Near the end of the film Aliens, the bunker in which the heroes are sheltering suddenly darkens, heralding an assault by the ravenous Xenomorph antagonists. "They cut the power," Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley murmurs, to which Bill Paxton's Private Hudson wails, "What do you mean, 'they' cut the power? They're animals!"
I found myself recalling this scene many times throughout Jurassic World a film that asks us to give even more credit to its dinosaurs' intelligence than in previous installments while at the same time indulging in some of the most corny monster movie violence I've seen since last summer's Godzilla.
In a brief discussion of a Jurassic World trailer, The Escapist's Robert Rath noted that unlike similar franchises, Jurassic Park's InGen tampers with science not to rule the world or create bioweapons but simply to "get rich off wonder." The film's opening segments seem to highlight just that as two brothers are packed off to the titular attraction (Their parents are, of course, in the midst of divorce proceedings, the logic of disaster movies being that the best solution to a failing marriage is for the couple's children to be placed in mortal peril.) and move through the sprawling theme park that John Hammond first envisioned in the first installment. Children play in paleontology-themed attractions, ride baby triceratops, and laugh as a great white shark is fed to an enormous sea monster. Pudgy tourists wipe sweat from their brows as they eat at dinosaur-themed restaurants (In one of the film's funniest sight gags, one man flees from a dinosaur attack while being careful not to spill his drink--someone clearly has their priorities straight). The park's owner, endearingly played by Irrfan Khan, shrugs off his manager's straight-laced concerns about sales revenue and focus groups in favor of a Walt Disney-esque emphasis on the enjoyment of the park guests. One wonders what animal rights groups might have to say about a park that makes an attraction out of once-endangered species eating pigs and goats and in another movie the ethics behind such a park might be the focus of the film. In a telling scene, the two brothers argue in a viewing center overlooking the T-Rex paddock. The Tyrannosaurus is fed a live goat a la the first movie, but the shot is deliberately obscured. We, like the park goers, have seen this sort of thing a dozen times over and now want something more.
Chris Pratt, the film's true star outside of the tired family drama subplot, responds to the need to "up the wow factor" with, "They're dinosaurs. Wow enough." But regular old dinosaurs are neither"wow enough" for InGen and nor the movie audiences. We need monster movie villains and so we get two. The first takes the form of the Indominus Rex, a genetically modified dino-hybrid whose escape triggers the film's inevitable disaster. The Indominus combines ferocious intelligence, knowing to tear out her own tracking beacon and create diversions to fool her human creators ("Clever girl."), with an arsenal of natural abilities that seem to grow with every scene. By the time she revealed the ability to camouflage herself as well as conceal her heat signature, I was starting to wonder if we were dealing with a dinosaur or a Predator. Vincent D'Onofrio plays the second villain, cartoonishly nefarious security chief Hoskins who dreams of turning Pratt's beloved velociraptor pack into the latest military killing machines. (In any other movie such an idea would be visionary rather than laughable--one wonders if he also wants to strap machine guns onto the T-Rex) Hoskins brings back all of the wicked corporation stereotypes that the film initially seemed to be bucking, complete with a private military force of bearded, machine-gun toting mooks. The film seems to want to return to the original parable about humans playing God with nature, but between InGen's scheming, the Indominus's shenanigans, and our heroes' forced relationship drama any hope of a lasting moral is lost amidst the inevitable carnage.
It becomes hard to remember the earlier claims that the dinosaurs are intelligent as shrieking parkgoers are hunted by Pterodactyls, but we are brought back to it once the raptors are unleashed to help bring down the Indominus. The intelligence premise does not take too long to become comedic; once two dinosaurs engage in a hushed conference in front of the bewildered humans, all pretext of seriousness goes out the window and one starts to wonder how long it will be before the raptors seize the guns for themselves and start shooting back. From there on out it's a fun but derivative slugfest. A scene that involves screaming, panicking soldiers being cut to pieces while horrified civilians watch the carnage via helmet feeds (Another of the Indominus's abilities is apparently immunity to bullets and anti-tank weapons.) again evokes Aliens while the film's climax is essentially a three-way tag-team dino wrestling match. By the time a dinosaur ran to save the day in heroic slow motion, I was laughing and having a good time along with everyone else, which is what I should have been doing from the get-go. Jurassic World isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's a fun monster romp that mostly suffers from its abandoned efforts to be something more.
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