Brief thoughts on the recent box office behemoth...
Photo by Emissary_Filmworks/iStock / Getty Images
PROS:
- The spectacle is there in full force
- Showing us Hammond's dream realized on the biggest scale imaginable is great, and initially showing it to us through his desired audience (a regular boy) - also great.
- Dinosaurs teaming up to take down a genetically designed monster is pretty cool, if a little contradictory (considering they are all genetically designed pseudo-dinosaurs to begin with)
CONS:
- The story attempts to transform all the main characters in complex ways, but ends up doing a lot of telling & no showing. Do we really need two talky scenes confirming that one brother loves another brother even though he's going to college? The older one just saved the younger one's life several times - point proven already!
- The evil military contractor subplot that becomes the main plot makes 0% sense. Velociraptors are better than drone missiles, apparently.
- $26 trillion on a new dinosaur and: no roof built over it's cage, no safety features implanted in its body to stop it, no animal behaviorists brought in to study/implant it? How did the guy who payed our nation's debt for it not know anything about it?
What I'm saying is - it's a gargantuan film built on the stilts of a story. All the logic is absent and any emotional rewards are lost in the jumble. The forerunner, Jurassic Park, had less than a dozen dinosaurs paired with simple, perfect foundations (chaos, nature, a few people trying to survive). Oh, and terror - there was real, exciting terror in that one too.