Jurassic World | Little White Lies

There is exact­ly one bril­liant moment in Col­in Trevorrow’s Juras­sic World: a teenage boy named Zach (Nick Robin­son) strolls through the T‑Rex exhib­it at the epony­mous amuse­ment park, just one of the 20,000 vis­i­tors who will pass through the trop­i­cal tourist attrac­tion that day. His phone rings; it’s his mom call­ing, and she wants to have a typ­i­cal mom conversation.

As Zach turns his back to the view­ing win­dow in order to hear the voice on the oth­er end of the line, the sin­gle most icon­ic film crea­ture of the last 25 years loud­ly wad­dles through the back­ground with an ancient roar. The crowd coos, doing their best to con­vince each oth­er that they’ve just seen some­thing awe­some, but Zach doesn’t even flinch. The spec­ta­cle is about as excit­ing to him as last year’s Christ­mas presents.

Zach, of course, is meant to be our proxy, as jad­ed to mad sci­en­tist mar­vels of bio­engi­neer­ing as we sup­pos­ed­ly are to the won­ders of spe­cial effects. And it’s true that the sight of Stan Winston’s ani­ma­tron­ic mas­ter­piece (or its rean­i­mat­ed CGI incar­na­tion) doesn’t inspire the same awe that it did when it first stomped over the wire fence of its orig­i­nal pad­dock in 1993. That sense of inure­ment is at the heart of the cyn­i­cal Juras­sic World, which has been mis­tak­en­ly described as a reboot of Juras­sic Park – it’s tech­ni­cal­ly a direct sequel, but it would be more accu­rate to describe it as a mis­be­got­ten reckoning.

More than two decades after John Hammond’s beta test implod­ed in grand fash­ion, his dream has been realised and then some. Isla Nublar is now dom­i­nat­ed by a theme park that makes Dis­ney­land look like a street fair, the dinosaurs inhab­it­ing a cor­po­rate par­adise criss­crossed by mono­rails and over­run with fam­i­lies of tourists – there’s even a Star­bucks (hell, there’s even a Mar­gar­i­taville with Jim­my Buf­fett him­self serv­ing drinks). Once upon a time, the sci­ence required the mon­ey. Now, the mon­ey requires the sci­ence. Life funds a way.

The heart of Michael Crichton’s orig­i­nal nov­el was about how dis­cov­ery and won­der are inevitably infect­ed by busi­ness, and Juras­sic World begins with the tail wag­ging the dinosaur so vig­or­ous­ly that they need to invent a mon­ster big enough to stay on its feet.

In order to sati­ate the pub­lic and keep them com­ing back for more, InGen is com­pelled to cre­ate a new attrac­tion every few years – as Claire (Bryce Dal­las Howard), the park’s worka­holic oper­a­tional man­ag­er, puts it: ​“No one’s impressed by dinosaurs any­more.” And Claire is right. One hun­dred years ago, audi­ences were (apoc­ryphal­ly) aston­ished and ter­ri­fied by the sight of a train pulling into a sta­tion. Ear­li­er this sum­mer this writer near­ly fell asleep watch­ing an inter­galac­tic team of super­heroes try to defeat an army of robots and pre­vent a falling city from crash­ing to Earth and trig­ger­ing an extinc­tion lev­el event.

Enter Indomi­nus Rex. The company’s lat­est and most colos­sal­ly ill-advised idea is larg­er than a T‑Rex, twice as blood­thirsty, and spliced with all sorts of fun new tricks. Need­less to say, the ghost of J Robert Oppen­heimer is rolling his eyes long before Indomi­nus slips out of her pen and pro­ceeds to run amok, destroy­ing the park’s infra­struc­ture and eat­ing all of its prized attractions.

As the main event of this crea­ture fea­ture, Indomi­nus Rex com­plete­ly fails to cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion. As a car­niv­o­rous metaphor for the dan­gers of con­fus­ing big­ger with bet­ter, she’s only slight­ly more suc­cess­ful (the movie’s most intrigu­ing new dinosaur is the aquat­ic Mosasaurus, a weight­less CGI cre­ation that nev­er­the­less remains sub­merged for just long enough to tap into our col­lec­tive fear of what lies beneath). This test tube behe­moth isn’t just an expres­sion of a cre­ative­ly bank­rupt cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture, she’s also a client.

Trevorrow’s block­buster, despite flirt­ing with 22 Jump Street lev­els of wink­ing self-reflex­iv­i­ty, lacks the vision or ambi­tion to do any­thing more than diag­nose a sick­ness that it’s pow­er­less to cure. Its action sequences are blood­less and unex­cit­ing, and the theme park’s attrac­tions – like the gyro­scopes tourists use to roam the grounds, the most implau­si­ble thing in a movie that fea­tures Vin­cent D’Onofrio plot­ting to use Veloci­rap­tors to hunt ISIS – are trans­par­ent­ly reverse engi­neered for their abil­i­ty to moti­vate a set piece. As Juras­sic World gets big­ger, it only gets worse. Not since Spike Jonze’s Adap­ta­tion has a movie so glee­ful­ly become the thing it resents most.

In Juras­sic Park, the pre­his­toric lizards were onscreen for a grand total of 15 min­utes, which left the human char­ac­ters to do much of the heavy lift­ing. In the sequels, how­ev­er, the peo­ple have become dis­trac­tions defined by their blun­ders, and Juras­sic World – despite fea­tur­ing the most series’ most charis­mat­ic cast since the orig­i­nal film – is all too eager to keep that tra­di­tion alive.

Claire is fun to watch, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the movie allows her to run with its goofi­est set piece (in high heels). As a strong woman who’s forced to con­front her mis­tak­en pri­or­i­ties, Howard does a decent job of mud­dy­ing arche­types in a film that defaults to them far too often. But the Amblin logo real­ly only means one thing: Kids are about to be in dan­ger, and Trevor­row makes sure to put Zach and his excitable younger broth­er in plen­ty of it.

Nei­ther of the youths is as annoy­ing as fran­chise vet­er­ans have come to expect, but the fact that the boys are Claire’s nephews nev­er feels like any­thing more than an excuse to dove­tail their plots togeth­er. Like­wise, the detail that Claire hasn’t seen them in sev­en years because she’s been too busy with her career, or that Zach’s par­ents may (or may not?) be divorc­ing, is even less impor­tant to the sto­ry than the plant-eat­ing dinosaurs.

Alas, Juras­sic World has a habit of giv­ing the most atten­tion to its least inter­est­ing com­po­nents. Trevor­row so des­per­ate­ly wants Claire to be his most inte­gral human, but the movie can’t help but dote on Owen (Chris Pratt), the rogu­ish Veloci­rap­tor train­er who’s con­script­ed into sub­du­ing the ram­pag­ing Indomi­nus. A light­ning rod for idi­ot­ic sub­plots, Owen is a rogu­ish­ly hand­some wet blan­ket with a strange accent and a very dan­ger­ous job. Also, he has a pack of Veloci­rap­tors who effec­tive­ly think he’s their dad­dy, and by the end of the movie they’ll be deployed to try and ride into bat­tle with him.

It used to be that the tran­si­tion of pow­er from one grade of spec­ta­cle to the next was a vio­lent func­tion of the block­buster food chain – in Juras­sic Park III, the Spin­osaurus had to fight and kill a T‑Rex in order to win our atten­tion. But now, it’s sim­ply assumed that the big new thing is supe­ri­or because it’s big and new, a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy that Trevorrow’s film milks for 100 min­utes only to insin­cere­ly reject dur­ing a cli­mac­tic scene that preys on the audience’s nos­tal­gia. It’s a fit­ting res­o­lu­tion for a movie that believes audi­ences are the prob­lem (rather than just a part of it), and that the stu­dios are to be pitied for hav­ing to be at their mercy.

The scene of Zach ignor­ing the T‑Rex may be a clever illus­tra­tion of how yesterday’s mar­vel can become today’s white noise, but Trevor­row gets one thing ter­ri­bly wrong about it: the T‑Rex isn’t bor­ing because we’ve seen it before, it’s bor­ing because it’s in cap­tiv­i­ty. The spec­ta­cle is big, it’s the imag­i­na­tion that got small.