But mostly there will be disbelief. Because as the credits roll we see this:
When in what we were really expecting was:
Look him up if you don't get the reference. I can't be expected to do all your homework for you.
Probably followed by:
Yeah, I know the font isn't an exact match. Sue me. Or the guy who made the font. Either's good.
I think it's probably this final kicker more than anything else that truly makes me despise the second Jurassic Park movie. Because god only knows it's not worth wasting any actual hate on. The words "Directed by Steven Spielberg". Not long after followed by the words "Based On The Novel By Michael Crichton". These are people who are generally reputed to simply be BETTER than this. So for something this... inept is the word I keep coming back to. There's simply no reason for this film to be as bad as it is. THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.
And, just for the record, I made a point of tracking down a copy of the novel once I discovered that it had apparently engendered this whole mess. The film is based on the novel in the same way a flaming pile of wreckage is based on a car: Sure, there's a few of the same bits in there, but that doesn't mean it's actually going to work.
This is actually an important point in discussing these sequels, but I'm going to come back to it later, as it's going to be particularly relevant when we start talking about part 3. For now let's concentrate on talking about part 2.
I always thought this was just the noise you make when you're about to throw up, but who am I to argue with google image search?
Where oh where do we even begin? How about at the beginning with a horrible unnatural scene of forced exposition? I mean, I know you've got a limited run time to work with, and you want to get to the dinosaurs, but would it honestly have killed you to cut to maybe extended it by say twenty minutes and tried to build up to things in such a way that ANYTHING that happened actually made sense? Or even better, maybe knock an hour of that fucking interminable truck on a cliff scene?
Seriously, if you want the full effect of watching this movie, just go stare at a soap on a rope for 2 hours, then look up a summary of King Kong.
Actually, this is probably more exciting.
Fun fact: When this film came out I was actually working at a cinema. And no matter what, whenever you checked on the screen it was just three idiots in a truck hanging off a cliff. NO MATTER AT WHAT POINT IN THE RUNTIME IT WAS.
Seriously, it was about all I could remember of the film before I rewatched it. All in all that's probably for the best.
Let us, for a moment, consider what is apparently considered the plot. John Hammond (who is suddenly good now because reasons) sends 4 idiots to the secret other island (which suddenly exists after several years because reasons) to do.... something? Involving a documentary? Maybe? Because all the corporate evil that he didn't actually have in the last film because the actor went for different interpretation of the character than in the novel has been inherited by a random nephew, and now he's planning to... do... something bad? And is allergic to documentaries?
This is the sort of problem we have here. They took a lot from the novel, but they didn't actually bother to take the CONTEXT. And without a firm foundation of any sort of point or plot the whole thing just starts falling apart from the get go.
It does seem kinda unfair to go down the route of continually comparing the film to the book when I didn't do that for the first film. But that's because the first was a good adaptation. Sure, stuff got cut out and things got changed, but that's rather par for the course. You;re moving from one medium to another, of course things will be different. There wouldn't be much point if they weren't. But you still need retain the basic essence of the original work. It has to have the themes and points as well as scenes and characters. And it's the fact that the movie adaptation ignores the themes of the book wholesale that's the real problem.#
Think about it. What's the theme of Jurassic Park? Well, it's got that whole man vs nature thing going on, right? Arrogance in the face of natural forces, over reliance on technology and other such hubris leading to downfall in the face of unstoppable natural forces. That kind of thing. Even I can see that, and I'm an over-opinionated idiot with a palaeontology fixation. But whilst there's slightly more to the book than "hey, that made loads of money. Let's do it again", all the movie actually takes is a couple of set pieces and the idea of there being another island.
And the movie doesn't even NEED there to be another island, since they skipped the part where the army blew the first one up. Why complicate things? If you're going to cleave so strongly to the stuff from the book you don't need couldn't you try taking some of the stuff you DO. You know, LIKE A PLOT?!?!
Let me put it another way. Why is Ian Malcom the hero in this story?
Aside from raw sex appeal I mean.
Because he's the hero in the book? Sure, kinda. But consider this: In the original Jurassic Park novel HE DIES. He get's retconned back to life for the novel, sure. But why choose him over Alan Grant, a character far more qualified for running around in a dinosaur infested wilderness.
In both the book and film, Malcoms' role is, basically, to be run over by a T-Rex and then gibber about chaos theory. And whilst they toned it down some in the first film it's interesting to note that this is what he does in BOTH books.
He's not an action hero. He's there because Micheal Crichton thinks "because chaos" is a good excuse for everything to go wrong. And this is ME saying this. Entropy is the nearest thing I have to a religious conviction, and even I can see that in the battle of man vs nature Jurassic Park presents us, once you've eliminated the "because Dennis Nedry is a dick" clause, Man wins.
Just so we're crystal clear here, there are very people who can say "because chaos" and actually get away with it.
I.E. only people with a credit in these, and possibly Micheal Moorcocke
This is another one of those important points. The Jurassic Park franchise is actually a lot like the various Silurian stories in Doctor Who, in that the only reason everything keeps going wrong is because there's always one idiot determined to ruin it for everyone else.
I suppose the problem in this film is that that one person is actually EVERYBODY. Actually, I tell a lie. There is ONE sensible character in there.
The psychotic, adrenaline crazed evil hunter. THIS is the most likeable character in the entire film. Because he's the only one that you don't immediately want to smash in the face with a shovel. Everyone else is, frankly, asking for it.
Consider, for example, so called expert Dr Harding. A woman who will lecture everyone about not interfering with the natural order, and then go out of her way to piss off every Dinosaur she sees by interfering with it's babies. A woman so stupid that she will lecture someone on both the fact that a T-Rex has a highly developed sense of smell and the fact that she has personally pissed it off, and the go swanning about the jungle drenched in the blood of said T-Rexes infant.
It's just as well she never got eaten. It's have the same effect on the poor dinosaur as drinking a mercury milkshake through a lead straw.
Then we have out vaguely defined super secret eco-terrorist, with his even more vaguely defined goals of..... Ummm..... Getting everyone killed? Seriously, think about it. Every single casualty in this film is directly attributable to the actions off this one man.
Although I think you'll find the technical term is asshole.
Who is it thinks it'd be a great idea to let all those captured Dinosaurs go on a rampage? More to the point, WHY did he think that was a good idea? I know you get some psychotic assholes in the more militant extremes of the animal rights movement, but this is a bit more direct than wrecking the local ecosystem because you let all the stoats out. What, exactly did he think this would achieve outside of making the gun toting survivors rather angry? I mean, it's not like they could just come back and do it again because they own the island and everything on it or anything, right?
And THEN he decides to bring a baby T-Rex home. Because there's no way THAT could horribly backfire.
I know 2 halves of someone who might disagree with that sentiment.
And then, THEN, having wrecked eveyones shit as much as possible he decides that the best thing to do whilst on the run from hordes of psychotic man eaters is to start stealing peoples bullets?!?!?
WHY?!?! What possible purpose does this serve? All it does is result in a bafflingly tacked on King Kong rip off homage which get's a load more people killed. This doesn't just make no sense, it makes NEGATIVE SENSE. I think this one characters existence has actually gone back in time and replaced all the dialogue in the first film with fart noises or something.
Although I am obviously using the term "character" in the very loosest terms here. It's not like he actually comes with a personality or motivation or anything. He just does stupid, horrible things because.... errrmm...
Sigh, okay, fine. Because Chaos.
And I haven't even actually mentioned Malcoms utterly ineffectual flailing around which helps no-one and achieves NOTHING. Or even worse the obnoxious child who randomly uses the power of gymnastics to save the rec center fight velociraptors.
And these are supposed to be the HEROES.
Not that the villains are much better. They're just as stupid and ineffectual. I mean, never mind who the hell listens to a walkman in the middle of a dangerous jungle. Who the hell even BRINGS ONE? And never mind the fact that they all go to sleep in the middle of aforesaid dangerous jungle without posting any sort of lookout, how the hell can anyone not notice a FUCKING T-REX in the middle of their camp until it's already too late?
SHUSH NOW HUMAN MORSELS. I AM THE TOOTH FAIRY. THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR.
More to the point, and I want you to think carefully here, what exactly is supposed to be so terrible about the bad guys? I mean, they're just presented as being vaguely evil because.... Ummm... they work for a large corporation? Because they are, in some unspecified fashion, not on the side of nature? Call me old fashioned, but I need something a little more concrete than the vague feeling that maybe Captain Planet might not get on with all of them.
"You're a dick, you're a dick, you're a TOTAL dick...."
To be fair the CEO guy IS pretty much a Captain Planet villain, only without any pollution producing superpowers. And okay, they did turn up in vehicles straight out of a toy line.
Seriously, there are G.I. Joe characters that would be embarrassed to drive this thing.
But other than that, what's so bad about them? Sure, there are animal rights issues to be considered regarding the treatment of the animals, but there are legal bodies that deal with that sort of thing. How does trying to save thousands of peoples jobs by bringing joy to children around the world mean that any of these people deserve bloody screaming death?
No, don't say it.
Ultimately I guess it comes down to whether or not you subscribe to the theory that Dinosaurs project some sort of localised field that accelerates entropy for some reason. I'm not actually aware of any fossil evidence to support such a hypothesis. And let us not forget, these people did specifically come for the HERBIVORES. Only resorting to pursuing a giant carnivore when all other options had been reduced to molten slag by terrorist activity, and in ignorance of the beasts magical powers.
Be fair, who'd have predicted that they'd capture a VAMPIRE T-REX.
When you think about it, there can be no creature more confused than a Vampire Tyrannosaur. I mean, you try explaining to a creature that doesn't actually differentiate between flesh and bone when it's eating how it is that it's supposed to subsist only on blood. You can only hope that the time it spends laughing at you gives you enough time to run away before it bites you into easily swallowable chunks. And what about it's other powers? A vampire is said to be able to transform at will into a wolf or bat. Both of which are A) Mammals, and B) not due to evolve for several million years. How the hell is the poor T-Rex supposed to know how any of that works?
So, yeah, let's try and move things on a bit and talk about the random bit tacked onto the end. What I suppose is most interesting about this is that you watch it and come away with the distinct impression that it wasn't part of the original film and was just added on to pad the runtime or something. And then you watch the extras and discover that THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS.
Now, bringing Dinosaurs into civilisation is not a bad idea per se. If nothing else it provides a nice frame of reference for just how large these animals really were. But there needs to be a little more to it than just thinking it'd look cool at the eleventh hour. I suppose the one advantage of it being such a late addition is that I can pretend to myself that the conspicuous absence of Mr Idiot McEco-Terroist can be explained by him being sent directly from the island to jail and most definitely NOT passing go.
So anyway, as I'm sure many other websites have had fun pointing out, how was it exactly that the crew on the boat got killed? If there's one thing a Tyrannosaur is noted for, it's not easily fitting into small enclosed spaces. Such as through doors, into corridors and the wheelhouses of ships. And yet dismembered crew parts lay strewn all over the shop. More to the point, how was it exactly that the rex thence managed to seal itself back up in the hold?
How did that get there? Forget me own thingy if weren't whatsit.
Well, as I already said, the rex was a vampire. Only reasonable explanation. It obviously used it's mist form to escape the hold, the transformed into a swarm of confused proto-mammals possibly ancestral to the common rat, and dismembered the crew that way. Somehow. Maybe the proto-vermin had big knives or something, I don't know. Then, mistaking the hold for a coffin it mist formed back inside for a bit of a rest whilst it waited for the boat to crash. Unfortunately it wasn't actually heading for Whitby so it's determined re-enactment of a passage from Bram Stokers Dracula was rather spoiled. But no points off for trying.
Don't look at me like that. If you've got a better explanation for how the crew managed to get themselves dismembered I'd love to hear it. Time travelling Possums from the 81st century equipped with the latest combat blenders perhaps?
To be fair, that would make as much sense as anything else in this sorry excuse for a film.
So anyway, T-rex goes for a wander, then goes back on the boat and instead of having it summarily executed after killing a bunch of people and causing untold amounts of property damage we instead decide to ship it back home? Okay, maybe they couldn't find a big enough bit of garlic at such short notice. But who the hell would actually volunteer to drive the damn boat after it's been conclusively proven to contain a VAMPIRE T-REX? One with the ability to summon Homicidal Possums from the future?
Actually, whilst we're on the subject, what good exactly do they think a full naval escort is going to do? It's the middle of the ocean dude, where do you think it's gonna go exactly?
ARG. This film makes me CROSS. It doesn't have a story. It has a series of plot holes, and just kinda hopes if it drops you through them fast enough you won't notice. I'm not actually sure I've managed to cover half the problems with the film here, and I've already been at this far longer than I would have liked. I mean, have I mentioned sustainable biomass and breeding populations in island environments? Because that's actually a REALLY important point.
I know it might sound like the sort of irritating nitpicking that I seem to enjoy so much to talk about these sort of things, but believe it or not there is more to it than that. Sure, it's fun to speculate about what sort of area the island would actually have to encompass in order to sustain the animals depicted, especially considering their dependence on certain foodstuffs in order to cope with their inbuilt lysine deficiency. But it's actually a significant point of difference between the novel and the book. Because there the scientists weren't being sent to the island to document a stable ecosystem. They were going to study extinction first hand. Because the ecosystem WASN'T stable. There was no way a small island can sustain such a diversity of creatures at that sort of scale. Things were already breaking down, systems were collapsing. THAT'S why Ian Malcom was the main character in the book. Because he was trying to illustrate all the chaos mumbo-jumbo the author was making him continually spout with a practical demonstration. Although if he'd really wanted to publish a paper on the nature of things going to shit he should have just put himself in charge of the making of documentary for this film.
Whilst in the original the flaws are glossed over by the direction and pacing, here we have the opposite effect. The whole thing is so woefully misjudged that each new problem simply magnifies the last even further. It is, frankly, 100% fucking amateur hour.
And STEVEN SPIELBERG directed it. The whole thing comes across as a cheap cash in, rushed through production with no real thought to the final product aside from the fact that it would have the words "Jurassic Park" written on it. AND STEVEN SPIELBERG DIRECTED IT. Not some random guy pulled in because he was cheap, or stupid enough to take on such an obviously flawed script. Not a maker of B-movie dreck hoping to move up the big time. No, this was produced by a man many would laud as one of the greatest movie directors of all time.
What really get's me about all this is George Lucas. The amount of hate and bile he's had to endure over the prequel trilogy is, frankly, staggering. God knows I've gone there myself. But whilst I'd never describe those movies as anything but bad, they're at least bad in a fun, entertaining and educational fashion. And yet Spielberg pulls this piece of shit on an unsuspecting public and nobody bats a fucking eyelid. This isn't a film that's a fun sort of bad. It's JUST BAD. Utterly misjudged on almost every level, the script is abysmal, the pacing is completely off, there's not the slightest hint of cohesive storytelling. It's just painful. It's like somebody heard someone else say "everything's better with dinosaurs" and took it as a challenge.
If we're dropping the hyperbole for a moment then I'm sure there are worse films. Indeed, given the state of film-making over the past decade or so I'm sure there are a lot worse. But this SHOULDN'T be this bad. It's (allegedly) based on a book by a good author. It has an (allegedly) great director. It has a good cast. It has a great SFX crew. You'd think some of that might actually count for something.
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