Left Behind

Year: 1981

Director: Graham Baker

Cast: Sam Neill, Rossano Brazzi, Don Gordon 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

You can listen to my full review of Omen III: The Final Conflict on Scream 101 right here.

TL;DR: Omen III: The Final Conflict is a film with some brutal moments, but pulls its punches too often to be satisfying apocalyptic mayhem.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count:

Reviews In This Series

The Omen (Donner, 1976)
Damien: Omen II (Taylor, 1978)
Omen III: The Final Conflict (Baker, 1981)

Rabbit Season

Year: 2018

Director: Will Gluck

Cast: James Corden, Rose Byrne, Domhnall Gleeson

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Over the past month, my heart has warmed considerably to children's entertainment. After being bowled over by Babe, Paddington and Paddington 2 swept in with a double decker blow of adorable earnestness that laid me flat. I've always been open to watching kids' movies, but I'm typically a hard sell, so I was wondering if my resistance was finally beginning to crumble. So Peter Rabbit came at the perfect time to see if my dulled resistance just needed a non-masterpiece as a whetstone.

As an updated feature based on a classic British children's story, it has a very similar pedigree to Paddington, so what could go wrong?

Peter Rabbit begins with a story you know well. Mischievous bunny rabbit Peter (James Corden), with the support of his sisters Flopsy (Margot Robbie, for some reason), Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki, for slightly more understandable reasons), and Cottontail (Daisy Ridley, for no reason whatsoever) among other woodland creatures, sneaks into the garden of Old Farmer McGregor (Sam Neill, for a reason so nanoscopic that scientists are still debating its existence) to steal some delicious vegetables. So far, so familiar. Until the part where Peter Rabbit tries to shove a carrot up the old man's ass and then he dies of a heart attack. Yeah, I don't remember Beatrix Potter jotting down that one.

Bring in the younger, sexier cast! The rabbits have always been cared for by McGregor's sensitive painter neighbor Bea (Rose Byrne), but when McGregor's fussy, city-boy nephew Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson) moves in, the rabbits are frustrated to discover that the two are falling in love. Thomas has managed to convince Bea that he is a wildlife lover, but in the meantime, he is engaging in a war against Peter Rabbit and his cronies, attempting to keep them off the property he has inherited and is attempting to sell.

Also, his laundry bill must be insane, considering all the produce that gets smashed into the fabric.

Peter Rabbit is actually two movies that are constantly warring with one another. The first is a delightful romantic comedy starring a pair absurdly underrated and hilarious actors. The second is an execrable "family friendly" hash of violent slapstick and clunky gags starring irritating CGI monstrosities. Peter Rabbit obviously only desires to be the latter, but the former keeps accidentally slipping in and reminding you how pleasurable this whole experience had the opportunity to be.

But let's focus on that good - perhaps even great - movie for the time being. Domhnall Gleeson is in terrific form here, flipping between big physical comedy and subtle, character-based humor without breaking a sweat. There's a sequence where he attempts to understand birdwatching that frankly belongs on his future lifetime achievement reel. Rose Byrne is given considerably less to do, considering that her character is clueless of the entire plot, but she provides an excellent foil for Gleeson's antics, and has a couple standout moments of her own.

The human plot is so swell that a huge belly laugh line is even given to a taxi driver character who appears in two scenes. There's more than enough to go around here.

But I literally can't even find a proper still of Rose Byrne, so that just goes to show how little the filmmakers value this film's strongest elements.

Ay, there's the rub. There's no way Peter Rabbit wasn't going to be about Peter Rabbit, but when he hops into the frame he brings with him everything that's unbearable and generic about the movie. At least the anthropomorphic animal CGI is mostly fine (save for one scene involving the rabbits in a football huddle, which we see at an angle that's downright criminal in its ugliness), but the second he opens his mouth you know you've been locked into an iron maiden of subpar children's movie material.

James Corden's performance style is what makes him perfect for a late night show: every word out of his mouth drips with the desperate demand that you find him charming and lovable. Honestly, this isn't a liability for a kids' flick, but when you combine that with the fact that the character is an unmitigated asshole, it's incredibly grating, like rubbing sandpaper directly on your eyes. For some reason, the screenwriters seem to think that the height of comedy is having a character make a joke, then immediately undermine it by either explaining it to death or making a quip about just how wacky they're being. 

Every gag is a one-two punch; an unfunny joke, then a follow-up that saps whatever minuscule scrap of energy it had to its name. Then there are all the requisite cliché details that come with being a movie for children in the 2010's: a million unnecessary dance sequences, random jokes "for the adults" (including a horribly misguided "pour one out for a fallen homie" gag that is repeated more than once, for heaven's sake), and an obnoxiously trendy soundtracks full of on-the-nose needle drops, including the most inescapable songs of the day (most egregiously "Feel It Still" by Portugal the Man, which is the most dangerously saccharine earworm this side of "Can't Stop the Feeling!" and "Happy").

None of them are BAD songs per se, but you wouldn't want to meet one in a darkened alley.

All of this is interspersed with incredibly violent slapstick that is just plain cruel (there's a gag about inflicting anaphylactic shock that has no business being in a movie not directed by, say, Quentin Tarantino) and occasionally nonsensical (a scene about McGregor being pelted with fruit while attempting to hold a conversation with Bea really tests the limits of Rose Byrne's ability to play oblivious). 

In short, almost nothing about these scenes that form 70 percent of the movie works on any level. There's the occasional spot of brilliance, like the 2D animated flashback sequence that uses the aesthetic of the original novels to tremendous effect, or a montage of Old McGregor's unhealthy choices that shows the filmmakers probably at least saw the trailer to Paddington. But in the end, it's all for naught. It's a noxious, irritating experience made even more painful by the fact that it mars what could have honestly been a pretty fun movie about two humans navigating a relationship, though it's quite self-evident that that was in no way the movie anybody wanted to make.

I'm happy those splendid moments are there, but there's no way they're worth sitting though the rest of this drivel. Also, on the Babe front, there's a "that'll do, pig" joke that made me want to screech with righteous fury. Rule of thumb: Don't strive to remind audiences of movies that blow yours so far out of the water you've entered the Earth's orbit.

TL;DR: Peter Rabbit is an irritating kids' movie, with just enough of a much better movie peeking through that it's not entirely a slog.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1170

I'm Sick And Tired Of These Conspiracy-Fighting Commuters On This Monday To Friday Train

Year: 2018

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson 

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jaume Collet-Serra is best known - by those who are aware of him at all - for his inescapable work with Liam Neeson over the past decade (Non-Stop, Run All Night, Unknown), and yet I've seen basically every item in his filmography save for those. And from the angle I'm using, I enjoy him very much. House of Wax was a gleefully gory, surprisingly solid mid-2000's remake, Orphan was a fizzy and delightful B-picture, and The Shallows was a perfect summer movie that proves the killer shark genre still has some juice left in it. So I was excited to explore his newest film, now that I've really had the chance to get down and dirty with him.

Let's just say I'll gladly sign up for his next horror effort, but I'll need a LOT of convincing before I approach another one of these action projects.

In The Commuter, Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is an Irish ex-pat who keeps a crummy job at an insurance agency to support his wife Karen (Elizabeth McGovern) and son Danny (Dean-Charles Chapman), who figure into the story exactly as little as you might expect. One day, after getting fired from his job, a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) approaches him on the train, offering him $100,000 if he can find the person on the train who does not belong, who is currently going under the alias Prynne. He isn't told what will happen to this person once he finds them, but one can assume they're not receiving a giant novelty check.

Wondering how ol' Neeson's gonna punchify his way through this one? Well, you see, it turns out the man is an ex-cop, so he relies on his skills, his ex-partner Alex Murphy (Patrick Wilson), and his relationship with the local chief (Sam Neill) to find Prynne, evade capture by the increasingly suspicious train authorities, and fight his way through various goon-shaped obstacles as it turns out Vera is just one head of a massive hydra conspiracy that has eyes and ears everywhere. But once he finds his quarry, he will be faced with this moral quandary: should he save this person from harm or save his family, who at some point during this whole shebang have their lives vaguely threatened.

Look, this whole movie is basically just Liam Neeson Mad Libs; they pretty much expect you to be able to fill in the blanks as needed.

"I'm 60 years of age!" shouts Liam Neeson in an early scene, helpfully underscoring just how useless the script is going to be the entire time. It's almost quaint, the way the dialogue just plain fails to sound like anything a human being has said since the beginning of time. I'd perhaps even call it Agatha Christie-esque, if I was feeling at all charitable, which I am certainly not. 

Because Liam Neeson needs as much information as possible to further the twists and turns of the mystery of who Prynne is, each and every suspect immediately spouts a wealth of detail and insight into their motivations when even slightly prodded. Even if they have up to this point found Neeson to be a frightening and erratic presence that they want to avoid at all costs, they spill the beans on their darkest secrets like they're characters in a Nancy Drew video game and he handed them the right item to unlock their clues. 

Nobody here is an actual dimensional character, least of all this "conspiracy" that fuels the entire conflict. At no point do we get a sense of who they are or what they want, except in the sense that conspiracies are Bad. This vast city-wide crime ring is also completely forgotten by the time the plot tangles itself into such a tight knot the movie is forced to end so it doesn't strangle itself. But I shouldn't bother myself too hard about it, because they don't seem particularly competent anyway. The vague threats to his family that I mentioned earlier are exactly that: his family is mentioned in a phone call but never actually directly threatened. I guess Vera hoped the power of implication would override the fact that they have absolutely zero leverage over this guy, who literally never even remotely considers the possibility that he should stop being a hero to save his loved ones.

I mean, he's had his fair share of action movie families, so I guess it's easy to forget why you care about this particular one.

Jaume Collet-Serra as a visual artist does bring a little more pep and zazz to the proceedings than your average workaday Joe Blow, especially in an opening montage that zips through a week of commuting, showcasing the monotonous, yet subtly different patterns that a weekday warrior can fall into. But no matter how many times he Murder on the Orient Expresses his train by zooming through the entire length, or moves the frame through a tiny hole in a punched ticket, there's no avoiding the fact that this is a pretty run-of-the-mill experience through and through.

The Commuter never shakes that sense of fatigue, especially when it's running through the too-long list of options for Prynne. The characters aren't memorable enough to capture the attention (save for the obligatory asshole banker character who must appear in all movies starring a random scattering of people from all walks of life, who provides Liam Neeson the opportunity to make the most clunky defense of the American middle class that the world of cinema has ever seen), and there's just so many to get through that it just feels endless. 

And when the third act finally kicks in, it makes such a bizarre hash out of police operating procedure and character motivations that it's almost like you slipped into an entirely different, substantially worse movie that goes on for even longer. At least the opening hour had a kind of manic energy thanks to Liam Neeson's natural gravitas, but that all drains directly into the dirt long before the credits roll.

The Commuter is a better January action choice than Proud Mary ever was, as you can potentially have a reasonably amount of fun by turning your brain off and taking the ride. But it would probably be more fun to just take an actual train trip somewhere. It would certainly be more stimulating.

TL;DR: The Commuter weaves a tangled web of plot that even Liam Neeson can't escape from.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1096

Popcorn Kernels: Q4 2016 Review Purge

In which I muck out my annual New Year’s backlog with mini-reviews of 2016 movies that just barely missed the cut.

Passengers

Year: 2016

Director: Morten Tyldum

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Two interstellar travelers are awoken from cryosleep 90 years before they reach their destination.

Passengers doesn’t know what it is. Is it a chamber piece about human durability? Is it a romance about how the love between two people can overcome all obstacles? Is it a soft sci-fi action film about two people stranded in the cold expanse of space? Passengers at times attempts to be any and all of these things, but here’s the secret. I know what it is: It’s a feature-length Apple commercial.

OK, not literally. Literally it’s a feature-length Sony commercial, as evidenced by some truly hilarious intergalactic product placement. But what I mean by this is that Passengers is full of immaculate creamy white textures and burbling electronic music, is exceedingly pleasant, and lingers in the memory for exactly 0.35 seconds. This ain’t a bad thing. An unchallenging film is sometimes just what you need, and the simplicity of Passengers allows it to act as a clear lens, magnifying the heat of the two stars burning bright at its center.

Sure, it’s stupid. Its infrequent feints into action territory come at the expense of any sort of logic or coherence, and its finale is mind-numbingly implausible. But it takes itself lightly enough that the goofy excess becomes joyful sci-fi window dressing, a loopy analogue to the struggle of the two characters at its heart. And Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are good in this movie, insofar as they just stand still and emit charisma as good movie stars are able to do.

Basically, whenever Passengers tries to have a plot, it threatens to rattle apart (especially during moments of Weyland Utani-esque foreshadowing that thud to the floor like it’s an electromagnet and go absolutely nowhere). But it excels at big, sloppy sci-fi spectacle, especially during the occasional moments where it remembers that gravity in space is like, kinda funky.

It’s shallow, but it’s far from a waste of time. And as loathe as I am to admit it, Thomas Newman’s score – which feels a little like it was written for a silicon valley corporate training video – stirred something in my godforsaken, electro-loving soul. Passengers is probably your best bet in theaters right now if you’ve already caught up with Rogue One and Moana and want to spend an evening away from the cold.

Rating: 7/10

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Year: 2016

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Sam Neill, Julian Dennison, Rima Te Wiata 

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A man and his foster son get lost in the New Zealand bush, inciting a nationwide manhunt that propels them to hide out in the wilderness.

Remind me again why the don’t set all fairy tales in New Zealand? Hunt for the Wilderpeople takes after Lord of the Rings as a visual exploration of just how f**king majestic the New Zealand landscape can be, and although it’s set in our reality it becomes just as riveting a fantasy. It doesn’t seek to pull away from its storybook influences at all. Hell, there are chapter titles dividing up the ten major segments. This is a daggum fairy tale and it is gorgeous.

In essence, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a tale of two dissimilar people who are thrown together to become unlikely friends, but it’s so much more than that. Sometimes it’s a wry, silly adventure movie with a child’s sense of wonder. Sometimes it’s a scalpel-sharp satire about societal norms and what constitutes a traditional family. Sometimes it’s a lush, large-scale epic with Tangerine Dream-esque synth cues quivering over the soundtrack. It’s a lot of things, but what they all have in common is that they’re pretty brilliant. 

Sam Neil has played a curmudgeon who needs to open his heart to a child before and he does it well here, but as a scene partner, Julian Dennison blows Jurassic Park’s Lexi and Tim out of the water like they’re rubber ducks. The young actor perfectly captures the character’s arc, nailing the nuance of his prickly exterior and displaying a world of pain and emoting on his face as he slowly lets his guard down. And comic timing must be genetic, because someone should have suffered through decades of training to be able to deliver jokes that well.

Oh yeah, did I mention this film was funny? It’s earnest and fantastical with the occasional sharp edge, but it’s also downright hilarious. Every character is a tile in a perfect mosaic, and every piece is in its place to deliver a wonderful cinematic experience. It’s rare that you see such sharp comedy paired with equally luscious visuals, but Taika Waititi is working magic here. It’s just a delightful film, and you should definitely make seeking it out a priority.

Rating: 9/10

Demon

Year: 2016

Director: Marcin Wrona

Cast: Itay Tiran, Agnieszka Zulewska, Andrzej Grabowski 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man becomes possessed by a dybbuk on the evening of his wedding.

For hardcore film fans, the final week of December is known as “cram week,” where we scramble to watch all the films of the year that we missed in order to properly flesh out our Top 10 lists (and, as you might notice, mine in particular requires a lot of fleshing out). I discovered that essentially my entire cram list was made up of foreign films, which makes sense because they’re not so easy to find in your local Cineplex: Japan’s Sadako vs. Kayako, Norway’s The Wave, South Korea’s The Wailing… But at the expense of the others, I chose a Polish export called Demon and here’s why.

1) It’s a tale about a dybbuk, a Jewish demon that doesn’t get much coverage in modern horror. 2) As arthousey as it looked, it also seemed like it would be a devastatingly chilling slow burn. And 3) First-time director Marcin Wrona committed suicide at the festival where this film debuted, and I wanted to honor his fist and last film. Plus, that story is so macabre and tragic, it’s like catnip for the horror community.

Let’s address the elephant in the room right off the bat: Demon is barely a horror film. Frankly, there’s more comedy than there is horror (pretty solid comedy at that, especially involving the drunkard town doctor and an impatient priest), but neither tone is sustained for too long either way. Demon is a very European film, content to glower at its audience with pallid, grey cinematography and a snail’s sense of pacing and dialogue.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The subtextual layering of Demon is phenomenal, beginning with the stress of going through an intense personal crisis on a day where you’re the center of attention and ending at a truly devastating reflection on the erasure of Jewish culture in Poland, a society still shattered by the lingering effects of the Holocaust (delivered in a heart-wrenching moment by an otherwise unassuming wedding guest who subtly emerges as the best performer of the entire piece.) It’s like being pummeled by a swinging log. There are long periods where nothing is touching you, then – WHAM! – the impact crushes you with freight train force.

Demon does very many things well, but they’re scattered throughout a story that feels rather aimless. It’s ambiguous and opaque in a way that seems almost aggressive, and the truly stellar moments are few and far between. While I was affected by these moments, I don’t feel like I can reasonably recommend the movie and the effort it requires to sift through its tonal doldrums. Still, it’s something you don’t see every day and I’m glad I had the opportunity.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1325

New Year's Resolutions: And Another Thing

Just when you thought it was over… My implacable backlog continues to grow, necessitating another slate of mini reviews.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Year: 1999
Director: Trey Parker
Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman
Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The kids of South Park become obsessed with a vulgar Canadian movie, prompting a parental crusade against Canada that erupts into all-out war.

South Park: The Movie. It’s just like South Park the show, only bigger! If you like the show, you’ll love the movie! Otherwise, steer very clear. I could just end my review there, honestly, but I would like to take this time to commend Trey Parker and Matt Stone for being two of the leading musical theatre songwriters of our generation. That statement sounds less ironic following the success of The Book of Mormon, but the fact remains that the duo has been writing incredibly rewarding musical theatre essentially since their careers began.

In addition to ramping up the vulgarity and offensiveness of their show, the movie also expanded their fairly frequent lyrical moments into a full scale musical extravaganza that’s just as much Les Misérables as it is South Park. That is, if Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg had seen fit to include a truckload more F-bombs. With an endless array of catchy tunes including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” the über-catchy “What Would Bryan Boitano Do,” and the downright genius, reprise-laden “La Resistance (Medley),” SP:BLaU is legitimately one of the better original movie musicals of all time.

Fun music with a sharp political agenda is most certainly an ironclad reason to recommend South Park, although the plot sequences do lack a bit of the thrust required to render the film itself a true blue classic.

Rating: 7/10

My Soul to Take

Year: 2010
Director: Wes Craven
Cast: Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Denzel Whitaker
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Seven kids were born prematurely on the same night a notorious serial killer died. Now they’re being hunted down on their 16th birthday. Could one of them carry his reincarnated soul?

I love Wes Craven and end to appreciate his works, good or bad, but boy am I glad that My Soul to Take didn’t wind up being his final film. His first self-penned script in nearly a decade and a half, My Soul to Take certainly contains nuggets of his typically idiosyncratic ideas, but it flops in its execution. Craven is nothing if not a skilled storyteller, but as a 70-year-old man, it becomes understandably difficult to write teen dialogue and situations. His script is littered with sub-Diablo Cody slanginess and a nigh-on incomprehensible story flow. It’s like one of those arcade games where your quarter bounces randomly down the pegs, with every turn almost exclusively going somewhere unpredictable and frustrating.

There is a lot to dislike about My Soul to Take, all of which I heartily do. The killer is everything Craven’s villains never were: Vulgar, crude, and loudmouthed. The less hardcore mindset he acquired as he grew older is queasily unsuited to bring this character to life, and his direction leans a little too heavily on MTV-style quick flashes and arbitrary slomo. It’s a garbled mess with subtext that pretty clearly announces that he’d rather be out bird watching than working on this film. Every genius has their duds, and their willingness to try new things make my appreciation for them even stronger, but damn is this ever a flabby, sputtering dud if I ever saw one.

Body Count: 12

1. Sarah is killed offscreen.
2. Doctor is shot in the head.
3. Ambulance Driver explodes.
4. Kay is stabbed in the gut and tossed into the river.
5. Penelope has her throat slit.
6. Brandon is stabbed in the gut.
7. Brittany is stabbed to death.
8. Quinn has his neck broken offscreen.
9. May is killed offscreen.
10. Cop is stabbed in the back.
11. Jerome is stabbed in the chest.
12. Alex is stabbed in the gut.

Rating: 3/10

Jurassic Park III

Year: 2001
Director: Joe Johnston
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Dr. Alan Grant is tricked into visiting Isla Sorna by a rich couple who want to save their stranded son.

So, the third Jurassic Park movie. This is the one that absolutely nobody talks about, so I was definitely apprehensive. Fortunately, no JP movie could be worse than The Lost World with its quiet bongo antics so I was in for a treat. I didn’t love it with quite the spittle of Friend Hunter over at Kinemalogue, but I certainly feel it doesn’t deserve its ignominy. It’s a popcorn flick through and through, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t worth a watch.

The stunning action setpieces that typically define these movies are back in full force, with a third act that leaps from stellar moment to stellar moment like stones across a stream. JPIII knocks its characters down, slits them up, drags them through the mud, attempts to drown them for good measure, and still comes back for seconds. It’s an exhilarating whirl, like being trapped in a washing machine. As an overall story it’s a little more generic, but it does the trick, bringing an estranged family together with the power of Amblin.

It’s got its action, a healthy sprinkling of comedy bits, a splash of theme about paleontology becoming defunct no that real life dinos are alive and stomping… There’s naught to complain about. It’s certainly tackier than the original masterpiece, and a talking raptor dream sequence is just about one of my worst movie watching moments of the whole year, but it’s a fun jaunt back into Crichton’s world, minus his heavy-handed political bleating.

Rating: 7/10

Getting Go: The Go Doc Project

Year: 2013
Director: Cory Krueckeberg
Cast: Tanner Cohen, Matthew Camp, Ramon O. Torres
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

A college student pretends that he’s shooting a documentary to get close to a go-go boy he’s obsessed with.

I’ve always been a proponent of applying the found footage style to non-horror genres, so this low key vérite romance is right up my alley. Part Weekend, part Breathless, all pretentious, it’s an interesting look at modern romance without getting too obnoxiously hung up on that “modern” part. It’s not all treatises on social media and tech trends, but a human portrait of a relationship between two people who fundamentally don’t work together. One is obsessed with his perfect ideal, the other is confident enough to know not to change himself for a man.

Mostly just conversation-based, Getting Go could very easily have been a snoozefest, but a layered script and some colorfully innovative editing keep the pace brisk, save for a closing ten minutes that could really use a trim. The acting is a little rough, especially from the nonprofessional Matthew Camp, but the two leads have enough chemistry to smooth out most of the clunkier line readings. Getting Go lives in its silent moments, which let the dialogue-packed scenes settle into your brain with contemplative stillness. It’s no new classic, but it’s sexy, it’s stylish, and it has a great soundtrack. What more could you want?

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1207
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Life Finds A Way

Year: 1993

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum

Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

This review is an epic adventure two years in the making. You see, back when I was first starting my blog in 2013, it was right around the time that Jurassic Park was re-released in theaters in 3D. During that time, I was still using my training wheels. I was still transitioning from my cruddy, Tumblr-based format, and it would be a couple months before I made the kamikaze commitment to pen a review of every movie I watched.

Unfortunately, a lot fell through the cracks, though it did lead to some very strange and insightful articles that are far from disappointing. Anyway, this all comes back to me sitting in that dark theater, re-experiencing Jurassic Park for the first time since childhood on the big screen. All big, puffed-up talk about Spielberg and popcorn blockbusters and the rise of the film school generation aside, that is the kind of experience that you can’t fail to be profoundly affected by. You wanna know why? I’m just gonna say it, professionalism be damned: Jurassic Park is freaking awesome. And I’m sorry I didn’t find the time to review this back then.

Yes, it has a brain in its head, yes, it’s marvelously composed and shot, and yes, the computer imagery is revolutionary, but before we get down to brass tacks, let’s take a moment to step back and look at the big picture that those tacks are pinning up.

Jurassic Park is freaking awesome.

Of course, Jurassic Park has the audacity to open straight onto its very worst scene: A tragically silly raptor attack littered with an uncomfortable profusion of extreme close-ups of mouths. But the effect of that front-loading means that it’s only uphill from there, and between this scene and the film’s grand finale, that slope is like Mount Frickin’ Everest.

When the movie settles down into its plot proper, we learn several things. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is a man with a dream. And a bank account that would make Donald Trump weep tears of liquid gold. His life’s ambition is to create an unforgettable theme park populated with live, cloned dinosaurs on the South American island Isla Nubar. When his investors demand a thorough inspection of the site before opening it to the public, they call in prominent mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). 

For his defense, Hammond brings in famed archaeologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and his wife/girlfriend/general long-term commitment person, the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). To his dismay, his guests don’t want to play on his elaborately-designed rides, rather preferring to marvel at the science behind the cloning and discuss just how dubious an idea it is to toss kids onto an island with a herd of hungry velociraptors.

Right on cue, Hammond’s grandchildren – Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex Murphy (Ariana Richards) arrive. Together with the inspection team, they set out on a jeep tour of the park that goes horribly wrong when a bit of subterfuge by disgruntled employee Dennis Nedrey (wayne Knight – Hello, Newman) causes the gates to malfunction, setting the ravenous dinos on the rampage. Dr. Grant finds himself stranded with the kids and, in the process of escorting the little buggers across the island, begins to shake his firm resolve against ever having one, because Steven Spielberg.

Also, Laura Dern could teach Bryce Dallas Howard a thing or two about sensible footwear in survival situations.

At its core, Jurassic Park is an astounding act of creation. Combining top dollar animatronic effects supervised by SFX superstar Stan Winston with an extremely clever, tastefully discreet use of nascent CGI technology, Jurassic Park brings prehistoric mayhem to impossible life. Computer graphics were about as sophisticated as a Nintendo game back in 1993, but by using them to augment brilliant practical effects and disguising the biggest deficiencies beneath the cover of night, the film holds up mind-bogglingly well. The dinosaurs here have weight and autonomy bestowed upon them thanks to the tender, loving care of the filmmakers, making Jurassic World’s collection of pixels look like a kids’ cartoon. 

Jurassic Park is ultimately a celebration of what technology can achieve* when it’s applied with some good, old-fashioned elbow grease. And that’s the thing about the film that makes it such an enduring classic: Yes, it’s an enormous popcorn spectacle, but the showstopping effects are generously ladled over what is already a terrifically solid film qua films.

*Ironically, the story is staunchly anti-science, but that’s more Michael Crichton’s fault than anything.

I would say that the movie would be just as good without the dinosaurs, but even I know that would be going at least a smidge too far.

Beneath the wondrous layer of dino mayhem, Jurassic Park is an appallingly clever film. The subtext (which is largely about chaos theory and how any manmade attempts to alter the course of nature are bound to go horribly wrong) manifests itself in a variety of subtle, layered ways, many of which are achieved with the help of ace cinematographer Dean Cundey (who also did Halloween and everything else that matters). In moments like a computerized DNA pattern being projected onto the rough, scaly skin of a hunting velociraptor, or the billowing “when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner that flutters from above a roaring T-Rex, Jurassic Park is both rapturously beautiful and visually inventive.

And this rampant creativity doesn’t just stop at frame composition. The film’s action sequences are among the best ever committed to celluloid, ranging from the unbearably tense (the raptors in the kitchen), the heroically cool (the jeep crashing down the cliff face), and the intoxicatingly intense (the kids fighting to keep the jeep’s glass ceiling between them and the T-Rex’s slavering jaws). All this cinematic carnage is peppered with instantly iconic shots that any movie producer would sell their left lung just to have one of, pushed over the edge with bombastic glee by John Williams’ brassy, epic score.

After all this time, we’re still trying to break through the glass ceiling.

Now here’s the part where the imperfections hiding in the shadows come out to pounce now that our guard is down. This was a film made in the early 90’s after all, and the only unquestionably perfect thing to come out of that entire period is me. As such, Jurassic Park hails from the early days of home computers, in which thriller directors found endless captivation in lavishly depicting people clicking through blocky filed systems.

But there’s one thing that betrays the film’s 1993 vintage above all else…

Hold onto your butts.

That’s right, Samuel L. Jackson is cast as the resident computer nerd. Pulp Fiction was a year away, so nobody could quite figure out what to do with him. This is mystifying, but it’s also a good segue into the acting, another unfortunate victim of the stranglehold of the 90’s. Along with a slate of malnourished characters that are more broad strokes than nuance, there are wild peaks and valleys in the film's overall performance quality. Attenborough, Dern, and – shockingly – Knight make it through without a scratch, but Sam Neill is a little too puffed-up, the kids are a little too shrill and wheedling, and I hate to admit it, but I’ve never uh… been um- a huge fan of –uh… Jeff Goldblum.

I appreciate that his acting style emulates the natural processes and rhythms by which actual real people formulate their speech. I really do. But if I had a nickel for every godforsaken syllable he uses to infinitely prolong his (admittedly well-crafted) dialogue, I’d make more than his entire salary. Plus residuals.

But aside from these slight speed bumps, Jurassic Park is and will always remain an indefatigable classic of popcorn cinema. It’s a superbly crafted work of art with a beating human heart hidden beneath its shining, high-tech exterior. And, after my next entry in this marathon, we’ll find out once and for all if quality blockbusters do move in herds.

TL;DR: Jurassic Park is an epic, delightful popcorn adventure.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1359
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)