Jurassic World

I felt sorry for the monster in this film as soon as I knew this movie would not base its appeal on introducing something new, but in showing itself in opposition to something so monstrously presumptuous, and in curdling back in the lap of already laid out accomplishment in rapturous fealty. The movie begins in suggesting that crowds of viewers were beginning to be bored by just plain dinosaurs, and profit required new, dazzling creations; brazen, even criminally bold, experimentation. But what we feel as we use members of this crowd as our avatars is not exactly boredom but the pleasure in being bored at something that really should bedazzle. We wonder for a moment if a real Jurassic Park was created, if, simply by our experience of watching the films, we might feel so grand — accomplished — to be a bit blasé at the sight of even reptile titans! This is a feeling to want to loiter in, lounge in, not necessarily to cast off quickly to once again be innocents to the unknown. 

The kids use their VIP status to stray outside the permitted areas, but the sequence that follows isn’t exactly unaccustomed to us: the big scary new dinosaur locks her jaws around the vehicle the kids are strapped to; they release their attachment to the vehicle, letting it preoccupy itself for a moment with the now peopleless contraption in her mouth; and then they move a few hundred steps before braving a cliff-jump into a body of water: in short, its the sequence out of Avatar, when Jake Sully sheds his antagonist, the giant cat monster, who equally as much as this dinosaur also takes a few very close snipes at her prey, risks a bit falling over the cliff herself, as they descend out of reach into the rapids and water. Those thirsting the new should be put off when they’re offered a theme park recreation of a scene made famous elsewhere. Those who don’t really want to stray, those who want to acquaint themselves as extensions of, as properties of, previous greats, would however thrill: they get to go on a chase into the great unknown without any feeling at all that what they’re also doing is abandoning others’ labours. They fled Jurassic into the lap of Avatar. One mother frets losing her children but feels salve in seeing they haven’t found recluse on their own, in self-autonomy, but rather in the lap of another mom.

There’s a short delay before the next great mark of fealty, some filler: a squadron of escaped reptile “birds” laser their interest at fleeing pedestrians, and so we are greeted to a revisit of the scene in Mission Impossible, where a blade — this time the reptile bird’s supinely sharp beak — comes within a hair of dispatching our momentarily caught out protagonist. Then finally our reward of being so partizan to past creations, past greats, who we imagine now not feverishly creating but, like dallying monarchs, basking in a landscape they’ve made their own … and so of course it makes sense that all the awesome meanies in the original film are actually our “friends”: T-Rex and the raptors team up as irritants and capable distractions, to this movie’s monster’s ultimate doom. The monster tried to telepathy the raptors onto her side. But what is a new spun power by an outsider pretending to distinction, when “they’ve” idiotically emerged into a landscape where every peasant met is so eagerly in the mood to taunt, “oh yeah, just see what our bad mamma can do!,” and to see Her riposte as devastating even if in truth it’s spittle to the newly emergent’s torrent. 

The great beast in this movie was doomed by being waged at the very beginning as being something truly new, something cemented in our estimation of her as she tricked her captors into believing she’d climbed her way out of her enclosure — something which suggested she had insight into the particular concerns of her captors: they had previously been fretting the wall’s perhaps insufficient height. Of being able, like the film’s Indiana Jones character is supposed to be capable of, to foresee possibilities that no one else had countenanced. She was doomed by an avenue of life the film wanted granted her, the exhilarating, open-ended one of freely determining exactly where she fits in the food chain, by granting no automatic status to anyone she meets but rather to succumb everyone to being testable and possibly dispatch-worthy: no way to cement a previously established social order this! past kings will fall! commercial people will displace aristocrats! anarchy and a new order!

So this poor sucker, sodden with everything that would exhilarate a sane, non-regressing society, as something to behold, becomes amongst the audience flocking to this film something to cheer being methodically sacrificed. For what is this film than the new idea being bated, bit by bit, one dumb dinosaur herbivore “breadcrumb” after one dumb dinosaur herbivore “breadcrumb,” closer and closer into a giant sacrificial Mesosaurus pit? It’s bright homo sapiens (I had hoped they’d crossed the dinosaur’s genes with maybe Einstein’s, which looked a bit the case at first) lured into a sea where a giant stupid orifice — a shark — can arrogantly presumptuously make a giant casual snack of it. A true tragedy, to be enjoyed only by those who project madly onto the orifice, someone who would hug his mother’s girth as if it was the grandest thing in the world, even while at the door is an invite that would take little him or her closer to something that smacks of adult interest.