-Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), The Prestige
When Christopher Nolan wrote those words, he wasn't talking about just magic tricks. He was talking about moviemaking in general, but it especially applies to special effects - which are kind of like magic tricks.
The original Jurassic Park should be required viewing for anyone aspiring to direct action films (also on that list: Aliens and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. More to come as I think of them). Spielberg hit the sweet spot, showing off the dinosaurs as necessary to tell the story (and elicit the impressed oohs from 1993's movie-goers). That film could not have been made without CGI, and yet that was not a film about CGI.
In Jurassic World, CGI dinosaurs have been a mainstay of movies theme parks for 20 years. The people running the show need more impressive effects dinosaurs to keep the money coming in. Eventually the CGI is substituted for an actual story with actual characters park breaks down again and a lot of people leave rather disappointed get eaten.
Does Jurassic World suck? No. By a considerable margin it's the second best Jurassic film. Chris Pratt is expertly cast as Chris Pratt, a raptor handler. They have two kids who can actually act, who do the stupid thing and get lost in the park and provide some incentive for people to try to rescue them. We get to see the desiccated remains of the original visitor's center, which gave me shivers as soon as I saw the door and realized what I was looking at. There was a great homage to Aliens with the helmet-cams and the heart-rate monitors (although Cameron did that because it was a way of obscuring the visuals; he knew people couldn't look at the aliens too long without seeing people in rubber suits). There was an unintentional homage to From Russia With Love, when a character is in a hotel room doing nothing important and the main theme blares excitedly. I loved the re-use of sound effects, starting with the incubator machine and the baby raptor squeals.
But we know these beats. We've seen it before. The dinosaur's face in the mirror. The T-Rex and the flare. The adoptive family of four about to be eaten before another dinosaur saves them. The film plays with the beats a bit by making this film's Nedry a good guy and this film's Muldoon the protagonist. This film's Hammond actually tries to do something, and this film's Wu is basically Book!Hammond. But it's not enough. We knew Pratt, the kids, and Pratt's notgirlfriend were all going to live, and that Vincent D'Onofrio was going to die. And yeah you could guess that the Main Four were going to make it in Jurassic Park, but that one had a big supporting cast that got picked off one by one. This one didn't really have that. The only major good guy who dies is the Hammond substitute. There were a lot more background noises getting killed off, but they weren't really characters. I'm thinking guys who died very late in the movie, like Samuel L. Jackson and Muldoon. Jurassic World didn't have that - again, except for D'Onofrio's Imabadguy. He doesn't count. So once you stop killing people off, the tension stops. And it, like Ultron, just becomes a giant CGI punch-up. Yawn.
Random other observations:
Yes, at the end of the film, Defrosting Ice Queen runs in high heels. That's so completely unrealistic that I need to mention it in a dinosaur movie that is a sequel to a dinosaur movie whose most famous scene (the vibrations in the water glass) was ignored at the end when the Rex came out of nowhere.
The new theme shares its first four notes with Jerry Goldsmith's theme for Star Trek First Contact.
Not!Nedry has a bunch of toy dinosaurs on his desk. Later in the film, the raptors undertake a sudden but inevitable betrayal.
The puppet Triceratops in the first film looked more realistic than (what I assume was) the puppet Brachiosaur head in this one.
Random other observations:
Yes, at the end of the film, Defrosting Ice Queen runs in high heels. That's so completely unrealistic that I need to mention it in a dinosaur movie that is a sequel to a dinosaur movie whose most famous scene (the vibrations in the water glass) was ignored at the end when the Rex came out of nowhere.
The new theme shares its first four notes with Jerry Goldsmith's theme for Star Trek First Contact.
Not!Nedry has a bunch of toy dinosaurs on his desk. Later in the film, the raptors undertake a sudden but inevitable betrayal.
The puppet Triceratops in the first film looked more realistic than (what I assume was) the puppet Brachiosaur head in this one.
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