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Jurassic World |OT| WARNING! Safety Not, uh, Guaranteed | RT: 71?!%

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Hey skip, I know you said the plot isn't very good, but is because of the cliches it uses or is it poorly written, in terms of logic? I can handle bad dialogue, but bad dialogue + logical inconsistencies (The Lost World) is hard to tolerate.

Still seeing it Sunday, but some reviews are making this out like it's "Jurassic Park" updated with Hollywood's modern idiotic action blockbuster sensibilities.

That...sounds about right.
 

vareon

Member
Just got back from it. Went in without much expectations and I'm really entertained. Some dumb plot here and there but there are genuinely tense moment and "fuck yeah" moment that made up for that. I don't feel the movie is too long either, it ended where it should.
 

kswiston

Member
$18M first day for Jurassic World in China. That ranks as #6 of all time for Hollywood films, even with the disadvantages that come with a mid-week opening.
 
$18M first day for Jurassic World in China. That ranks as #6 of all time for Hollywood films, even with the disadvantages that come with a mid-week opening.

I think the BO numbers alone are going to guarantee JP5.

5fCfjSQ.gif


Polygon: JURASSIC WORLD REVIEW: A WORTHY POPCORN MOVIE

This is a Jurassic Park movie, then, and not a great one, but a good one. Coming right after Mad Max: Fury Road won't do it any favors, and its lack of truly memorable characters kills its chances at becoming a classic. But Jurassic World, for all of its faults, knows that a good Jurassic Park movie has substance beyond the visceral appeal of "Dinosaurs are eating people!" and also knows exactly when to revel in the spectacle.
 
I think you are in the minority with that opinion, not sayings its wrong (its an opinion after all) but I see very few people every cite it as "awesome". Most call it mediocre.

I thought it was a lot of fun but I'm not a big Superman guy. I liked the story and action. And music. I dunno. Was just a simple straight forward action movie to me. I don't get wound up in superhero nerd politics either which may explain some of it.
 

Timeaisis

Member
It's also worth noting that Jurassic Park was pretty mixed-to-positive when it came out. Not that that really means anything.
 

Senoculum

Member
I think you are in the minority with that opinion, not sayings its wrong (its an opinion after all) but I see very few people every cite it as "awesome". Most call it mediocre.

Oh, I'm definitely aware, haha. It's 56% on rotten tomatoes, so I'll counter that there isn't a majority on either opinion. Its struck right in the middle between favourable and unfavourable.

The critic in that one piece says Jurassic World is as rumbustious as the next summer blockbuster as if it's a negative. I disagree; the original spirit of the first film was pitch-perfect, sure, but I'm not expecting any sequels to try and repeat its success - sequels totally need their own identity. Plus, I grew up with Michael Crichton and his original novels are definitely not family-friendly, bubble-gum, tea-cup rides. They're violent, they're action packed, and chock full of commentary on the woes of science going too far.

So I'm going in with high hopes, and if it's as "block busting" as Man of Steel, then so be it!
 

kswiston

Member
It's also worth noting that Jurassic Park was pretty mixed-to-positive when it came out. Not that that really means anything.

It had a 100% positive rating with the 5-12 year olds who were driving family business to the movies. That's what will ultimately matter this time around as well. Critical reception won't matter if it is a hit with the 5-25 demo.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I think the biggest thing going against any Jurassic Park sequel is that the franchise is just not something conductive to sequels. It doesn't have an iconic character that will regularly get into exciting danger like Indiana Jones or James Bond or any other superhero. It doesn't have villains that appear anywhere like Mike Myers or in your dreams like Freddie Kruegar. It not something you can replicate anywhere like the thousand and one horror franchises like Final Destination and Insidious, cuz the dinosaurs are mostly confined to one island that requires untold amounts of money and brainpower to engineer. It doesn't have this big, fascinating world and lore to explored like Middle Earth or Star Wars.

Its really just that one story. They tried to get dinosaurs going on an island, it went tits up, and everybody said, "Yep, bad idea. Lets never do that again." And that should have been the end of it. BUT Jurassic Park made more money than God, so for financial reasons it couldn't be the end of it, so we got a squadron of lesser sequels with some contrived reason to go back to the island with thin characters and sequences that are never gonna match the awe and wonder of the original. I mean, the sequel lost before it even really began.

JW might be the best JP sequel, but its not exactly illustrious company. There's only so many ways you can retread the original film. Dinosaurs eat people for two hours to Michael Giacchino music, go in expecting that, probably have an enjoyable enough time.

Oh I definitely agree. While I love parts of the sequels, overall I would have been perfectly fine if they had never made a sequel (and hell, that goes for Crichton's book too.) And even if this film is good or great, the studio push to turn things into franchises I don't think bodes well.

Some stories just naturally have room for expansion. What they're doing with Jurassic World seems like about the only avenue for further exploration.
 

jtb

Banned
Huh. Little White Lies referenced, of all the films, Jonze/Kaufman's Adaptation.

That's kinda interesting. This movie is going to shit on the idea of all these blockbuster cliches and then go sliding into them, full speed, in the last half hour, that's what I'm being told.

Maybe the comparison should have been Vaughn's Kick-Ass instead? Adaptation is some lofty shit.

Adaptation is when it's done right (and even then... I'm not sure how I feel about the last third of that film), Kick Ass is when it goes oh so very wrong.
 

Blader

Member
I think the BO numbers alone are going to guarantee JP5.

5fCfjSQ.gif

This gif reminds me of something that occurred to me when rewatching JP the other day, something I'd suspected as a kid but wasn't able to confirm until I had a better idea of what acting is:

Laura Dern is terrible in that movie. Overacts the shit out of everything.
 
Oh I definitely agree. While I love parts of the sequels, overall I would have been perfectly fine if they had never made a sequel (and hell, that goes for Crichton's book too.) And even if this film is good or great, the studio push to turn things into franchises I don't think bodes well.

Some stories just naturally have room for expansion. What they're doing with Jurassic World seems like about the only avenue for further exploration.
It would be interesting to further explore the consequences of playing God. Look at invasive species, Kudzu, africanized honey bee. Now imagine dinosaurs being thrust into a modern ecosystem, long extinct diseases and mutated viruses spreading, etc.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I only really notice her overacting from the raptors onwards.

What I never got was exactly how she injures her leg. I don't really think she's overacting, she's just playing her role, and her role is a freaked out scientist.

If you want bad Laura Dern acting, nothing will top Blue Velvet. She tries to make that damn robins speech into something, but it's crap.

It would be interesting to further explore the consequences of playing God. Look at invasive species, Kudzu, africanized honey bee. Now imagine dinosaurs being thrust into a modern ecosystem, long extinct diseases and mutated viruses spreading, etc.

Yeah, but then it wouldn't be a man vs. nature adventure film in the same mold as the previous ones. Dealing with invasive species, even dinosaurs, is not as sexy a prospect for a film (there's a lot of meetings, and governmental squabbling, and putting out lures and bait...)
 

Blader

Member
I thought it was because Spielberg loves seeing blonde women scream.

heh, it did remind me of Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom.

What I never got was exactly how she injures her leg. I don't really think she's overacting, she's just playing her role, and her role is a freaked out scientist.

Ha, I'm pretty sure that was the main thing that stuck out to me as a kid, before I even knew what overacting was. Why was she limping all of a sudden?
 
What I never got was exactly how she injures her leg. I don't really think she's overacting, she's just playing her role, and her role is a freaked out scientist.

If you want bad Laura Dern acting, nothing will top Blue Velvet. She tries to make that damn robins speech into something, but it's crap.



Yeah, but then it wouldn't be a man vs. nature adventure film in the same mold as the previous ones. Dealing with invasive species, even dinosaurs, is not as sexy a prospect for a film (there's a lot of meetings, and governmental squabbling, and putting out lures and bait...)
Not if you have InGen and militarized personnel having to drop in and contain dinosaur infestations across the globe ;)
 

andymcc

Banned
This gif reminds me of something that occurred to me when rewatching JP the other day, something I'd suspected as a kid but wasn't able to confirm until I had a better idea of what acting is:

Laura Dern is terrible in that movie. Overacts the shit out of everything.

She was terrible in Blue Velvet too. But it sort of lends to that film's charm.
 
It would be interesting to further explore the consequences of playing God. Look at invasive species, Kudzu, africanized honey bee. Now imagine dinosaurs being thrust into a modern ecosystem, long extinct diseases and mutated viruses spreading, etc.

I would LOVE for the sequel to not go into "gotta top the last one" mode and do something completely different. Dinosaurs on the mainland could be interesting, but I worry it would just turn into "Jurassic Park...on the mainland".

I'd much rather have a time jump to a situation, as you said, where dinos have been bred for a while and they decide to reintroduce specific species in parts of the world. Exploring the ecological, ethical, and practical problems of that reintroduction could be really cool, but I guess it's not very "Jurassic Park".
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Not if you have InGen and militarized personnel having to drop in and contain dinosaur infestations across the globe ;)

More_Badass
Member
(Today, 11:14 AM)

heh, it did remind me of Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom.



Ha, I'm pretty sure that was the main thing that stuck out to me as a kid, before I even knew what overacting was. Why was she limping all of a sudden?

Only thing I can see is either she overextends or twists her leg when she's pushing against the fencing, or that she twists it when she turns to run and has the radio or whatever dragging behind her. But yeah it's not really made clear.

Realistically my estimation of her acting abilities is probably compromised by the fact that her in this movie was probably one of my first movie crushes. Smart, beautiful, and willing to literally wade into shit to get the job done.
 

jtb

Banned
Laura Dern's fine in Blue Velvet. She's got that naivete that Lynch films thrive on; she doesn't pull it off nearly as well as... say, Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (which is one of my favorite performances ever), but she did what she was supposed to. It's part of Lynch's dreamy texture.
 

Timu

Member
From RT:

"Jurassic World can't match the original for sheer inventiveness and impact, but it works in its own right as an entertaining -- and visually dazzling -- popcorn thriller."
 

inm8num2

Member
RogerEbert.com - 3/4 stars

Directed by Colin Treverrow in a style that's Spielbergian but not slavishly so, they're bruising and loud but never overbearing, and laid out with admirable clarity. You always know where you are and what's happening, and you rarely see as much blood as you think you do: some of the nastier mayhem is suggested by sound effects, a blur of motion obscured by foreground objects, or a spray of blood on a wall. Every shot and cut pulls its weight. Every new development makes the sequence feel like a story-within-a-story with the end goal of getting the hell away from dinosaurs.

...

It's possible to filter out the irritating aspects and enjoy the movie as a raucous, often brilliantly assembled spectacle. But we shouldn't have to. The fact that we do makes an otherwise hugely impressive sequel feel small-minded.

HitFix

In many ways, this is the Indominus Rex. It is bigger and meaner and louder than its precursors, and it does exactly what it was bred to do. Like the "Terminator" series, though, I think the more times you return to the well, the more you reveal just how little narrative reason there is to tell further stories. At least Trevorrow seems to be genuinely enjoying what he's doing, and it's that sense of someone having fun behind the camera that ultimately won me over.
 

Woo, MZS liked it! This bodes well (for me).

Some quotes:

The best aspects of the sequel "Jurassic World," in which a hybrid super-predator runs amok in the trouble-plagued theme park, are so very good that they transport you that exhilarating mental space where the series' original director, Steven Spielberg, raised a tentpole way back in 1993. The worst aspects are bad indeed: thin characterizations, a blase attitude toward human-on-animal violence and a weird male-supremacist streak that comes close to sneering at unmarried career women who don't have kids.

Oof. I have no idea what to expect of BDH's character. Heard just about everything, good and bad.

On the "smarter" side of the ledger, you can enter three, maybe four large-scale action sequences that do the master proud. Directed by Colin Treverrow in a style that's Spielbergian but not slavishly so, they're bruising and loud but never overbearing, and laid out with admirable clarity.

Every shot and cut pulls its weight. Every new development makes the sequence feel like a story-within-a-story with the end goal of getting the hell away from dinosaurs. The most intense set piece is the final half-hour, a sustained chase through dark woods that reverses expectations again and again, culminating in a whirl of dino-on-dino violence: a funnel cloud of claws and teeth. But best in show would have to go to the sequence where park visitors are attacked by a swarm of pterodactyls that pluck them from the ground like mice and devour them in midair. It's an extended, often wildly imaginative homage to "The Birds" that amounts to Treverrow doing Spielberg doing Hitchcock. You can say a lot of things about this director, but not that he lacks confidence.

THAT has me very excited.

For the record: I really enjoyed Godzilla in spite of its horribly thin characters and weird pacing.
 

kswiston

Member
I'm not sure why RT bothers doing their critical consensus blurb at 25-30 reviews when they know they are going to get 200+ for something like Jurassic World. You end up with cases where what is written in the consensus doesn't really match the tomato meter at times.
 

jtb

Banned
I'm not sure why RT bothers doing their critical consensus blurb at 25-30 reviews when they know they are going to get 200+ for something like Jurassic World. You end up with cases where what is written in the consensus doesn't really match the tomato meter at times.

I agree, though they've changed the consensus in the past. I'm thinking of Man of Steel, when the first reviews were all pretty positive but once all the reviews had come in, it was rotten.
 
Just saw it today, for me its close to lost World but a little better. Story is kinda mess, Chris Pratt characters is boring.

Kinda bummed that all our original concerns with the characters/actors (Pratt is awkward with his dialogue/doesn't seem to have his charisma, BDH's character is a thin stereotype and she gives a stilted performance, etc.) seem to be coming true.
 
I think that's what sold me on the movie. Finally being able to see what a successful Jurassic Park attraction looks like, up and running + the meta-stuff like the amazing websitehttp://www.jurassicworld.com/

Haha this is awesome. Didn't know about this.


I'm looking to walk in, brain shut off, and be a kid again. I hope it delivers.

This is the best way to go in. For what it's worth, I got goosebumps at the beginning when they showed a wide-shot of the park and the theme song swelled. It felt new and nostalgic. Had a smile on my face for mostly the entire movie.
 
Kinda bummed that all our original concerns with the characters/actors (Pratt is awkward with his dialogue/doesn't seem to have his charisma, BDH's character is a thin stereotype and she gives a stilted performance, etc.) seem to be coming true.

I warned you when we got the sexist clip :p. It's always been sort of obvious (I haven't seen it, just guessing)
 

Superflat

Member
Kinda bummed that all our original concerns with the characters/actors (Pratt is awkward with his dialogue/doesn't seem to have his charisma, BDH's character is a thin stereotype and she gives a stilted performance, etc.) seem to be coming true.

I feel like there are also plenty that praise their performances, even if they're not "deeply explored" characterizations. I have no doubt there will be cheezy hollywood dialogue throughout but I suppose it depends on one's sensitivity to it.
 
Just saw it today, for me its close to lost World but a little better. Story is kinda mess, Chris Pratt characters is boring.

I actually liked Chris Pratt in this. Admittedly, I'm a big Pratt fan, so I don't know if I liked his character or him. But I thought he was pretty fun to watch. Loved watching him train his raptors.

Regarding the story being a mess, I kind of agree. One part that bothered me was
when the kids fixed up the Jeep. It was never established that either of them had experience fixing cars. *finds broken Jeep* "Remember when we fixed up grandpa's old car?" Just came out of nowhere and felt way too convenient.
 
I think that's what sold me on the movie. Finally being able to see what a successful Jurassic Park attraction looks like, up and running + the meta-stuff like the amazing website

I wish I could download that entire site as it is right now so I could look at it 10, 20, whatever years from now. It's so cool to visit and imagine you can really book a trip there, but these official sites never seem to last.
 
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