What is ee pee vee eye eye?
-Tom
Oh, sorry, I under-abbreviated!
SWEPVII:TFA
That should clear it up!
Looks like a military acronym for a green-friendly surface to air missile.
Swept-Winged Electric-Powered Vertically Inclined Interceptor.
Task Force Alpha!
I wasn’t 100% pleased with TFA, but at least there weren’t any characters that I wanted to be eaten alive. JW had several.
Yeah! Except for that poor nanny watching those kids for the day! She got fucking eaten alive by a Pteradon! FOR NO REASON!
Her maternal instincts were clearly compromised. We can’t have that.
I thought it was the mosasaur that ate her, and the pterodactyl just got the assist. Maybe my brain has already begun deleting this movie.
I also like how they had to have a quick scene earlier where the babysitter was like 10% negligent, so the audience isn’t supposed to feel bad when she is majorly murdered.
It didn’t help. That death felt really unfair. And maybe a bit mean, what with the tag team stunt-biting as if she were a dog treat on the nose of a dinosaur.
I mean dinosaur treat. Or dog nose.
I’m not sure if you are joking here, but Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.
I honestly do not get this whole “That death felt really unfair” thing about that death in the movie. What would you all prefer. That only someone who “deserved it” were killed in that moment, and by extrapolation, every other moment? Because I can see just as much objection from that point. “So only the really bad guys get killed? Really?”
Did the death of the goat in the first movie feel unfair? How about the bloodsucking lawyer. Was that fair?
She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The filmmakers could have chosen Extra #421 I guess, but instead they chose the neutral character in whom we were least invested. So we have at least been introduced to the character and have some investment.
I fail to see what fairness has to do with it.
-xtien
P.S. Weirdly this rant I just made brought me back to The VVitch. I really need to see that again.
Because they clearly positioned that character not to be liked so the audience would cheer when she died… except it didn’t work. It’s kind of like when the non-dinosaur villain guy dies… you feel sort of vindicated, but this attempt was a misstep by whoever came up with that crappy idea.
I’m betting that if the character had been a guy there would be have been zero backlash associated with that scene. The series is full of “good guy” characters getting eaten (Eddie couldn’t have been more of a good guy, and he got torn in half on screen). Nobody seems to have a problem with those, though. What’s the difference?
I’ve had arguments about this on other forums and it was just about the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen. “Well it wouldn’t have been the same if it were an extra, because we knew her”. “Well we knew Eddie, sure, but he was a major character, so it’s different”. “Well Muldoon was part of the park system, so even though he’s a good guy that’s different, too”.
So, people are simply outraged about the babysitter chick because:
1: She was more well known than an extra.
2: But less well known than a major character.
3: The scene was slightly too-long according to unwritten rules of some sort.
4: She was picked up and dropped (to no effect, mind you), which is also apparently even more barbaric than being ripped in half on screen by two Rexes.
She’s a hapless character who makes a mistake. If they are positioning anyone not to be liked, as you say, it is Claire. She has disregarded her one family responsibility in seven years which has put members of her family in danger of being killed. If your purpose in positioning someone not to be liked is to kill them, then Claire should be killed.
But that’s not how it works in these movies. Ancillary characters are killed. I certainly didn’t dislike the first worker who was killed in Jurassic Park, and definitely didn’t dislike Ray Arnold. They’re both killed. That Donald Gennaro gets gobbled up while hiding on a toilet is just a crappy joke about lawyers.
Zara being killed is just another example of choosing an ancillary character who can be disposed of, nothing more. Her losing track of the kids, when that should never have been part of her job, has nothing to do with it. She’s someone we have actually been introduced to, so it means more when she’s given the prehistoric turducken treatment.
Again, I hardly see how that is labeled as “not fair” any more than any other death in these movies that isn’t an overt villain-gets-what’s-coming moment.
-xtien
I think you just put it far better than I did and much more succinctly.
-xtien
Jesus. We discussed this earlier in this very thread. No one here (maybe on other sites, but not here) objected to her getting killed because she was a female. Neither is her getting killed breaking some kind of JP rule. The people that have an issue with it do so because the character’s death was not in proportion to the supposed “sin” she commits, which does break the general rule in adventure movies like this that only shitty people or villains get gratuitous death scenes.
And yes, Eddie dying was brutal and he didn’t deserve it, but he did earn it. His sacrifice keeps the trailer from falling off the cliff. That kind of heroic death is a staple of adventure movies.
I like your distinction between deserve and earn, Telefrog.
-xtien
That death was a really weird tonal thing. JW was a bit of a lark, more of an adventure/comedy than the original Jurassic Park, and then all of the sudden you have this sorta’ brutal sequence that feels like the Chrissie sequence at the beginning of Jaws (not as well done, obvs). I just popped over to YouTube to refresh my memory, and yeah, it goes on for 30 seconds when everything else in the movie was a quick snatch! chomp!. It’s fairly effective, I guess, especially when she hits the water and they dive after her, but it just feels so out-of-step with everything else.
A bit similar in tone to the opening in Jurassic Park, with the caged Raptor, but that movie pulled it off better.
For my purposes, I thought Jurassic World was completely forgettable and shrug-worthy.
Keep in mind that Zara was supposed to have more screen time and a better story. It’s hinted at in the movie as-is, but she was originally supposed to have a subplot with her fiance on the phone in which she goes bridezilla on him. I guess that was supposed to make her death okay?
“It was the first time a woman was going to die in a Jurassic Park movie. We’re an equal opportunities bunch of murderers! So we felt, ‘Alright, let’s make it the most spectacular death we can possibly imagine - let’s involve multiple animals from sea and air…’ I love this moment so much. We’re playing on the audience’s expectation and jadedness. You drop her in the water and immediately everyone goes, ‘Oooh, I know what’s going to happen.’ But you don’t. Then the ‘birds’ start coming in and you get distracted by that and suddenly [it] happens. I knew I’d be accused of killing the Brit! Well, Katie’s Irish so she had no problem with it. But we definitely struggled over how much to allow her to earn her death, and ultimately it wasn’t because she was British, it was because she was a bridezilla. She has one line about the bachelor party: ‘Oh, all his friends are animals.’ In the end, the earned death in these movies has become a bit standard and another thing I wanted to subvert. ‘How can we surprise people? Let’s have someone die who just doesn’t deserve to die at all.’”
Uh…okay Colin.
Any predator movie worth its salt should have creatures that exist outside any moral or tonal framework. That’s why predators are so scary. We don’t relate to the predator/prey relationship. It’s senseless and horrifying to us. It doesn’t fit neatly into adventure stories. At least not adventure stories outside the context of 70s cinema. Jaws opened with a woman being killed. A 14-year-old dies shortly thereafter. The gruff experienced heroic captain dies the most gruesomely*. Granted, he’s part Ahab. But remember that Hooper was supposed to die as well. Because predators just eat with no regard for whom they’re eating. It’s the stuff of horror that has to be tamed to be safely inserted into an adventure. Which Spielberg will do handily as he gets more commercially successful.
So as a fairly tame PG-13 or below series in a post-70s movie industry, the Jurassic Parks mostly apply a moral and tonal framework. None of the lead characters die. Kids never get killed. Women don’t die. The bad guys get theirs in the end, and it’s particularly gruesome because They Deserved It ™. So when a good guy does die, it’s jarring! Richard Schiff getting torn apart is, to my mind, the height of Jurassic Park’s representation of dinosaurs. It will be all downhill from there.
That’s why it was a bit weird that Colin “Safety Not Guaranteed” Trevorrow chucked some hapless nanny so brutally to her death with such elaborately staged choreography. Frankly, as a horror fan who wants my predators – and especially cool ones like dinosaurs! – to be scary, I loved that scene. Loved it! But the fact that we’re discussing it just goes to show how how tame the Jurassic Park universe has become and ham-handed Trevorrow is as a storyteller. Which doesn’t bode well for his Star Wars movie. Unless he gets a great script and straightjackets himself into a do-no-harm approach, my expectations are pretty low. :(
-Tom
- You see a touch of this in Jurassic Park when the hunter dude gets waylaid by raptors, but it seems to me that scene exists to boost the raptor’s scary factor rather than to create a universe in which heroes can die. I guess Sam Jackson dies offscreen as well, but such is the fate of disposable technicians. Once Jake Johnson comes along, those sorts of speaking parts will be off limits to any hungry predators!