Jurassic Park isn't good either. But at least it didn't have such an offensive archetype in its female lead iirc. Or intelligent dinosaur gang wars with raptors who don't eat humans.
JP3 certainly isn't great, but at least it feels like a movie. JW in comparison is an incoherent lump of CGI-induced commercial pandering.
I don't know, I don't see it....It's a retread of the first for sure, but so was Force Awakens. I don't see how it was commercial pandering.... It had a story and worked in all the moments people wanted. You can say the story is shitty but I don't get other criticisms.
It is a response a lot of people use to deflect criticism of films they like. No one was going into Jurassic Park 4 expecting a deep meditation on the meaning of life, and no one grades it that way. People were comparing it to the previous films and other monster movies.
Comparing it to the other Jurassic films and monster movies? They are all corny and have their issues though. I think nostalgia and people being tired of reboots/remakes influenced people's enjoyment of this movie.
I would say that ninety percent of people would look at the original and the new one and say that the original is considerably better. Nostalgia is obviously part of it, but that is the new film's fault; it only exists as a loose remake of the original.
The original Jurassic Park is an excellent example of craft and personally I think the greatest movie ever in the Disaster Movie genre (though its inclusion in that category is admittedly arguable).
Someone drinking a Coca-Cola (with the label facing the screen) while working outside in the middle of the day in Central America (actually complaining about the heat a minute later) was the most hilarious part of this most recent viewing.
Spielberg's understanding of how to suggest before he shows, and his ability to plot action scenes, is seen nowhere in Jurassic World. The entire lead-up to the T-Rex (not seeing him the first time, the footsteps, the fence following) is master filmmaking.
Exactly. There's a reason so many shots leading up to the T-Rex attack are among the most parodied and instantly identifiable in 90s film. They're just that distinctive. The T-Rex's attack on these people you've gotten to know is tense and has stakes. The crowd of pterodactyls wreaking indiscriminate havoc on a crowd of helpless theme park attendees could (and should) be horrifying but instead is impossible to discern anything going on, and when you can tell, it's gross, gleeful and sexist. It's Roland Emmerich level murder-porn and it being compared to the original is just ludicrous.
Something that modern action filmmakers do not understand is that the higher stakes in terms of body count and destruction actually makes the dramatic stakes lower. In Jurassic Park, the park has been emptied due to a storm, and the worst-case scenario is that the heroes are killed. We know that the animals will not escape the island and would eventually be put down, but we care so much about Grant and others that it feels bigger. Other than the assistant, the victims in the big attack are completely faceless and nameless. Since someone brought up Star Wars, it is similar to how the destruction of Alderaan was more effective than the new film's destruction of eighteen planets at once.
Absolutely. The raptors are revealed similarly throughout the duration of the film, and their first full reveal makes for one of the best jump scares in cinema. Trevorrow's sense of delayed gratification was practically nonexistent by comparison.
He tries to do it with the Indominus, but the way he shoots action scenes you never really get that much of an idea of what it looks like, or even what differentiates it from a T. Rex. He prefers close angles with shaking where Spielberg knew when to go wide and when to cut in for human reactions. Even in something like Lost World, which people didn't like, the scene with the raptors in the tall grass or the reveal of the second T. Rex when the guy with the truck was trying to save the trailer are better than all of Jurassic World.
That is a good point. That was ridiculous how all those planets exploding didn't hit any dramatic notes really.