REVIEW: Jurassic World

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Dominion

Film director and victorious fanboy Colin Trevorrow has justified Jurassic World: Dominion and his trilogy by saying it's not just a continuation but a culmination of all the "Jurassic" movies that came before. I suppose it's for each viewer to decide whether Trevorrow and the team he's assembled have pulled that off. We each come to the franchise bringing something personal to the conversation.

As for me though, come the series' twilight moments, I was moved by the way that it made somberness and hope sit next to each other so gracefully. If watching the brachiosaurus tromping across Jurassic Park makes me feel like a kid again, beholding the dinosaurs travailing across the savannah with such dignity took me to a more mature place.

Now that dinosaurs have proliferated across the globe, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have secluded themselves in their woodland cabin, where they keep their adopted daughter, Maisie, safe from a world that would jump to exploit her and the genetic marvel she represents. Meanwhile, Blue, the raptor Owen raised from infancy, is back, this time with a child of her own. Their haven is disrupted when the bad guys take both Blue's child as well as their own, prompting both Claire and Owen to chase after them, inspiring an adventure that will unite them with some very familiar faces ...

The stakes in this film are at once more personalized and more wide-reaching than it was in films past. Owen and Claire's mission is to rescue their loved ones from the evil corporation, but if they fail, it won't just be their home that is broken. Planet Earth will fall prey to widespread devastation.

How does our evil man on top plan on bringing the world to its knees? Well ... the answer is bugs. He plans on conquering the world with bugs. Giant bugs, mind you, but bugs nonetheless ... On the one hand, genetically modified locusts are technically in line with the series' fear of not just dinosaurs but of biotechnology as a whole. On the other hand, that's not a mosquito silhouette on the franchise poster. Give us what we want, Trevorrow!

Make no mistake, the film follows through on its promise of delivering lots of dinosaurs for the curtain call. We have dinosaurs jumping over buildings, fire raining from the sky, dinosaurs attacking airplanes, etc. This finale goes out of its way to provide high volume and high-stress thrills.

Yet despite the firework show, there's a maturity, even dignity to the world of "Dominion." Owen and Claire have moved on from quarreling lovers trapped in a fiery mating ritual and planted roots in the home they share their daughter. Even the color palette is more somber, more mixed with shadows, than we've seen in previous films. The park is closed for good, and it's a grown-up world now.

The film takes a big bite entertaining a cast this large. "Dominion" blends our current cast with the '93 heroes, while also introducing newcomers played by DeWanda Wise and Mamoudou Athie. All of our players bring their A-game, and there was something deeply moving about seeing all the members of this multi-generational team trusting one another and working together.

When it became clear that the film would blend casts of both generations, the question became whether one set would outshine the other. Each of our heroes get their shining moments, but neither the legacy characters nor the rising stars overshadow the other because this film belongs mostly to Maisie, brought to life with intelligence by Isabella Sermon.

In this landscape, it's Maisie whose journey drives the story. She's the one who wrestles with questions about where she as a living clone fits into this world. Children have always been a central focal point of the series since Dr. Grant was carrying Hammond's grandchildren across Jurassic Park, and so there's something very poetic about this generation's youngest protagonist becoming our guiding star during the franchise's final stretch.

With the filter of mass media, there's always a distillation of complex systems. No single film is going to provide the answer to today's societal hurricanes. Yet Jurassic World: Dominion doesn't end by assuring the audience that the good guys have won, per se, and now there's no more reason to fret over the future. I hope it's no spoiler to say that the series doesn't end comfortably, but it remains an ending full of hope. In that space between the formidability of the future--a future we made in part ourselves--and the human capacity to keep climbing whatever the circumstances, the Jurassic World films find their grace.

Thanks for the ride, Trevorrow.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

I had a mixed reaction to Jurassic World: Rebirth, but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory. I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so. Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time. That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Superman

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters. The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention. And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture. I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere. Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized. It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life. Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019. Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke: There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade. See, t he Wiza...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place. There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone. I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

Wicked vs Maleficent

“Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping. Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser. Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog