Raptor Buddies

Year: 2015

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ty Simpkins

Run Time: 2 hour 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jurassic World is not a better popcorn movie than Jurassic Park. But to be fair, I can list the number of popcorn movies better than Jurassic Park on a Post-It. With room to spare. But as a peer to this summer's Mad Max: Fury Road, which is also a decades-later followup to an inordinately successful trilogy, I can comfortably say we're two for two in fourth sequels that aren't total garbage wastes of time. 

Mind you, Mad Max is a luminescent, damn near perfect masterpiece of balls-to-the-wall action that challenges the very notion of what cinema can be and Jurassic World merely isn't quite as dumb as Jurassic Park III. We're measuring on vastly different scales here, but two successful franchise continuations in the new Millennium? For Hollywood, this is like Christmas.

Though I daresay Santa's reindeer have slightly fewer teeth.

Jurassic World is a direct sequel to Jurassic Park, depicting the successful application of John Hammond's dream to create a fully functioning theme park with genetically modified, de-extinct dinosaurs. Run by the eccentric billionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), Jurassic World is now a well-oiled machine attended by thousands of happy tourists a day. Hoewver, as time has passed, children have become immune to the technical wizardry of the past. They long for bigger, better, more exciting adventures, and Jurassic World is prepared to give it to them. The park, that is. The movie is content to slop a bucket of CGI onto the screen and call it a night. But I digress.

Headed by the emotionless businesswoman Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park has been developing a new attraction designed by the noteworthy scientist Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong, the only returning cast member from the original film). Called the Indominus Rex, this massive creature has been designed to be scarier, deadlier, and larger than any creature the park has ever attempted before. Evidently they failed on that front, because we learn from a too-early reveal (and a quick scan of any nearby Toys R Us shelves) that the creature is pretty much just a kinda tall, albino T-Rex. Wheeeee.

Needless to say, the highly intelligent animal escapes, putting Claire's nephews - surly teen Zach (Nick Robinson) and his wide-eyed younger brother Gray (Ty Simpkins of Insidious) - and the entire park at risk. Together with the gruff raptor trainer Owen (Chris Pratt), they must work to bring the theme park back from the brink of total disaster, butting heads along the way with Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), a militaristic meathead who wants to use the raptors to bring down the beast in order to prove their viability as military weaponry.

As you can probably tell, Jurassic World has a bit too much on its mind, and that's without even mentioning the subplot about Lowery (Jake Johnson), the comic relief control panel worker, or the ongoing divorce proceedings of the kids' parents, Karen (Judy Greer) and Scott (Andy Buckley).

Trying to keep track of them all is like trying to keep four raptors from biting your pretty hands off.

Jurassic World has too many plates spinning in the air, which prevent it from ever truly realizing its full potential. 

The first plate to wobble and crash to the floor is its characters. There's too many of them drifting on and off the screen to really find a hero to root for, only two of them have any semblance of an arc (Claire, who seems to be the protagonist, if only because she happens to be onscreen the most and her costume design actively reflects her transition, is the first; the second is Zach, who goes from being a surly teen to a less surly teen, so let's not dust off our Oscar shelves just yet), and the rest are shallow ciphers: Hoskins is a picture of avaricious evil, Gray is the whiz kid, Owen is the badass knight in shining armor, and so on.

The emotional impact of the storyline lacks sinew thanks to the protagonists' lack of inner life, and many of the broad strokes masquerading as character development only weakly prop up the cardboard cutouts populating its world. The parents' divorce adds next to nothing to the film (save about 5 more minutes of screen time), and the awkward, forced romance between Owen and Claire is about as credible as the McDonalds "Healthy Choices" menu.

Just look at that crackling chemistry. You can feel the heat from here.

The second, and largest, plate to fall is the special effects. CGI graphics are improving as time goes on, and nothing here is quite as egregious as the weightless copy-and-paste construction robots in Tomorrowland, but the fact remains that Jurassic Park was a success thanks to its conscientious use of computer graphics. Instead of using computers to augment and aid practical effects, Jurassic World  liberally - and lazily - slathers the film with pixel grotesqueries. 

The only abominably unconvincing dinos are the T-Rex and occasionally the raptors, but there is no lasting spectacle to be found in Jurassic World. Chockablock with flat, obtrusive CGI that lingers even in the furthest corners of the film (Really - A gate? A bird? You're telling me there's no birds pecking around the windowsills at Amblin that you could grab?), even the most convincing visuals lack impact thanks to their remarkably spotty brethren.

When you set uninspiring CGI monsters against a cadre of dull stereotypes, all running around the island madly bumping into one another, it becomes extremely difficult to muster up any cobwebs of suspense.

I mean, look at this. I'm pretty sure I played this computer game in third grade.

The third and final plate is the script. Along with a complex tunnel system of plot/logic holes, nearly every decision made by any human is the worst possible outcome for whatever situation it happens to be. I of all people am willing to accept some gaps in logic from dumb characters in suspense movies, but many key moments (and nearly every aspect of the "release the raptors" subplot) are idiotic and, worst of all, generic.

It would be one thing if the flaws in the story were in service of unparalleled action and suspense, but for the most part they form a loud background hum to one of the most hideously cliché adventure movie beats in years. Bad government, mad science, wan romance, and blockbuster drama collide in Jurassic World, careening pointlessly in all directions. The film is self-important in the worst way, packed to the gills with Important Lines that characters say while staring off into space. In fact, I don't think a single shot exists in the first act, where Chris Pratt doesn't saunter into frame (even if he's already in the middle of a conversation) to say something Badass and Insightful.

Chuck in a production team that somehow thinks it's appropriate to resurrect John Williams' classic theme when the characters are riding an escalator and you've got yourself a bit of a mess on your hands.

Nothing a good barber can't fix.

OK, are we done complaining? Good. Because, in spite of its ample flaws, Jurassic World is still a fun, dumb summer flick. The shadow of Jurassic Park is a terrifyingly tough one to escape, and of course this film - with its supremely rickety foundation - does not manage it. But it does manage to scrape together a pretty decent thrill ride for the new generation of dino lovers.

There's a negligible amount of genuinely effective suspense in this film thanks to its thin characters, but more than a couple scenes have moments that startle the senses into something above complacency. Likewise, there are a handful of comic relief moments that strike gold and have the capacity to elicit actual, bona fide peals of laughter. The rest of the film coasts on effects-filled action and, when it gets a chance to abandon its pretenses at telling an authentically human story, it does not disappoint.

Jake Johnson is funny as always, and Bryce Dallas Howard is more effective than the trailer gives her credit for, but the real conflict comes with Chris Pratt. He does more than enough to prove himself as a viable candidate for future non-comedic roles, but Owen gives him absolutely nothing to work with. He's awash in the contradictory pages of the script, relying only on his natural charm to get the point across rather than any act of true character creation.

It's shallow and it's messy, but it's still a good time at the movies. Maybe the rampaging dinos don't have they heart they used to. Maybe the humans they tread upon fall short of interesting. But as a slick, surface level thrill ride, Jurassic World does its job. No more and no less than that, but it's something I don't dread seeing again.

TL;DR: Jurassic World is a totally fine popcorn movie, all things considered.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I ain't gonna stop ya.

Word Count: 1514

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)

The Furtherer

Year: 2013

Director: James Wan

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Who'd've thunk that the director of Saw would become the most prominent horror filmmaker of the decade?

Starting off with 2010's Insidious, a tight little haunted house thriller and continuing his horror collaborations with Patrick Wilson in this year's grand scale witchcraft/haunting/demonic possession shocker The Conjuring, Wan has risen to the top of pop horror for better or for worse. 

In my opinion, he's overwhelmingly derivative but clever enough to synthesize his sources into something that doesn't feel stale and hackneyed. So really, I don't mind. But, sitting as it is in the shadow of its older brothers, it's hard to go into his third haunted house feature of the decade without some measure of baggage, especially considering the super weird place where Insidious left off.

Remember that? [Warning, this review contains excessive SPOILERS for the original movie if you care about that sort of thing.]The old lady who had haunted Josh (Patrick Wilson) as a child had taken over his body, strangled the medium Elise (Lin Shaye) and snuck up behind his wife. She turns around, gasps, and CUT TO BLACK.

Horror movie or Sopranos episode? You decide.

This film starts about three days after that event and right off the bat we get two age-old horror sequel standbys that cement in my fears of how stupid this movie is going to be. First, the whole "Patrick Wilson is evil" thing gets shoved into a corner as his wife Renai (Rose Byrne) immediately trusts him again. This angle will play out in allegedly mysterious ways as we see her begin to doubt his sanity over the course of the proceeding weeks. Since we already know he's evil, this is just hella boring.

The second (and most egregious) offense is the sheer amount of scenes in the first 20 minutes in which characters say "Let me explain the entire plot of the first film to you, even though we both already know what happened." It's just plain clumsy screenwriting and the extensive flashbacks to Josh's childhood compound this with screechingly bad acting and very unnecessary depictions of events we have been told about twice already (once in the last film and once in the beginning of this one).

If you recall my review of Insidious, you'll remember that that film was an effective and scary film for the first two thirds but peters out, opting for a bizarre and out of place ending that goes on far too long. Chapter 2 is the opposite of that, so the good news is it gets better as we go along. The bad news is that for the first half of the film, what we get is Rose Byrne is Scared of Things 2.

This half of the film acts as a dictionary of horror tropes, cycling through a laundry list of clichés. It touches upon many of the old Insidious standbys and throws in Pausing a Videotape to Look at Ghosts, There's a Scary Lady in the Mirror, Mysterious Piano, and more! Wan is up to his old tricks, cribbing heavily from The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, The Changeling, Black Swan, The Silence of the Lambs as well as such seminal horror classics as Final Destination and Return to Horror High.

And just a dash of American Horror Story.

This entire section of the film is ineffably, laughably bad. The filmmakers falter at basic things like match cutting or making sure there's no dust on the camera lens. At one point Patrick Wilson teleports about ten feet in a one second cut. Almost as bad are the outlandishly stupid characters.

It takes investigators about fifteen minutes to realize that the dead bodies in a serial killer's house are victims, nobody seems to notice Josh is transparently murdery, and apparently Elise recorded her hypnotism of Josh as a child but then never rewatched the tape.

My personal favorite bit of dialogue is perhaps a bit hard to understand transcribed, but I'm gonna do it anyway because it's so indicative of the level of contempt Insidious 2 holds for its audience.

[Magic Ouija dice spell out "Our Lady of Angls" when asked where to find clues}

Paranormal Investigator: "Our Lady of Angles?"

Rose Byrne's Mom: "No. It's Our Lady of Angels. I know because... I used to work there."

No, you know because you have a basic grasp of the English language.

So. Not to beat a dead horse, but it's dire and embarrassing and the crowd was laughing uproariously the whole time.

And this lady who is in like five minutes of the film is in every single freaking promotional still.

But then! All of a sudden, you can feel a different film struggling to break through the mire. The first tremendously effective scare happens about three fifths through the film, and boy is it a doozy. I shouted in my seat and recoiled. Unfortunately, it is immediately followed by probably the worst scare in the entire film, but from that point on the terribly scary movie Chapter 2 so desperately wants to be begins to assert itself.

The second part isn't perfect with its inscrutable baby motif and mild transphobia but it really starts to pick up steam, chugging along with some terrific scares and a tie-in with the original film that could have been a cheap gimmick but works so brilliantly that it must have been planned out the minute they wrote the original script. And if not, it's an absolutely seamless bit of universe building.

It's involving, it's pretty terrifying, and it totally works. Even the obligatory sequel tag ending works in a way that completely gels with the narrative universe, more along the lines of The Conjuring than Insidious, which is really a great place to be, that film being Wan's magnum opus.

Again, Wan milks a PG-13 rating for every drop of atmosphere and dread. The lighting scheme inside of the house is beautiful and weird in a nod to Dario Argento that doesn't hold the tang of Wan's typical pilfering, the effects are realistic and brutal, and the final act zips along even managing to wring scares out of The Further, the location that absolutely killed its predecessor.

Although the flaws outnumber the successes, I am excited to see where this series ends up going. I never thought a sequel could work for the original film, but Chapter 2 showed spurts of excellence that prove there's more story to tell here.

Also she played the teacher in A Nightmare on Elm Street. So there's that.

TL;DR: Insidious: Chapter 2 is weighed down by a bloated and boring front half but still delivers solid PG-13 thrills.

Rating: 4/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Definitely one to marathon before the inevitable Chapter 3 comes out, but there are much more exciting horror films coming down the pike in October so don't fret if you miss it in theaters.

Word Count: 1178

Reviews In This Series

Insidious (Wan, 2010)

Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)

Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)

Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Red

Year: 2011
Director: James Wan
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When people find out I'm a horror buff they almost always ask if I saw Insidious, and until now my answer was no. I was much too caught up in the annals of 80's horror to be bothered with the new ones. My movie-watching field has since expanded and I found that I had missed out on one of the essential horror experiences of the year.

Did my experience live up to the hype? Well, yes and no. Insidious is chock full of borrowed elements and visual quotations from much better haunted house movies that were produced decades ago. At times it seemed like the filmmakers had bitten off more than they could chew, just throwing every ingredient in the pot and calling it a stew. Happily, it turns out that they were much more clever than that and even the most far-fetched elements fit into the narrative universe with very little manhandling and quite a bit of subtle foreshadowing.

Likewise, borrowing from other films isn't necessarily a crime. Many famous horror pictures wouldn't exist without standing on the shoulders of giants. And reintroducing classic elements to a modern horror audience was somewhat of a gift in the bland, chalky horror environment of the time. While Insidious didn't necessarily break any new ground, it was a step in the right direction for horror.

But let's throw all that analysis out the window for a moment. The most important thing Insidious does - and does well - is the rather impressive accomplishment of making a PG-13 horror film actually scary.

With frames like this, it's really not all that hard.

Josh (Wilson) and Renai (Byrne) Lambert have just moved into a new home with their three kids. Renai is a stay-at-home mom with dreams of becoming a successful musician, and the move was partially orchestrated so she can focus on her work. Her dreams are dashed for the moment when her son Dalton (Simpkins) falls into a mysterious coma and things start to go bump in the night.

It's easy to dismiss these early occurrences as stress or the house settling or what have you, but when she starts seeing mysterious people infiltrating her kids' rooms, she wisely decides that maybe they shouldn't be living in that house no more. To her dismay, the entities don't give up that easily and she calls in a medium (Lin Shaye) and her assistants (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson - who I recently saw in the delightfully wacky Aussie flick 100 Bloody Acres).

The third act is where things start to get a little rocky as the parents try desperately to save their son. The climax is extended far beyond its capacity, the main villain is turned into a mockery of his terrifying self, and Josh exhibits some truly embarrassing Stupid Horror Movie Character behavior. This sequence is repetitive and features numerous false endings which drag the film on a good fifteen minutes longer than it needs to.

It's almost like being in a coma.

Despite the finale's shortcomings, Insidious is a well-crafted thriller that provides a lot of bang for its buck. Cheap haunted house movie scares don't get much better than this, and the red-faced demon that provides the film's major antagonist is unforgettable.

The film works within its PG-13 rating and thus manages to avoid being neutered by it. There's no need for profanity - this is a family with young children. There's no need for buckets of gore - that's not what this domestic horror film is about. It is about the fear of the things that go bump in the night. The fear of those dark corners in a place you know so very well. And the fear that your child has become ensnared by something so sinister that you have no possible way of saving him - whether it be a coma or a cherry red minion of the Antichrist.

Not to mention we are thankfully spared the torture of child actors.Yes, the main victim of Insidious is a young boy, but the film is truly about his parents' relationship and their attempts to save his life. Both adult actors are tremendous in their roles and Josh's fear of being inadequate for his family and Renai's fear of being trapped in her role as a housewife are the driving forces behind the most hard-hitting horror sequences.

This is a horror film populated by uniquely human characters that uses a classic haunted house framework to further explore the dynamics of its central family. It does have some unique spins on the genre tropes, but it mostly relies on tried and true methods to tell a story larger than itself. If it weren't for the ending, this movie would be much higher on my list. But it does have it and while it doesn't diminish the overall effect of a very good scary movie, it does knock it down a peg or two shy of being a modern classic of the genre.

TL;DR: Insidious is clever, insightful, and - most importantly - scary.
Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend Money On This DVD? Yes, this movie is great for slumber parties. Scary enough to have actual impact but not so much that you'll never sleep again.
Word Count: 899
Reviews In This Series
Insidious (Wan, 2010)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)