Jurassic World (spoilers)

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. 

Poetry for Parents

I consider myself a writer for the screen most of the time, and when I'm feeling especially powerful - straight fiction. But sometimes memories and feelings mix in such a way that you have to express them through a medium that you're not comfortable in.

The first one is a mix for my mother, the second for my father. 

At the Edge of the Dock, Looking In

Those hands are boiled tough,

brushing soot off an old steel grill.

The breakwater, blue and teeming,

is a forest of sunken pines and flaring moss.

Everything churns to softness,

muddied under the cool surface.

Working

to keep the hands

warm in the morning?

My mother glares

out to the waves

shivering the surface beneath me.

I don’t go in the lake when it’s cold,

her voice skims over the planks

to my feet,

I’m waiting

till we come back

for summer.

The Perch

The wind kills the tickle on my face, 

my tree perch creaks.

Air hisses through the naked canopy

carrying silence on its back.

My father’s face, stone-chipped and mossed;

his gun slung, a sharp slim branch across his chest. 

We wait in the swaying tree

for some burning life below to brazen by us.

I breathe slowly through shivers.

A leaf leaps down to my shoulder,

staunching glowing breath. 

Miscellany

Eventually, I'll scatter my thoughts right here.