Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom

Amber-ling Entertainment

Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom
2018 USA Directed by J.A. Bayona
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

Hmm... yeah. Okay this is not that great people. In fact... it’s far from good. I gave the previous entry of the five Jurassic Park films, Jurassic World, an okayish review (just here) but you can tell I was trying to be really kind to it and I said it was my fourth favourite of the bunch. This one... well, it’s not exactly terrible but, yeah, I guess this is my fifth favourite and it seems to be one of those franchises like Transformers or, to an extent, Pirates Of The Caribbean, which gets just a little bit worse each time around.

It’s pretty hard, I would have thought, to screw up a movie where giant dinosaurs run around eating people and, to be fair, this still holds true for this movie... kinda. Except there must be some real problems, it seems to me, when I find myself struggling to stop myself from looking at my watch during the movie.

Okay... so let me focus on the stuff they got right for a minute...

Well, the performances from returning actors Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are top notch and, even when they haven’t got great dialogue... and this is a film of a lot of scenes which don’t have great dialogue... they do an admirable performance in their roles here. As do co-stars Rafe Spall, Daniella Pineda and Justice Smith. Jeff Goldblum is, of course, always watchable but, as I suspected when I saw the trailer, he’s only in it for a couple of minutes at the start and a couple of minutes at the end so... not a great return for his character Ian Malcolm, to be honest. I was quite pleased when Toby Jones turns up as a nasty business man because the first thought you have is.. this guy is just here to get eaten. That’s almost his sole purpose in this movie... so that was another box ticked off.

Another positive is that the director seems to be making a concerted effort to design some nicely composed shots some of the time. There are cool examples of emphasising things by shifting focus and using sections at the edges of the screen in a few instances. So some nice, cinematic moments scattered throughout.

Okay so... that’s pretty much all the good stuff there.

Frankly, this film dragged quite a bit... even though it was full of action. Well, I say that... nothing much happens for the first twenty minutes or so but, once we get to the island, things go wrong for the main protagonists very quickly and heroes and villains are speedily identified. Everything is clearly marked but even the main characters seem to be acting like they have labels rather than names. Like many films, each character has their function but this movie makes it seem so obvious as to what role the characters are supposed to fulfil that you might as well just label them up... ‘velociraptor whisperer’, ‘high heel in peril girl’, ‘vet girl’, ‘button gal’, ‘computer guy’ etc. Everything slotted into place so obviously that there was nothing much to surprise you except... oh yeah... that one thing.

There’s a sleeper of a twist reveal which you kinda know is coming for the little girl played by Isabella Sermon as they keep dropping visual hints but... and this is a problem with a lot of things throughout the whole film... nobody, including the audience, really gets time to digest it when the big reveal is finally... um... revealed. And that’s a typical thing happening with this movie because, once the movie ramps up about 20 minutes or more in, there aren’t really that many pauses or time for reflection and suspense to build up before the next bus load of dino madness is upon us. So there’s no real weight or sense of terror lurking in the background and the suspense sequences feel just a little bit samey and anemic. Not something which has bothered me before when I see these things but it is a big problem here because this story really doesn’t have too much going for it. It really can’t afford to rollercoaster over those few good dramatic beats here and there in the way it does.

It’s interesting because this movie is much more graphic in its depiction of violence compared to the other Jurassic Park movies... it seems to me. Bearing in mind it’s a 12A rating in the UK, there’s a scene where half a guys arm gets pulled off while a dinosaur ‘toys with its food’ and another scene where you see a man ripped in half, Darth Maul style, between two dinosaur’s mouths. Now I’m not specifically blaming the director for what I’m about to say here but... you never really feel the violence and it shows just how beautifully crafted Steven Spielberg’s first two films in the franchise were because, with a minimum level of on screen goriness, you somehow feel the grizzly nature of violent death more in the way those are shot, edited and scored. Here, you see more but feel way less. Maybe a good demonstration of that old cliché ‘less is more’ in reverse here, it seems to me.

And talking of scoring. I love the majority of Michael Giacchino’s film music... heck, I even went to his birthday concert last year... but the music in this really is an unstoppable force and has a heck of a time trying to compete with the sound effects on this one. It seems simplistic and overpowering and, given the composers knack for weaving in other composers styles and melodies, the John Williams source material is barely referenced. In fact, there was probably more of it in the trailers than you got here and that’s just crazy because there are some real moments where the audience could benefit from the identification of those Williams themes to lift the emotions and, it just doesn’t really happen.

My one big, unforgivable mistake on this whole movie, however, happens within the first ten minutes or so and I was so angry about this that I could barely watch the next scene because my outrage was  persistent. In the early scenes they use a lot of BBC ‘newscast’ footage to recap the audience on what happened at certain points in the last movie as well as bring them up to speed as to what has happened in the couple of years chronologically between the two films. There were even scenes of people watching these broadcasts with their naked eyes and no special glasses... you know what’s coming don’t you? How in the heck are we supposed to believe that the BBC or whoever is broadcasting in 3D? Seriously, the TV footage stuff was all in 3D too and there’s absolutely no way that would happen. Popped me straight out of the movie. Just completely dumb. How is this stuff allowed to happen? I don’t even have the words to express my anger as to how a flat screen is suddenly able to magically broadcast in 3D. What were they thinking?

Also, while I’m at it... is it even possible for amber to break, let alone shatter from such a small distance? I think not, somehow.

So, yeah, I’ll just try and calm down now and say that... if you like the other Jurassic Park films then Jurassic World - Falllen Kingdom is probably going to hit some of the right buttons although, honestly, I’m getting really fed up with these now. There’s a post credit sequence which just underlines what you already know, which is that the producers obviously have a clear goal for the next movie in the series but, honestly, I’m just not sure I care what happens after this. A bit of a misfire but the kid inside you might like it. Or not. Who can tell? Give it a go and see what you think.

1300th Post - Image & Ownership

My 1300th Post

Image And Ownership

Well, this one makes 1300 posts since my on-line debut back in March 2010 (right here). As always... thanks very much for reading. I appreciate that a lot.

I didn’t really have anything planned to write for this one, it kinda crept up on me so... I thought I’d pose a question about something which has been bothering me on and off about linearly perceived visual arts since somewhere around the mid 1980s. And the question is ultimately this...

Should shots in film be copyrighted? Is it an infringement when, say, a particularly well known shot is imitated in a certain kind of way? Not a question that most people would ask but I was almost obsessed with it in the 1980s and, well, here’s my take on it...

This question first occurred to me because of Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Jaws. Everybody loves that shot on the beach where the camera seems to fold out the perspective and caress Roy Scheider’s face, right? It's achieved by pulling the camera back at speed from the subject while simultaneously zooming in at exactly the same speed... or the precise reverse of what I just wrote. I forget which but you get the picture. It’s a celebrated shot and... perhaps rightly so. I used to love it. However, a few years later I finally got around to watching Alfred Hitchcock’s absolute masterpiece (although I didn’t appreciate it as such the first time I saw it) Vertigo and, well, you probably know that exactly the same trick with the camera movement timed to the reverse zoom is used in the model shots looking down the interior of the tower that James Stewart’s character famously can’t climb. So it turns out that Spielberg, who I seem to remember was once, as a young man, thrown off one of HItchcock’s sets, kinda nicked the idea from the celebrated director... or did he?

I’ll use a later example now and I’m going to pick on Spielberg again... not because I have anything against him. On the contrary, I think he’s one of the all time great American directors of his generation. It’s just, please forgive me, I’m getting a little old and I can only think of certain examples off the top of my head.

So let’s talk about Jurassic Park (1993) for a minute.

I think I may have mentioned this before in a review but in that move there’s a celebrated moment where the Tyrannosaurus Rex gets loose and goes on a rampage. The main protagonists are sitting in special jeeps stranded by the enclosure from which the errant T-Rex has escaped and, to heighten the suspense, Spielberg focuses his camera on a glass of water sitting on a ledge in one of the jeeps. We then start to see ripples in the water, followed not long after by the sound of the gigantic footsteps as a way of wringing out every last bit of tension from the scene. It’s great stuff but... take a look at The Unbearable Lightness Of Being from 1988, a clear five years earlier than Spielberg’s masterpiece (and it is a masterpiece... both these films are). There’s a scene where two lovers are in an apartment and the camera focuses on a glass of water which begins to ripple as vibrations build up from the Soviet tanks invading Prague in August of 1968. Is this another ‘origin’ shot or was this visual substitute for approaching danger used even earlier in cinema? I don’t know the answer but the comments section is downstairs if you do.

Okay, so two shots that are, on the surface, quite unique and then an inventive use of them in other movies by a different director, right? But where does homage end and plagiarism begin? Stay with me on this for a minute...

I recently watched director Anna Biller’s fantastic first feature length movie Viva (the review is written but it might not go up for a month or two yet and... I do mention some of this shot detail in there too). There’s a sequence in there where the director (who also stars in and wrote the thing) is lying naked beneath a man who is, more or less, forcing himself on her. The scene uses the same camera technique from a similar scene in Radley Metzger’s sexploitation opus Camille 2000. The camera focuses on a bowl of apples (in this case) in front of her and, as she heavily breathes in and out on the soundtrack, the differential focus keeps switching in time to her breathing between the apples and her face. The scene is clearly a knowing homage and Biller even uses the score from Camille 2000 in this scene (and a few other scenes in the movie too) to re-enforce that idea. However... how many young people watching Viva are that likely to have seen Camille 2000? What percentage of the audience? So... and I really am playing Devil’s advocate here... when does copyright infringement kick in when a percentage of your audience, possibly even a significant one, has no idea you are intentionally parodying using something from another movie.

These are just three examples here but I’m pretty sure there are a wealth of others which could be thrown into the mix too.

My personal response/answer to this question back then... after I thought about it for a good long while... is that you can’t copyright a shot or even a series of shots. These, like everything that has gone before them in cinema history, are things which are additional techniques added to the toolbox of any director’s visual semantics. It’s fair game. After all, I don’t ask why a director uses a zoom or a dolly or a pan or cuts to a close-up after an establishing shot. Therefore, I can’t, in all fairness, expect anything else in history’s cinematic arsenal to be exclusive to one person. And looking at that long history of the motion picture (relatively), it’s obvious that there are a hell of a lot of movie makers not bothered about any sense of visual ownership either. So there you go... there’s my answer.

However... think on this as a little postscript to this proposition...

In this day and age when two different comics companies have the opposing rights to the words ‘super heros’ and ‘superheroes’... and the phrase ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ is off limits, possibly due to copyright violation in some countries (hence a change to Salazar’s Revenge for the fifth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie in certain areas?) then you have to ask yourself what kind of world we are living in right now and, you know, how long before companies do start asking this exact same question and trying to patent specific types or styles of shot? I hope it doesn’t come to that but... well... watch this space.

And thank you for indulging me for reading to the end of my 1300th post. As I said before, it's much appreciated. Stay tuned for more reviews, coming to this blog soon!

Jurassic Park

Raiders Of The Lost Park

Jurassic Park 1993 US

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screening at UK cinemas for two weeks only.

Warning: Big dinosaur sized spoilers on this one...

if you seriously haven’t seen this movie before.

You know I couldn’t believe, when I heard the news of Jurassic Parks limited re-release at the cinemas, that it had been 20 years since I first went to the cinema to see it. The most I would have said it had been out was maybe seven or eight years. Well, as it happens I was right to an extent. It hadn’t been 20 years... I checked and it’s only been 18. What the heck? Drumming up business for BluRay sales and such like. Shame on you Mr. Spielberg. I remember a time when it was “all about the movies”.

Still, I’m not complaining too hard. It’s definitely a classic film and a bit of a masterpiece for one of America's most commercial movie makers. I’ve always liked the film and it truly deserves the status it holds with film enthusiasts and here’s why...

Jurassic Park is one of those movies which very much takes the Hollywood line of “cause and effect” cinema to its most resilient and unshakeable and, though I’ve never been an admirer of that A leads to B leads to C kind of linear and logical progression in US moviemaking... it has to be said that when a movie of this stature is released, and that whole way of focussing and sharpening a script until everything (and I mean everything) in it is relevant to what comes after and before it, then just occasionally it’s a real pleasure to be watching a movie that gets it all so right.

Starting off with a very bleak opening sequence that completely killed the illusion created by its almost cutesy, cuddly advertising, Spielberg does exactly the same thing that David Lynch did with Wild At Heart... and that is to demonstrate just how dangerous one of the main (non-human in this case) characters can be. After a few, almost atonal scene setting notes from Johnny Williams score play out to start off and continue through the sequence, we get a truly great piece of film-making where some well equipped “experts” try to transfer a Velociraptor from a cage into its enclosure. Of course something goes wrong and in an absolutely brilliant and very chilling sequence comprising of sound and rustling foliage in which we never actually see the dinosaur, a man is dragged into the cage to be eaten. The disturbing impact of this and the foreknowledge that even a bunch of well-equipped specialists could not compete with this particular breed of dinosaur does a lot to the way in which you view the rest of the film. You can watch people make googoo eyes at cutesy Brontosaurus’ and Triceratops’ all you like but you know that your central characters are really going to have to tread through the movie carefully if they want to make it back out alive.

From there on, the movie never lets up the pace (even in the talkier sections) and everything thats said or focussed on in one sequence has some kind of pay off in a later scene... all except one. Nedrys “samples” which he’s stolen from the super-rich owner John Hammond (played charmingly by Richard Attenborough in the movie but who is actually almost a villainous character in the original novel) are buried in their shaving foam tin protector under some wet mud while Nedrys is being chomped up by a roving dinosaur. This was possibly left in to be picked up on in a sequel but, ultimately, neither of the two Jurassic Park sequels chose to pick up on this little gift to future filmmakers in the franchise.

Other than that slight detour, though, it really is full steam ahead on this movie in which Spielberg really shows us he is one of the true “children of Hitchcock” in the way he controls the audience thrills and suspense. People forget how dark a movie this one actually is and frequently take very young kids to see it. There was a 6 or 7 year old in the audience behind me when I revisited this in the cinema the other night and he never made it past the break out of the Tryannosaurus Rex before his dad had to remove him from the auditorium. Spielberg even manages to throw in a cross cut set of sequences where Laura Dern and Samuel L. Jackson attempt to get the park booted up again while Sam Neill and two kids are climbing down a dead electric fence. The suspense across these two sequences is tremendous because you know that if one group are successful in their endeavour, the electric fence is going to spring back into life and one of our other characters will suddenly be toast.

The one thing I would flag up as slightly underwhelming though is the CGI work in the movie. I know it’s because of this movie that George Lucas realised that the effects were such that he could move ahead again on his Star Wars movies and finally shoot the prequel trilogy but, seriously, the effects didn’t look that great back in 1993 (especially the Brontosaurus animations) and they really don’t hold up well today when they are being screened on digital equipment. I’ve noticed this before but some of this digital stuff seems to make old effects movies look worse and certainly makes some of the stuff really look like its laying on a separate plate within a shot. This is not good and the only thing that I could throw up in its defence is to remind people that CGI hasn’t really got that much better in recent years than it was back then... especially when it comes to dinosaurs. Have you seen those awful CGI effects in the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong? And Yoda looks more like an animated cartoon these days than a real person (of course he's a real person, don’t be näive).

Packed full of some great and iconic moments (including a sound activated glass of water which is a steal from the start of the sequence of the tanks rolling in at the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being) it was truly a joy to rewatch this movie in a cinema again. Jurassic Park really is like a well oiled machine... a big, well oiled, movie making machine which really knows how to reach the audience and push the right emotional buttons to engage with that audience. Especially with the assistance of Johnny Williams melodic and mostly sugary score which, though it doesn’t musically reference the 1933 Max Steiner scored version of King Kong like the music in the first sequel to Jurassic Park did in one place, has loads going for it and even the most casual viewer will most likely have at least one or two of the main, pulse pounding tunes lodged in their heads for a good deal of time after their screening.

You know, I remembered there’s a shot where a girl falls out of a heating vent, is caught by her friends and pulled back in right as a Velociraptor makes a jump for her leg and just misses... I clearly recall that back in 1993 I was so on the edge of my seat by this point in the movie that my right leg gave an involuntary kick as if to kick the Raptor away from me at that moment. I’m glad to say that, this time around, I had sufficient control of my bodily functions to not get caught out like that again but as I was watching it I realised that, really, there is a lot of power oozing out between the frames of this movie. It really is one of the great American works of commercially accessible art and it really needs to be taken out of the closet every ten or so years and appreciated and celebrated all over again. Every now and again these days, Hollywood is still capable of making, not just a good or halfway decent movie, but a really great film. Jurassic Park is one of them.