Thoughts on Jurassic World

Today I had to assemble some furniture and the Mets game on my Tivo was finished before I was, so I resorted to watching Jurassic World as I finished.

I have not seen the original since the year it was released on video. I don't think I've seen any of the sequels before this one.

Visuals​

The movie opens on an egg hatching a Velociraptor. I immediately was shocked by how cartoonish it looked. My memory tells me that this looks vastly worse than the dinosaurs in the original movie.

Not pictured: the box of Crayola used to create this dinosaur.

Of course, this could be false. It could be that young Michael was more easily wowed by relatively new CGI methods. It could also be just the fog of memory. This was long before widescreen, high-definition TVs. Finally, I never saw this one in the theater, where things usually look more impressive.

​"...Good is Dumb" - Dark Helmet

Let's assume that you were forced to divide the characters in Jurassic World into two camps, Good vs. Evil, based on how "good" they became by the end of the movie.

Good

• Lady in Charge
• Raptor Trainer
• Two Kids
• Control Room Shirt Guy
• Foreign Rich Man
• Future Divorcees

Evil

• Kingpin
• Law and Order Scientist

Now let's examine the major decisions in the movie, whether they were smart or dumb, and who is responsible.

• ​Going to the Island
  Dumb: This isn't a reboot. As the movie makes clear, the events of Jurassic Park actually happened and people know all about it.
  Responsibility: The parents. The parents send their kids off to a death island to be taken care of by someone they haven't seen in seven(!) years. This would be criminally negligent even if there weren't vicious monsters on the island. (Note to self: vicious and viscous mean very different things.)  The mother even jokes about the danger. These kids need a foster family.
  
  
• Genetically Engineering a Supersaur
  Dumb: You're literally devising a creature to be able to efficiently kill people dumb enough to go to your theme park.
  Responsibility: Foreign guy. You might want to make an argument that Asian Scientist is at fault here, but as he correctly states, if he hadn't created what was asked for, someone else (probably less talented and careful) would have. "Not Actually" Wong also points out that every dinosaur in the park is an abomination of genetic engineering. That was a central plot point in the original film, every single dinosaur in that park has been gene spliced in dangerous and unpredictable ways.
  
  So all of this falls so squarely at the feet of Foreign guy that he ALMOST gets (rightly) moved into the evil column. However, the film's internal logic makes it clear he is supposed to be seen as well-intentioned good guy. Howso? First, he tells Lady in Charge to take a walk on the beach and not be uptight and number-focused, which is her entire character arc! He also recognizes the dinosaurs as living things with emotions, which is a key component of Indiana Pratt's character's good-guy status. Finally, he sacrifices himself in an attempt to save people's lives. So, it's clear the film considers Foreign Rich Man to be a good guy, even if we don't.
  
  
• Housing MISSINGNO Rex Without Knowing Its Abilities
  Dumb: How can you build a cage when you have no idea what will be kept inside?
  Responsibility: High-Heels McGee. She explicitly tells Starlord that she accepted a dinosaur made of unknown genetic components and builds a pen for it. This is so remarkably stupid I seriously don't understand how someone whose character is defined by obsessive analytics would agree to it. What if the D-1000 sprouted goddamn wings and flew out?! What if this was secretly another Fantastic Four reboot and the Fantasticsaurus Rex streched it's legs to be 100 feet long and just stepped over the fence?
  
  Jurassic Shirt Guy, the audience stand-in character, even points all of this out in advance. Which means the movie is fully aware that its protagonists are idiots.
  
  All of that is hypothetical, but the film's actual events turn on this. Frankenstein's Monster gets out specifically because of one ability that it had that they didn't know about (the stolen Klingon Cloaking Device) and one ability it didn't have but tricked the Scooby Gang into thinking it did (gold medaling in the high jump).
  
  
• Going in the Pen Before the Tracker Was Used
  Dumb: If it did get out, why bother going in? If it didn't get out, why bother going in?
  Responsibility: Burt Macklin. He was super-careful about going into the pen full of raptors that he had trained and only did so because there was an unmistakable and immediate death about to happen. Why would he not wait five measly minutes for the Dino-GPS information before entering a pen of a creature he knew was specifically bred to be terrifying?
  
  
• Not Returning to Safety; Going Through a Broken Gate
  Dumb: If you're in a zoo more dangerous then Cincinnatti's Gorilla Enclosure and you ignore instructions to return to safety and go past a broken gate with warning signs, you deserve to learn what the other side of digestion feels like.
  Responsibility: Chip and Dale.
  
  
• Using Rubber Bullets and Not Evacuating the Island
  Dumb: As we've already established, it's a beast with unknown genetics. You have zero idea if tazing it will bring it down or just make it's hair stand on end.
  Responsibility: Carly Fiorina and Ravi Shankar. He verbally nixes lethal measures based on "how much we have invested" and she refuses to evacuate because "we'll never reopen again". To be clear, for me, these decisions irrevocably make these characters the real monsters. However, in the movie's logic, they're considered good guys instead of facing charges at the Hague.
  
  
• Using Raptors to Kill the Cloverfield Monster
  Smart: This is the first smart idea that anyone has. Everything up to that point has shown that humans are incapable of overcoming nature. This is clearly the best shot at stopping it and later proves to be right.
  Responsibility: Gomer "I am in a world of shit" Pyle. This is the first major decision by a clearly evil character. Military-Industrial-Complex man is a common archetypal villain and this one is no different. Yet this first "evil" decision is also the first smart decision made by any character. Unfortunately...
  
  
• Not Using Raptors
  Dumb: For the inverse reasons as the above.
  Responsibility: Harley Raptorson. For some reason, our supposed hero decides that more people should die because of his dumb earlier decision instead of him doing the one thing that might actually work. An hour later, he finally goes full Mowgli and rides a motorcycle through a dense jungle without a helmet. Smart guy.
  
  
• An Amateur Flying a Helicopter into a Combat Situation
  Dumb: You can barely fly a helicopter under supervision with calm conditions, but then you decide you should pilot the space shuttle while the Death Star is coming into orbit.
  Responsible: Helicopter McChopperface. His stupid "bravery" ends up unleashing the pterodactyls and getting dozens of people eaten and unseen hundreds of people trampled to death Jon Snow style in the ensuing panic. The worst part is that the movie uses this as the final move in his turn from greedy evil to misguided good.
  
  
• Relocating the embryos and GTFO the Island
  Smart: The island is in chaos and the last thing needed is to lose control of baby monsters. The smart move is to take them to a controlled environment ASAP.
  Responsible: The Law and Order Duo. This "evil" act is even a good thing for the people they would leave behind on the island. Those people would not be helped by dozens of new hungry baby dinosaurs hatching in the insecure park.
  
  

By the way, I am not saying these are plot holes. I am just taking characters' decisions at face value and seeing what that says about those characters.

So, what does this analysis reveal? Every dumb decision that endangered lives was made by a "good" character. Every smart decision that saved lives was made by an "evil" character. According to this movie: Good is dumb.

The Movie Hates Itself

Up until the ending this felt like a normally bad Hollywood cash-in sequel. I was ready to completely forget about the movie. But then the denouement convinced me there's something deeper to this movie. It inspired me to actually think about what I saw and write this article.

Brief recap: to defeat Ghostface Killah Rex, Gwen Stacy releases a T-Rex, which (along with the velociraptors) was the big bad of the original movie. She guides it into a fight with the new monster via handheld flare (directly referencing a tactic used in the original movie). Together, the T-Rex and the Raptors kill the new kid on the block.

This convinced me that the film's makers hated this whole film and were trying to subliminally let the audience in on that secret. Howso?

The control room guy who wears the Jurassic Park t-shirt is clearly an audience stand-in, specifically audience members who fondly remember the original movie enough to spend hundreds on a t-shirt for it. He spends the whole of act 1 loudly complaining that breeding new fake dinosaurs is dumb, because the dinosaurs in the original movie were awesome enough. Lady Macbeth mocks him in front of everyone. At first I thought this was the filmmakers making preemptive fun of critics.

When all else fails and the protagonists are about to finally get the chewing they so richly deserve, Sansa Stark turns to the man she previously looked down on, who again represents people that think the original film is way better than this one. She needs him to open the T-Rex pen, because everyone else has fled. This is the filmmakers saying "We recognize we can't possibly succeed without you, even though you will be our harshest critics. Please stick around to save us from our own stupidity in making this movie."

Finally, the T-Rex and Raptors win. This is the filmmakers admitting that the original movies monsters were superior to this new bullshit. Adding in 20 years of technology failed to improve on the original. Which is of course a metaphor for this sequel. The new CGI is inferior to what we had before and the new characters are incompetent ninnies who need a guardian of the past film to save them.

Am I reading too much into that ending? In case you think otherwise, I am not someone who cares that much about this movie. I don't hate it. I am not one of those die-hard fans of the original film. I was barely paying attention by the time this one was over. Which is why I'm so confident that this was meant as a blaring admission of failure by the filmmakers. I wasn't looking for any such thing. It was just there for all to see.

Do you agree? Am I a lunatic? Is analyzing a movie a full year after it was released a tremendous waste of time?