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I think a lot of critics would have preferred a) to not have any sequels to JP, or b) to have more "serious", "grounded" sequels that act out the nostalgic reverence the audience has for the original. The Force Awakens of course is in the early stages of its inevitable downward reassessment, but I imagine this is the sort of thing people were looking for?
The original Jurassic Park did not lend itself to having a sequel that matches its tone and has a similar plot. You can't keep sending people to that island. And The Lost World handled its job perfectly: it was meaner, it was more sarcastic, and it opened with a broadly cheesy wealthy family being attacked and cutting from the screaming mother to a yawning Ian Malcolm. And of course it finished with Japanese businessmen fleeing the movie's monster in San Diego.
Jurassic Park III (which appears to be undergoing a positive reassessment) takes it unbelievably easy on the plot and delivers very good dinosaur action, which is kind of the point of these movies. The original film (which is fantastic) gets a little bit too much credit for it's allegedly deep dive on ethics in bioscience, or its character arcs (Grant goes from mild distaste for children to mild affection for children, amazing)--every sequel has an equal amount of that stuff, but no JP sequel can show you realistic dinosaurs again for the first time in your life.
Jurassic World took a nearly opposite approach to what The Force Awakens or the recent Ghostbusters Afterlife did, openly mocking its own existence and franchise culture generally, anticipating the reactions of its most superficial critics and critiquing itself in a cleverer and funnier way than the point-missing segment of the audience that hated it. Its two sequels have gone progressively crazier, spending (and earning) huge amounts of money on b-movie premises and it's self-aware and absolutely glorious.
I know it's cool to dunk on Colin Trevorrow for some reason, but Jurassic Park Dominion is a great looking movie, with set pieces as well-realized and memorable as they are bonkers. I don't know what the 70% of grumpy critics on Rotten Tomatoes were hoping to see, but I'm glad as hell they didn't get it!
"Jurassic World: not a fan."
--Ian Malcolm, Jurassic World Dominion
:))
I wanted to throw in one other observation: JWD is easily--easily--the most Michael Crichton movie ever made. More than Jurassic Park, more than Congo or Sphere or anything else. This is a setpiece-driven techno-thriller with a bit of high-falutin philosophizing sprinkled throughout. Everything from the locusts to Dodgson to characters changing allegiances on a dime to keep the plot trucking along--it just screams Michael Crichton novel start to finish.
Your Source? I always knew that they would make more.
@MaxCasino Here's The Source:
https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3701323/jurassic-world-4-producer-frank-marshall-teases-plans-beyond-jurassic-world-dominion/
Thank you. This franchise needs to go extinct, honestly. To paraphrase Ian Malcolm: Greed will find a way.
I'm certainly up for another six tongue-in-cheek movies about dinosaurs living in the modern world!
I saw JW:D again last week and really enjoyed the genre-hopping it does. The lab stuff is basically sci-fi, there's a torch-led trek through a cave like an adventure movie, and over-the-top spy movie in Europe stuff. Even a dragon near the end! "Bananas," as Malcolm said.
There are also a few very clear SW references from Trevorrow: Dodgson's control room looks just like an Imperial Star Destroyer bridge, and his staff are even uniformed as though they're on one, and when Owen and Kayla get in the plane, it's very evocative of the Millennium Falcon.
I still think that Trevorrow bringing the original 3 back is his way of giving Star Wars the middle finger for firing him and not having their original 3 share any screen time together.
I don't really understand that. Occam's Razor: having the three characters back is an obvious and appealing choice without the additional motive of "giving Star Wars the middle finger", and it's difficult to see how it would do so anyway. Especially when several shots in JW:D are homages to Star Wars.
I think it was a given anyway before that. Goldblum was in the previous film, after all.
First of all, I made the mistake of going in expecting a sort of apocalyptic horror film like The Walking Dead with dinosaurs: empty streets, dino attacks everywhere, World War D. An(other) attack on "big pharma" was not what I thought I was going to get. Well, I blame myself. I shouldn't be annoyed because the film isn't what I wanted it to be.
But secondly, it's a dull mix that throws the new cast, for whom I have very little affection anyway (sorry, Starlord), in the same adventure as the "old cast", for whom the film has shamefully little substantial use. "Oh look, it's Alan and Ellie and Ian and that guy with the shaving cream and they're BACK, folks, they're back! Now give us your money."
Another problem is that the films continue to play it safe, as in "kid safe". Ever since Spielberg's tense classic, I've been waiting for another slick and exciting creature feature, a B horror flick that kids with a sufficiently strong stomach can sit through as well, but that doesn't fully cater to them. Again, this is on me; it's another case of me making the mistake of wanting something I'm not going to get.
The recent trilogy may have been box office gold, but I'm just not swinging with it. After the "requel", which had strong moments, we've been sort of going nowhere with the dinos. Having seen Dominion, I have all but completely lost interest in the dinos. I'm sure they'll be back because money talks and all that, but unless they make the films tense again, I don't think I will enjoy them anymore.
My ranking:
JP
JP3
TLW (controversial, I know)
JW
FK
Dominion
My ranking:
JW (controversial, I know)
Dominion (controversial, I know)
JP3
TLW
FK
JP (controversial, I know)
What has the first film in last place?
Where to begin? None of the raptors talk...Grant doesn't spend 5 minutes struggling to order a coffee...no dinosaur auctions with bad guys twirling mustaches...
This film is a mess.
I Mean, JP Was A Success Because The Concept Of A Group Of Dinosaurs Living Loose On An Island In The Contemporary Era Was Interesting, JPII:TLW Was Really Underrated Even At Its Time Of Release, The Film Had Such Interesting Concepts That Were Ruined By A Bad Execution, And Then There's JPIII...
This Movie Was The ACTUAL Movie Where The Saga Became To "Extinct", JPIII Had A Lot Of Problems From The Very Beginning (They Already Had Everything Ready To Film But The Script Was Rejected At The Very Last Moment, So They Had To Improvise While Filming), But I Love The Films Anyway...
My Ranking:
JPII:TLW
JPIII
JPI
JWII:FK
JWIII:D
JWI
JP in the last place? Wow. :-D Let me see: best story, best action, best score, best thrills, ... ;-)
Here's how I rank the films:
JP
TLW/JW
JW:FK
JPIII
JW:D
I really do think The Lost World and Jurassic World are about on par with each other in quality and entertainment.
No hot take in placing JPIII over JW:D. JPIII is silly monster movie fun. JW:D is an extinction-level meteor collision.
Knowing that they're going to produce a whole new trilogy (hopefully taking things in a whole new and much better direction), I really regret that they crammed the Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm reunion into the conclusion of Owen and Claire's story. The film was seriously overstuffed with lead characters and too little attention was given to properly wielding the OG characters. They could have given the next trilogy to Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm and done their returning storylines right. It's kind of how I feel about cramming the emergence and obliteration of SPECTRE into the tail-end of Craig's saga.
Well, I do love them all! Something has to be last!
But best story? I don't know that any of these six movies has an especially compelling story, really. "Guy builds dinosaur park and the dinosaurs get out" is a fine pretense for making a movie where dinos chase people around, but not that much more. I think the subtext is what can be more interesting with these films, like TLW's dark reversal of the first film's cliches, or JW making its big bad dino a metaphor for the movie itself being an evil monstrosity destroying the legacy of the original.
Best action is hard for me to rank, because one of the reasons I love this series so much is that all six of the movies have such well-crafted setpieces. I'd say JPIII is the most impressive in that regard--the aviary, the river battle with the Spinosaurus--but they're all well beyond solid. The vehicle hanging off the cliff in TLW is absolutely perfect. Dominion's myriad chases in Malta were stunning.
The thrills I'd say have remained at about the same kind of low level. TLW is the only movie that allows much of a question of what characters can be killed--those kids aren't gonna be eaten in JP's kitchen scene, even if my 11-year-old self wasn't sure about that in 1993. The indoraptor stalking the mansion in FK matched the tension of that scene as far as I'm concerned, and any scene where Owen is not sure he can continue to control his raptors likewise. JPIII is again particularly good here: I know the central cast is in no danger of dying, just as I knew that of the main characters in the first movie, but it was usually very hard to see how they were going to get out of their various perdicaments.
I don't know, I do think expectations and appreciating these films on their own terms is the issue with this series. I'm not talking about you or any other person here specifically, but I think there's a joyless pretentiousness to being able to watch a very well-shot, funny movie where dinosaurs chase people around and not have a good time. I simply can't understand how anyone can fail to giggle loudly when a swarm of flaming mutant locusts breaks out of a lab and wreaks havoc on a dinosaur island. :))
These characters don't have storylines. Well, Grant had one: he went from not loving kids to kind of liking them. Arc complete. But that's it. Doing it "right", which I imagine would entail a straight-faced and highly contrived reason for these three to continue to face dinosaur threats, would just be bad. Sending the characters up a bit in a satirical and self-referential sequel was the best way to go.
I mean, they could have done it your way, but I promise you the critics wouldn't have liked that either: Jurassic Park 6 was never going to match the acclaim of the original (oh wait: 68/100 on Metacritic?! Seems nostalgia is at play here).
Again, it seems you think these films should not be self-aware, and should be more "serious" somehow. I'm not sure why a comic dream sequence is a problem? Grant ordering coffee was actually great, as was that entire scene. If you take the technophobic character of Alan Grant and put him in a biotech company headquarters in the 2020s, full of bourgeois young people, that's the character moment you're going to have: it makes sense and it's funny. And it comes alongside the reestablishment of Ian Malcolm's character of the cheerfully bleak ultra-pessimist hedonist. Ian gives his po-faced, depressing speech to the kids, and then goes out and signs autographs and seems to be enjoying a bit of a racket as a sellout before he pulls Ellie aside to do his plot-dump. It's great.
To be clear (and I realize I wasn’t) I was just making a joke. I actually didn’t find the coffee scene problematic in Dominion. Just using it as a silly example.
You're right, these movies can be both self-aware and serious—and in some of their best moments they have been. I love Jake Johnson’s hilariously meta dialogue in Jurassic World, and Spielberg had all kinds of fun winking at the audience when he had a lawyer get snatched off a toilet by the T-rex and his own screenwriter get snagged off the street.
JW:D did bake in a storyline for Grant and Ellie though: the two of them finally acknowledging their feelings for each other and getting together in the end. That was an unfulfilled storyline fans had been longing to see happen since the end of the first film and one that the filmmakers hastily powered their way through in Dominion amidst so many other storylines they had going on.
Sure, Grant and Ellie finally got together in the end, but it was totally unearned and therefore weirdly unsatisfying. Grant and Ellie spend what little screen time they have together messing with CGI bugs, and then…they’re just together in the end. They had more palpable chemistry in their scenes at Ellie’s house in JPIII, and I’m actually not being at all facetious on that point. I really do think they had on-screen chemistry in JPIII, and I simply didn't feel any chemistry between them in the film where the script throws them together at the end.
I don't know what satire you find in Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm's involvement in JW:D though.
Well, their presence in the film isn't satirical in and of itself, but for the entire final act of the movie, you basically have Jeff Goldblum with you in the cinema telling you he's "not a fan" of Jurassic World and judging the action on screen to be "bananas". That would be the main thing.
Grant and Ellie less so maybe, but I don't know. Grant's overly earnest speech when we first see him seems tongue-in-cheek to me. Talking about true science before being draggged well out of his element into the least plausible techno-thriller of all time is pretty amusing to me. You're totally right about Grant and Ellie being at their best in JPIII, and while I never exactly pined away at the hope of them getting together again, they did have good chemistry there. Their sudden kiss and lovey ending seems on point in Dominion though. The JW trilogy started with a movie about the bloated, cynical excess of franchise films, and they've just increased the ridiculousness as they go along, pumping six or seven genres into the final instalment. The cliche sudden romance just fits in my opinion.
Don't forget, Alan Grant basically looks straight at the camera towards the end and says "This isn't about us". Jurassic Park isn't really about the nuances of human experience. It's about dinosaurs fighting with dinosaurs (or humans, or large vehicles, or San Diego as a whole). It's basically a celebration of the fun of blockbuster cinema, from the King Kong and Disney references of the first film, to the Star Wars and everything else in the last one.
I can't believe how much I've been writing about this movie. :))
I just think these six films have done a remarkable job of offering consistently fun and witty entertainment and have kind of been misunderstood and taken for granted. Blockbuster movies, especially of the horror/thriller genres, usually get sequels that keep trying to recreate the first film but end up going up their own asses and taking themselves too seriously and they just get worse. The Jurassic films, in my view, have dodged that bullet by pretty blatantly trying to let the audience in on the joke that is a second trilogy (!) of movies about dinosaur clones run amok.
I’m sure it’s been commented on many times before but is something I hadn’t noticed before.
I believe it was from eating a certain plant; evidence was found in the dung. In the big picture it was not vital to the story.
Yeah, it's from the book. I think it's poison berries that were mixed in with stones the dinosaur consumed to assist digestion. They must have filmed more of it. But they couldn't cut everything because they needed to break up the characters, so it's a bit messy.
https://www.slashfilm.com/535122/why-was-the-triceratops-sick-in-jurassic-park/
That's the thing: Ellie actually says there's nothing in the dung- it goes nowhere. Quite an odd thing to just leave dangling, and even weirder that one doesn't really spot it while watching it- it's certainly taken me 30 years! :) I guess you just get swept along in the film.
I did look up the answer you found above when I spotted it, it was good to have it answered! Although I'm not sure it makes much sense: it hasn't been eating the poison berries... except it has? :D
It's not an extraordinarily compelling mystery to be honest, so I can see why they cut it. But it does leave a weird Plenty O'Toole-style gap in the film...!
On this point, I've always wondered if the two (!) misspellings (!) of dinosaur names in the movie were a little Easter egg to show how out of touch the JP staff were with what they were doing, or if it was just a screw up.
There are actually quite a lot of bloopers in the first JP, and I'm tempted to view many of them as an odd stylistic commentary on Hammond and his staff, though it's likely not the case. The misspellings though, maybe. There might actually be more than two.
Yes, thematically it serves the purpose of demonstrating how they never really had the control they thought they had over the park. Two no-shows and one sick triceratops. The park was failing even without Nedry. And storywise, it didn’t matter if we or the characters ever learned what had made the trike ill. But the answer, as has been noted, is found in the book: the animal wasn't eating the toxic berries off the bushes but was ingesting them off the ground along with its gizzard stones.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Boy, I wish I could view Dominion as positively as you! I'll go into a second viewing as open-hearted as I always do, even for the releases that disappointed me the most, but this was one rough romp through the prehistoric forest for me.
You do make a good point about Malcolm. He was the most entertaining part of the film for me. I wish he could have been a bigger part of it.
https://collider.com/jurassic-world-dominion-extended-edition-blu-ray-review/
(I obviously share the writer's bafflement at JW:D's reviews)
Yes, I think this is what it is too. The film has Hammond say "we spared no expense" and then goes on to showcase the myriad expenses that were spared in their hurry to get dinos up and running.