BEFORE: They showed this film in late June at the theater where I work, it was a special screening hosted by the Visual Effects Society. They also screened "Elvis" and "Lightyear" the same week, and I worked those screenings so I couldn't watch the films - but I went in on my day off to catch "Jurassic World", because I knew that I would need to make the connection between "The Harder They Fall" and another big-budget summer blockbuster that also has Chris Pratt in it, bit in more of a supporting role. Hmm, that one also has Idris Elba in it, but going straight there from "The Harder They Fall" just would not have worked, trust me on this point.
DeWanda Wise carries over from "The Harder They Fall". I was going to do a whole Idris Elba thing here, but that path didn't seem to connect to the start of my horror chain in the right number of steps - from those films, I'd get there too quickly, so I flipped part of the chain around and padded it a bit, so now I think things are going to work out, with a couple trips to the movie theater I've got a clear path now to Christmas, even though it's only late August.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (Movie #2,986)
THE PLOT: Four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar, dinosaurs now live - and hunt - alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history's most fearsome creatures.
AFTER: Please please PLEASE let this be the last "Jurassic Park/World" film, because enough already. The third film of the second trilogy, or however they're pitching or justifying this, it's all gotten quite ridiculous - never mind that, it was ridiculous when "The Lost World" came out, which was the second movie in the franchise, and they couldn't even title that one properly, that's how little the studio cared about it. Then they really began beating a dead horse with "Jurassic Park III". "Jurassic World" shot some new life into the franchise, but they did that by going back to the basics, and re-opening the park with live dinosaurs again - gee, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with live, hungry dinosaurs and a park full of tasty humans? Are you kidding me?
But the best thing I can say about "Dominion" is that they DO NOT open up the park again for tourists - finally, after making the same mistake four or five times in a row, somebody with a brain said, "Hey, maybe this doesn't need to be a Disneyland-type attraction where the dinosaurs are the entertainment and the humans are also the snacks." The previous film, "Fallen Kingdom" was really about rescuing the dinosaurs from a volcanic eruption on their island - what, can't they just swim to another island? But then there was also stuff in there about selling the dinosaurs on the black market, and some stuff about human cloning that really felt like a weird tangent. But it ended with dinosaurs roaming all over the world, getting into whatever biospheres they felt most comfortable in, and trying to fit in with the other species already in the world - gee, it's not like we have a limited amount of resources on this planet, or anything like that. A few dozen apatosauruses could probably eat up the Amazon rainforest in a couple of months, and then where will we be?
Isn't it bad enough that we humans have to always be on the lookout for bears in the forests and snakes in the grass, and sharks in the oceans? Now you throw dinosaurs into the mix, and you know what, let's just not leave the house for a while, OK? Everything out there just wants to kill us, so we live inside now, I'm cool with that. But instead we're shown former dinosaur trainer Owen Grady trying to wrangle stray dinosaurs by using horses, as if the dinos are cattle. Wait a second, maybe that's the answer, if we have too many dinosaurs running around the planet, we should treat them like cattle, and EAT THEM. What better way to show that we're the superior species, that we humans belong here and they don't - they had their chance, after all, and they messed it up. So why wasn't this a viable solution, just hunt all the dinos down and eat them, and we've solved world hunger at the same time! There, I fixed it, we're five minutes in to the film and I've solved two problems with one solution, and everybody's having bronto burgers tonight. Film over.
But sadly, that's not what happened. Instead the movie follows up on that human cloning thing, because sure, that's why we all came to the movie theater today. Owen and Claire live in a remote cabin near the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and they're sort of co-parenting Maisie Lockwood, who's the clone of the granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood, who was an important rich scientific philanthropist from one of the previous movies, or something. Blue, one of the velociraptors that Owen trained in "Jurassic World" lives in the woods nearby, and she somehow gave birth to a baby raptor asexually, or she got the in vitro fertilization or something - I get it, Blue's not into men, that's OK. Lesbian dinosaur single parents are very hip right now.
Meanwhile, something's wrong with the world's ecosystems, beyond the fact that there are now DINOSAURS living in them. Giant locusts are wiping out crops all over the place, but they only eat the crops belonging to farmers who did NOT buy their seeds from Biosyn Genetics. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, right? Because that's the same company that has just established a dinosaur preserve in the Dolomite Mountains, it couldn't possibly be that the company is into some really shady stuff, right? RIGHT? The paleobotanist from the first film, Dr. Ellie Sattler, takes one of the locusts to her old partner from that same film, Dr. Alan Grant. Why, it's almost as if the plot is designed to draw every character that's ever been seen in this franchise back into the plot, creating some kind of "all-star" installment for the final (we hope) film.
Meanwhile, operatives from the SAME corporation kidnap both Maisie, the cloned girl, and Beta, the asexually-produced baby raptor. And everybody heads for the Biosyn laboratory for different reasons, either to research the locusts or find the girl or find the baby dino, and when they get there, who's working for Biosyn? Why, it's Dr. Ian Malcolm, and the reunion of the former stars of this franchise is inevitably completed. Somehow this became a reunion of the stars of both the original "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World" at the same time - calling this chain of events contrived would be a massive understatement.
Don't let me forget that Dr. Henry Wu is working for Biosyn, too - he was in the first film, too, and then appeared in all three of the films in the second trilogy. If he's working for Biosyn then I'm sure everything is just FINE, investigation over, we can all go home. JK. Really, you're not going to want to mess around with dinosaur or even plant genetics unless this guy is on the scene - but the twist here is that this guy does have a conscience after all, it's just his boss who wants to control the world's food supply by forcing farmers to like and subscribe. The Biosyn CEO, Lewis Dodgon, wants to do for farming what Jeff Bezos did for Amazon, sending all the little farms to the same fate as so many independent bookstores - it's diabolical, really.
But you really came here for the dinosaurs, didn't you? Not some B-plot about farming and locusts and controlling the world through wheat and corn. Again, just let the people eat dinosaurs, and food shortages aren't going to be much of a problem. One giant dinosaur could probably feed a whole city block for like a week. Just saying, some of the BBQ joints I go to in NYC sell something they call the "dino ribs", but they're really just beef ribs that are much bigger than the usual pork ones. There's even a restaurant in Brooklyn called "Dinosaur Barbecue", but what a disappointment, there's no actual dinosaur on the menu, just beef, pork and chicken. Hey, didn't they find a wooly mammoth frozen in the Arctic ice a few years ago? Whatever happened with that? How soon can we defrost and clone that thing so I can eat mammoth ribs?
I'm getting off track again - but this movie does that too, quite often. Once the whole Team of Former Jurassic Park All-Stars has been assembled, they have to work together to escape once the (say it with me, now...) dinosaurs get loose and take over the complex. Honestly, here's the part of the film that I found very hard to follow, because a lot of shit goes down in a very tight time-frame, there are of course narrow escapes because the team is constantly surrounded by very hungry dinos running loose, and meanwhile they have to accomplish a series of objectives beyond "RUN!" - they have to find Maisie and Beta, they have to restore power after an outage, they have to secure some method of escape, because some of them arrived in a plane that, umm, crash-landed. Whoopsie.
To make matters worse, there's no real technical support available for re-starting a hidden dinosaur enclave. Well, did you try unplugging your hidden dinosaur enclave, waiting ten seconds and then plugging it back in? Right, that usually does the trick with these hidden dinosaur enclaves. OK, now just get to the exit point without getting eaten, and you should be all set. Now let's all work together and do what we do best, eat the other species and then we'll never have to worry about this again, OK? The long-term advice for this franchise is the same that should have been given to the people who wanted to re-open Jurassic Park for the fourth time: "You know what, just shut it down."
Also starring Chris Pratt (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Bryce Dallas Howard (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Spielberg"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"), Mamoudou Athie (last seen in "The Circle"), Isabella Sermon (last seen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"), Daniella Pineda (ditto), Campbell Scott (last seen in "Music and Lyrics"), BD Wong (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Omar Sy (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Justice Smith (last heard in "Ron's Gone Wrong"), Scott Haze (last seen in "Zeroville"), Dichen Lachman (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Kristoffer Polaha (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Varada Sethu, Dimitri Thivaois (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Caleb Hearon, Freya Parker, Alexander Owen, Ahir Shah, Elva Trill, Teresa Cendon-Garcia, Manuela Mora, Bastian Antonio Fuentes, Jasmine Chiu, Ben Ashenden (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Enzo Squillino Jr. (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Glynis Davies, Mo Brings Plenty, Emilie Jumeaux, Aisling Sharkey, Joel Elferink,
RATING: 5 out of 10 stolen embryos in a fake can of shaving cream
No comments:
Post a Comment