Jurassic World

Polygon has a piece wondering if Maisie was supposed to be a half dinosaur hybrid at some point, and if that reveal was cut at the last minute..

Reminds me how the script for the Original Jurassic World clearly intended for the I-Rex to have human DNA (Explaining why it was so smart, could figure out its own tracker, and its sociopathy), and that plot point was clearly removed at the last minute, leading to the Unreveal that the Dinosaur that looks like a giant Raptor, does in fact, have Raptor DNA.

Just saw it today. I loved it. I think it might be my favourite Jueeask Park film? Great ensemble cast. Evil people are satisfying murdered in poetic ways. Heroes were endearing. I like the theme of guilt? Masie might be my favourite character in the franchise. She's exactly a he sort of hero in the books I used to read as a child that I've waited so patiently to arrive on screen. The programmer? From the trailers I was anticipating hating him, but actually I was always sympathetic to him? The vet? Gosh, my gaydar is just going haywire for her.

Great Direction, I should looked up who did it. Cinematography is engrossing, dramatic and moody.

Volcanic eruptions do NOT work like that, but that's the magic of Hollywood I guess.

The best part of this is that finally, finally, this series is asking us to sympathise with the dinosaurs? Great use of animatronics and tragedy to really sell it.

Pacing is a bit weird. The indorapter was not loose for very long. Dramatic death of course, but after the Indimonous Rex and the Spinosauros, Indorapter seemed like she died like a punk.

Edited by Whowho on Jun 28th 2018 at 6:07:16 PM

Speaking of the cast, at first I thought Lockwood looked a bit like the late great Christopher Lee.

James Cromwell must be the most type cast actor in Hollywood. He always plays great scientists who have fallen from hubris and sit down a lot.

Star Wars First Contact, iRobot, Surrogates, and I'm sure there's more.

Probablt because he's six foot seven so if he stands up the boom is in shot.

This whole movie was just kind of Narm for me.

What is it with the Jurassic Park franchise and feeding the T. rex goats? :S I think a Beefmaster or a Texas Longhorn might satisfy their appetites better.

Goats are small enough for a T.rex to swallow whole.

Didn’t she eat a cow in the first film?

I thought that was the raptors. Then again, I haven't seen the movie in forever. ^_^;;

The raptors eat a cow

The T-rex eats a goat

The goat makes sense in the first film as it's used to attract the t-rex to the edge of the Enclosure for tourists. It makes sense you'd pick a smaller prey she can eat multiple off in a day (So you can do it multiple times for multiple tours), as opposed to something bigger she'd eat once.

Makes me wonder if a T-Rex would actually bother with such small preys. Like, (Along with humans) would be too small for the T-Rex to effectively strip meat off the way most carnivores do. Could the T-rex eat an entire small prey whole and process the skeleton, like some owls and snakes do with mice? Or would the skeleton get stuck in them.

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 30th 2018 at 3:35:06 PM

I doubt it would recognize mammals as prey in the first place. Tyrannosaurus primarily hunted by scent, but Mesozoic mammals were far too small for it to bother targeting. It would probably just ignore goats & cattle since they don’t smell like its natural prey.

That can just be worked around by feeding him from youth mammal meat.

I'm more questioning the T-Rex' digestive system's ability to eat such small preys.

Whales eat krill, shrimp, and fish.

Yes. None of which can get stuck in a whale's bowels (And whales evolves specifically to eat these things). So not sure what your point is here.

That they’re tiny and yet the whale can eat them.

I’m sure to the T. rex that a goat is just an oddly shaped Protoceratops or something.

I'm surprised that the monosaur seemingly didn't eat the Indominoius Rex. Or perhaps she did and just pooped her out whole.

So I took a look at Reddit's opinion of this movie, which is obviously very low, but one thing that stood out to me, contrasted with a read of the character pages here, was the criticism of the villains being cartoonishly evil (the TV Tropes character page for Fallen Kingdom lists Eli Mills as the biggest Hate Sink of all Jurassic World/Park characters), while the character pages to me seem to be trying to make a huge deal of how evil Mills is and how utterly cathartic his death is.

My issue with the two points together is that simply accepting the criticism of the cartoonish villainy undercutting the film feels like a cop-out to avoid the feeling of true hate against Mills, simply avoiding needing to hate the character himself when you can just hate how he's written to be like this. On the flip side, if I take Eli Mills and the need to hate him completely seriously, then the Catharsis Factor scene that is supposedly satisfying would be useless to me because that wouldn't ease the overwhelming hate I would feel or let me take my mind off him, not to mention that I prefer subversions of Catharsis Factor via being too horrifying to be satisfying.

NOTE: I didn't watch the movie and I don't plan to, so I'm just going off of words alone.

I loved watching everything spiral out from under him. He's greedy and not as smart as he thinks he is, and this keeps coming up, leading him to catastrophy.

Honnestly I think most viewers aren't sadistic enough to enjoy watching this character march to his death like I do.

He recreates a monster that he knows just destroyed a park, hires a poacher who isn't qualified, he puts the monster on auction even though he knows its not fit to even be on show, and then he tries to save his DNA sample rather than taking cover from dinosaurs. All because he thinks he's smart enough to make a whole lot of money

I would imagine that if you weren't paying attention to the film's teligraphing, you would be frustrated by the character rather than enjoying the foreshadowing.

However, the one moment where he was genuinely scary for me is when he asserted legal guardianship over Masie. That was the one part where the film wasn't winking at me and was a lot darker than the rest of his actions (though actually, it did get him killed in a roundabout way thanks to it motivating Masie's final actions in the film).

I just think the film tries too hard to make me hate him. There are too many actions that feel like they're there to make me not like him and not a single actual genuine moment.

Also, I'm just tired of the whole 'Evil Billionaire wants Dinos' villain motive. Or that they want to weaponize the Dinos. Because we've done that in... basically every movie. Its tired.

I think another problem I have is leaving the whole 'Theme Park' angle behind. I understand why its hard to keep using it after the park is closed but I think its an aspect of the wonder and excitement that we've kind of come to love from the franchise. It'd be like Westworld trying to get rid of Westworld. The 'Park' in the title is kind of still relevant to the franchise. Or it should be.

Trouble is, I'm not sure there's five films of premis in "a park filled with genetic dinosaur monsters"

A TV show, sure, could get loads of material, but films chug though premis potential way more quickly.

At the same time, what's the premise after this? A wine tasting trip through Nappa valley just with dinos and maybe some blood stains to match the wine stains?

I feel like the problem is 'We've moved passed the park... what now?'. The original movies had the same problem because the second one tried to bring Dinos to LA and it didn't work so the third returned back to the park and worked a bit better. But now Fallen Kingdom has burned the bridge of the park entirely and I worry we're not going to get a particuarly interesting film, especially considering I found Fallen Kingdom to be rather boring and uninspired.

I also think its worth noting what audiences actually took away from the original movies. In the original it was the excitement of the technology and how it worked and just the experience of being a kid at Disneyland but, instead of a guy in a costume, its ACTUALLY MICKEY FUCKING MOUSE right there. In the soft-reboot, I've asked friends what they remember from Jurassic World and they mostly remember the innerworkings of the park and the fantasy of going to such a place and seeing real dinosaurs. The Indominus Rex barely got mentioned.

I feel like the franchise is putting all of their eggs in the 'Dr. Wu and his genetic dinos' basket (never mind that the films contradictoraily seem completely disinterested in ever actaully doing anything with him) and I don't think the basket is going to hold.

Point of order: the third movie took place on Isla Sorna, just like the second movie. It was a plot point that Grant was not familiar with the island.

The park has only ever been a relevant part of the franchise in the first film, and later in JW where the thing actually got off the ground for a while. The whole point of the franchise is that the controlled environment and the dinosaurs just don't mix, and then exploring the unpredictability of genetically engineered creatures roaming the wild.

The very first book, where the infrastructure of the park lasted a lot longer than in the movies, ditches the concept at the later chapters in favor of exploring the dinosaurs as animals that now exist in the world, which is completely realized when Chrichton wrote The Lost World (and even there there's a clear undercurrent of the dinosaur island being an unnatural thing that man tampered with and that will fall in time).

I agree that the "evil rich guy wants to exploit the dinos" plot has been overused, but at the same time, that is EXACTLY what would happen to those animals so long as nobody cares about them as creatures and just see them as a product (which I've seen reflected in a disturbing amount of reviews).

What I object is that when they rebooted the franchise, they decided to resurrect InGen out of thin air as the greedy company exploiting genetic power instead of bringing back fricking Biosyn into continuity.

Between that and the complete erasure of Site B via complementary matrial (rendering the whole fricking point of TLW moot - which this movie even dared to callback to via Lockwood), I'm just really sour on the world building of this trilogy.

Also, the franchise is no longer Jurassic PARK, the movies go by Jurassic WORLD now. So the intention of ditching the park aspect was there from the begining.

Edited by MrSeyker on Jun 30th 2018 at 8:24:22 AM

Fair arguments. I concede on a few points.

I still think what audiences have taken from the series is still relevant though. The movies are technically thriller horror movies with dinos as the killer. What people remember about them is the imagination and fantasy of big beautiful creatures suddenly being alive again. If the series keeps focusing on the first part (horror thrillers with dinos) and ignoring the latter (fantasy of dinos being resurected), the movies won't do so well. Look at the three sequels we have; Lost World, 3, and Fallen Kingdom and all have kind of underperformed and not been well recieved. Contrastingly, the two that gave in the most to the fantasy and wonder of Dinos have been the most successful and are probably closer to what the films are at heart rather than at concept.

The shot of the one long neck left behind on the burning island is really the only part of Jurassic World 2 that I genuinely felt someting. And that was true of every person I saw the movie with and we usually argue (in fun, not angry) about films and tv all the time.

For all of Hammond's flaws as a character, audience still kind of step into his shoes for all the love he has of these creatures. And I think the films would do better with indulging that a bit more.

Ok, so, what IS the premise of these movies now? If its not 'Fantasy Park with Dinos' anymore then... what IS it? Because I feel like this is a franchise that, of all things, has a bit of an identity crisis?

Edited by InkDagger on Jun 30th 2018 at 8:36:04 AM

"How can we make money off of dinosaurs" ironically.

The original novel was never supposed to extend beyond that one story. Spielberg talked Chricton into writing a quick cash-grab sequel which he then cherry-picked from for his own quick cash-grab sequel.