Killer cartoons kill cartoonish humans and nobody cares

Rating: 4/10 (24 June 2015)

I started looking at my watch pretty early on. I thought the point of movies like this was to give the audience the feeling of "What if?" -- In this case what if humans recreated dinosaurs and opened a theme park and the dinosaurs escaped their enclosure? How would you feel? How would you react? What could go wrong? The first Jurassic Park did a great job of painting how different individuals would react in that situation. Remember the genuine terror those kids felt? -- screaming and exhausted and frightened. The fear in Sam Neil's eyes. The lawyer who leaves the kids to fend for themselves. Anyway, I could go on. The point is all the characters showed a range of emotions that the audience could relate to. They are the emotions we believe we would feel in such a terrifying situation. The Lawyer represents our baser urges of wanting to flee, in spite of those we leave behind (in this case, the two kids in the care with him). Sam Neil represents the responsibility of those he's been entrusted with. Laura Dern, represents maternal instincts and emotional intelligence. Wayne Knight's character harbors feelings of ingratitude and greed. So we live vicariously for two hours through those characters because we understand the way they feel... even the baser emotions of the more despicable characters. In sharp contrast, Jurassic World treats every character like the two dimensional page it was written on. There's no genuine fear displayed. There's no feeling of "Oh that's how I would react". I mean when Chris Pratt is under the car when the I-Rex escapes and he just looks at that guy for a moment before the guy is eaten, I couldn't help but feel if that guy was Bryce Dallas Howard's character, then Pratt's character would have tried to distract the dinosaur, or at least do something... anything. Instead he just watches as the I-Rex finally eats him. Not much of a hero, but the character that was eaten was only a bit player, unattractive, and overweight, so his death means nothing. And that's the problem: every death in this movie means nothing. It barely acknowledges when people start being killed. You would think even one death should have some effect on Bryce Dallas Howard's character but she remains seemingly unaffected. Oh wait a second, she cries after coming across a dying dinosaur. An emotion that has no development whatsoever -- it just suddenly appears. Nice to see she can cry at the death of a dinosaur but not an ounce of evident remorse when people are being killed. We, as the audience, don't just go to observe the unraveling of the plot, we go to experience every scene vicariously through the characters. For that vicarious feeling to work we need to relate to the characters emotionally. The same way we get emotional when watching our team play a game of football or basketball or whatever sport. We're emotionally invested in our team, so it means something to us. Watching a game without our team playing doesn't have the same effect on us. On top of that we usually have a favorite player who we're even more emotionally invested in. He or she is usually the player that does the things we believe we would do if we had the opportunity and ability. We get even more emotionally invested in the player if he or she is a great person off the field -- especially if they're funny and charismatic. Again we're feeling "I want to be like him or her". Same goes for characters in a movie. The hero has to be a person who does the right thing, no matter what the cost. Pratt's character made no effort to save that poor guy. And the fact is he didn't even have to save him, he just had to try to save him. Anyway this is just one example. Bryce Dallas Howard's character has no redeeming qualities until near the end of the film. She's given the same aloofness that Sam Neil's character had in the first film when it comes to kids, but Sam Neil was given the opportunity early on to show that he has a heart of gold. The moping teenager was a chore to watch -- what was the point of having a moping teenager who does practically nothing in the film other than mope? Oh he fixes a car, so teenagers are useful after all was the message I guess. Is the point to have a character for each age and gender demographic? When I was a kid most of the characters I watched were in their 30s and 40s -- I didn't need a character my own age to vicariously experience the events of the movie through. Nor did I need a male representative when I was watching Ellen Ripley outsmart and slaughter aliens. I was happy to experience the film vicariously through her, despite the fact she is a woman and I'm a man. I'm not saying don't have them in the movie, I'm saying do have them in the movie, but not just as tokens to ticked off; instead represent them accurately and entertainingly. It seems, it's not about having a great story anymore; it's about trying to represent every possible demographic, but only to a point that couldn't possibly be offensive to any individual within those demographics. It's so constrained as to have the human emotional element almost completely removed. Is it at least fun? Fun is watching an entertaining movie. It's not fun feeling bored because the movie was emotionless, uninvolving and poorly written.