Post by The Social Introvert on Jun 21, 2018 9:14:18 GMT
For a video version of this review, see here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=suNFZxhFqHk
Seeing Jurassic World on the weekend was the worst cinema experience I’ve ever had in my life. I know many places and people have had it worse, but where I live people are really civil. This day was a nightmare though. For starters, as soon as the film started I found myself needing a piss, but didn’t want to miss anything so I stayed in my seat and by the time the credits started rolling my bladder was in genuine danger of popping like a balloon to be the day’s best jump scare.
Throughout this though, I had the geeza behind me kicking my chair every time he crossed his legs, which was about every half a second, a guy constantly rustling his popcorn bag so loud like he was trying to wake the dead, a middle aged couple a few rows away yapping away constantly, but the worst was this kid, I’m guessing around 5 years old, moaning, screaming, laughing, and running up and down my isle and rocking chairs back and forward with his parents blissfully watching the film without a care in the world. It was really rude. There were some dialogue scenes were I did miss what people had said because of the kid’s noise. I can understand it if you want to enjoy a dinosaur film with your family, I must’ve been about 5 when I first saw Jurassic Park but you can bet my folks would unsheathe their swords and spears if I made a racket in the cinema. This couple didn’t give two hoots, and the stuards came very close to telling them to leave. On top of all this, I didn’t even want to see Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom anyway, I only went because the Mrs wanted to see it, and after all that I turned to her and asked “Did you like it?” and she said “No, it was crap!”
Anyway, none of these catastrophizes can be attributed to the movie itself. I did my best to focus my attention on the big screen in front of me. I’m not a big fan of the first Jurassic World. Spielberg’s original is a classic, a gamechanger, I’ve got a soft spot for the second, the third I can do without but the fourth movie was the first one that I thought to myself, this doesn’t even feel like a Jurassic Park movie. So I didn’t have the highest of expectations going into this one.
If you’ve seen the trailers you pretty much know the story. A volcano is erupting which will kill off all the dinosaurs that are still alive after the events of the last movie, and an expedition which includes returning characters played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard is sent to rescue them in what is essentially The Lost World on steroids. But then it turns out that it wasn’t really a rescue mission at all, and the shady folks that orcistrated the whole thing are in fact selling off the dinosaurs to rich billionaires and warmongers. Pratt and Howard are joined by two hipsters and together they form our group of pretty bland and colourless protagonists. I’m starting to really question Chris Pratt’s ability. He’s no Pacino of course but I did think he was quite charismatic and likable in Guardians of the Galaxy but the more I see of him the more I feel he is incapable of carrying a blockbuster. I was also quite surprised at the treatment of Howard’s character. She was largely at fault for the hullabaloo that went on in Jurassic World which caused loads of deaths and shut down the park and yet there is no repercussion for her actions and negligence. A stab at redemption is mentioned but she has essentially gone from inept, emotionless, vulture-like businesswoman who played a part in a massive catastrophe to being the lovable sidekick. In general though, the characters felt less like people and more like vehicles to move the movie from one place to another.
I was quite disappointed with the special effects in the film, which has always been one of my pet-peeves with recent mainstream movies in general. It wasn’t that they were sci-fi channel level horrendous, it’s just that for the most part the effects are cookie-cutter standard mediocre Hollywood CGI blah. The special effects are completely interchangeable with the 10s of other crappy effects driven cash grabs that Hollywood shits out every year. And that wouldn’t be a problem if this was a Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson vehicle but this is Jurassic Park, the franchise, or at least the film, that was one of the great pioneers of movie special effects in the modern age. The animatronics and puppets had the legendary Stan Winston behind them, the CGI usage was minimal, delicate and restrained, the scenes were properly storyboarded and well thought out, and a wholly creative director in his prime was behind the camera. The Lost World’s effects were equally stupendous, there was a noticeable but slight dip with JP3, and then Jurassic World was released with some effects genuinely looking like they hadn’t been completed. Fallen Kingdom continues this sad but steady decline with really poor digitally rendered dinosaurs, and practical effects enhanced and coated in so much CGI and colour correction that they look CGI anyway. And it wasn’t even the dinosaurs – trees, mountains, dust, fire all rendered through a computer that really gave the film a stale, sanitized feel. It feels as whole thing was shot on two sets, one with a massive green screen and a couple of plastic hedges for the scenes set in the island, and the second with a couple of corridors and rooms for the mansion, despite the fact that they went to Hawaii to make the film.
Credit where it’s due, the film’s centrepiece, the IndoRaptor, looked great, it really did. The design was great and it looked real, it looked tangible, like it was there, it was looking at you, and it could get you. But I don’t know whether they blew their entire budget on the creature or what, because none of the other dinosaurs looked good and quite frankly I’m bored of complaining of shit CGI and special effects in films. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna accept it, and I do understand why a lot of people don’t have a problem with it and see guys like me as nitpickers. To enjoy a good old-fashioned, turn-your-brain off blockbusters, people want different things. Some people want absolutely no politics, no message. Others want the good guys to always win. For me, a minimum requirement is that the effects look tangible, it looks like the dinosaurs are really there moving around. If it doesn’t look like they’re there, I can’t get invested, I can’t get excited during a chase sequence or a hunt for survival, I just can’t even if I try. The effects don’t even need to be good, I’ve seen a lot of 80’s and 90’s films with practical effects where the effects were rubbish, it’s that they need to look like they’re actually there. And aside from the IndoRaptor, Fallen Kingdom fails big time.
There’s loads of problems with the dinosaurs in this movie. First of all, there’s too many of them. There’s no sense of wonder like the build up to the Brachiosaurus in the original, no sense of trepidation like in the jungle in The Lost World – Fallen Kingdom just grabs every dinosaur possible and throws as much as it can in your face. There’s literally dinosaurs tumbling over each other and squeezing themselves into every possible frame. I can’t believe they managed to make dinosaur boring and saturated. D’you remember the complaints about the star wars prequels that everyone kept on whipping out their lightsabres every two minutes? Fallen Kingdom does something similar with the prehistoric beasts, shoving them everywhere possible like some nepotistic school play teacher pushing his kid to the front of the stage.
Another direction this movie and its predecessor went with, in regards to the dinosaurs, is that they are like characters now. What happened to the animals that eat, shit and sleep, the ones that attached only if they felt threatened or were hungry? When Fallen Kingdom isn’t treating some dinosaurs like crazy monsters addicted to murder, others are individualised to the point that you’re wondering whether this isn’t an adaption of my first dinosaur. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is like an old family friend, a cousin that pops around on special occasions, and bites baddies in a due ex machina again and again, with the film makers clearly scared to kill her off lest fans riot. The raptor blue is another offender, coming off less as an animal bred in captivity but more of a recurring soap opera character. And what’s with the IndoRaptor pretending to be asleep, opening his eyes every couple of seconds with a shit-eating grin on his face when one of the mercenaries turns around, like a bloody pantomime villain. What is all this? They don’t move or act like animals any more, and are never shown in an environment where they are just being animals. The closing shot of The Lost World was always one of my favourite scenes in the franchise, when you see the two T Rex’s chilling with their young, the Stegosaurus herd grazing and ambling forward, a couple of other dinos here and there doing their thing. Nature in perfect balance. Such a scene could not exist in today’s Jurassic Park movies – the T Rex’s would have probably jumped on the Stegos, hacking and snapping their jaws with Stegs whipping his tail back and forth in rage.
It’s too much. It’s too much crash bang wallop and I tried really hard but I just couldn’t care about anything going on on the island. Spielberg made a cup of water and the sound of footsteps more exciting than anything in Fallen Kingdom. The Dino run could have potentially been one of the great adventure scenes, Indiana Jones running away from the boulder, ET flying across the moon, instead it just looks like a pixilated mess. The second half of the movie, though many plot elements were contrived like how a dinosaur containment facility was built in a guy’s basement without his knowledge the introduction of some crazy subplots like cloned humans, was a lot better because they scaled everything down. Everything was suddenly a lot more relatable and realistic. You’re stuck in a mansion, there’s a dino in there. You’ve got to get out and make sure he doesn’t. It was very simple and by far and away contained some of the film’s better scenes.
For the most part though the movie just shoves too much in your face. It leaves nothing to imagination, nothing to ponder. I’ll give you an example, there’s a scene where they show an Allosaurus, my personal favourite dinosaur, and though it was quite big a character mentions that it is still a juvenile. So I started thinking “Hmm, I wonder what it looks like as an adult. I wonder how big it grows, what it mainly uses for attach, what it’s hunting style is etc etc” That was the only scene where the film even momentarily stimulated my brain into thinking, or wondering.
I probably enjoyed it a little more than the last film, but Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom didn’t do it for me. It felt quite interchangeable with all these other mediocre effects-driven blockbuster. It lacks the charm of the Jurassic Park movies, it wasn’t effective enough in its louder brash scenes and didn’t have any room whatsoever for the quieter, rich scenes that really elevate a movie like the silent helicopter ride home in the original. I give it a 5.5 out of 10.
P.S. how about that auction, huh? In a world where footballers are moving teams for £200m, a living, breathing dinosaur clone only costs $10m.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=suNFZxhFqHk
Seeing Jurassic World on the weekend was the worst cinema experience I’ve ever had in my life. I know many places and people have had it worse, but where I live people are really civil. This day was a nightmare though. For starters, as soon as the film started I found myself needing a piss, but didn’t want to miss anything so I stayed in my seat and by the time the credits started rolling my bladder was in genuine danger of popping like a balloon to be the day’s best jump scare.
Throughout this though, I had the geeza behind me kicking my chair every time he crossed his legs, which was about every half a second, a guy constantly rustling his popcorn bag so loud like he was trying to wake the dead, a middle aged couple a few rows away yapping away constantly, but the worst was this kid, I’m guessing around 5 years old, moaning, screaming, laughing, and running up and down my isle and rocking chairs back and forward with his parents blissfully watching the film without a care in the world. It was really rude. There were some dialogue scenes were I did miss what people had said because of the kid’s noise. I can understand it if you want to enjoy a dinosaur film with your family, I must’ve been about 5 when I first saw Jurassic Park but you can bet my folks would unsheathe their swords and spears if I made a racket in the cinema. This couple didn’t give two hoots, and the stuards came very close to telling them to leave. On top of all this, I didn’t even want to see Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom anyway, I only went because the Mrs wanted to see it, and after all that I turned to her and asked “Did you like it?” and she said “No, it was crap!”
Anyway, none of these catastrophizes can be attributed to the movie itself. I did my best to focus my attention on the big screen in front of me. I’m not a big fan of the first Jurassic World. Spielberg’s original is a classic, a gamechanger, I’ve got a soft spot for the second, the third I can do without but the fourth movie was the first one that I thought to myself, this doesn’t even feel like a Jurassic Park movie. So I didn’t have the highest of expectations going into this one.
If you’ve seen the trailers you pretty much know the story. A volcano is erupting which will kill off all the dinosaurs that are still alive after the events of the last movie, and an expedition which includes returning characters played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard is sent to rescue them in what is essentially The Lost World on steroids. But then it turns out that it wasn’t really a rescue mission at all, and the shady folks that orcistrated the whole thing are in fact selling off the dinosaurs to rich billionaires and warmongers. Pratt and Howard are joined by two hipsters and together they form our group of pretty bland and colourless protagonists. I’m starting to really question Chris Pratt’s ability. He’s no Pacino of course but I did think he was quite charismatic and likable in Guardians of the Galaxy but the more I see of him the more I feel he is incapable of carrying a blockbuster. I was also quite surprised at the treatment of Howard’s character. She was largely at fault for the hullabaloo that went on in Jurassic World which caused loads of deaths and shut down the park and yet there is no repercussion for her actions and negligence. A stab at redemption is mentioned but she has essentially gone from inept, emotionless, vulture-like businesswoman who played a part in a massive catastrophe to being the lovable sidekick. In general though, the characters felt less like people and more like vehicles to move the movie from one place to another.
I was quite disappointed with the special effects in the film, which has always been one of my pet-peeves with recent mainstream movies in general. It wasn’t that they were sci-fi channel level horrendous, it’s just that for the most part the effects are cookie-cutter standard mediocre Hollywood CGI blah. The special effects are completely interchangeable with the 10s of other crappy effects driven cash grabs that Hollywood shits out every year. And that wouldn’t be a problem if this was a Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson vehicle but this is Jurassic Park, the franchise, or at least the film, that was one of the great pioneers of movie special effects in the modern age. The animatronics and puppets had the legendary Stan Winston behind them, the CGI usage was minimal, delicate and restrained, the scenes were properly storyboarded and well thought out, and a wholly creative director in his prime was behind the camera. The Lost World’s effects were equally stupendous, there was a noticeable but slight dip with JP3, and then Jurassic World was released with some effects genuinely looking like they hadn’t been completed. Fallen Kingdom continues this sad but steady decline with really poor digitally rendered dinosaurs, and practical effects enhanced and coated in so much CGI and colour correction that they look CGI anyway. And it wasn’t even the dinosaurs – trees, mountains, dust, fire all rendered through a computer that really gave the film a stale, sanitized feel. It feels as whole thing was shot on two sets, one with a massive green screen and a couple of plastic hedges for the scenes set in the island, and the second with a couple of corridors and rooms for the mansion, despite the fact that they went to Hawaii to make the film.
Credit where it’s due, the film’s centrepiece, the IndoRaptor, looked great, it really did. The design was great and it looked real, it looked tangible, like it was there, it was looking at you, and it could get you. But I don’t know whether they blew their entire budget on the creature or what, because none of the other dinosaurs looked good and quite frankly I’m bored of complaining of shit CGI and special effects in films. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna accept it, and I do understand why a lot of people don’t have a problem with it and see guys like me as nitpickers. To enjoy a good old-fashioned, turn-your-brain off blockbusters, people want different things. Some people want absolutely no politics, no message. Others want the good guys to always win. For me, a minimum requirement is that the effects look tangible, it looks like the dinosaurs are really there moving around. If it doesn’t look like they’re there, I can’t get invested, I can’t get excited during a chase sequence or a hunt for survival, I just can’t even if I try. The effects don’t even need to be good, I’ve seen a lot of 80’s and 90’s films with practical effects where the effects were rubbish, it’s that they need to look like they’re actually there. And aside from the IndoRaptor, Fallen Kingdom fails big time.
There’s loads of problems with the dinosaurs in this movie. First of all, there’s too many of them. There’s no sense of wonder like the build up to the Brachiosaurus in the original, no sense of trepidation like in the jungle in The Lost World – Fallen Kingdom just grabs every dinosaur possible and throws as much as it can in your face. There’s literally dinosaurs tumbling over each other and squeezing themselves into every possible frame. I can’t believe they managed to make dinosaur boring and saturated. D’you remember the complaints about the star wars prequels that everyone kept on whipping out their lightsabres every two minutes? Fallen Kingdom does something similar with the prehistoric beasts, shoving them everywhere possible like some nepotistic school play teacher pushing his kid to the front of the stage.
Another direction this movie and its predecessor went with, in regards to the dinosaurs, is that they are like characters now. What happened to the animals that eat, shit and sleep, the ones that attached only if they felt threatened or were hungry? When Fallen Kingdom isn’t treating some dinosaurs like crazy monsters addicted to murder, others are individualised to the point that you’re wondering whether this isn’t an adaption of my first dinosaur. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is like an old family friend, a cousin that pops around on special occasions, and bites baddies in a due ex machina again and again, with the film makers clearly scared to kill her off lest fans riot. The raptor blue is another offender, coming off less as an animal bred in captivity but more of a recurring soap opera character. And what’s with the IndoRaptor pretending to be asleep, opening his eyes every couple of seconds with a shit-eating grin on his face when one of the mercenaries turns around, like a bloody pantomime villain. What is all this? They don’t move or act like animals any more, and are never shown in an environment where they are just being animals. The closing shot of The Lost World was always one of my favourite scenes in the franchise, when you see the two T Rex’s chilling with their young, the Stegosaurus herd grazing and ambling forward, a couple of other dinos here and there doing their thing. Nature in perfect balance. Such a scene could not exist in today’s Jurassic Park movies – the T Rex’s would have probably jumped on the Stegos, hacking and snapping their jaws with Stegs whipping his tail back and forth in rage.
It’s too much. It’s too much crash bang wallop and I tried really hard but I just couldn’t care about anything going on on the island. Spielberg made a cup of water and the sound of footsteps more exciting than anything in Fallen Kingdom. The Dino run could have potentially been one of the great adventure scenes, Indiana Jones running away from the boulder, ET flying across the moon, instead it just looks like a pixilated mess. The second half of the movie, though many plot elements were contrived like how a dinosaur containment facility was built in a guy’s basement without his knowledge the introduction of some crazy subplots like cloned humans, was a lot better because they scaled everything down. Everything was suddenly a lot more relatable and realistic. You’re stuck in a mansion, there’s a dino in there. You’ve got to get out and make sure he doesn’t. It was very simple and by far and away contained some of the film’s better scenes.
For the most part though the movie just shoves too much in your face. It leaves nothing to imagination, nothing to ponder. I’ll give you an example, there’s a scene where they show an Allosaurus, my personal favourite dinosaur, and though it was quite big a character mentions that it is still a juvenile. So I started thinking “Hmm, I wonder what it looks like as an adult. I wonder how big it grows, what it mainly uses for attach, what it’s hunting style is etc etc” That was the only scene where the film even momentarily stimulated my brain into thinking, or wondering.
I probably enjoyed it a little more than the last film, but Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom didn’t do it for me. It felt quite interchangeable with all these other mediocre effects-driven blockbuster. It lacks the charm of the Jurassic Park movies, it wasn’t effective enough in its louder brash scenes and didn’t have any room whatsoever for the quieter, rich scenes that really elevate a movie like the silent helicopter ride home in the original. I give it a 5.5 out of 10.
P.S. how about that auction, huh? In a world where footballers are moving teams for £200m, a living, breathing dinosaur clone only costs $10m.
