It wasn’t so much that she was killed, randomly or otherwise. It’s that the movie reveled in her death, teasing the actual fatality several times in the span of a few seconds. The execution (pun!) was gratuitous, not just the seemingly arbitrary decision.
I’ve said it before, but the assistant was a criminal waste of Katie McGrath.
This gorgeous creature.
The horny teenager smiling at all the girls and totally ignoring that the entire time was the most unbelievable thing in a movie about dinosaurs running amok in a theme park. If you’re a teenage boy and this is your minder, you do whatever she tells you to do.
I liked her in Merlin. Fantastic Morganna.
Which is ok, in the case where it is written for a death like that to make sense. But, it just felt so out of place in the movie. It would be like if Indiana Jones and pals were running through a temple, John Williams music playing, romping around dodging traps, having fun… and suddenly a lady that short-round had befriended was hit by some wall spikes and then dropped into a pit of lava, slowly dying and screaming.
That would feel really out of place in my summer adventure film, as did the scene in Jurassic World, and I don’t think this is a mountain out of a molehill, because I think that scene is perfectly emblematic with what I feel is wrong with the movie.
Jurassic World is to Jurassic Park as Sharknado is to Jaws
I don’t think that’s how analogies work.
-xtien
Yes, proper SAT format would be: Jurassic World is to Jurassic Park as Sharknado is to Jaws. Jeez, Jon, get your insult analogies right ;)
Sorry. I’m studying for a test. I’m not normally this anal.*
-xtien
*Yes I am.
Lol. As I was writing it, I tried to remember back to the SAT prep, and clearly I failed. I blame it on only drinking half of my cup of coffee before writing this.
Yep, if her death was only arbitrary then maybe it would have worked, under the guise of “dinos don’t have morality.” But it was goofily over-elaborate, with her being tossed around like a ball in a juggling act. It was more Loony Tunes than horror,* and out of step with both other JP movies and what had come before in JW.
The ending had the same problem - weirdly overelaborate in a way that obviously the director thought was cool but so silly that it causes all the eyeballs in the audience to spin like marbles. In the original JP ending Spielberg pushed things in such a way that the audience said, “Well, that was quite a piece of good luck, but sure, that could happen” while at the same time reinforcing the food chain that had been established in the movie. In JW, the ending is absurd - neither the Kingpin’s nor Opie Jr.'s plans ever made a lick of sense, given they were sending things lower on the food chain against the apex predator. The actual conclusion relied on a truly spectacular coincidence. They might as well have dealt with the big bad by having him be struck by lightning.
*Loony Tunes can work with horror - think Gremlins - but you have to keep that tone going throughout the whole movie. And if it were going to be that kind of a movie, then one of the kids should have gotten it instead. God, they were annoying.
I watched this again last night and this is EXACTLY what I was thinking…and looking at!
I tried to watch this movie again, but just couldn’t make it very far. Despite my love of dinosaurs and the fact that this movie does a few things better than the prior sequels, it’s just too painfully stupid. Even the dino attacks aren’t very interesting, as all you see are little snippets of action. It really pains me at how bad this series is, yet it may prevent us from getting more interesting dinosaur/prehistoric movies. I’d love an updated version of one of Harryhausen’s dino movies, or Land/People that Time Forgot, or A Conan Doyle’s Lost World, or just something along those lines, which was less slapstick and stupid.
There’s Kong of Skull Island, but everything I’ve heard about it isn’t very promising.
And the real reason everyone flips about how she died.
Well I can’t say I am not disappointed, but admit it, you just can’t be bothered fighting the spell-check.
eh? All CGI-gone-wild is a result of a director wanting it and a producer greenlighting it, the artist does what the brief says.
If a flourish is there it’s because the big dogs want it there, not because the artists snuck it in. Games are a different story, because the artists are more likely to be running themselves, and tv shows because there isn’t (usually) the money to go through 17 iterations.
The reality is, control is delicious to directors and vfx sups. I can’t tell you how many times we’ll tweak a digi-double doing an action move to be pose perfect, when it’s directly cutting with a live-action stunt guy that’s a tangle of arms and elbows… and usually you point that out and you get a lot of sighs and shrugs.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Unless using a specific piece of reference to match to exactly, it’s easier to build a performance around an action, rather than just semi-random movement, even though semi-random movement is often closer to reality. So all those actions can get distracting and hammy, as you’re saying, but in a tentpole like JW, usually everything has been manicured to a high degree.
Picked up the Jurassic Park bluray set when it was on sale at Amazon for Black Friday - pretty solid deal, as it was all 4 movies on bluray, plus the 3D versions of Jurassic Park 1 and 4, for under USD 20. Even though most of the movies are terrible, I love dinosaurs, so worthwhile just for the creature effects for me.
But man, Jurassic World is so damned bad. As wretched as 2 and 3 were, it somehow manages to be even worse. And the 3D is so crappy (like most post-processed movies these days) compared Jurassic Park’s 3D (which is actually pretty spectacular on an OLED, and justifies the cost of the package alone). Jurassic Park’s 3D actually shows how much a more dedicated 3D version can accomplish compared to the crap theatrical post-processing we typically get.
I watched this today. The setup in the beginning was really boring. But once the creature gets out, I had a great time. Maybe it was the low expectations, but I was leaning forward and laughing through a lot of the movie. It certainly had way better action than your typical Michael Bay movie, which always has several scenes where I have no clue what’s going on. In this movie, the action was pretty clear and you were never confused.
I saw this:
They think a T-Rex couldn’t really run, based on machine learning algorithms trying to peace together how a T-Rex would walk and run.
So the scene near the end of the movie where she leads him from place to place and the T-Rex wasn’t able to catch her on the way, that scene makes sense, even though you guys made fun of it upthread. :P
Which they train on… other dinosaurs?