Jurassic World

While on vacation visiting my two younger boys out west, we went and saw Jurassic World: Rebirth last week. Naturally, Id didn't have high hopes for the movie. Although the original Jurassic Park is a great movie that still holds up well today in most respects, no other movie in the series has managed to do so, with the possible exception of the first Jurassic World movie. Even then, that one was more mediocre rather than good; it was merely the best of the series after the original. This latest reboot; I can't quite figure out why they did it.

I mean, that's not exactly true. The franchise has made a lot of money, so of course they'd keep trying to milk it. But this was studio-safe, made by committee corporate slop. Literally nothing about it was really all that good, except a single action sequence involving a raft and a T. rex, which was allegedly from the original novel (can't remember. It's been at least thirty years since I read that novel.) And maybe the mosasaur and spinosaur water sequences. From a creative and artistic perspective, though, I can't imagine why they made this movie. It doesn't have anything interesting to tell, or anything interesting to do. Let me list my gripes in bullet point form below.

But first, let me say that I was reasonably entertained. It has dinosaurs. It has dinosaurs attacking people. It's got that cool King Kong original theme going for it. It's not a bad movie, it's just a completely pointless and forgettable one. Which is a real shame considering how much time, money and effort was put into making it.

• Nobody believes that 40 year old (or 40+ maybe; I dunno) Scarlet Johannsen is a tough mercenary. She's a middle-aged woman in reasonably good shape, but c'mon.
• The last three movies prior to this one set up a whole premise of dinosaurs now living in the modern world. The very first thing that they try to do is undo that, which is kind of ridiculous.
• The whole "people are tired of dinosaurs now" vibe was stupid and silly.
• The characters were all forgettable, non-charismatic, and were just place-holders for plot points. Assuming that they weren't actively obnoxious, like the whole illegal alien family who was oddly wandering around in the Forbidden zone and pretending like they were totally entitled to be there.
• The whole premise of needing to get genetic samples of the three dinosaurs that they needed to get (two of which, of course, weren't even dinosaurs at all) was stupid. I mean, it's super flimsy and very video-gamey. Just ridiculous.
• The big boss monster mutant at the end not only looked stupid, but wasn't even close to any kind of dinosaur. What in the world it was even doing on the island at all was insane. Really bad design. For an alien movie of some kind, it might have been OK (although not great); for a dinosaur movie, it was bad.
• Which reminded me; the vibe of the movie often approached that of some of the Alien movies. The bad ones, I mean; I was particularly reminded of Alien: Resurrection by the monster at the end.
• The whole "heroic sacrifice/nevermind, he's fine" plotline for the new Blade actor; whatever his name is, was pretty dumb. In general, he wasn't a very believable character anyway.

Again; not sure why it was made. It had nothing to say. The whole hubris of science message of the original was downgraded to corporations = bad. The characters were pointless. The action sequences were pretty competent, but given the fact that this is, what' the 7th movie in the franchise, they seem just a bit superfluous at this point. Especially given that the plot was dumb and the characters were dumb. 

Like I said earlier, the movie gives off that made by committee pointless corporate slop vibe. There's no artistic vision, and they didn't hire artists to work on it, just craftsmen. There's certainly a place for people who do that kind of work, but the result is rarely memorable, and certainly not if it doesn't have a good script.