Nerd Pandering
If I had made a spoof of the Jurassic Park franchise, it might have been
remarkably similar to “Jurassic World.” This movie is not too far away from
being a total joke. Take two main plot points. First, the theme park “Jurassic
World” is not growing in attendance because people are bored with the same old
dinosaurs and the investors are getting anxious. Say what? A theme park with
dinosaurs is losing its appeal after only ten years in existence? Surely that
is one of the most absurd scenarios in the history of movies. But whatever, in
reaction to this scenario the theme park is training velociprators like
bloodhounds and creating a newer, bigger, more dangerous dinosaur. You see
their focus groups suggest that giant carnivourous dinosaurs tend to draw
larger crowds. These new attractions have gotten the attention of the U.S.
Military which brings us to the second plot point. A contractor named Hoskins
(Vincent D’Onofrio) exclaims “Imagine what we could have done with these guys
in Tora Bora!?!” I can actually answer that question. An Al Queada soldier with
a sniper rifle would take down the raptor from about 500 yards away. And that’s
if the beast could actually be transported to Afghanistan in the first place.
And these absurdities are what drive the main plot conflicts of the story.
Really. This movie just made a record 200 million dollars in one weekend. The
silver lining to that I guess is that this movie would not have made nearly
enough without the enormous goodwill garnered by the first two very good
Spielberg films. So, at least in this instance, critics can be assured that bad
movies don’t come out of nowhere and make tons of money. They stand on the
shoulders of actually good movies and also in this case a pretty good book.
Let’s talk about the dinosaurs. They are relatively deficient from past
movies in their capacity to provoke wonderment or thrills. The lack of wonder
has much to do with the movie’s insistence via the characters that the
dinosaurs are not so special. In the first movie you followed the reactions of
paleontologists whose every dream came true when they saw their first living
dinosaur. Contrast that with the two kids who visit the park in this movie. One
of them, a child, is sufficiently excited. The other, a teenager, is more
interested in girls. I felt like smacking him upside the head for most of the
movie. It matters less what is on the screen than what the characters think
about it. The experience of movie going is a vicarious one. If the characters
don’t care than the wonder is not extended to the viewer. The fact that
“Jurassic World” had one of its main characters not be all that impressed with
dinosaurs really undercut the whole reason to see this movie: i.e. that it had
fucking dinosaurs in it.
These dinosaurs are less thrilling than the ones in the original movie.
Now I’m going to make a distinction in the technology but keep in mind that
there is actually no particular reason why computer images could not do both.
Think back to the original movie and pick out some of the more visceral moments,
perhaps the Velociraptor in the kitchen tapping its big claw, or the water
vibrating, or Wayne Knight’s death, or the girl being sneezed upon. None of
these little things employed computer effects. It would be absurd to use
computer effects for them, as they were not needed. However in the new movie,
as far as I can tell, the dinosaurs are completely computer generated even for
the moments when it isn’t needed, i.e. closeups on faces. And those dino faces
look unnecessarily weird to me compared with the first movies. But as before it
is not really the problem that the dinos are almost entirely computer
generated. The real problem is that there are not really any moments that do
not call for computer generation. There are no little moments. All the moments
are big. And this is a problem because you need little moments to create
suspense (i.e. water vibrating) and also to explain things.
Filmmakers studying Spielbergian masterpieces such as Jaws and Jurassic
Park (as no doubt the director of “Jurassic World” Colin Trevorrow has)
continually draw the wrong lessons from them. They assume that if you do not
see a monster for a significant length of time that it suddenly becomes
scarier. This is not true. The reason why the shark and the dinos are scary in
those movies is because they are thoroughly explained. That is to say in “Jaws”
Richard Dreyfuss explains in length the nature of Great White Sharks and in
“Jurassic Park” a paleontologist explains how velociraptors attack in
herds. It amazes me how these scenes
are sometimes the first ones dropped in inferior movies. What you get instead
is movie cheats wherein the creature, not being defined, is allowed to
arbitrarily gain and lose supernatural powers at the movies whim. Here the new
dinosaur is allowed to camoflauge himself amongst the trees. This somehow makes
it impervious to bullets, lots and lots of bullets. Or take the raptors, which
can be trained to follow orders from Chris Pratt until they don’t want to until
they want to again. It also does not help when the ambitions of the movie are
so great in scope that a wild animal as a villain just cannot work without it
having absurd levels of competence in fighting modern technological war
machines. Sometimes for the purposes of thrills that do not insult the
intelligence of the audience it is better to have a boat that is not big
enough.
Now lets talk about the secondary attractions, the people. There is not
much to say here other than how well they play out stock imitations of other
Spielbergian characters and tropes, most explicitly the one where an adult
needs to stop working so much and spend more time with the kids. Then there is
Chris Pratt doing his best ‘Indiana Jones’ impression. Not bad although I think
he really should be drinking a beer in his first scene and not a coke (and who
drinks coke from bottles anymore?). BD Wong, the scientist from the first
movie, is back as a scientist here. His presence is nerd pandering which I will
get to next. The same can be said about the characters of Jake Johnson and
Lauren Lapkus the computer nerds in the control room. Again, more on that
later. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a vapid corporate dummy who disrepects nature
and is too high strung and organized for a relationship with Pratt to work. She
has these high heels. Pratt at one point when they are in the midst of nature
with danger all around them ridicules her decision to wear them. He is right of
course. She shouldn’t be wearing them in this context and high heels in general
are rather vain and unbecoming for someone already in charge with nobody to
impress. So that’s a good criticism. But then the movie does something else: It
insists that Bryce continue to wear the high heels the rest of the movie past
many scenes when either a sane person would have ditched them or they would
have broken past repair many times. Now given that the character is only
wearing the heels because the movie itself (written, directed, and produced by
guys) has been intent on making her wear them beyond all suspension of
disbelief, is it really okay to make fun of the woman’s character for wearing
them in the first place. I would suggest that it is not but this is the sort of
thing one generally gets when a movie deems as its mission to above all else
pander to nerds. In this particular case nerds like to think of themselves as
Han Solo and that every girl is Princess Leia who would fall head over heels
for them if only they weren’t so stuck up. Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard Dallas
are just another reiteration of that classic type of nerd pandering.
I don’t like nerds. I don’t think there is another group of people who
would sit through all sorts of stupid drivel as long as it patted them on the
back and made them feel special. But boy do studios love nerds. Make a movie
about their favorite comic book and the nerds will feel compelled to show up as
a matter of honor perhaps if only for the opportunity to complain loudly about
how terrible it was done. So the incentive to make decent movies is lessened
right there. What is more is that the nerds routinely react with glee when
sequels or reboots incorporate the best jokes and lines of the original movie.
“Jurassic World” is no exception. There are a ton of inside jokes and callbacks
to “Jurassic Park” (Hell, look at Jake Johnson’s “Jurassic Park” shirt) and
“Jaws” that make the plot more predictable and all the action tinted with a
sense of déjà vu. There is the ‘objects look closer than they appear in the
mirror’ gag, there is ‘the loosening of a giant tooth from a vehicle’ trope,
there is the ‘flare baiting of the T-Rex’ scene. The best example of all is the
musical score. It isn’t John Williams great score from ‘Jurassic Park.’ It is a
similar but inferior version whose best quality is to remind you of how great
the original was. The most frustrating thing about “Jurassic World” is not that
it isn’t a great movie, it’s that it cynically did not even allow itself the space
to be a great movie. It deliberately set out to be a nostalgia piece. And the
ones to blame are the nerds because they do not insist that their movies
challenge them. (One could perhaps argue that the whole idea of having
superpowers is an immature way of escaping real world problem solving). As long
as they go and see the next Spiderman reboot every five years why would the
studios ever give them something different.
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