*sigh* I am...slightly disappointed. I went back through my tweets and realized that I've been waiting on "Jurassic World" for no less than eight months. It was November of last year when I saw the first trailer and got all kindsa excited for it. The posters were awesome. The trailers were good, although I felt they gave away a lot more than they should've. It wasn't until last week when my mom made a comment about how it would suck if the movie...well, sucked, given all the hype surrounding it. Man, do I hate when she's right. And she was sorta right here. I don't think it was terrible by any means, it was more just meh. It was almost a carbon copy of the first one, just with a fully operational park. Both movies had siblings working together to survive, both movies had an overly ambitious park owner, both movies had people who weren't crazy about kids charged with taking care of kids. I loved the shots of the park and seeing what the original dude's vision eventually turned into, the tie ins with the first movie, anything involving the Mosasaur, and the end where the original T-Rex basically inherited the island, but that was about it for me. I wanted to see more of the park and the attractions (we don't see or even know of the aviary until ish goes down and the birds are freed?), and I wanted to see more of the dinosaurs in general, not just the dinosaurs eating people. The plot was meh, but I didn't expect a great plot anyway. So yeah, I have that kinda letdown feeling. I'll probably watch it again at some point and maybe it'll grow on me a bit, but it definitely won't ever be as good as the original in my eyes.
While most of the people I know thought the movie to be meh, a few absolutely hated in, my mom being one of those people. She didn't like that it was a copy of the first one in so many ways, but her bigger issue is that she didn't like seeing all that was done to the animals in captivity. I didn't care for the latter either (that scene with the dying dinosaur nearly killed me yo), but the one thing the movie did do was perfectly show what would happen if such a park were ever to come into existence. It would be full of corporate sponsors and chain restaurants and shops and how much more money can we make if we invent something new. That's the world we live in now. And the moral of the story is, once again, you cannot control nature or evolution. We're not meant to control those things. Dinosaurs and man have never co-existed for a reason and bringing one back to live alongside the other would only have negative consequences, which the JP characters never seemed to learn. Did ya'll see the size of that I-Rex? It was frickin' MASSIVE. Just its foot was the size of an SUV. You can't contain something that big. Even if it wasn't genetically altered, you have no way of knowing what its behavior will be as nearly everything we know about how real dinosaurs lived is conjecture. That's the moral of both movies, but I think this one could've taken a different approach to getting us from point A to point B. Tell an original story, not a rehash of everything that happened the first time around. Rumor has it there may be more sequels to this movie. I don't know how that's possible given the ending here, and I hope they don't make anymore if they're just going to give us the same stuff all over again. The first sequel sucked, the third one was okay, but at least they changed up the stories.
From a film nerd point of view, here is the problem when you attempt to make any kind of sequel to a blockbuster movie - you can never top it. In theory, though rarely in practice, sequels are supposed to expand upon the original film and best it. It'd be hard enough to do that with a movie that did well, but to do that with something that was a game changer like "Jurassic Park" is virtually impossible. That movie was the first time we saw realistic dinosaurs in a movie, and they look as good 22 years later in HD as they did in 1994 on film. How do you top that? Obviously, you don't. Yeah, it's nifty to see a fully realized theme park with dinosaurs, but then what? Oh, you destroy it when a dinosaur gets loose? That's original. I don't know why, but I expected a bit more oomph and cleverness to JW, perhaps because it's been in development for over a decade. And yet it's the same old story. The irony being that while the people in JW were jaded by the existence of dinosaurs to the point where they needed a new hybrid to pique their interest, some of us were so impressed by the first movie that it'd take something super original to make us love a new installment.
