Wild Things Deux

Rating: Null/10 (10 May 2010)

"Filmmakers like Spielberg actually pride themselves on "telling a good story" in this children's-book sense of the phrase. The great works of literature — Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's plays — are not reducible to their plots. Only hacks like O. Henry and Christie confused narrative art with "telling a good story" in Spielberg's sense." - Peter Greenaway
"Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick." - Steven Spielberg (1978)
All the "Jurassic Park" movies waste a great premise and squander brilliant special effects. Whilst Michael Crichton updated Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" (Doyle's "Lost World" has been in the public domain for many years, allowing both Crichton and Spielberg to utilise its title without paying license fees) by turning Doyle's 1912 dino-quest into a techno-thriller about the confrontation between a mechanistic and indeterministic universe, Spielberg simply opts to go for empty bubble gum
The result is a 73 million dollar movie which doesn't make much sense. A dinosaur rampaging through a city? Why not! A black teen acrobat? Who cares! A T-Rex eating passengers on a cramped ship? F**k the laws of physics!
But in a way, the shameless stupidity of the whole thing is quite endearing. Yes, there are many interesting things you could do with this franchise, but Spielberg doesn't care. He's serving up Harryhausen with pixels, banking on the fact that his audience is too young to remember "King Kong", "The Lost Continent", Irwin Allen's "The Lost World", "Godzilla", "The Lost Continent", "The Valley of Gwangi", "Reptilicus", "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth", "Gorgo", "The Giant Claw", "Gamera", "Planet of the Dinosaurs", "Behemoth", "The Beast from 20,000 fathoms" and countless other scifi/dino films that played on TV when he was a kid.
Like "Indiana Jones" and "Close Encounters", this is thus a resurrection of 50s junk and pulp adventure, jazzed up by modern technology and funded by a budget that dwarfs the gross domestic earnings of Cuba. Cue a couple iconic, beautifully crafted action sequences – a Velociraptor attack in the grass, a couple wrangling sessions, a T-Rex encounter in the rain, a King Kongian ship which leads to a Godzillian city brawl – and you have a nice little homage.
Only it's not little. This beast moves with the baggage of transnational corporation. Toy tie-ins, lunch boxes, a plot hastily constructed to sucker an audience....the film isn't an "amusement park ride" trying to pass itself off as a "film", it's a piece of corporate cynicism passing itself off as an "amusement park ride".
Thematically the film is also several levels dumber than its predecessor, which was itself several levels dumber than both Crighton novels. Themes of parental love and conservationism are all that's present, the former handled better elsewhere in Spielberg's filmography, the later hypocritical considering Dreamworks plans to pave over wetlands to build a studio. At times the film seems to want to contrast the empathy of its merry band of scientists with a big-game hunter who seeks only to take down a T-Rex (effectively reversing the themes in the original "Jurassic Park", dinosaur becoming unhinged science, lowly man with rifle being man's primal urge to survive), but unfortunately he's dispatched early on. Wouldn't you love to see a film revolving around him?
Still, at his best, Spielberg serves as a conduit to a certain brand of 50's fantasy. Instead of King Kong ascending up the Empire State Building or the climax of "Gorgo", in which icons of the British Empire fall before a monster's maternal rampage, Spielberg gives us a T-Rex stomping through a neon-lit gas station. Those films brought fantastical dreams to the city, Spielberg brings them to the suburbs.
7.9/10 – "War of the Worlds" has rendered most of Spielberg's previous action scenes obsolete, but there are still a couple great sequences here. One nevertheless wishes for more imagination. All Spielberg's films are retro-remakes, and aside from the solid state effects of "The Beast from 20,000 fathoms" or "The Valley of Gwangia" being replaced with digital models, there's nothing new here.
Worth two viewings.