(NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past several months I’ve been running a strikingly unbalanced review of the four films, because I’m a big fan of parts 1 & 3, while distinctly unenthusiastic over parts 2 & 4. Today’s chapter is the last of the series, finishing my thumbs up review of JP3 and and also wrapping up JP4 in one fell swoop. The previous eight installments are listed below.)
Jurassic Parks, Part 1 Jurassic Parks, Part 2 Jurassic Parks, Part 3 Jurassic Parks, Part 4
Jurassic Parks, Part 5 Jurassic Parks, Part 6 Jurassic Parks, Part 7 Jurassic Parks, Part 8
Escaping at last from the bird cage, the gang finds something left by InGen that actually works, a river boat with a full tank of gas, as well as a specimen cage that looks like it’s built for raptors. After an initial scare, when they hear Paul’s cellphone’s jingle once more, they catch another break. The phone’s not in the Spinosaurus any more! It’s in his shit! Pawing bravely through the muck, they find the little device, which, it seems, is almost indestructible. As night falls they’re finally en route to that near-mythical coast when they’re hit by the final element of Spielbergian JP mise-en-scène, a tropical downpour. Oh, and did I tell you, Spinosauri can swim?
Yeah, the big guy is back and ready to party, setting up an extremely elaborate Spielbergian set piece reminiscent of Jaws, with the Spinosaurus standing in for the great white. While the Spinosarus is raising Hell, Alan manages to put a distress call through to Ellie, except that it’s four-year-old Charlie who answers the phone. “Tell your mother that it’s the dinosaur man!” Alan tells the kid, who is more focused on Barney, the once ubiquitous purple PBS T. Rex. The gang seeks shelter in the specimen cage, which the Spinosaurus promptly tosses into the drink, imprisoning them under water. Fortunately, Paul manages to escape and heroically draws the monster’s attention towards himself and away from the others, allowing Alan to use a flare gun to ignite gasoline spilled on the water to drive away the beast and, coincidentally, causing Amanda to fall back in love with him (Paul, that is).
In the morning they finally approach “the coast”! They’re so close they can hear the surf! Yes, they’re almost safe, but not quite there, because the raptors have caught up with them at last and their egg-stealing asses are in a serious bind. The gang crouches, trembling, on the earth, anticipating the final assault as the raptors snort and sniff, focusing on Amanda. “They think you have the eggs,” a trembling Alan tells her. She trembles as well, and then, in a brilliant stroke of feminist kitsch, girds up her loins like a mom and tells Alan “Give … me … the eggs!” Yes, chick to chick, mom to mom, dino to human, the exchange is made. The raptors have the eggs. Then, in a final, final twist, that I’m afraid was a bit over my head, Alan whips out the resonator that Billy crafted (remember that?) and manages (somehow) to give the raptors some sort of distress call that sends them scampering off. But, since they can see, and hear, where the message is coming from (they’re supposed to be smart, remember?), why does that trick them into leaving? Well, anyway, the do, scampering off, eggs in mouth and wrath assuaged, the Balance of Nature restored.
And now to the coast, for the final wrap-up. They’re greeted by the entire U.S. Army, more or less, because Ellie got the message! And not only that, Billy’s okay! Echoing the conclusion of JPI, they ride home in a helicopter, soaring high about the waves, except that this time they’re joined by Pteranodons. “Looking for new nesting grounds,” Alan guesses. Because sea gulls could use a little competition.
After JPIII, I was more or less dino-satiated. It was the best dinosaur movie I’d ever seen, and I could enjoy it even more on my 60-inch home screen with 7.2 surround sound, without having to sit through the first 15 dino-free minutes. But Spielberg, rather amazingly, still wanted more, and started planning a fourth film almost immediately, despite JPIII’s less than spectacular numbers. Somehow, even with Stevie calling the shots, JPIV fell into a spectacularly prolonged development Hell, the film not emerging until this year, officially produced by Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, a joint project of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Thomas Tull’s Legendary Entertainment, with Colin Trevorrow as director and virtually an all-new cast, reasonably enough, since who likes to look at old people?
The new Jurassic Park, officially called Jurassic World, is very heavy on the meta and the Corporate Greed versus “Nature” (whatever the fuck that is), which is precisely what I liked least about the original Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton died in 2011, when “Jurassic World* was still deep in gestation, but he might have liked the outcome, a film that satirizes both modern-day theme parks, which, of course, have grown enormously since Crichton first ridiculed them back in the early seventies, and the feckless masses who throng to them. It seems that InGen has finally gotten the wrinkles ironed out of its sauropods and Jurassic World is a smash. America’s middle class has turned its back on Sea World and all the rest. Why go to Sea World and watch a killer whale eat a fish when you can go to Jurassic World and see a Mosasaur eat a great white?1
But the feckless masses who swarm to theme parks, well, they’re feckless, rather like movie audiences. They always want more! They’ve seen T. rexes! They want something bigger and meaner! And they’ve seen smart raptors! How about some really smart raptors? As with the original Jurassic Park, at this point Jurassic World is effectively parodying itself.
Well, what the public wants, the public gets. Prada-wearing ruthless business gal and park manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is determined to make that bottom line snap, crackle, and pop, and Mother Nature be damned. She’s cooking up a new hybrid dinosaur, a Motherfuckasaurus officially called an Indominus rex. At the same time, motorcycle-riding, leather jacket wearing, and (probably) cigar-chomping regular guy/he-man Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is training a whole mess of Velociraptors to stand up and salute, kind of an Island of Dr. Moreau kind of thing. At the same time, Claire’s niece and nephew, Zach and Gray Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins), are coming for a special tour, now that mom’s getting a divorce. Claire, who’s both too busy and too fastidious to actually mingle with the common folk, dispatches Zara, her classy, English-accented PA Zara (Katie McGrath)2, to take care of them.
Will the Indominus rex prove to be more than a handful? Will the Velociraptor training program prove to be quasi-faciscistic plot? And will Claire’s sphincter be psycho-spiritually loosened by Owen’s warm, genial, masculine presence? Well, yes. And, also, the kids will be saved, while the feckless masses will be first inconvenienced by a park shutdown and then terrorized and probably shat upon by pterosaurs, which I think is what Spielberg and show folk in general would like to do to us ticket-buyers. We’re so afraid of you! Well, goddamnit, this time you’re going to be afraid of us!
Jurassic World, which I would rate as “watchable” (unlike The Lost World) but a half dozen notches below Jurassic Park III, was the most successful of all the JP films, earning a whopping $1.6 billion just at the box office. So is there a JPV in the works? Yes, indeed. And I’ll probably see it too.
- Spielberg (and, I suspect, many other show biz types) believe that what the public really wants to see is something big being eaten by something bigger. In the original Jurassic Park, Spielberg shows us a hapless cow being lowered alive into the raptor paddock, lets us listen as the invisible raptors rip the poor bovine to shreds, and then shows us the bloody harness hauled up afterwards. ↩︎
- In real life, McGrath is actually Irish, though in the film Claire describes her as “British”, which only works if McGrath is Northern Irish (and only if she’s Protestant Northern Irish). ↩︎
