Saturday 13 June 2015

REVIEW - JURASSIC WORLD (COLIN TREVORROW)


Some might consider the hiring of rookie indie filmmaker Colin Trevorrow to helm the latest Jurassic Park film a contradiction. Indeed, gone is the grandeur of Spielberg's vision, if not the perplexing process of insisting on awe through awesomeness. Trevorrow brings a new, engaging dynamic to the film, and his tone is solid - the contradictions in Jurassic World's screenplay derail this film. It's schizo in the most manipulative manner - they don't want you to spot the seams, and most will be too enamoured with the CGI to notice. At Jurassic World's thematic heart is a cautionary notion about outsmarting nature, which writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver bring from their experience in another franchise: the recent Planet of the Apes films. Yet it goes without saying that their key concern is its human characters, and their makeshift attempts at outsmarting nature naturally prove successful enough to keep the ensemble body count at a low. The military comes in for the fiercest attacks, until the writers realise the entertainment value they can derive from military tropes, and abandon this thread. That's indicative of the whole film - it briefly fosters interesting ideas  before succumbing to the fact that most moviegoers don't understand sentences with more than three words and resorting to visually bankrupt bluster. The hypocrisy is what I understood: warnings against corporate culture juxtaposed with product placement and an infatuation with the vulgarities of human expansionism; gender stereotypes, including one particularly offensive point (among many) that women are effectively worthless if not taking care of a family, juxtaposed with futile efforts to prove that worth, in the understanding that Bryce Dallas Howard's character actually needs to because she's a woman. Howard doesn't need to prove a thing. She's magnetic, and easily the most attractive element of Jurassic World, human or otherwise.

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