155 réponses à ce sujet

[Han Shot First]

I think the new Mad Max sounds awesome and I'm stoked for the new Star Wars. I plan to see both in the theater.

 

I'm not interested in Jurassic World because multiple reviews mention it lacking elements I liked in the original. Its not so much that there is change, its that I think the changes sound a bit disappointing. (unlike the other two films you mentioned)

[TheClonesLegacy]

I think the new Mad Max sounds awesome and I'm stoked for the new Star Wars. I plan to see both in the theater.

 

I'm not interested in Jurassic World because multiple reviews mention it lacking elements I liked in the original. Its not so much that there is change, its that I think the changes sound a bit disappointing. (unlike the other two films you mentioned)

Fury Road was pretty rad. But Mad Max is the only series I can think of where each film is wildly different from one another so that was a bit of a bad call on my part.

 

I mean I guess it's fine, you're entitled to watch whatever you want or to not watch as it were. But to me, all the complaints thrown at the film can be applied to the whole series. So I just personally can't understand where people are coming from, and that's on me.

I'm gonna see it. Because hey, new Jurassic Park Movie, doing a few things different from the other three, has Chris Pratt. That's not the worst way to spend 2 hours.

[Cainhurst Crow]

Haven't seen the movie, but did they finally break away from the formula they've used for the other **** Jurassic park films?

 

You know the one, Prequel shot where bad stuff happens, cut to reluctant hero scientist who hates the world, cut to obligatory flying over water shot, big monster attacks, crying scene, whimsy beauty of nature shot, other monster attack shot, other whimsy shot, final monster attack shot, riding off to safety in a helicopter and end credits?

 

I watched all 3 films over the weekend, and I noticed this formula creep up in the other 2 films. That and the unlikable characters and completely nonsensical reasons to go to the islands tended to ruin the experience quickly.

 

I just want to know whether I should save my money and not see another rehash, or if this movie actually brought some originality and fresh air to the franchise.

[Milan92]

Well apperantly the director was accused of sexism by Josh Whedon because of the characters.

[TheClonesLegacy]

Not exactly "aside from," no. That's kind of the problem.

Obviously it's not for you, so hopefully you can enjoy the movie and accept that not everyone is as into it as you are. If it's any consolation, I barely ever go to the theater regardless.

Ok, could you say that again, but not imply I'm ignorantly stupid? That'd be great.

[TheClonesLegacy]

Well apperantly the director was accused of sexism by Josh Whedon because of the characters.

I respect the mans work, but every time I see his stupid Fedora I want to smack it off his head.

[KaiserShep]

Haven't seen the movie, but did they finally break away from the formula they've used for the other **** Jurassic park films?

 

You know the one, Prequel shot where bad stuff happens, cut to reluctant hero scientist who hates the world, cut to obligatory flying over water shot, big monster attacks, crying scene, whimsy beauty of nature shot, other monster attack shot, other whimsy shot, final monster attack shot, riding off to safety in a helicopter and end credits?

 

I watched all 3 films over the weekend, and I noticed this formula creep up in the other 2 films. That and the unlikable characters and completely nonsensical reasons to go to the islands tended to ruin the experience quickly.

 

I just want to know whether I should save my money and not see another rehash, or if this movie actually brought some originality and fresh air to the franchise.

 

 

I didn't think of this as a problem for the first movie, and I think it's a fantastic movie that should have simply ended there. But, I think the real problem is that the movie veered off so much from the book that it left the franchise wide open to keep going. In fact, The Lost World actually lifted some bits out of the original novel, such as the scene with the little girl with the procompsognathus on the beach. The novel also did have the prologue involve a person who was mauled by a raptor, but you simply did not have the attack occur directly on the pages, but rather the worker was lifted out of the island. In the original novel, Ian Malcolm died, as did Hammond, Muldoon and Genaro lived, and the military bombed the island. 

 

Anyway, as a stickler for dinosaurs, I've always been a bit bothered by the dinos depicted in these movies anyway. Having that pterosaur lift someone off the ground is pretty dumb.

[Killdren88]

I didn't think of this as a problem for the first movie, and I think it's a fantastic movie that should have simply ended there. But, I think the real problem is that the movie veered off so much from the book that it left the franchise wide open to keep going. In fact, The Lost World actually lifted some bits out of the original novel, such as the scene with the little girl with the procompsognathus on the beach. The novel also did have the prologue involve a person who was mauled by a raptor, but you simply did not have the attack occur directly on the pages, but rather the worker was lifted out of the island. In the original novel, Ian Malcolm died, as did Hammond, Muldoon and Genaro lived, and the military bombed the island. 

 

Anyway, as a stickler for dinosaurs, I've always been a bit bothered by the dinos depicted in these movies anyway. Having that pterosaur lift someone off the ground is pretty dumb.

Well yeah? How else could they milk the franchise dry for all its worth if all loose ends were tied? It's what Disney is doing to poor Frozen squeezing it until there is nothing but a dried husk left.

[KaiserShep]

I didn't even care for the first Frozen, to be honest, so I couldn't care less what they do to it. But, the point does stand though. Heck, Spielberg is the one responsible for there being more Transformers movies. People love to blame Bay, but Spielberg's the one that urged for more. 

[Jeremiah12LGeek]

Yunno, they never did resolve the fate of that T-rex who took over at the end of the original.

 

That's what this one's about, right? If I don't find out whether he managed to turn the park around and make it a success, I'm out.

[Jaison1986]

Well apperantly the director was accused of sexism by Josh Whedon because of the characters.

 

Says the guy that proclaims himself a feminist only to write Black Widow as romance fodder for half of AoU. No one should take that idiot seriously anymore. Even the freaking feminists hate him now. Good thing he is not working in Civil War.

 

Anyway, I heard this movie is not doing so hot. Seems people are bothered how the movie deviates from the themes of the first one.

[Killdren88]

Yunno, they never did resolve the fate of that T-rex who took over at the end of the original.

 

That's what this one's about, right? If I don't find out whether he managed to turn the park around and make it a success, I'm out.

 

I hear its the same T-rex in this film. And it has the Scars from the Raptors along her sides.

[Dobbysaurus]

Just got myself a Jurassic Smash Blizzard from DQ. Peanut butter ice cream with cookie dough bits. My favorite flavors. Best part, my cup had Chris Pratt with the velociraptors on it. Yum.

[Aimi]

Anyway, I heard this movie is not doing so hot. Seems people are bothered how the movie deviates from the themes of the first one.

Nah, those people are idiots. This is a fanboy film. It replicates a huge portion of the plot of the Jurassic Park novel, for one thing, and it basically treats the second and third movies as never having happened. Except for the raptor call from the third film. The sound effect is still in the movie. But everything else might as well have never occurred.

Warning: I will spoil basically everything in this spoiler. Do not click on it if you don't want to be spoiled.

Spoiler

Throughout the film (and especially in its advertising), they play up "genetically modified dinosaurs" as something new, revolutionary, and dangerous. Dangerous it is, but not new or revolutionary. Chris Pratt's character, Owen, criticizes the new I. rex as something "cooked up in that lab"; Bryce Dallas Howard's character, Claire, describes it to investors as bigger, better, faster, stronger in ways that nothing before has existed.

But near the middle of the film, Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, reprising his role from the first film) tells Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan, playing a South Asian version of Mark Cuban) that all of this moralizing and hyping is nonsense. The dinosaurs in the park were always gene-spliced abominations. They had to introduce code to fill in the inevitable gaps in each DNA sequence; they had to introduce code to make the animals better-adapted to a modern environment. Wu points out that even the original favorites, like Rexy and the raptors, barely look like the original article at all - a nice way to account for the fact that the JP raptors are completely unlike any species of Velociraptor that has ever existed.

Wu is cast in a sort of villain's role, but he's not wrong in pointing this out. In fact, the conversation between Wu and Masrani mirrors one between Hammond and Wu in the original book. In the novel, Wu is trying to persuade Hammond to let him make more modifications to the animals: he wants them slower and more docile, because he fears that people will think that they're too fast to be real, too dangerous. That was, after all, the image of dinosaurs in the public mind back in the eighties: massive, lumbering titans, not quick and birdlike. Hammond ignores the suggestion and claims that the animals as they exist are real, and real was good enough. And Wu, just like in the film, insists that they are not real, that they were always genetic abominations, and that any assertion otherwise is just willful ignorance.

I feel kind of proud for pointing this conversation out several months ago. (Apparently, the thread was baleeted. ) Trevorrow himself has used it as ammunition in Twitter arguments, which amuses me to no end: citing the chapters "Version 4.4" and "Tim" from the original book in arguing against misguided fans is just too funny.

Incidentally, Wu's motivations in the book were fundamentally about tinkering with the science, seeing what he could make, publishing, achieving academic immortality, and pushing the boundaries of genetics. He was also generally quite ignorant of the consequences of all that he did in a fairly monstrous way. Trevorrow, interestingly, pairs him up with Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), another InGen manager who is interested in the military applications of these de-extincted biologicals; that Wu would effectively sanction the use of his work for war continues another idea thread in Crichton's book. Ian Malcolm, Wu's primary critic in the book, speculates about the nature of genetic power in his many drug-induced philosophical rants, and suggests that it will be easily adapted to use as a weapon in kits for dictators and terrorists. And indeed, Wu and his embryos get bundled off to an undisclosed location late in the film on Hoskins' orders, in an instance of fairly obvious sequel-bait.

There are, of course, many other parallels between the film and the first book.

Zach and Grey escape from I. rex by going down a waterfall, in a scene vaguely reminiscent of Tim, Lex, and Grant's use of the raft; the kids and Grant found a maintenance tunnel and a golf cart that got them back to the visitor center, but in the film Zach and Grey scavenge a battery from a damaged golf cart and use it to repair one of the old Jeeps in the ancient visitor center garage so they can use it to get to the new visitor center.

The old visitor center and most of the northern part of the island are the "restricted zone", off-limits to park goers, where much of the research goes on. The northern part of Isla Nublar, in the book, was the primary location for the original park, while the mostly-volcanic southern tip was more poorly developed and not well-surveilled. The raptor nest turns out to be in the southern part of the island. It was an interesting nugget to have the restricted zone be the northern part of Isla Nublar - and a bit of foreshadowing for die-hard fans as to the sorts of other things that would be up there.

In the book, the big rex gets into the sauropod paddock shortly after escaping and attacking the cars. (Muldoon pithily comments that she'll be having "fine dining tonight".) I. rex's first target after wiping out the containment team is...the sauropod paddock, where she kills at least four animals before leaving to attack the kids and several Ankylosaurus.

"Management" - Hammond - forbade Muldoon from having heavy weapons out of fear that the priceless animals would be slaughtered instead of retrieved; he eventually badgered them into giving him a rocket launcher, but it primarily fired tranquilizer rockets and only had six explosive shells (to deal with 8 raptors and 2 rexes, plus the dilos and whatnot). It wasn't the LAWs that he wanted, but it had to suffice. The park's primary containment gear was shock prods and nets, which were all too slow and useless. Jurassic World has a similar setup: the ACU's shock prods and nets are slow and weak and can't do much to I. rex, and only a helicopter-mounted minigun and a rocket launcher late in the film give it any pause. Owen tells management that the ACU's gear is laughably insufficient, but Masrani and Claire say that they don't want to turn the park into a "war zone" - parroting Hammond's line almost exactly.

Oh, and when Gray and Zach are riding the monorail into the resort from the port, you can see somebody behind them reading a book reflected in the glass. The book is, of course, Alan Grant's Lost World of the Dinosaurs.

Gray and Zach also carry in a few plot lines from Tim and Lex's story in the novel. Their parents are getting a divorce, so they get to spend the week with Aunt Claire on VIP passes to see the park. That's basically the storyline Tim and Lex had going: their grandfather wanted to get their minds off their parents' divorce, so they would get to spend the weekend on his island resort.

Other aspects of the film owe their provenance to the franchise's fandom rather than to the books. The ultimate example is the climactic fight between the heroes and the I. rex. To totally and utterly spoil everything, the raptors attack I. rex but don't hurt it enough, so Claire goes and gets "more teeth": T. rex, who she baits out of its paddock to fight I. rex. Rexy and the raptors basically team up against I. rex and win (with considerable help from a Mosasaurus). The final shot of the film is of Rexy standing on one of the island's buildings roaring in triumph, once again master of its domain. Remember the outcry after Jurassic Park III, when the Spinosaurus aegyptiacus curbstomped a T. rex and fans were livid? They weren't livid for the "right" reason; Spinosaurus was a bigger, more powerful dinosaur, so having a T. rex get rekt by it would make perfect sense. They were livid because the iconic Rexy got beat by some new punk dinosaur. Well, Trevorrow pitted the old fan-favorites, Rexy and the raptors, against some new punk dinosaur, but this time the old fan-favorites won.

Or the instance early in the film, when we first see a control room technician, Lowery, wearing a vintage original Jurassic Park shirt. Claire suggests that it's in bad taste because, y'know, people died. Lowery acknowledges this, but points out that the first park was totally legit. With his sarcastic asides on the unfolding disaster, Lowery stands in for the longtime fans. He also stays at his post until the end and survives, but he does get friend-zoned by Vivian, who works next to him in the control room and who already has a boyfriend. That...that kinda sums it up right there, doesn't it?

And then there's the holographic Dilophosaurus, in full movie frilled-dragon about-to-kill-Dennis-Nedry pose, that startles a raptor chasing the heroes through a building and allows them to escape.

Frankly, fans haven't got anything to complain about. In fact, the movie could arguably have been better if it didn't bend over backwards to take Jurassic lore into account; the final battle was awesome but goofy for the same reason that the fight at the end of last year's Godzilla was kinda goofy: the "good" dinosaurs sort of teamed up with the humans to take down the "bad" dinosaurs. I mean...why didn't Rexy go after all the evacuees half a mile away after the mosasaur ate I. rex? Why didn't it go after Owen, Claire, and the boys?

Anyway. I enjoyed it; it was a fun dinosaur flick, a good date-night movie, and an excellent alternative to watching the Warriors win by 20. It wasn't as good as the first film was for a variety of reasons, but it was better than watching Vince Vaughn cause the destruction of half of San Diego, and it was better than watching William H. Macy kidnap a bunch of people to Death Island (which sounds awesome in theory but worked out pretty stupid in practice).

[Obadiah]

...
it was better than watching Vince Vaughn cause the destruction of half of San Diego
...

Yes, WAY better than that.

Spoiler

ALTHOUGH, there was that scene near the end where Owen (Chris), Bryce (Claire), and the kids let Vic (Vincent, one of the "villains") get eaten right in front of them by a velociraptor without trying the help. A few moments later when they were trapped again by the velociraptors Owen managed to assert alpha status for a bit. I'm sure Vic wouldn't have minded if he had tried that a bit earlier.

[Killdren88]

Yes, WAY better than that.

He stole the hunter's bullets! How many people got killed as a result of his hippy BS?!

[Aimi]

There has been one interesting current of complaint about the film that I very much agree with: the paleontological angle.

The first Jurassic Park film was silly science-fiction in many ways, but it was cutting-edge in one sense: it depicted dinosaurs in a form generally congruent with modern academia. Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were diverse in size, shape, and temperament; they could be lightning-fast and birdlike, or slow and plodding; they could be ferocious or docile. Horner, Bakker, Ostrom, and the rest liked Jurassic Park because, despite being fiction, it showed audiences the sorts of dinosaurs that paleontologists believed actually existed.

But now the franchise has taken over the way dinosaurs are shown. Paleontology, like all academics, has continued to change. Many dinosaurs are recognized to have been feathered, or covered in some sort of fuzz. Yet the new discoveries have made no impact on the film franchise, which continues to show its raptors and rexes in the same form that they existed in 1993. Now, there are 'canonical' reasons for this, as I pointed out in my previous post: the dinosaurs are genetically modified creatures that are explicitly recognized as 'not being the way they would have been' in important ways. But that's a separate question to the sort of image of dinosaurs that the films foster. Things have gone full circle: once on the cutting edge, the Jurassic films have fallen behind the times and no longer show realistic animals.

One almost gets the sense that this, too, is due to fan pressure (although derision might also play a role). After a tentative step toward a different-looking raptor in Jurassic Park III met with general opprobrium, Trevorrow explicitly promised "no feathers" for the new film. I feel that this was a missed opportunity. Jurassic World was in many ways a reboot, and given the pliability of the genetic modification theme it would've been very easy to introduce dinosaurs more coherent with modern academic thought. But they never took that step.

Spoiler

ALTHOUGH, there was that scene near the end where Owen (Chris), Bryce (Claire), and the kids let Vic (Vincent, one of the "villains") get eaten right in front of them by a velociraptor without trying the help. A few moments later when they were trapped again by the velociraptors Owen managed to assert alpha status for a bit. I'm sure Vic wouldn't have minded if he had tried that a bit earlier.

 
Yeah.

Spoiler

When that scene happened, gf asked me whether the gun in Owen's hands was for decoration or something, because he certainly wasn't using it to shoot things.

At least Hoskins' death wasn't as bizarre as Ludlow's was in The Lost World.

 

He stole the hunter's bullets! How many people got killed as a result of his hippy BS?!

Not only that, but he and Harding wrecked the InGen camp and brought the baby rex back to the trailer, stranding them all on the island and getting poor Eddie killed. (Another thing about the second movie that I hated: turning Eddie Carr and Doc Thorne into a single character. Thorne was awesome.)

I think either Spielberg or Lucas said after the movie came out that Van Owen and Ludlow were meant to represent two opposite poles on a spectrum of crazy: the environmentalist-terrorist kind and the unfettered-corporate-scumbag kind. The latter came out pretty easily, but the former really didn't; Van Owen did a lot of things that were pretty bad but there wasn't really an acknowledgment of that in the film.

[TheRealJayDee]

I was pretty hyped about the movie... right until I watched the first trailer. So far I've seen a total of nothing from the movie that did anything to get my excitement level back up again. I might watch it soon nonetheless, if only to support Chris Pratt's career and to be able to have an informed talk about the movie with my Jurassic Park fanatic sister.

[Steelcan]

I'll type up my own review after I get back

[Killdren88]

I'll type up my own review after I get back

 

Keep it tagged with spoilers for those who haven't seen it yet.

[Fast Jimmy]

Just got myself a Jurassic Smash Blizzard from DQ. Peanut butter ice cream with cookie dough bits. My favorite flavors. Best part, my cup had Chris Pratt with the velociraptors on it. Yum.

Are you staying yum for the ice cream, or yum for Chris Pratt?

[EarthboundNess]

Are you staying yum for the ice cream, or yum for Chris Pratt?