Cult-Movie Review: Jurassic World (2015)

The very best quality of Jurassic World?

This is one blockbuster movie that bites the hand that feeds it.

Certainly -- as the fourth installment of a billion dollar big studio franchise -- the obvious path would have been to play things safe, and not feature any kind of embedded social commentary in the film at all.

Instead -- and quite delightfully -- Jurassic World attempts to speak to our time, 2015, much in the way that Jurassic Park sought to speak to its historical context, circa 1993.

The substance of the commentary is entirely different, but both films possess it, and that’s quite possibly the best way to honor the source material.

Jurassic World isn’t about the irresponsible creation of life in the Age of the Human Genome Project, but rather the easy way that our species, mankind, can grow bored by that life, unwilling to treat it as anything other than a not so-exciting attraction.

There’s an old joke about this very idea. It goes something like this:

A person sees God for the first time, and is utterly wowed.

It’s God!  Amazing! Wondrous! Blinding! Fantastic! 

Then, that person sees God on a second visit.

Yeah, God is still cool. Maybe not like before.  But still very cool.

Finally, the same person visits God a third time, and you know what?  God’s no big deal.

Yeah, it’s God.  Ho-hum.

Wait, someone’s texting me….

This is precisely the philosophical terrain that Jurassic World contends with: our constant quest, our ubiquitous desire to find something new, to see something shiny. We can get bored with anything after a short time, even the Divine.

And dinosaurs too.

Yet in Jurassic World, the so-called attractions (or “assets”) bite back, and demand attention for what they truly are: miraculous, living, individual things. They aren’t just there for our amusement. They have lives, destinies, and desires too.

It's so easy to forget that.

In the era of cookie-cutter, generic blockbusters (see: Avengers 2: Age of Ultron), Jurassic World’s dedicated attempt to focus on this facet of the human race’s genome -- let’s call it a collective “meh” in the face of the wondrous -- renders the film both unique and worthwhile. 

Perhaps not on the same gonzo, jaw-dropping scale as Mad Max: Fury Road, but certainly enough for this reviewer to state the obvious; that a lot of fresh blood has been injected into this particular franchise.

Don’t believe, either, the critics who claim that this genre film is misogynistic. You shouldn't believe that any more than you should believe the sour puss male critics who said that Mad Max: Fury Road was anti-male.

Here’s the context for Jurassic World that the “misogyny” crowd doesn’t provide. 

Every single Jurassic Park film in history has concerned adults learning to parent children in their custody (if not their actual, biological progeny). The character who undertakes that journey in Jurassic World happens to be a woman.  Her name is Claire Dearing, and she is played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Some critics would like you to see this development as deeply sexist in nature, noting that it is biased and sexist to assume a career woman like Claire must yearn deep down to be a mother. Yet the movie features no such yearning.

Instead, Claire steps up to take responsibility -- a key philosophical touchstone of the franchise -- in a pressure cooker situation. She takes responsibility for the children she must protect, and for the park that has gotten out of control.

She undertakes her parental responsibilities, just as Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and even the Kirbys (Tea Leoni, William H. Macy) all undertook the same journey in their respective dino adventures.

This is not a coincidence. This is by design.  

So why repeat the kids, parents and dinosaur mix?

Well, in the Jurassic Park franchise they all go to together in a very specific algebraic equation. 

In the face of cravenly irresponsible scientists, business-men, and military man, other people -- good people like the ones I tagged above -- get a first-hand lesson in the most important and immediate responsibility any of us will ever face: becoming a decent parent.  

Those who can become good, responsible parents are then ready to take on genetically-engineered dinosaurs.

The skill-sets are, in some way, one in the same.

Treat each “beast” (kid or dino…) according to its gifts or nature -- and with care -- and they won’t eat you for lunch.

Jurassic World reiterates the same theme to good effect and is absolutely not sexist “in a seventies” or 2015 way if you actually consider the context of all the Jurassic films.  

Yet I would recommend the film not the basis of how it remixes the old favorites, but rather how Jurassic World makes a trenchant point about the iPhone Era.  

This is a span in which something on our personal screens is always more interesting than what is actually in front of our noses in the real world.

The chaotic events that occur in Jurassic World are a wake-up call, then, for people to unplug -- or log-off -- and look up at the world before their eyes. In doing so, they might see things they haven’t tended to, like out-of-control children...or rampaging prehistoric animals.

“Extinct species have no rights.”

A fully functioning Jurassic World Theme Park will soon debut its new attraction: a genetically-engineered hybrid predator called Indominus Rex.

Meanwhile, a trainer, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) has been wrangling a team of velociraptors, teaching the pack to respond to his commands. He is their “alpha.”

The park’s harried administrator, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas 0Howard), meanwhile, must play babysitter to her sister’s two teen boys, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins), who are visiting the theme park.

When the Indominus Rex escapes from captivity, an InGen military adviser, Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) believes he can use the trained velociraptors to take down the predator in what amounts to a field study.  

If successful, he believes velociraptors can be utilized in combat situations.

Owen and Claire team up to save Zach and Gray when the boys are reported lost in a gyroscope.   

Meanwhile, the boys stumble upon the old park, from twenty years earlier…

“You made them and you think you own them.”

The line of dialogue excerpted above marries the two key letimotifs of Jurassic World: parenting kids, and herding dinosaurs, essentially. 

In both cases, we have made “children,” and believe it is our right to control their destinies. They (dinosaurs and human children) are extensions of us, here for our pleasure and happiness, and governed by the rules we lay down. 

But if you’ve ever met a velociraptor, or a teenager, for that matter, you understand that -- in the words of Owen Grady -- this equation is not about control, but about honoring the relationship.

As Jurassic World starts, it’s pretty clear that the relationship between man and dinosaur has not been honored, save by Grady and his cohorts.  

For example, the Indominus Rex has been raised in isolation, without socialization, and Owen points this fact out to Claire. She replies sarcastically that the dino “needs a friend” and that maybe the park should “schedule a play date.”

What we have here is a total lack of honoring important relationships.

This idea is mirrored in the Mitchell family. Gray and Zach have not been told by their parents that they are planning to get divorced. Instead, Mom and Dad have retained lawyers and are taking steps to dissolve the family, but they have not informed the ones most impacted by their decision; their own progeny.

Again, is that any way to parent?  

It is, but it's abundantly selfish.

The theme park under Claire's command, Jurassic World is similarly selfish. The park's runners care more about product placement and profits than they do about the welfare of the animals in the park. 

Those animals, as noted above, are termed “assets.”  

That sure makes them sound like things, not living creatures, doesn’t it?

And it's easier to control a thing, than a person, or an animal.

And indeed, this is why the movie is not in any way sexist.  Claire -- at the start of the movie -- is already a bad mother or parent (like Victor Frankenstein, to provide a prominent literary example). Her children, however, are not human, but dinosaurs. She treats them no better than her sister treats Zach and Gray.  She moves assets around, but she takes no responsibility for the "life" under her authority.

So one can't claim that Claire yearns to be a mother in the movie, as she undertakes her journey with her sister's kids.  On the contrary, she is a mother from the word go. 

Instead, Claire learns to be responsible in her motherhood as she undertakes her journey. See the difference, and why it is significant?

In short order, we see just how empty Claire's world is, in terms of respecting the relationships with the wards. Jurassic World shows us the Samsung Innovation Center, a Starbucks, and reveals the promise that Verizon Wireless will present the Indominus Rex.  Every business worth its salt wants a piece of the dinosaur profits.  

But when those profits falls, the dinosaurs are blamed. Claire notes, for instance, that “nobody’s impressed with a dinosaur anymore.”  

The message?  

That the children are not good enough.  That the assets have somehow failed their parents.

Only a new child, one better than the old children, can fill the void.

And so irresponsible business joins with irresponsible science to engineer a new dinosaur that will spike profits.  Even the name “Indominus Rex” has been audience-tested. And the beast has been engineered to be “cooler,” with more teeth, with more awesome abilities (like natural camouflage) and a bigger “wow” factor.  

The whole idea is that a “normal” dinosaur no longer does it for park visitors.  They're bored.

They need the next fix, the next “cool” thing that can go viral on the Internet. What's the next product? The next thing to consume?

This is a tragic impulse in the human animal, but especially so for children, who lose the love and attention of their parents to siblings, or simply to the next "big" thing.

And don't make the mistake of believing this only happens in science fiction blockbusters. 

I can tell you for a fact that there are many parents out there who believe that by having another child, a new child, they will repair all that's wrong in the family. 

This idea of grasping for new, shiny objects, runs rampant in the film's scenes set at the theme park. For example, there’s a hologram in the Hammond Creation Center, another cool thing to ooh and aah over and draw the eye.

Or consider the stadium seating that can descend to the aquarium level.

But, once again, life finds a way, and before long, there is chaos in the theme park. The forgotten children take back by force the attention they've lost.

The only way to defeat the isolated monster child (I-Rex), in this case, is by pitting it against Grady’s velociraptors, whom he has treated with respect, and -- for the most part -- raised well.  

And -- to audience cheers -- the movie also trots out another old friend from Jurassic Park, one scarred and old, but still gorgeous as hell and ready to go to the mat against the pretender for her throne.  This creature has been forgotten, shunted aside for cooler attractions.  But as we see, she is still magnificent.

In the course of the film, Claire finally recognizes that she has not been honoring the relationships in her life.  

Not with her co-workers, not with Owen, and not even with her sister and nephews. So she makes a change.  She acts...responsibly. She sets the animal in Paddock 9 free.

By contrast, Grady is indeed wise and “a life-force” (as Joss Whedon tweeted...), but his character is monumentally uninteresting in comparison to Claire. 

It is Claire who takes on the Alan/Ian/Kirby role of parent who learns the error of his/her ways.  By comparison, Grady already knows everything he needs to know to be a good parent and a good dino wrangler in his first scene in the movie. 

 He doesn’t change or grow, accordingly.  He's right in his beliefs at the beginning of the movie, right at the movie's half-way point, and vindicated in his rightness at the denouement.  So, despite Pratt's efforts and inherent charms, Owen is pretty dull and stagnant as a character.

It’s Claire -- not Owen -- who does the changing and growing.  Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill vetted this subplot too, so perhaps it is actually the opposite of sexist that this time around Bryce Dallas Howard gets to do so.

We have seen men take responsibility for their children and for the genetically-engineered dinosaurs on several previous occasions. Why can't a woman undertake the same character arc?  

And when she does, why do some insist it is sexist for her do so? If a man can take this journey (or men, accurately...), why is it wrong to send a woman on the exact same one?  Isn't that, actually, what equality is all about?

Moving on from these ridiculous social politics, the first hour of Jurassic World is pretty terrific.

It features an amusing tour of the park (including a dino petting zoo…) and plenty of scenes that help us understand how the theme park isn’t honoring the animals.  

And then, one of the best scenes in the film finds Owen and Claire encountering an injured dinosaur in the field, after the I-Rex break-out. 

Claire touches it gently, as it takes its last breaths.  She realizes that she has given too little thought to the idea that these assets are living animals -- with their own thoughts, their own purpose, and their own destinies.  

The scene represents a nice breather in the action that alludes to the original film (and a scene with a sick triceratops), but more importantly, it hammers home this movie's point. When you don’t treat life with respect and reverence, you are doing the opposite.  You are acting in a dishonorable fashion. 

That is exactly how Claire has lived. 

Her most meaningful and indeed heroic act in the last third of the film, involves the release of a dinosaur from Paddock 9, as I noted above.

Claire releases it to rescue her nephews, of course, but also as an act of honoring the animal.  She frees it and allows it to pursue its destiny as king or queen of the jungle.  It has been denied this fate its whole life; its place on the "food chain" (which Owen tags as a key element of dinosaur life).

That destiny becomes the film’s beautiful, valedictory image. The metaphor is thus clear: we can't cage our children, dinosaur or human, and chain them to our expectations . At some point, they must be free to do what they will.  The film's final image really captures that idea in a majestic, emotional way. 

I won’t lie and state that Jurassic World is a perfect film, despite its adroit handling of the franchise's ongoing  parenting/responsibility leitmotif.  It’s not. 

For example, Vincent D’Onofrio’s character is pretty two-dimensional and awful. He is handled in a less human fashion, even, than are the velociraptors…who are fully dimensional, especially Blue.  He does and says all the wrong things, and at all the wrong times.  He is a basic movie villain, and we anticipate his much-deserved death from his very first scene.

Similarly, there’s not enough suspense in the film's last act, after all the dominoes have fallen. The denouement is satisfying, and yet I walked away from a screening feeling that, at least a little, the film had not scared me sufficiently. 

I can understand not being able to repeat Jurassic Park’s sense of wonder.  It's an impossible act to follow.  

But I did hope for a bit more in terms of scares or jumps this time around.  I suspect I may feel this way because Trevorrow does not possess the neo-classicist visual approach of a director like John Carpenter or Steven Spielberg.  The film is smart and witty, but it is not patient, and the visuals don't reflect the story as meaningfully as they could, except in isolated instances (like the film's aforementioned valedictory image).

In short, the visuals simply do not feel as cinematic this time around, and I missed that element. There's not a single scene here as tense, or as meticulously constructed, for example, as the trailer-on-the-precipice scene of The Lost World (1997).

Still, Jurassic World (2015) ably incorporates all the key genetic sequences of the long-lived Steven Spielberg franchise and gives the juggernaut a solid face-lift. 

Jurassic World is better, frankly, than either of the two previous sequels, even if it’s not quite as good you might hope it to be. 

The film's leitmotif about honoring relationships -- whether with dinosaurs or children -- is powerfully-wrought, and a perfect corrective for our busy, eyes-on-iPhone-screens-at-all-times age.

In the final analysis, Jurassic World gets the job done, but without, precisely, the visual legerdemain Spielberg might have provided were he still in the director’s seat. 

It's a good sequel, but Jurassic Park (1993) still reigns in this Jurassic world.

Movie Trailer: Jurassic World (2015)

At Flashbak: Don't Tamper in God's Domain - Jurassic Park and the "Life Finds a Way" Horror Movies of the 1990s

This week at Flashbak, I remembered the science run amok horror movies of the 1990s, a sub-genre exemplified by Jurassic Park (1993).

Here's a snippet and the url: (http://flashbak.com/dont-tamper-gods-domain-jurassic-park-1993-life-finds-way-horror-movies-1990s-36135/ )

Jurassic World (2015) -- the third sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) -- opens this week in theaters in the United States, and appears certain to carry on in its predecessors’ footsteps.  

  

That means not only more rampaging dinosaurs, but a deliberate charting of what disasters can occur when science runs amok; when man dares to “tamper in God’s domain” of creation.

This conceit -- of genetic science as a Pandora’s Box of sorts -- proved a key element of the horror films of the 1990s, including JP.  

If we consider that the best horror movies always deliberately reflect society’s fears, then one can pinpoint events in the Clinton Decade -- the 1990s -- that helped to bring this old Frankenstein trope to the forefront.

In October of 1990, for example, the Human Genome Project commenced.  And in 1997, a sheep named Dolly was cloned. 

The film brethren of Jurassic Park, therefore, didn’t merely feature dinosaurs resurrected by irresponsible scientists, but all sorts of “playing God” creations, or silver screen monsters. 

In all cases, “life found a way” (to quote Jurassic Park’s Dr. Grant) to spread, threatening to up-end man’s dominance on planet Earth. In such films, the audience had to ask: what kind of a self-destructive creature is man that he is so willing to (genetically) engineer threats to his supremacy over the Earth?

Besides Jurassic Park, here are some of the other “Life Finds a Way,” or “Don’t Tamper in God’s Domain” horror films of the 1990s. (Continued at Flashbak).

Jurassic Park Week: Jurassic Park III (2001)

Well, this is my “versus” or “vs.” week on the blog, I guess you could say. In the past few days I’ve reviewed both Alien vs. Predator films, and today I turn my attention to another slug-fest, 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. 

Globally speaking, the overriding creative impulse behind such cinematic monster meet-ups seems to be the pent-up fan-desire or built-in coolness factor associated with such clashes.

These films answer, first and foremost, the question…wouldn’t it be cool to see (fill in the blank) fight (fill in the blank)?

As I noted in terms of AVP (2004), those aren’t the most artistic or dramatic motives underlining a work of art, or even a popular entertainment. 

And because “versus” movies tend to feature two separate continuities, the screenplay writers involved also have to pack in a lot of supporting material, and make certain that each monster or participant is given a moment of glory.

One thing I observed, having watched AVP and Freddy vs. Jason this week is that these match-ups or contests do tend, at the very least, to reveal a new shade of the characters. 

In both versus films, one “villain” unexpectedly becomes the hero or champion, while the other is dismissed as irredeemable or evil.  

For example, in AVP, the Predator, Scar, joins up with Alexa (Sanaa Lathan), working with a human to defeat the real bad guys: aliens. And Jason adopts a similar role in Freddy vs. Jason, proving to be the slasher/monster that humans can -- if not work with -- then at least manipulate towards their own end. 

Indeed, Freddy vs. Jason is the first film in the Friday the 13^th continuity to attempt to drive the audience’s empathy towards the hockey-masked slasher and not away from him. Here, we get a dream sequence revealing Jason to be a bullied, neglected, ostracized child.

Freddy, by contrast (and like the aliens) is sinister and unrepentant. He’s the “real” monster, the true evil that must be defeated.

As you may recall, I was pretty ambivalent about AVP.  

I feel that it shines in comparison to AVPR, and that it possesses some qualities that make it worthwhile, notably the imagination of the flashback sequences, and Lance Henriksen’s very human performance.

By contrast, Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t even have that much going for it.

The human characters here are paper-thin, even though it is always nice to see the remarkable Katharine Isabelle (and I’ve been enjoying her performances as Margo in Hannibal).  

Also, Jason Mewes should probably sue the makers of the film for appropriating without permission his silver screen persona in a few key scenes.

Beyond the fact that the human characters are either dull or derivative, Freddy vs. Jason genuinely lacks scares too. The final battle at Crystal Lake is shot well, and it's really bloody, but it isn’t scary.  

An unexpected side-effect of these monster-on-monster smack-downs, then, seems to be that terror dissipates, and two franchises are actually compromised rather than improved.

When a studio green-lights a project like Freddy vs. Jason, it no doubt expects to revitalize two franchises for the price of one.  

Funny how that is almost never the real-world result...

Even the attempt to be faithful to Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th lore is only partially successful in Freddy vs. Jason.  There’s quite a bit of rewriting (or ret-conning) going on here to get the two monsters into the same world (either dreams or reality), and the ret-cons don’t always fit with the established canon.

Most disturbingly, Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of fun about this clash of the titans. A lot of the Elm Street sequels got by on a wing and a prayer, action set-pieces and a wicked sense of humor.  

But Freddy vs. Jason doesn’t express any sort of joy in Freddy’s return. We get lame one liners and all, but there's a sense that the filmmakers don't really love or fully understand the appeal of the material.

Freddy vs. Jason ends, finally, with no real winners.

“Welcome to my nightmare.”

In Hell, mass murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) laments his inability to impact the children of the real world.  The people of Springwood have forgotten his reign of terror, so he needs someone  to revive his fearsome legend.

He finds that someone in mad-dog killer Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger), the slasher of Crystal Lake. Imitating Jason’s Mother, Freddy convinces Jason to travel to Springwood and begin a killing spree; one designed to revive the memory of Freddy.

On Elm Street in Springwood, teenage Lori (Monica Keena) and her friend Kia (Kelly Rowland) soon realize that the town is being stalked by not one boogeyman, but two.  

Lori’s old boyfriend, Will (Jason Ritter) joins them, after escaping Westin Hills Sanitarium, to help bury Freddy and Jason permanently.

“It’s time to put this bad dog to sleep for good.”

Freddy vs. Jason opens and closes strong, I’ll give it that.  

The film commences with the words of the most unreliable of all narrators, Freddy Krueger, and in broad but effective strokes, re-tells the origin stories of Freddy and Jason.  The film squeezes a lot of information into this colorful montage, and it works surprisingly well.  It’s an interesting device to have Freddy talking to us directly, telling us his (warped) side of his own story, and it opens the film on a high note.  It feels like a fresh take.

But after that ingenious opener, we meet our lead (teen) characters, and they are all as milquetoast as humanly possible. Lori is our standard feisty final girl^Tm and Will is the “outsider” (but always loyal...) boyfriend.  There’s also your obligatory co-culture “best friend,” in this case African-American Kia.  These characters are so dull and so uninteresting, in part, because they don’t honor the tradition of either supporting franchise.

Actresses such as Heather Langenkamp, Amy Steel, Patricia Arquette, and Lisa Wilcox …all demonstrated how a solid, thoughtful performer could take a lead character in a slasher film and imbue that character with life, energy and individuality.  That lesson has been forgotten here.  Lori's most memorable trait is, alas, physical: her porn star (collagen?) lips. 

The filmmakers also seem bound and determined to feature elements or call-backs to previous franchise entries including 1428 Elm Street, Westin Hills Sanitarium, Hypnocil, the Freddy Worm, Jason’s mother, and Camp Blood, but they would have been wiser to focus on creating human characters that we can care about, or can invest our energy in. 

I will readily admit that the Elm Street sequels are of variable quality, but they are -- oddly -- enlivened by pro-social portrayals of insightful and courageous young women.  Alice, the Dream Master, fights Freddy, it's true, but also goes through the process of self-actualization. Nancy Thompson, similarly, gets cast as horror's Prince of Denmark (or Princess), Hamlet, tasked with going through the lies of her morally questionable parents. 

These characters had weight and individuality, and made the films more than mere "dead teenager" movies.

I would be hard-pressed to find teens less interesting than those featured in Freddy vs. Jason.

For example, let's go back to the horrid Jason Mewes knock-off. That’s what he is, and there's no way to deny it. He’s a lookalike/sound-alike doing the Mewes’ shtick. Since that’s all he is, why didn’t the filmmakers actually just hire Jason Mewes himself? 

Because we know that persona from the New Jersey Cycle (six films and counting), we would at least register him as an authentic human being and not a cipher. Instead, I can't ever see Freddy vs. Jason's stoner as a human being or person, just as a rip-off, a derivative clone.  I'm taken out of the movie's narrative every time I look at him in his stolen clothes.

And, let's face it, love or hate the Mewes persona, the actor would have added a clear sense of fun to the proceedings. Imagine watching Mewes go up against Jason. It's impossible not to smile at the thought.

In another creative area all together, the movie's screenplay hems and haws. The movie wants to studiously avoid giving us a clear winner in the fight.  Freddy gets his moment in the sun, turning Jason into a human pinball in the dream world.  Then Jason gets his glorious moment, decapitating Freddy and emerging from the water in (a beautifully-shot, beautifully-visualized) epilogue.  

But Freddy winks at the camera, just so we don’t draw too strong a conclusion about the victor. 

Did Freddy and Jason have it in their contracts that neither one could win? What's the fun of setting up a fight like this if no one can be crowned the winner?

Again, what I found most intriguing about Freddy vs. Jason -- and it may not have even been intentional -- is that when these characters are thrown together, we, as viewers, make judgment calls about the true villainy of our two starring monsters.  

Jason seems compelled to maim and murder, but it feels instinctual…like it is part of his wiring.  

Freddy, by contrast, relishes in his badness. He intellectualizes it, seeks out ways to increase his range, and manipulates others.  

So Jason is the shark in Jaws, and Freddy is Hannibal Lecter.  Fact to face, I judge Freddy the more evil of these two monsters, and almost (at least in this film...) can’t blame Jason for what he does. The sympathetic flashbacks make it clear that his vengeance is righteous, or at least justified.

So if you get in Jason’s way, yes, he will kill you (as Kia learns).  But Freddy will seek you out, and find ways to get you, regardless of where you are, what you are doing, or why you are there. He's a puppet master and a schemer.

Again, this comparison would not exist if we didn’t have the monsters sharing the same story.

Still, some of the ret-conning doesn’t work.  

I know the filmmakers want each monster to have “Kryptonite,” the thing/element that stops him.  Freddy’s kryptonite is fire, and I get that.  He died in fire.  But now, suddenly, Jason is afraid of water?  I know he drowned in Crystal Lake in 1980, but many previous films have revealed him emerging from the lake, or attacking skinny dippers in the water (Part VII is one example of the latter).  But now he can’t even approach water without paralyzing terror?   

That just doesn’t pass the smell test.

I enjoyed the battles in AVP and similarly I enjoy the fight between Freddy vs. Jason here.  At least in this case, gore is not shorted.  The wide-ranging final fight -- from cabin to construction site to the lake -- lives up to expectations in terms of violence and bloody depiction of violence.

My problem is -- again like AVP -- that the whole movie is constructed around a fifteen minute fight. The rest of the movie is just filler.  Dumb filler at that.  There should be a TV series called “Versus” where all great movie monsters can fight one another with glorious special effects and extreme destruction, sparing us the necessity of seeing whole movies built for a single serving purpose.

Bottom line: Freddy vs. Jason isn’t fun enough or scary enough to honor its parent franchises.

But it is bloody enough.

Some days, that will do, I suppose.  

And I should note, I’ve watched Freddy vs. Jason probably five times over the years, always thinking that on the next re-visit I’ll see something new or change my mind about its overall quality.

And I always come out feeling disappointed.  

Yep, it’s time to put this bad dog to sleep for good.

Movie Trailer: Jurassic Park III (2001)

Late Night Blogging: Jurassic Park Games Commercials

Jurassic Park Week: The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 (1997)

Each time I pen a review of a sequel that doesn’t quite measure up to the original film, I am reminded of the late critic Roger Ebert’s brilliant opening line from his review of Halloween II (1981): “It’s a little sad to witness a fall from greatness.”

And a fall from greatness is exactly what we witness in the 1997 cinematic sequel to Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park. 

Fortunately for audiences and fans of the franchise, it’s not a colossal drop.  

Rather, this first sequel dips from the realm of “classic” (like the original) to merely “good.”  Bottom line: it could have been worse, perhaps even a lot worse. 

Although marred by a final act that seems utterly disconnected from the body of the film proper, The Lost World remains enormously entertaining.  

The film plays like a tense roller-coaster ride and one crafted with uncommon technical skill to boot.  In particular, an incredibly complex, nail-biting set-piece involving a double trailer on a precipice – in a rain storm, no less – reveals Steven Spielberg’s killer instinct and directorial legerdemain. 

Perhaps the most significant difference between Jurassic Park and its sequel is that The Lost World feels a whole lot, well, meaner.  

While some fans and critics may consider this shift in tone lamentable, there was probably little choice. You can only play the “wonder” card once, and Jurassic Park did so superbly. Now the franchise gets down to some brutal, bloody business…

Technically astounding, and with protagonists constantly in “the company of death,” The Lost World represents an above-average sequel to Jurassic Park, but in both coloration and thematic tenor, the film feels very dark and even devoid of joy.   There’s nothing wrong with existing on that plateau, but after watching this film you feel more throttled than you do enthralled.

And while beautifully rendered, the final image of the film -- a fantasy-land of diverse dinosaurs dwelling together in peace within a literal stones-throw of one another -- feels piped in from another franchise all together.  

Given what we know of man, and particularly of man as depicted in the film itself, there’s no reason to believe a paradise like this would be permitted to thrive. 

Even worse, given what we’ve seen of the dinosaurs, there’s no reason to believe they would inhabit this world either, living peaceably in such close proximity to one another.

“Our last chance at redemption…”

John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) summons mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to his home to inform him of some startling news. A Jurassic Park “Site B” exists on an island eighty miles south of Isla Nublar, called Isla Sorna. There, dinosaurs have lived in isolation for four years.  In fact, they are thriving.

However, all that is about to change. The new head of InGen, Hammond’s nephew, Ludlow (Howard) believes that the way to raise his company out of bankruptcy is to exploit the dinosaurs.  Specifically, his plan is to capture the dinosaurs at Site B and bring them back to San Diego as a stadium attraction.

Having learned from his own unique mistakes regarding the dinosaurs, Hammond understands the folly of this course, and believes that the dinosaurs should be left alone to live in peace without the specter of human interference.  But to rally the public to support his cause, he has sent paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) to the island to document life on Isla Sorna. 

Because Sarah is his girlfriend, Ian heads to the island on a rescue mission, along with videographer Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and tech-guy Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff).  They are joined by a stowaway, Ian’s daughter, Cathy (Beller).

In short order, a squad of hunters arrive on the island too, and commence a vicious dinosaur safari at Ludlow’s behest.  When one of the hunters, Roland Tembo (Peter Postlethwaite) captures a T-Rex infant, it’s worried parents come looking for it, and the dance of death begins anew…

“An extinct animal come back to life has no rights…we made it…we own it.”

Along with director Spielberg, David Koepp returned to scripting duties for this sequel, The Lost World.  Accordingly, the film feels like a legitimate continuation of the first film, right down to the feisty, occasionally corny or schmaltzy sense of humor. 

In terms of narrative depth, however, The Lost World offers something a lot scarier than science run amok, the chosen terrain of the first film.  In short, the follow-up concerns capitalism or big business run amok, and in that regard is indeed frightening.  

Specifically, the film revives the axiom that the free market becomes ethical only when the cost of unethical behavior becomes too great a cost for the market to bear.  Here, Ludlow has no time for ethics until he is on the line for murder and property damage. And even then, he’s still trying to figure out a way to make money…  

Another way to parse the difference between first and second film in the JP series: If Jurassic Park concerned the wonder of dinosaurs brought to life via the auspices of science then The Lost World dramatizes the crass, inhuman exploitation of these DNA-created animals…for profit.  

In fact, all of The Lost World is suffused -- at least thematically -- with a tremendous sense of…responsibility. 

Because modern, technological man created the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna in the first place, the argument goes that man is responsible for what ultimately happens to them, and must treat them with respect and dignity.  

We see this idea reinforced and mirrored throughout the film, in both a subplot about reluctant, absentee father Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and his daughter, Cathy (Camilla Beller), and even in the story involving parent Tyrannosaurs and their infant offspring.

Warm-blooded or cold-blooded, we all struggle to be good parents, and preserve the future for our children. We can’t abandon our children, or we risk turning them into monsters.

Given this leitmotif, the film’s villains come under the camp of vulture capitalists like Hammond’s nephew, Ludlow (Arliss Howard) and irresponsible, merciless hunter, Dieter (Peter Stormare), a man who views every new dinosaur as a thing to bully, hurt, or beat down.     

Metaphorically bad parents, Ludlow and Dieter are concerned only how they can “strip mine” the island for profit, or for personal gratification.  It’s one thing to create new life, to play Frankenstein, but The Lost World travels further down the road and asks, how does Frankenstein treat his monster once it is here, for good? 

With humanity and grace?  Or as something to be controlled and used up?

The downside of this storytelling approach is plain.  

John Hammond was certainly misguided in Jurassic Park, but not a villain or a terrible person.  But The Lost World requires old-fashioned, mustache-twirling human villains to maintain its momentum, and they aren’t exactly portrayed in three-dimensional terms. 

The up-side of featuring such cruel, villainous human antagonists, however, is that audience members experience a vicarious sense of justice meted out when the dinosaurs strike back and kill them.  

Ludlow’s fate – to be the plaything of a T-Rex child just learning to hunt – is absolutely “just” given his cavalier treatment of the dinosaurs.  He believes that because his company created them, he “owns” them.  

In the end – at least before he gets ripped apart – Ludlow gets to experience what it feels like to be owned by someone else. 

And Dieter, after bullying tiny dinosaurs with a cattle prod, learns there is strength in numbers when the diminutive lizards team up to overwhelm him.

In terms of the “sequel effect,” The Lost World features more gadgetry, more guns, more victims and more leaping lizards than its processor did, so it’s carnage candy galore. Even better, Spielberg seems to be in a nastier mood than usual and dispenses with his characteristic sense of sentimentality.  The film’s opening sequence reveals dinosaurs surrounding and attacking a cute-as-a-button little girl, for instance.  Later, one of the film’s most likable characters, Eddie, gets viciously ripped apart by two angry Tyrannosaurs.  And this comes after after working his ass off to save Malcolm, Sarah and Van Owen.

Overall, the impression is that this sequel absolutely means business, and isn’t pulling any punches.  So obsessed is Spielberg, it seems, with the film’s action, that he stages an impressive (but also strangely obsessive…) action scene set in a trailer dangling over a high-cliff.  

This scene builds and builds, layering on new elements and becoming ever more intense, as if Spielberg is testing the limits of audience endurance, and also his ability to play us like a piano. 

And…I like it. I like a "meaner," Spielberg, one relying on his chops and sense of visual classicism.

At one point during the scene, Sarah falls directly towards Spielberg’s camera through the body of a vertically-tilted trailer, and her body strikes a glass barrier, a window.  Soon, tiny cracks in the glass begin to spread and multiply, line by line, and the progression of the shattering glass -- perhaps better than anything we saw in Jurassic Park -- hints at the true nature of Ian’s Chaos Theory.  Incident piles upon incident, action upon action, effect upon effect, with surprising results.  Pretty soon, we’re putty in Spielberg’s hands, swept up by the progression of terror.

Again, this scene is gloriously nail-biting, and literally the last word in cliffhanging action.  Through cross-cutting, fast-cuts and an unmatched sense of visual placement and geography, Spielberg transforms what might have been a short or perfunctory  moment into an extended dance with terror as man grapples with nature, technology and monsters too.  I’d give this sequence the nod as the best (and most technically complicated…) action sequence in the entire JP trilogy.

Another great scene in the film involves Velociraptors lurking in tall grass, waiting to strike a group of human passersby.  

Spielberg’s camera adopts an extreme high-angle, so we see only Velociraptor paths – like contrails -- moving stealthily through the grass on a trajectory towards the unlucky human pedestrians.  

And then the dinosaurs strike and Spielberg cannily shifts to eye level with the top of the high grass, so it looks as though the men are being pulled beneath the surface of a roiling sea.  In some ways, it’s the Jaws approach all over again, but once more, I must repeat that I really like Spielberg when he’s in “mean” mode.  When we wants to, this director can match Hitchcock or De Palma shot-for-shot in terms of visual aplomb and wicked gallows humors.  As a viewer and critic, I appreciate it when Spielberg indulges that not-often seen side of his personality.

The last act of The Lost World is the one that, as a critic, I have trouble with.  The tyrannosaurus looks small and inconsequential compared to the gas stations, high-rise skyscrapers and suburbs of San Diego, and so the final urban scenes don’t quite work as they should. 

Furthermore, Nick Van Owen – the daring “Earth First” crusader of the film – disappears completely from this final act.  

Wouldn’t he have agreed to help Ian and Sarah recover the infant T-Rex?  Nick’s total disappearance makes the ending feel tacked on after the fact, like it was a second thought, or the result of a focus-group preference. 

And finally, after the T-Rex rampage in San Diego, The Lost World culminates with that fairy tale shot.  

Now quarantined from the human world, the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna become literally one happy family.  By showcasing all the dinosaurs (T-Rex, Stegosaurus and Pterodactyl) within one frame (during a pan, left to right), the impression is of a Kumbaya paradise that, simply put, could never be.  It’s an unwelcome return to Steven Spielberg in his most sentimental, schmaltzy mode. 

Make no mistake, the valedictory shot of The Lost World is absolutely gorgeous and brilliantly rendered, but would carnivores and vegetarians really mill about peaceably together for a Sunday afternoon in the park?  

Not likely…

I know a lot of critics hated The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  I’m not one of them.  In Horror Films of the 1990s I rated it 3 stars out of 4, and I stick by that assessment.  

The film entertains…almost relentlessly, and there is a subtext here about protecting the lives we bring into the world, through science or nature. The grueling, edge-of-your set action scenes work like gangbusters as well.  

But the script takes a few wrong turns in the end, and closes on a note of such utter fantasy, that you’re left, finally, with a sense that you have witnessed, if not a fall from greatness, then at least a small stumble from the path of greatness.