BEFORE: All right, this Movie Year is officially one-third over - umm, right after I watch this one, that is. I didn't even mention I've been operating sick the last few days. I called out "sick" last weekend for one day (I wasn't sick, but had a different valid excuse, sort of) and then karma's just going to take it out on me, by giving me a real cold. Right? I worked last Tuesday and wore a MASK for the first time in forever, it's not really a good look if you're serving food or beer at a sports game and you're coughing all over the place. By Thursday I didn't feel I needed the mask any more, it felt like the cold was going away, but really it was digging down and planning to stay a while. I'm coughing more now, and my already irregular sleep schedule is now completely nuts, because I can't sleep when I'm supposed to, so how the hell can I finish a movie? This would only be a problem if I had four theater shifts coming up in the next week, and two of them had early morning starts... I may have to skip a movie day here or there if I'm still feeling under the weather.
Ed Skrein carries over from "I Used to Be Famous". It's a big century-mark today so I'm landing it on the latest installment of one of the biggest movie franchises ever
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jurassic World: Dominion" (Movie #4,226)
THE PLOT: Five years after "Dominion", an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
AFTER: Anything in the "Jurassic Park" or "Jurassic World" franchise re-confirms the "Reductio ad Absurdum" idea, where we all tune in to see everything go wrong. Think about it, if they built an amusement park with dinosaurs genetically grown from million-year-old DNA and everybody was safe and happy and have a good time, that would somehow feel like it was just HALF of a movie, right? But then even after things went horribly wrong, they rebuilt and re-opened that theme part a couple times, didn't they? And people WENT BACK for some reason, knowing there was a non-zero chance they would somehow get eaten up by dinos. Like, come on, fool me once and shame on you, but fool me twice, that really should be on me. If people died going on the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland, and they closed it, fixed it, re-opened it and then MORE people died on "It's a Small World", would you go on that ride? Not if you were smart.
So in at least two or three of the movies, they re-opened Jurassic Park and we're supposed to believe that people came back because the appeal of live dinosaurs was still there, despite the danger. Umm, sure, but right now people are boycotting a movie theater chain just because their ticket app or their food app isn't working. If customers do not have a good experience, they will NOT come back again, this was part of my training at the stadium where I'm working now. They showed us the results of a poll where people who said they would not return to the stadium were asked WHY, and according to this poll, 57% of those people said they would not return because they had a negative encounter with an unhelpful employee. What's funny to me is that 0% of the people said they would not return because the food and ticket prices were too high, which is what I suspect people really would say. (My guess is that this was not an option given to them on the survey.) Where "Jurassic Park" is concerned, they surveyed the people who were eaten by dinosaurs if they would return to the park again, and well, they're still waiting for a response. But thanks to the poll, corporate believes that 0% of the people who would not return said that was because they were eaten, so really, no need to improve on the safety issues.
The most recent sequel neatly sidesteps this dilemma by NOT showing any of the island park venues re-opening, THANK GOD. Instead this depicts a world where the dinosaurs who live in most parts of the Earth are dying off en masse, perhaps it's a problem with the air or the unstable nature of the cloning process, or maybe it's some kind of correction the Earth is taking because it knows that the natural order has been messed with. But there is still a zone around the equator where dinosaurs are NOT dying, so it's maybe got something to do with the climate or the amount of daylight or the distance from the poles, who can say? Anyway there's a small number of countries and islands that can support dino life as a result, so thankfully everybody knows to stay AWAY from that part of the world, like even families on a personal boat trip know to steer clear of the equator, so there's zero chance of any civilians passing into the danger zone...
Instead, a pharmaceutical company puts a crack team together to go back to one of the old island testing grounds of InGen or BioSyn, whichever, because they need to get fresh genetic material from living dinosaurs, as they believe they can use this to create a cure for heart disease and save millions of human lives. Well, sure, with all of the disasters that befell those other two companies, I guess it's believable that none of them saved any of their genetic material, or any of their notes. Or perhaps it's a legal thing, if they went through the proper channels they'd have to reimburse those companies or the shareholders or whatever, plus it would be a whole legal thing, but if they just went down there and got the samples themselves, like they were just out there in nature, you could make a case that material would be public domain, or taking it would at least be a lot less prosecutable. And the mission will be quick and easy, as long as there's not a family on a personal boat trip that crosses into the danger zone for some reason.
Come on, admit it, even in this new scenario, if they put this crack team together, took the boat down to the island, used their fancy technology to collect the samples, got in, got out and nobody got hurt, the movie would be like fifteen minutes long and YOU would feel like you got ripped off. So you paid your $18.50 to sit in a movie theater and you WANT to see things go south, you WANT to see people get eaten by dinosaurs, sure you want the mission to succeed, but you WANT it to be very difficult, because only then will you feel like you got your money's worth, that you've been properly entertained to the legal limit. The greater the danger, the greater the payoff, and things really have not changed a bit since the days of Roman gladiators, now, have they?
So, really, it's same shit, different island - the team has to travel to Ile Saint-Hubert, which we're being told was a testing lab, it's where the original park tried to come up with some new dinosaurs, because people were getting BORED with the old ones. People, right? You bring back a bunch of species from billions of years ago, major scientific miracle, and after people see the T. Rex and the raptors and the giant apatosauruses, people got BORED. OK, the people that didn't get eaten got BORED. I can't really tell if this is meta or not, because what we're talking about here is franchise fatigue, and it's being referenced as a problem in the fictional theme parks, so you have to wonder if it isn't also a problem in real life with the "Jurassic Park/World" films themselves. They showed us T. Rexes and raptors and the giant apatosauruses, and then where do you GO after that? Are you not entertained enough?
So now we have to focus this film on Mosasaurus, that giant aquatic dinosaur, the Titanosaurus which maybe wasn't even ever a real dino, and the Quetzalcoatlus, which was like the largest flying thing that ever lived on Earth. Sure, the dinos are getting bigger, but so is the danger... to make things even worse, this turns out to be the island where the company was making new hybrid dinosaurs, you know, to get people back to the theme park to see new dinosaurs that never even existed in the first place, this will surely fight the franchise fatigue both within the movie and IRL. So now we get the Mutadon, which is a mix between the raptor and the pterosaur (sure, flying raptors, what could possibly go wrong there?) and the Distortus Rex, which is a mix of the T. Rex and the xenomorph from "Alien". Sure, green light, let's run with that.
The Distortus Rex sure looks like a rancor to me, the creature kept underneath Jabba the Hutt's throne room in "Return of the Jedi". The tip-off was how it held that guy and bit him in half, like he was a corn dog or something. I mean, I guess if you're going to steal, you steal from the best, but do you have to do that so blatantly?
I firmly believe we're past the point of worrying about diminishing returns with this franchise, like this most recent film did get an Oscar nomination for visual effects, but it did NOT win and it did NOT get any other nominations. The only people still watching these films are the visual effects junkies, not people who love a good story or seek out great acting - if you took a survey asking why people went to see this movie 40% would say it was for the effects, maybe another 30% for the adrenaline rush and probably 20% went out of habit. Maybe 10% of people just had nothing better to do on a Friday night. But really, it's time to cut the losses and stop trying.
To prove my point, there are only 20 cast members - I remember when a "Jurassic Park" film had a cast of thousands, or at least hundreds, so clearly they're in desperate straits and trying to save money wherever they can. That's a sinking ship, if you ask me. My fear is that this latest film is just the start of another trilogy, however, because this DID make money, with a budget of $180 million and a worldwide gross of $869 million. So yeah, there will be more.
Directed by Gareth Edwards (director of "The Creator" and "Godzilla")
Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Rupert Friend (ditto), Mahershala Ali (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Jonathan Bailey (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Manuel Garcia-Ruffo (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Luna Blaise, David Iacono (last seen in "Joker"), Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Adam Loxley, Niamh Finlay, Julian Edgar, Lucy Thackeray (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), Billy Smith (last seen in "Mile 22"), Jonny Lavelle (last seen in "1917"), Frankie Verroca (last seen in "Babygirl")
RATING: 5 out of 10 bags of stale chips in the abandoned service station
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