of one and the other. Making the best of a crummy situation, he ties the two belts together to secure himself. Brilliant! As Dr. Malcolm put it, “Life finds a way.”
Here’s what’s going on. Later on in the film, we’re told that the dinosaurs can’t breed because they’re all female. You can’t breed if you’re all female, after all. Yet in the end, Dr. Grant finds out that some of the dinosaurs utilized some of the frog DNA in their genes to change their sex in order to balance the ecosystem. They had two parts of a seatbelt that didn’t go together, but they figured it out anyway. I love that!
Even if this movie didn’t have any of the stuff I just brought up, it’s still got dinosaurs. And that’s more than enough for me.
The Lost World (****1/2)
They have TWO T-Rexes!
Jurassic Park may have been the original, but this film has TWO T-Rexes. Who on earth would ever complain that there are too many tyrannosaurs? I just don’t get why this film received such lackluster reviews in comparison to the original. Sure, it’s not the original, but you can never be the original once the original’s already come out. And aren’t we all here to see dinosaurs?! This movie has like a million dinosaurs in it!
So yeah, obviously the dinosaurs are great – but just like last time, there’s more than dinosaurs to keep things exciting. I love Pete Postlethwaite’s character Roland Tembo. He literally has come to the island for only one reason: to hunt and kill a T-Rex. What a boss. Peter Ludlow, the evil corporate guy, is definitely satisfying as a villain who’s so obviously wrapped up in his own self-importance that he can’t see the dinos for the trees. There’s also a really great scene where our protagonists are trapped in an RV that’s been pushed halfway over a cliff. Dr. Sarah Harding has landed face-first on a glass window that points straight downward to certain death. With every tiny move she makes, the glass cracks just a tiny bit more. That was a blast. The tension was real, and Julianne Moore really makes us believe that her character is scared to death.
Here’s what I just can’t wrap my head around. I’ve heard multiple people complain about the big final act of the movie. That’s the bit where a T-Rex gets loose in San Diego and starts running around eating people.
WHAT ON EARTH is not enjoyable about that?
I loved every second of that climax. It’s fun, wild, and it’s even clever once or twice. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke in that scene where the T-Rex bursts through the US Customs center – right through the “Please declare if you are carrying any food, alcohol, or animals” sign. The whole thing is purely for the fun of it, and I get that, but that’s no crime. Especially when it’s this level of fun.
So yeah, this is one of those movies that I’ll never say no to watching. It’s packed with dinosaurs, fun characters, and some terrific action sequences too. It’s just a shame that the third one ended things off on such a sour note.
Jurassic Park III (*)
THEY HAVE THREE -
wait -
what the heck is a spinosaurus
This film feels like a slap in the face of the previous two. From the opening seconds, I got a bad feeling. We start with a shot of the island from a distance, and the subtitle comes up to tell us that we’re looking at Isla Sorna (Site B) from the last movie. This text goes away and is suddenly replaced with “RESTRICTED” in all caps, coloured bright red. I feel like the movie and I really did not get off on the right foot based on this. Obviously Isla Sorna is going to be restricted. You don’t need to tell us that. No one walks into a film called “Jurassic Park III” thinking ‘I bet things are totally fine now since the last movie’. And even if you haven’t seen the previous two movies, anyone could’ve guessed that this island probably has dinosaurs on it. And yes, I know – first impressions can sometimes be wrong. But that was definitely not the case for me and this movie.
Let’s go over all the bad calls they made one-by-one so we can finish this on a high note. Getting rid of Spielberg was a bad idea. Sure, he was still involved, but the final film in a trilogy is no time to switch captains.
Secondly, the Spinosaurus didn’t strike the same chord that the T-Rex did in either of this film’s predecessors. I think part of this is because we usually saw the Spinosaurus in the daytime, where the light of the scene made the man-behind-the-curtain a bit too visible. What I mean is that it was fairly obvious to me that the Spinosaurus was a giant animatronic for a number of these scenes. The T-Rex was usually shot at night in the past, which made him look cooler but also hid the flaws and missteps of animatronic technology. To make matters worse with the Spinosaurus, they made it kill a T-Rex! You can’t just kill a T-Rex like that! It’s like having Darth Vader killed by Kylo Ren as an introduction. You can’t solidify a new villain’s place by undermining the authority of your previous antagonist. And come on...the T-Rex is the king of the dinosaurs. I don’t care about science or statistics. In the eyes of the public, the T-Rex ruled the dinosaurs just like lions rule the jungle. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t true – it’s what we believe. And movies are at least in part about taking us to those places we believe in.
And look, you can’t introduce an icon of cinema like the T-Rex as a joke. When we first see the T-Rex here, it pops up out of nowhere as a ‘surprise gag’ for our characters on the island. There’s then a little joke about how everyone runs away from it instead of following Grant’s orders. Think about the way that we were first introduced to the T-Rex in the first film, or consider the entrance of Darth Vader or the Joker into any film they appeared in. From a cinematographic standpoint, we’re made to understand their significance by the way the filmmakers reveal them to us. So why the heck are you showing us a T-Rex like it’s just another angry dinosaur?
I think my undying love for the Tyrannosaurus is probably a bit too evident now, so let’s move on. The script also sucks. Alan Grant says “Nothing on heaven or earth could make me go back to that island”, which makes total sense. But then someone offers him money and he changes his mind. That’s it! Just money! And that’s exactly the reason he went last time! And what about the bit with the talking velociraptor? Sure, it was just a dream, but it was unequivocally stupid. And why did the velociraptors have feather things on their heads? Did they just sprout those in the few years since the first movie?
And what about that comment where they said the Spinosaurus wasn’t on ‘Ingen’s List’? What was that? It felt like a line that was meant to increase the feeling of danger with regards to the dinosaur, but we’ve never heard of Ingen’s List before or since. And how did Billy survive the pterodactyls? Is Grant now gonna sue the head off of the couple who dragged him to the island? Why did they split Grant and Sattler up for no good reason? And how the heck did the kid get T-Rex urine? This script is a hot mess!
Okay, I said I’d end things off on a high note. There were a few shots of dinosaurs that were nice, and although I will fiercely debate the plausibility or justifiability of the outcome of the T-Rex/Spinosaurus fight, it was a cool moment. But even if they had had three more of those fights in this flick, it wouldn’t have been enough to save it from its horrible story and unconvincing special effects.
Also there’s no way a kid would last two freaking months on a dino-infested island. A couple days would’ve been believable, but at the two-month mark, that’s basically a summer internship. That kid should’ve been eaten a long time ago.
Jurassic World (****)
They have a Starbucks!
After the extinction-level disaster that was Jurassic Park III, it seemed that this dinosaur franchise wouldn’t be as easy to resurrect as its starring attractions. More than ten years passed, but one day the trailer rolled out for a new chapter in the Jurassic Saga. This trailer showed us a brief glimpse of the fearsome Indominus Rex (great name, by the way) and also showed us Chris Pratt riding a motorcycle alongside some velociraptors. I didn’t believe for a second that these raptors were trained to such a high level of obedience by Pratt’s Owen Grady. My hypothesis at the time was that the shot actually showed us Grady cycling away from some big dinosaur, and the raptors were so terrified of the new beast that they also happened to be running away too. I got proven wrong, of course, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.
The moment that trailer ended, I turned to my brother and said, “The T-Rex has to fight the Indominus, and the T-Rex has to win.”
“Why?” he inquired.
“Because the Indominus is a hybrid,” I answered. “It’s basically representing corporate greed and anti-naturalism...and it’s not a real dinosaur. The T-Rex is the original. They have to show that the natural way is the right way. AND they screwed up last time with the Spinosaurus killing the T-Rex so they have to right their own wrong.”
Needless to say, I was literally half a heartbeat from leaping to my feet when I sat in the theatre watching the T-Rex crash through a Spinosaurus skeleton to make its triumphant roar before charging headfirst into the Indominus. I hadn’t had a need so absolutely fulfilled by a movie in a long time, and this film gave me exactly what I wanted.
To clear the air, I know that this movie isn’t the film that many Jurassic Park fans were hoping for. Most characters in this film were basically cartoons – the intellectual debates of the first film had been traded in for characters saying “This is a horrible idea” and “Nonsense! This is fine!” to each other in increasingly ludicrous situations (I’m looking at you, raptor trainer). I also know that there were a few points in this film where the filmmakers didn’t quite succeed in doing what they set out to do. For example, the big triumphant Jurassic Park theme we all know is usually reserved for beautiful shots of dinosaurs walking through a plain or something like that – but here they used it to show us the human-filled side of the park. That kind of fell flat, because there’s nothing particularly magnificent about looking at buildings from a long distance.
But hey, this is miles better than the historic low set by this film’s predecessor, and a big part of that is enjoying seeing Hammond’s dream fulfilled. We get to see people canoeing next to brachiosaurs, kids riding baby triceratops, and safari excursions with herds of running gallimimuses. That’s awesome! The imaginative ways that park-goers get to interact with dinosaurs was really fun, even if some of the ideas (like the gyrosphere) strained credulity at points. Even the over-commercialized aspects of the park were fun because they were so believable.
At the end of the day, what sets this film’s script apart from the script of its predecessor is the fact that all of its stupid bits are tongue-in-cheek. The movie itself knows that Owen Grady riding his motorcycle with raptors is a bit on the insane side, and that its main human villain is unbelievably dead-set on weaponizing these dinosaurs. Even the bit where Grady catches a fly in midair is so ridiculous it’s laughable, but it’s so obviously laughable that it’s forgivable. And anyway, say what you will about these films, but as long as there’s a T-Rex in it, I’ll come back.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (***)
They have a volcano!
As someone who works with students and children on a regular basis, I know that a classic gag of live children’s entertainment is having someone standing and talking to the kids, not knowing that something funny is going on behind them. The kids usually point and yell, trying to get the person to turn around and spot the funny thing. But when the person turns around, the funny thing (usually a puppet, funny character, or something like that) has disappeared. It’s an old joke, but it never gets old for kids. I’m just surprised that it worked on me, because this film used this joke THREE times. Three separate times, a character was minding their own business doing something when a dinosaur of some sort appeared in the background. The character obviously never noticed until it was too late – but the funniest one was undoubtedly the first one at the very beginning of the movie. It’s clear from the movie’s opening seconds that the tongue-in-cheek factor from the previous film has been cranked up to ‘maximum’.
And you know what? I’m okay with that. I don’t mind tongue-in-cheek as long as it’s done well. The bad guys are hysterically and nonsensically evil – the tooth-grabbing poacher and the wicked auctioneer being two such examples. Sure, there’s no depth to their characters, but it sure does make it fun to watch them get eaten. We as an audience love watching people get what’s coming to them, and this movie delivers on that. Think of Indiana Jones fighting against Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. There’s nothing wrong with characters that are very clearly black-and-white.
While we’re talking about bad guys, though, I have to admit that the chief antagonist Eli Mills sucks as a character. He’s essentially an exposition machine – every word out of his mouth is a poorly scripted means of delivering information to the audience that we’re supposed to need. It was impossible for me to ever separate his character from the screenwriters because his lines were so clunky and unnatural. There’s a particularly bad shot where he’s standing over a holographic representation of the Indoraptor, and the camera is zoomed in on the hologram itself with his midsection and gesticulating hands in the background. However, his hand movements don’t sync up with his lines. He’s delivering lines that the screenwriters wanted us to hear, but the editors put more focus on the hologram itself than the character speaking. This is emblematic of the amount of effort they put into this guy’s character – next to none.
But hey, this movie looks great. The dinosaurs are incredibly lifelike, and the emphasis on real-life special effects and puppetry really paid off. The puppet they made for Blue’s surgery scene is jaw-dropping. It’s moments like that that remind me what movies are all about – making us believe in something that we know isn’t real. Beyond the dinosaurs, there are so many beautiful shots sprinkled throughout the film. There’s real aesthetic value to this flick, even if there isn’t much value intellectually.
One more major gripe I have to voice. Why did they do the thing where they made our protagonist love interests break up off-screen? I hate when movies do that. What’s the big deal with having them as a dating couple? This movie could’ve unfolded just fine without that unneccessary bit of will-they-won’t-they drama.
More than any of the previous Jurassic films, this one is definitely a mixed bag. Even so I walked away more pleased than disappointed. There were plenty of great dinosaur moments, some exhilarating action scenes, and the screenwriters finished the film off by opening a door to a whole new world of storytelling. I have no idea what Jurassic World 3 will look like – and that’s great!
Battle At Big Rock (*****)
They have a short film!
This ROCKED! For a film less than ten minutes long, it packed a real punch. For one thing, it gives us a glimpse of the world that’s come to be as a result of the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. For another thing, it tells a story that feels like a Jurassic movie should. It has family issues, a moment of awe in the face of dinosaurs, terror and screaming, and a thrilling resolution. The way each of these aspects are introduced is perfect, and it all happens at a break-neck pace. There’s nothing not to like about this!
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (****)
They have an unsupervised teenage campground!
I required only one thing from this show – for people to get eaten. And boy, did it deliver.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only person nervous about the idea of the franchise being watered down for this kid’s show. If you’re going to make a Jurassic World themed show, you can’t make the dinosaurs all friendly (or at least unimposing). Part of the reason we love dinosaurs is because they’re intimidating. If you take away a T-Rex’s teeth, it’s going to lose fans quick.
This is definitely a show for kids, but I still found it immensely enjoyable because it followed the Jurassic Park formula uncompromisingly. People get eaten. Kids scream in horror. Characters run and hide from ominous razor-toothed dinosaurs. That’s what I’m here for! We don’t often see fear as a central element in children’s entertainment – fear and family-friendly don’t go together very well. But some of the best stories told with young audiences in mind include fear because it’s such a primal and relatable form of excitement. This show is packed with tense moments and hold-your-breath shots of adrenaline. There’s a line that they won’t cross because young kids are in the crowd, but they definitely push the envelope and keep the dinosaurs as scary and awesome as they were in the original film.
One of the coolest things about this show was how it ended. I initially wondered how they were going to make a Season Two – or if they ever intended to. The way they wrapped up this story was a little anti-climactic (our characters accept an unexpected ending with hardly any resistance), but it sets the stage for a very different next season.
This is exactly the show I would’ve loved to watch as a young kid – which is probably the reason I have such respect for it today.
This post was originally published on April 6th, 2020.