As a lover of horror movies, monster movies, etc…I think you nailed it on the head with this. I had no problem at all with the ‘nanny scene’. Someone getting eaten by a monster in a monster movie shouldn’t be as rare as it is. If it is rare, then it should be more meaningful than, as you say, the ham-handed method used to dispose of the nanny. At that point, it didn’t even need to be the nanny, just a ‘jane/john smith’ trainer would have worked as well. To incorporate the nanny into that scene feels like they were ‘reaching’ for a way to kill her off.
Yep. It’s a slasher flick, and I want a reason to enjoy each death. Make it funny, make it satisfying, make it someone who mattered. But don’t kill the poor sap whose only interesting feature was standing near a main character at some point.
Because then it’s just “huh, what the hell did she do to piss off the director?”
Really, RickH? Putting aside your assertion that this is a slasher flick for a moment, I don’t quite get you wanting a reason “to enjoy each death” in the movie. I guess I just don’t get that, at all. I’m no horror movie expert, and don’t really know from slasher pictures, but I think I’ve seen enough of them to be able to say that in watching them I don’t enjoy the deaths of the characters. What a weird word choice! And certainly I think slasher flicks kill their fair share of poor saps who are only near the main character, whether they peed on the director’s Wheaties or not.
This isn’t a slasher flick, RickH. It’s a monster movie. Sometimes monsters eat the wrong people. Sometimes they step on the right ones (sorry Charles Grodin). Sometimes monsters just kill people who happen to be in the way and there is nothing funny or satisfying about it, because those people aren’t people who mattered since they were just on the wrong bridge at the wrong time (I’m looking at you, Cloverfield).
All that aside, you’ve done nothing to address the point I make in the quote you grab from me. Unfair? Huh?
This discussion does inspire me though, because in addition to making me think of how another movie that I mentioned earlier deals with this, I’m suddenly brought to It Follows when I consider who deserves what, who earns what, and whether or not fair and unfair even matter.
-xtien
Sometimes monsters eat the wrong people, but in a blockbuster with a…conventional moral outlook, there’s a sense of proportionality to the deaths. We don’t see characters killed in protracted detail unless there’s a specific purpose to it, be it punishing moral transgressions, underlining a noble sacrifice or establishing the heinousness of the monsters.
The Pterodactyls are pretty incidental, she’s definitely not sacrificing herself, so people come to the conclusion that the movie thought she deserved it, because that’s how these scenes work in these kinds of movies.
If the scene was done in a long shot from the kids’ POV, no one would be talking about it. (And it still would be fulfilling it’s actual function, reminding us of the Mosasaur, in order to set up the lame finale.)
That’s it. Her death is absurdly gratuitous for no reason whatsoever. It’s moreso because they made such a half-hearted attempt to make us not like her, while making an even worse attempt at serving up to kids we’re supposed to like (but don’t). People are saying “fair” in the immediate few posts but I suspect what they mean is “it made no sense given genre norms/tropes”.
Like those crazy engineers at InGen, I have created a monster.
But seriously, that moment in the film felt really weird to me. Like, it was weirdly dark, and it felt really gross to me. It was so theatrical and ridiculous, yet it also felt very mean and weird. Like the movie was triumphant i saying, HA! that bad person got killed!
When you deal with “animals as slasher villains” you have to couch the animals as what they are. Cold-hearted beasts only out for one thing, to kill you (for food or in defense), and that is what makes them so scary. The idea that animals are soul-less robots that could at any moment kill you is frankly terrifying. They are opportunistic predators that can’t be reasoned with, and show no emotions. They have cold dark black lifeless eyes, like a doll’s eyes.
This was what was so great about Jaws (mostly) and the original Jurassic Park (mostly), which honestly now I think about it the Lawyer that leaves the kids alone in the car like a coward is eaten alive on a toilet. But somehow, for me, that felt less grody. The guy had done something stupid, got out of the car, exposed himself to the t-rex, which caused him to die. But, in those movies, the animals are just ruthless. One of the most terrifying scenes is when Laura Dern has to go out and jump start the generators, you don’t see the raptors for a large part of that scene, and she is running scared through the jungle, knowing the velociraptors could be behind any tree or shrub outside. It is an awesome piece of suspense, her staring out at the quiet jungle, lush with greenery, knowing that a heartless murderer lurks within.
The scene in Jurassic World felt like some toss-away death that the characters didn’t even react to, and it certainly didn’t build tension to make the villains (the dinosaurs) more scary. It just felt odd, but it was indicative to the care that went into thinking out the film and the “Frankenstein’s Monster” concept of science fiction horror. That scene was just there to shock the audience, and that is what shitty horror movies do.
Jurassic Park is a fantastic film, with scenes (water in cup trembling), T-rex chasing the jeep (objects in mirror are closer than they appear), and the velociraptors stalking the kids in the kitchen, that will live on as iconic moments in movie history.
Jurassic World was trash. Pure trash. I guess the real difference is having the master of Animal-Predator as horror film-maker (Spielberg) vs (Trevorrow)
SWEPIX is going to be trash too… :(
Well, it’s a film in which we have a cast of characters who die, not all at once, but in ones and twos due to a menacing external force. Could be zombies, could be dinosaurs, could be fate itself, could be some guy in a hockey mask, but the killing force does lack an essential core of humanity. That to me is a slasher flick.
I don’t quite get you wanting a reason “to enjoy each death” in the movie. I guess I just don’t get that, at all. I’m no horror movie expert, and don’t really know from slasher pictures, but I think I’ve seen enough of them to be able to say that in watching them I don’t enjoy the deaths of the characters. What a weird word choice!
Why else would anyone watch a slasher flick? I’m not much of a horror buff, but I’ve watched more than a few (not torture-porn like the Saw movies, more like Scream or Final Destination, or the zombie variants), and it seems to me that they are, for the most part, low-key morality plays. The audience is invited to follow along and watch the characters make poor choices that lead them to their fate, telling themselves that THEY would not have made such foolish choices.
And as far as the use of the word “enjoy,” fill in your satisfaction-equivalent of choice. It would most definitely not be fun to watch a cast of characters die at random intervals for no particular reason as they went about their business. I wouldn’t bother finishing such a film. But if the point of the story is indeed the very real menace of death (as opposed to the never-realized threat of death, recalling the story of Hitchcock’s “bomb on the bus” scene where he let it explode and then promised himself that he’d never allow that sort of tension relase to occur in his movies again), then the deaths must have a point or they will not resonate with the audience.
And by the time of this particular character’s death in JW, the point that dinos are dangerous had already been made, so her death felt pointless and therefore not enjoyable as part of the story. I’m pretty sure why they killed a character in that way, it was to set up the water-lurker as a threat so that the ending of the film would be properly foreshadowed, but there was no reason to kill that character in that way. I haven’t used my undergrad degree in a loooong time, but one of the screenwriting rules I do remember is that “there are no extra characters” in a well-written script. An extra character does nothing to advance the plot, and should be either eliminated or merged with another character who does advance the plot. And in my opinion, they made her into an extra character because her presence in the film did not advance the plot. But I have already complained about the poor scriptwriting upthread.
And yeah, now that I think about it – the older I get, the more I find movies where teenagers (technically 20-somethings acting like teens) are killed one-by-one have become black comedies. In the case of films like Scream, they have literally become black comedies, so I guess Wes Anderson figured it out early on.
Interesting point. A recurring theme from reading war memoirs or war fiction (such as Band of Brothers and Wings of Victory), is how death is always seen as mostly a matter of luck, and not talent or ability or training (or not exclusively anyhow). And how often you will have people who have a natural inclination for war, or action, or the adventure of it, and who take a bullet and die, and the writer will remark the incredible irony that those who love it die and those that can only suffer through it are left to their continued misery in the situation. And there are films that kind of touch on this idea, like Sam Jackson getting scarfed by the shark, or Steven Seagal getting sucked out of the air lock, and it’s great because it defies our expectations of what that character was going to accomplish. But I think the ultimate example of it in film for me was Death Proof, where 4 ladies who really didn’t deserve it get killed, and on the second time round, I was half expecting the director to do it again, because that would have been an even more daring thing to do, and it made every minute of buildup that much better. And I was mildly disappointed that he didn’t… mildly, because it was such a great finale, action-wise.
But I’ll say that a movie that coldly offs people randomly and realisitically sounds like something I’d enjoy watching, because then I wouldn’t be stress-testing the hollywood formula in my head all the time and could just get lost in the suspense.
I am not a slasher or a horror flick fan, but there are some movies that I enjoy in the genre. Lake Placid, I know not a great movie, has a lot of innocent people die in it. Most of the characters don’t deserve it on any level, but the movie never pretends to be anything more than it is. Despite popular belief, if it had been a young man talking on the phone annoyed by the presence of kids… I would have felt the same way. I wouldn’t care if some woman was part of the security team and got gobbled up… this particular scene felt weirdly long, the character oddly placed, and it was just unpleasant. And yeah there was a scientist, a number of other “innocent” people that died in a normal length death in mostly believable ways that was fine.
It felt off for this movie.
But… but… it has ‘epic’ right in the… acronym.
So the whole set-piece should have been eliminated? I’m not sure what the argument is here. Because for the set-piece to work, and I would argue that they all thought this was a money set-piece, the layering of the kill requires time to set up. That’s kind of the point. To say nothing of the fact that it further bolsters the climax of the movie. The length of the scene is vital to the scene, and the scene helps make the climax.
I don’t know what “normal length death” means. Does the T-800’s attack on the Rick Rossovich character violate the Normal Length Death Rule? Both take about forty seconds of screen time, and that dude did nothing to deserve (or even earn) being dispatched by that monster. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as was Sarah’s roommate. To say nothing of what transpires at the police station. Is it simply a matter of expectation based upon rating? Because if so, I think I can understand that, even if I didn’t have your reaction when I saw this scene in Jurassic World.
I respect that you think it felt off for this movie. And I appreciate that it felt unpleasant. But unlike the idea of enjoying deaths in these movies, I have no problem with deaths feeling unpleasant in monster movies or slasher movies (which this is not) or whatever. Deaths should feel unpleasant, shouldn’t they? I get uncomfortable when people cheer when a person is killed in a movie, even if he “deserved it” because he was bad. That a hapless personal assistant, who again should not have been required to babysit as she was clearly unqualified, is the person being killed, doesn’t make me think this is more unfair than some bystander being killed or Sarah’s roommate’s boyfriend being slammed repeatedly through glass and walls. Not that that is your argument. Which I think, again, is that the scene simply shouldn’t be there.
Am I right on that?
-xtien
I think we’re just going to disagree on this point, which is fine. I don’t think the scene should have been there. I think they set it up to be a certain way, but it felt forced, too long and out of place. The character herself was mostly pointless, and it added nothing to the movie. I don’t think their emotional goal with the assistant scene was realized. I think you were absolutely supposed to feel something with it, but the only thing it did for me was make me think about the writers and their failed intentions, not the characters, not the monsters, not the plot. I just sat there thinking was I supposed to dislike her and this was her deserved end, like what did the writer intend with this? And then it made me think about all the other ridiculous stuff I saw in the movie earlier.
It threw me out of the movie as i was watching the movie whereas other long death scenes in the series… they didn’t do that. That’s why I said weird and unpleasant. I don’t think it was because she was a woman just… the whole thing was just badly done.
Fair enough. I think you’re right about us disagreeing, and while I can see your point and understand it throwing you out of the movie, I think it was necessary for the script structure with regard to the climax. I would have hated it had we seen Mosasaurus eat a dead shark and then…surprise, here she is taking out the Big Bad at the end. I think there’s a rule-of-three coming into play there that I appreciate.
As I have seen nobody say anything that makes any sense to improve the scene, your contention that it simply shouldn’t be there is a fine point upon which to disagree.
-xtien
As someone with no dog in this particular fight, I find the discussion fascinating. By that point in the move I was firmly in embrace the absurd mode. The scene struck me as the type of silly that the movie had become at that point. I mean I bust out laughing at the sheer audacity and willful stupidity when the raptor rode the T-rex like a cowboy. I was actively rooting for that to happen the entire fight!
So that particular death was past the point where cinematography mattered for me. That said I did feel as if they were framing it as if it was intended to be a catharsis of sorts. I don’t have the movie vocabulary to articulate why I get that impression, maybe camera angles and framing, but I do see that point that Nessrie is making.
I just no longer cared to take the movie seriously at that point. It had become, almost, a monster comedy.
And that’s kind of why I like JW better than SWEPVII. At least JW knew it was absurd and just had fun with it.
There were so many moments during this movie that I laughed out loud. So much b-movie dialogue, and this ridiculous death sequence. It all felt gratuitous and absurd.
2 ways to improve that “caretaker death” scene, all based off of one idea, character motivation. That character died a pointless, gory, and gratuitous death. We can make it all better by adding a b-movie style reasoning to her death.
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She dives to save one of the kids, and is caught and killed, thus redeemed and her noble sacrifice is memorable.
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She pushes the kids out of her way to save her own skin, causing her to be caught and killed
Either way, it adds a reason for her to be killed. I know this goes against my whole “animals killing without reason” argument. But that world doesn’t exist in the Raptor-trained, super dinosaur fantasy land of Jurassic World. And that random death felt really out of place to me, as a part of this film.
I like your second reason. It mirrors the lawyer running from the car and hiding instead of staying with the kids in the first movie. In the universe of Jurassic Park, abandoning children in danger gets you killed. That’s a simple and satisfying moral lesson for these kinds of popcorn movies.
Talk about mountains and mole hills. The assistant was actually, IMO, a minor character you feel some empathy for.
She is not presented as negligent. She is just a long suffering assistant who has been tasked with baby sitting kids who can’t wait to give her the slip. I felt for her.
Then, later, she dies. Because we knew her a bit, it was more shocking and we felt more empathy than for extra #2643. It added to the impact of the scene.
But that was it. Dinosaurs kill people in many ways. She was one of the victims. End of.
All the pages you guys have filled about why it’s a bad scene and how to make it better don’t resonate with me one bit.
I guess I don’t expect my dinosaurs to have morality or make all deaths quick and merciful. shrug
Wendelius
I watched the scene again over the weekend. It’s even more gratuitous than I remembered.
Umm, empathy was not the feeling i felt here. I wasn’t focused on the character at all but the stupid script that must have been written to cover the scene. One of the most empathetic deaths in this movie was that poor assistant that was hiding from the monster rex next to a car. I don’t know his name or really what he did at the park, but that was a good scene. That was someone who didn’t deserve to die and yet did, and it was a little longer but it just felt… believable… like someone would actually hide next to a car and think they’re safe and right next to them is this dinosaur expert who can’t help them.