When Jurassic Park III came out in 2001, I had just graduated from college and one day at my friends’ apartment we caught the first commercial. And I don’t remember who said it, but someone asked, “Why the hell do they keep going to the island?”
Well, there are now four Free Willy movies. And seven Jurassic Park/Jurassic World movies are now out there. Now, they’re basically just rehashing bits and pieces of the previous movies. Some people want dinosaurs or their DNA and it doesn’t go easy. It never does.
The problem with these movies is they’ve become so formulaic you really don’t care anymore. Scarlett Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a covert operation expert and Mahershala Ali is her second in command, Duncan Kincaid, so you know nothing’s going to happen to them. The rest of their team becomes dino chow. A section of the world around the equator is the last place in which the dinosaurs now mostly live and it’s off-limits.
Yeah, like that’s stopped people before. Americans and the world have gotten bored of dinosaurs apparently as they’re not able to acclimate to the climates and have bcome a nuisance as they are slowly dying. This would make a more interesting story, but you don’t spend a quarter of a billion dollars on some existenstional story about human apathy toward the world they are destroying.
If there is any good news, the human antagonist now is a pharamaceutical bigwig Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) who wants to use the dino DNA for expensive cardiovascular medicine. I don’t think it’s happenstance his name and appearance looks like Martin Shkreli when he raised the price of a drug from $13.50 to $750. He also disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan. There’s also a side story about the Delgados, a family on a sailing vacation whose boat is capsized by a mosasaurus which is what Zora’s team was chasing, so they rescue them.
Of course this is because the novel that Michael Crichton wrote back in 1990 has been turned from the gruesome horror story about playing God and getting rich off of it into a family friendly franchise where people are eaten alive. Many of the characters in Crichton’s novel faced very horrible deaths. The whole Delgado subplot feels like he was added during the fourth or fifth rewrite. There’s even a cuddly little creature the young daughter befriends.
The movie lacks the charm and excitement of its previous installments. It never does feel like writer David Koepp was too involved to give the characters any reason why we should care. Johansson and Ali may be the lead stars but they never do feel like protagonists. No one really does. In the first Jurassic World, there was a scene where the kids barely glance at a T-Rex eating a goat alive and it’s the perfect metaphor for how pedestrian and repetitive this franchise has become.
Zane Says 