Yes, I saw it on opening day. And it’s an extremely entertaining two hours of movie – no denying that. Unfortunately it’s also one of those films that it’s probably not a great idea to think too hard about – which, obviously, I then did.

SPOILERS!

Things I Liked

• Chris Pratt And His Raptor Beast-Friends
  

Best plotline in the film. Without question.

Any scene between Owen (Chris Pratt) and his raptors is gold. Honestly, I kind of wonder whether it would’ve just been a better idea to have the whole “evil dinosaur-that-somehow-isn’t-a-dinosaur (?)(maybe they also mixed in cat DNA?)” be just the push that gets things going into a panic mode, kills the man in charge (poor Irrfan Khan, aka Simon Masrani), and then leaves the opening for that douchy military twit (seriously, weaponized dinosaurs? Sigh. See below on Things That Were Dumb) to try to steal the raptors to turn them into military assets (again, really? really?), then Owen and his pals have to try to rescue them.

That would’ve been a better Act II, honestly. That evil dinosaur got pretty magic by the end of the film.

But back to Owen and his beast-friends. Here’s what made it so good – Chris Pratt. (actually, Chris Pratt was carrying a large percentage of that movie on his back – hope he got paid a lot) Pratt doesn’t play his raptor-whisperer like most people would, which is “oh, raptors just want hugs and cuddles and YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND MY RAPTORS OH MY GOD!”.

That would’ve been really dumb. And it probably would’ve killed the movie. (actually, I think that’s what Julianne Moore got stuck doing in Jurassic Park II: The Parkening. She played a large-animal expert with years in the field who decided that the most awesome thing to do would be to take a wounded baby T-Rex back to the base camp so that they could fix its leg, because how could that possibly go wrong? What made it worse was a statement from her boyfriend, Jeff Goldblum, which made it clear that this was usual behavior from her. Which, shit, was not only pretty stupid, but which I think we as the audience were supposed to just accept because of Moore’s ovaries. Stupid. So stupid.)

What Pratt does with the character is that he makes it clear that he has real affection for his raptors (Daddy loves his raptors! Raptors love Daddy! This was, actually, a really nice plot point at the end when the raptors protect Daddy from the evil dinosaur. For all its telegraphing, it still worked), but that he never for a second forgets that these are RAPTORS. He actively warns quite a few people that these are dangerous animals. He warns the new employee to never turn his back on the cage (cut to a great shot of one raptor being all “waaaaaaaants to eat him, Daddy! Waaaaaaants!”). When one of the kids asks if the raptors are dangerous, Owen does not hesitate before saying “Yes.” When the raptors betray the humans (because… the script. Sigh. See below.), Owen is the first one who realizes what the hell is going on, and he doesn’t hesitate before moving forward with this new state of affairs. I mean, he has a few sad and intense gaze exchanges with the raptors, but he isn’t all “I can reach them! With the power of LOVE!” – he accepts that they are going to have to be shooting at his raptors now. Kudos.

Some of the above was obviously writers who made the character of Owen awesome – basically by merging Sam Niell and the dinosaur big-game-hunter-in-short-shorts from the first film, then adding a dash of Navy Seal and then a smidgen of Sexy Bad Boy. But I think a lot was also Chris Pratt acting the hell out of that part.

Also, the raptors make the most adorable inquisitive chirping sounds at the end of the film when Blue (who was, let’s face it, completely Daddy’s Favorite) makes the decision to save Daddy (and, by total accident, those other humans) from the evil dinosaur. Kudos for that also being the only scene where Owen touches a raptor without the strange metal head-casing protection system.

• Simon Masrani Is Not A Money-Hungry Dick

Sexy billionaire, but bad decision-maker. Well, you can’t have everything.

This is Hollywood. A non-Caucasian non-American was the owner of this park? Oh, I was bracing myself for what was to come. (“An evil dinosaur is loose in the park? Let him eat the park-goers! They had to pay in advance, so this will just increase profits because we can re-sell their hotel reservations! Now hold on, I have James Bond tied up in the aviary with those weird T-Rex-headed dinosaur birds. Mwa ha ha!”)

But, he’s actually a pretty awesome guy. For the 8th richest man in the world, he’s got a pretty light-hearted side, and he’s a good heir to the original Bad Decision Making Boss of the first movie, Hammond. He’s worried about whether everyone at the park is having fun, whether the dinosaurs are happy (Claire, because she’s a Professional Woman, is all, “I tried to get metrics on the dinosaurs’ happiness, but they ate the surveys! I can’t handle this problem, or any other problem that involves emotions rather than spreadsheets!”)

• Simon Masrani and Dr. Henry Wu Faceoff!

Damn right I play god, motherfuckers.

That encounter where the park owner is all “Oh noes why did you do this awful thing and create a monster you are a terrible person!” and the lead scientist (BD Wong reprising his role of lead scientist from the first movie, only this time with 500% more badass) is all “Dude, I followed the memo YOU sent me. Super predator features = a super predator. Don’t come crying to me. Also, a cat is a monster to a canary. Suddenly you aren’t the cat anymore, and oh yeah motherfucker that was a mike drop moment.” I thought that was a really great scene. Also, in a movie that is, admittedly, kind of Chris Pratt heavy (which, man carried most of that film, he gets all the good scenes), that was some good acting.

Also, this scene is how the film passes the Diversity Bechdel Test.

• Dinosaur Attacks Don’t Prevent Divorce Court

The kids (Zach and Grey) have been sent for a week with their very uninvolved Aunt Claire (“I’m a working woman whose job involves overseeing a park with literally thousands of child visitors a day! I don’t know anything about children!”) because their parents are getting a divorce. Rather than tell their children that they are apparently going through the final proceedings (yet still living together and faking a working marriage – healthy, guys, very healthy), they’ve decided to do it in privacy, having farmed the kids out for what should be a delightful final week. (any happy memories, btw, would’ve been permanently soiled by coming home to realize that the house had been sold and their stuff divided between Mom’s New, Much Smaller House That She Rents, and Dad’s Condo, but what can you do?)

Grey, because he’s a child genius (this, incidentally, plays no part in anything except perhaps an assist on a car repair – which was kind of refreshing, actually. I was expecting him to have to reprogram the entire park system mainframe or something.), has figured out that his parents are in the middle of a divorce. Zach, because he’s kind of an ass who mostly stares at random girls, has not gotten even an inkling of this. Grey has to tell his brother about this, in what had to be the most awkward day on the monorail ever for the family sitting in the seats behind them. (“Let’s get ice-cream,” the parents of that family said to their children as they got off the monorail. “I think we all deserve some ice-cream.”)

As viewers, we have an initial introduction to the parents – a delightfully sarcastic father and a very earnest and peppy mother. We then get periodic check-ins with the mother, because she’s Claire’s sister, and is calling to make sure that her sister knows to feed her sons (Claire: “I bought a few containers of baby formula. The package said that it’s good for up to 18 months old – that translates to years, right? Oh my god I’m an important working woman and I can’t figure this out!”). No check-ins at all during the actual crisis – thank goodness, because that would’ve been annoying. The next time we see the parents, they are showing up at the end of the film to pick up their traumatized sons. Presumably they plan to tell the kids about the divorce during the flight home (probably to the horror of everyone sitting around them in business class), but the important thing is that at no time does this happen:

Parents: You’re safe! Thank goodness!
Gray: *wails* No, because you’re getting a divorce, and that is so worse than having that dinosaur try to eat me a dozen times!
Parents: Oh no, you found out! But it’s okay, because we reconciled years of bitter, festering issues on the flight out here, because of the power of dinosaur attacks!
Gray: Yay!
Zach: Wait, I was looking at sexts my girlfriend sent me. What just happened?

No, that divorce is still happening. It’s just nice that both sons are still alive to see it.

Edited to add — Since writing the above, I have been reminded that in the original Jurassic Park, the grandchildren were also visiting in order to be comforted during a difficult time of parental divorce. So, going by observation, I’m going to state that there appears to be a link between parental divorce and dinosaurs attempting to murder children. Who knew that dinosaurs were so focused on family values?

Divorce: Exposing Children To Murderous Dinosaurs Since 1993.

• Claire Doesn’t Overtly Declare That She Now Wants Children

As we all know, the only women Hollywood will allow to declare even slight ambivalence about having babies are Working Women. (all that collating of papers and pondering of Excel spreadsheets puts their ovaries into stasis)

While talking on the phone, Claire and her big sister are slightly bantering about the effectiveness about big sister using some of their mother’s old guilt-inducing lines.

Big Sister: Yes, those lines are effective. You’ll understand when you have kids.
Claire: If.
Big Sister: When! OH MY GOD DON’T SUGGEST THAT YOU DON’T WANT CHILDREN THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE TO MY MAMMALIAN BRAIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IT’S WHEN, WHEN, WHEN! DO NOT TAKE MY IMPLODING SHAM OF A MARRIAGE AS ANY INDICATION THAT YOU SHOULD NOT IMMEDIATELY FIND A DUDE AND START SQUIRTING OUT BABIES!! HOW ABOUT THAT GUY WITH ALL THE PLASTIC DINOSAURS IN THE CONTROL ROOM – HE SEEMS SINGLE!
Claire: We seem to talk on the phone regularly, but I don’t even have a vague sense of what age my nephews are. I’m going to just float this – I don’t seem to have much interest in having babies, and that’s okay.
Big Sister: *explodes into a pure goo of socially sanctioned maternal longing*

(by the way, these exchanges between Claire and her Big Sister allow the film to pass the Bechdel Test. Well done, film!)

So over the course of the movie, as her nephews are threatened with death over and over, Claire does eventually realize that she kind of doesn’t want them to be eaten. Her nephews realize that they are probably safer by staying near Owen, who is armed and awesome (no, that part is actually true. It’s hilarious.). Mostly Claire realizes that she might consider giving Owen a second date, assuming of course that he can avoid wearing board shorts (Owen makes no promises about the board shorts – but honestly, given Claire’s kind of non-response to Owen’s “you saved my life and that’s hot so I’m going to kiss you now” moment, I’m not sure they’re going to make it to a third date).

But at the end of the film, when everyone is saved and Owen and Claire kind of make a joke that assures the audience that, yes, they are now in a committed and heteronormative relationship (aw, good for you, Working Woman!), they do not mention kids. Or the having of them. Claire also doesn’t say anything like that to her sister. (also – points for Big Sister for doing what most characters like this forget to do, and showing relief that *her sister* also survived the dinosaur attacks. It reinforces that while Big Sister was terrified on the flight down about the safety of her sons (we assume, it’s offscreen, thank god), she was also afraid for the safety of her sister. Kudos, film.

By the way – this whole kids storyline is not solely because of Claire’s gender. In the first film, Sam Neill’s character was in a relationship with Dr. Sadler (ancient plant scientist) that had a hitch – she wanted kids, and Sam Neill kind of preferred traumatizing *other* people’s children rather than his own. By the end of the film, there is the clear implication that, yes, Sam Neill’s heart grew three sizes that day, and that he’s now ready to impregnate his girlfriend and begin the lifelong traumatization of his own child. (In my head, that child grew up to become the scrawny guy who falls into the raptor cage attempting to catch the runaway pig. Circle of life.)

• The Kids Are Invulnerable, But Actually Managed To Not Be Annoying

Yeah, we’re definitely living through this. Better start worrying about yourself.

I mean, once Zach was taken out of the proximity of pretty age appropriate girls he was attempting to show off for by pretending that he had no relationship at all to his little brother. After that he managed to be a pretty good big brother, what with repeatedly saving his younger brother’s life from the dinosaur that was trying to eat them. Also, after he finally realized that dinosaurs were dangerous, Zach did make the solid decision to stick like glue to adults, avoiding any potential separation. Also, there were some very nice “You’re my brother and I’ll always take care of you” moments.

But when the boys are initially trying to avoid being eaten, Zach actually makes several smart moves – he gets them out of the protective globe once it is clear that it is being destroyed, he encourages his little brother to jump off a waterfall with him, and he takes the lead on getting a new battery into one of the old jeeps that they encounter (grandfathers – teach your grandchildren how to fix cars! That will save their lives in dinosaur parks run by your incompetent daughter!), which allows them to get back to safety. After that it’s mostly huddling and running, but that’s appropriate for the situation, so great. I think it’s pretty notable that while the younger boy, Gray, is in the usual age range for kids in these movies (old enough to run quickly, young enough to still be adorable and hug adults), Zach is well above that. At 16, he might actually be the oldest. Honestly, it helps a little. Yes, he’s a douche at times before the peril starts, but rather than it just being two defenseless kids in peril, it’s two defenseless kids in peril with the older one having to keep his little brother safe. That works better.

Honestly, though, George R. R. Martin didn’t write this dinosaur movie. The kids will get through it without even a scratch, because they are invulnerable, and we all know they’re invulnerable.

• Barry Makes It Through Alive

Barry: So what are the odds that I live through this?
Owen: I’m going to be honest, good buddy — not good.

If you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I had to look that name up too. This is Owen’s awesome raptor-training assistant. Mostly he assists Owen by rolling his eyes in agreement about how much of an idiot evil military dude is, but he also does some solid spotting by handling the Oh My God You Are Such A Delusional Jackass duties completely on his own during a very important raptor-face petting-through-Hannibal Lector-metal-cage session. Barry was pretty awesome, and I was convinced that he was going to get eaten. I’m actually pretty sure that he DID get eaten in an earlier cut of the movie, and then someone thankfully realized that it wasn’t a great idea to have the only surviving characters be only white people. Basically, during the night-scene-motorcycle-chase-raptor-assisted-evil-dinosaur-hunt, when the raptors have joined up with the evil dinosaur (“curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), the humans get their asses handed to them. Barry is holed up inside a hollow log, with one of the raptors attacking and trying to get to him. He calls the raptor’s name, the raptor pauses.

Cut to a very separate scene (almost certainly on a sound-stage months later). Owen hears the off-screen screaming of Barry, who is in danger. Instead of running to his friend’s aid, Owen deliberately revs his motorcycle’s engine three or four times. This distracts the raptor from killing Barry (…..I don’t know why or how), and the raptor decides that chasing Daddy on the motorcycle is more fun than killing Barry, who is right in front of him and now completely unprotected. Again, no sense. The next scene is Barry sighing in relief as the raptor runs off. This is the last we see of Barry until the final scene of the film, when he is just hanging out with all the other survivors. Because, yes, he was stranded alone in the middle of the island of on-the-loose and hungry dinosaurs, with even his best friend riding off alone on a motorcycle and not seeming too concerned about his safety (“Yeah, Barry will be fine. What’s the worst that could happen at night alone and on a dinosaur-infested island?”), but he apparently got to safety without any problems and without us needing to check in on him at all until the very end.

Bullshit. Someone realized that every person of color on the island had been killed off, and realized that this probably wasn’t a great idea. Some strategic editing to change Barry’s horrible death to Barry’s survival-through-motorcycle-revving, then a quick shot of him at the end. And one other shot of Dr. Wu being loaded onto a helicopter, and suddenly things are all better!

However, I am still grateful that Barry made it through alive. Because it would’ve been pretty bullshit if, once again, the only survivors (primary characters, people – none of us give a shit about the extras who just sat in the park during the entire peril) from the island were the white people. (I’m going to note right here – yes, I know that in the second film a survivor was not white. But a .25 average for the series as a whole would not have been great.)

• Just Because There’s A Dinosaur Crisis Doesn’t Mean You Get To Kiss Your Co-Worker

Bad decisions were made. But they were made well above our pay-grade.

There were two control-room systems techs whose names I had to look up. Boy Systems Tech is named Lowery (??) and Girl Systems Tech is named Vivian (??). Firstly, I like them both as characters – they had bit roles but did good work, Lowery’s constant sadness over people messing up his plastic dinosaurs was great, and they helped humanize the control-room portion of things, which can be tricky but necessary.

But I really liked that when Lowery made the choice to stay behind on the island rather than going to safety, and went in for the heroic kiss with Vivian, Vivian was all, “WHOA, I have a boyfriend!” And there was some fun back-and-forth where Lowery was made aware that Vivian made a distinction between work and social relationships. Then Vivian wished him luck and headed off for safety, leaving a fun wuh-woh moment for Lowery.

I kind of wish Vivian had been all “WHOA, misread signals!” instead of calling boyfriend (because sometimes you can like someone and still have reasons other than pre-existing relationships for why you don’t want to kiss them), but I enjoyed it.

Things That Made No Sense

• Claire and Owen’s initial relationship

Three months, minimum, for this level of animosity.

There’s a whole lot of discomfort, animosity, and really unprofessional behavior going on when Claire initially has to tell Owen to join Plotline A: Evil Dinosaur. Part of it stems from Claire’s impressively shitty interpersonal relationships and complete failure to maintain a professional work environment (this, by the way, is Hollywood shorthand for Claire being A Professional Working Woman Who Has No Time For A Family Or Romance – though how she would’ve achieved the position she did, which appears to be the manager of the entire park, with such horrible interpersonal relationship skills is left to the imagination. It’s breezed through fairly quickly as the filmmakers hot-step their way to evil dinosaur on the rampage, but it felt like extremely lazy writing. We’ve seen this character in every working woman since the 1970s. It’s boring.

But, seriously. Claire and Owen supposedly went on one ill-fated date, and never went on a second. Okay, that happens. Your next work meeting then goes by with both individuals doing everything possible to get back to the previous collegial work relationship (because if you hated each other, or even had an extremely fraught relationship, you wouldn’t have gone on the date in the first place) and minimizing everything that happened on the date. Because this is probably what happened:

***

Claire and Owen sit in a restaurant, both staring at their menus with fixed concentration, avoiding all eye-contact.

Owen: *internal monologue* Oh my God, oh my God. She had a printed itinerary for this entire first date. This is the control freak to end all control freaks. RED FLAG! RED FLAG!
Claire: *internal monologue* Board shorts? He wore board shorts? Oh my God! My itinerary clearly listed dress code as DRESSY CASUAL!

Claire and Owen accidentally make eye-contact as the waiter arrives. They smile awkwardly, then immediately look away.

***

That…. is not what’s happening here. For this level of animosity, discomfort, and Owen’s shtupping jokes (“Oh, you need a consultation? I have one right here, IN MY PANTS.”), we’re talking a three-month relationship that ended poorly, and the last time they saw each other was in the parking lot of their fourth-favorite brunch spot, when they each had a cardboard box filled with the other person’s tee-shirts, CDs, shampoo, and loaned books, in the classic post-relationship-exchange-of-prisoners. (and Claire still has at least one tee-shirt that Owen wants back, but not enough to actually bug her about it)

• The Indominous Rex

It’s a dinosaur! No, it isn’t a dinosaur! We used other shit in it! But we’ve always used other shit in all the dinosaurs! It was raised in isolation and will be a social misfit because of this! But genetically it’s part raptor so it suddenly took over the raptor pack with suave ease! We are surprised by several of the traits that it is exhibiting! But wait we’re totally not because the military specifically wanted these traits bioengineered to create killing machines!

Pick a backstory, people. Pick it and stick with it.

Things That Were Kind Of Uncomfortable

• The Death of the Assistant

I really didn’t have this coming!

That was, to put it the least, excessive. Jurassic World has a whole lot of dinosaur-on-human violence, but for the most part it’s really left to the imagination. If anything, it seemed significantly toned back from the first film. Mostly there are cuts away, or the person is dragged into tall grass, or the person just gets eaten in one bite. The biggest jackass of the film, the evil military dude, is attempting to be the pack-leader of a raptor and gets his hand kinda-bitten off, then the raptor jumps to finish him off (Raptor: “You’re not my real Daddy; that’s Owen! You’re not even Cesar Milan, who I would at least respect, if not obey!”) as all the people we actually care about go running away and the camera follows (for the record, Owen tacitly endorses this death. He makes no attempts during this scene to take control of the raptor, even though he probably has a good likelihood of being able to do so. This is an Owen-Approved Raptor-Killing.).

But the killing of the biggest douche (evil military dude) of the movie is actually not the most elaborate death. That distinction belongs to Zara, Claire’s British personal assistant who gets deputized into being a babysitter for the nephews. Zara is pretty disinterested in that particular job (and, dude, who can blame her – the younger kid, Gray, is nice, but that older one, Zach, is kind of a dick for the first chunk of the film), but it really isn’t her fault when Zach makes the executive decision for the pair of them to run away from their minder and go into the main park. Offscreen, she then makes spends a large chunk of the film attempting to locate the boys (very poorly, since the boys should’ve been easily trackable by their wristbands, and stopped the first time they attempted to get on a ride, but the park is clearly run by idiots, so fine). She is reunited with the boys offscreen, and is running in their general vicinity again as the entire park gets menaced by pterodactyls. Her death occurs as she is grabbed by a pterodactyl, which then flies her over into the aquarium tank, dunks her, lifts her out, dunks her again in some pretty uncomfortable drowning behavior, then lifts her out again, then both Zara and the pterodactyl are eaten by the giant aquatic dinosaur. It actually sticks out as fairly cruel.

Where I think this came from was an attempt to mimic another part of the first movie that is somewhat iconic – the death of the lawyer as he hid in the porto-potty. It was pretty funny, yet grisly, and the audience responded approvingly. The problem was, the audience was accepting of the death of the lawyer for a number of reasons:

1. He was a lawyer. (boo!)
2. He was kind of a dick. (boo!)
3. In a situation of real and immediate peril, he abandoned two children to attempt to save his own life. (enough to make the audience eager for his death, and also a strategic blunder – dude, those kids are invulnerable in this film. You stick with those kids and you might survive)

Zara had the following:

1. She was British. (not enough, sorry)
2. She was talking on her phone instead of closely monitoring her charges. (16 and 12ish… sorry, I think you can talk on your phone. They’re not toddlers anymore, and they won’t just roam off – unless one of them is a dick and they deliberately run, in which case, Zara would’ve been screwed even if her phone had been off.)
3. In a situation of real and immediate peril… she was actually trying to keep close to the two kids, and was yelling instructions. So, um, babysitting kudos?

I’m not saying that Zara should’ve lived – it’s a dinosaur movie, and if you’re over the age of 21 and you aren’t a romantic interest or a sexy leading man, you’re in real and present danger of being eaten. What I’m saying is that the death was awfully drawn out and overly cruel for a character that I had no reason to desire special dinosaur vengeance for. (example: I would’ve been completely okay with this death for evil military dude. Possibly even for the Not-Mad Scientist.) Picked up by pterodactyl, fine. Dropped by pterodactyl into the aquarium and eaten by the giant aquatic dinosaur, okay – after all, that giant aquatic dinosaur is apparently going to be important for the climactic scene, so we have to re-establish it at least once more in the middle. (Chekhov’s Aquatic Dinosaur is what I’m going to call this from now on) But the repeated drownings – a little uncomfortable.

• Claire’s High Heels

Maybe I should’ve changed into flats or something.

It’s impressive that she managed to continue running in those heels for the whole damn film, but when one of your plans is to hold a lit flare and run fast enough to lead the T-Rex to the climactic battle, YOU SHOULD BE WEARING SNEAKERS.

She and Owen are in her car before they get out to start looking for her nephews on foot. She’s pretty fit – I bet her gym sneakers were in the trunk of her car. I know it was part of the character’s arc to have her in a formal skirt and top for the whole film, then slowly have the top come off and get everything else dirty, but come on – sneakers wouldn’t have been hard to do.

But can we all just acknowledge – if Claire can outrun a T-Rex after a long day of running away from dinosaurs, and do it IN HEELS, I bet that woman has at least a silver Olympic medal back at her apartment.

This didn’t make me uncomfortable like the death of Zara did, but it did make me feel uncomfortable on behalf of her feet and calves.

Things That Were Dumb

• Chekhov’s Aquatic Dinosaur

One must never place a loaded aquatic dinosaur on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
-Anton Chekhov, in a letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev

The evil dinosaur was being attacked by the T-Rex plus the sole survivor of the raptor pack. It had already been shot at by a small army of Stormtroopers (yeah, that’s what I think about their aim), almost blown up by a rocket-launcher, attacked by four raptors who realized that they really DID love their daddy, shot at by Owen (who actually COULD hit what he was aiming at, plus was supporting his raptor babies), and then attacked by a T-Rex. Now, this was still Baby Evil Dinosaur’s Big Day Out, so I’m just going to say it – that really should’ve been enough to take it down. Having it attacked by the giant aquatic dinosaur took us to a bit of a Peter Jackson place (anyone who has seen King Kong, with its dramatic choice to have King Kong attacked by THREE T-Rexes, knows what I’m talking about here). Too much, movie. Too much.

• Militarized Raptors

Does the Navy make use of animals? Yes. Sea lions can be trained to stick bombs on enemy ships or just swim around with camera packs. Dogs have a long and glorious tradition within our military (by the way, that preview of Max totally made me cry – damn you, filmmakers!).

You know what don’t have a long and glorious tradition within our military?

Tigers.
Bears.
Sharks.

Yes, millions of years of evolution have crafted these into top predators. But I don’t care if you can train these animals to not attack their trainer, or maybe even follow a few basic commands. We don’t deploy animals like this against the enemy for a few reasons:

1. They would maul everyone, not just the people you want them to maul.
2. When bored or hungry, they would probably just wander off rather than continuing on the mission.
3. Enemy combatants could shoot them or blow them up.
4. The cost would be absolutely prohibitive, particularly given how quickly the enemy would start shooting or blowing them up.

Given that each raptor would have to be cloned (oh god expensive), grow in an egg (oh god can you imagine how many probably don’t survive, so expensive), imprint at birth on the trainer (yeah, that means that has to be its SOLE trainer), be raised with a specific team of siblings (probably wouldn’t play well with random raptors, expensive), have intensive and individualized training (so expensive), and you still probably would have only a small percentage that could obey their trainer’s commands outside a carefully controlled environment.

Yes, this is totally a better plan than drones. Because, omg, drones can get hacked. You know how you hack a raptor? WITH NUMMY TREATS AND PRAISE. (“Hey Blue, your Daddy is a douche. I’ll give you TWO delicious dead rats, all for you. Who’s a good raptor? YOU! Yes, YOU!”)

It helps slightly that the only person on this island who thinks that this is a decent plan is the evil military dude, but it’s still pretty stupid. Good luck with your attempt to create your very own line of German Shepard Raptors, though. Oh, wait, you can’t, because you’re dead. So sad.

Still, though. This was the kind of plan that Bond villains come up with.

• Dinosaurs Cannot Be Shot

Normally a bullet would have some kind of impact at this range.

This isn’t stated, but it kind of happens. I think the filmmakers were a little squeamish about humans killing dinosaurs (which is kind of funny, given how many humans get eaten over the course of this movie). A lot of bullets get shot, but I don’t see any bullet wounds on any dinosaurs. Some kind of incendiary (rocket-launcher?) thing knocks the evil dinosaur of its feet momentarily, and one raptor gets killed with a direct hit from the same kind of weapon, but that’s actually it, other than some very effective tranquilizing of the pterodactyls, and one pterodactyl shot over the open ocean (but that was by a clearly evil military mercenary with a beard, so I’m not sure it counts).

• Simon Masrani Makes Really Terrible Decisions

He is only two days away from getting his certification to fly a helicopter all by himself! Yes, his flying is so terrible that it terrorizes all underlings and apparently made his flying instructor nauseous, but why should that stop Masrani from thinking that he is the perfect person to fly the helicopter when they are attempting to take down the evil dinosaur from the air? I mean, basic take-off and landing can’t be any different than when you are flying with open doors and animal control staff with giant guns leaning out said doors, right?

I was sorry that they killed Masrani, and I kind of wish they hadn’t. If Hammond lived through the first film, then I think there’s a good precedent for the Well Intentioned But Poor Decision-Making Park Owner to make it through the film alive. I get that Masrani’s death opened the door for the evil military dude to try to force a takeover (though since Claire was in charge on most days, that’s still pretty shaky from the moment she gets back from being lost in the park), but it was still a really stupid decision that led to a stupid death. And I really felt badly for the two former soldiers who died because of it. (“So, you served in Afghanistan, you say? You might’ve survived that, but you won’t survive this! Ha ha! I kid, but seriously, I hope you have life insurance.”)

• That One Dinosaur, However Evil, Caused This Much Trouble

Why, why didn’t we prepare for the dinosaurs having teeth?

Seriously. This plot has too much resting on incompetence on every level. (which I think, as park manager, is actually Claire’s fault. You’re terrible at your job, Claire!)

The utter catastrophe of the original film wasn’t “the animals are out.” It was a combination of:
1. The storm approaching the island resulted in most of the park personnel heading back to the mainland, leaving only a skeleton staff behind.
2. Newman, who was a dick, deliberately fucked up all the computer systems and shut down all the park fences so that he could steal dinosaur embryos and sell them.
3. The park was still months away from opening, and basic protocols regarding animal control and safety were still being refined.

Thus, when the dinosaurs all got out, those left on the island did not have either the personnel, the protocols, or the systems control to deal with the issue on any level. That is how the tragic deaths of both Samuel L. Jackson and that big-game hunter in the short-shorts occurred.

This is the catastrophe of Jurassic World:

1. A really big, really evil dinosaur escapes from its enclosure.

…….

That’s it.

This is a park that supposedly has been running smoothly for at least seven years. They have been dealing with both large carnivores (T Rex) and smaller, intelligent carnivores (Raptors), successfully. They have teams of individuals whose sole job is animal wrangling. They have protocols in place to protect the 20,000 park visitors in the event of a loose animal or an emergency.

These things are great! I wonder why more people don’t use them as protection against dinosaurs?

This should not have been a park-ending emergency, or even the catastrophe it became. I’m fine with the kids being in peril, because Zach is an idiot and ignored the park safety protocols. There were secondary armed fences protecting the inner portion of the park (I saw them, the kids drove up to one). The squads who went out to catch the evil dinosaur were unrealistically stupid – even if this was a new and sneaky dinosaur, these are teams that have dealt successfully with a T-Rex. Their nonlethals should’ve consisted of some really effective tranquilizers (and that evil dinosaur was in their captivity – they would’ve known just how much to use to drop it), some kind of armored vehicle to keep the teams safe during encounters (that little hamster ball held up pretty well for a while to a concentrated attack from the evil dinosaur – why wasn’t each member of the retrieval squad in one of those?), and NOT those stupid little cattle prods. Listen, those little cattle prods were beyond dumb, because they were less than a foot long, meaning that the dinosaur would have to get to less than a foot away from the person before they could be used. Meaning that the person is already being mauled before they can make use of their safety device. In a park that had been open for a number of years, they would’ve known about that, and would’ve been armed appropriately.

It was also very nice of all of the squads to wait patiently while the dinosaur mauled each of their squad members in turn. Classy, very classy.

The evil dinosaur escaping from its enclosure is fine for the first act of the movie, but there needed to be a secondary element. Maybe the evil military dude rigged parts of the system to go down so that he could justify a partial takeover to get the raptors he wanted – maybe a militant and really stupid wing of Greenpeace decided to infiltrate and bring down the entire computer systems (including invisible fences?) from the inside to make a statement about animal cruelty – maybe anything. In a pinch a hurricane would’ve worked too. But the problem was that that dinosaur ended up having to become magical in order to explain why a working park with a fully staffed containment crew hadn’t caught it (ie, KILLED IT) after the second or third encounter. And that’s a basic writing problem.

Things I Really Wish Had Happened

• Clicker Training

Blue is Daddy’s favorite.

Owen trains his raptors using (awesomely), clicker training. He does it repeatedly in early scenes, and it’s great. In that final climactic moment of the movie, when Blue has totally saved Owen’s life by betraying the evil dinosaur and risking her own life, she and Owen stand and look at each other, and it’s very Born Free.

I wish that, at the conclusion of that look, Owen had pulled the clicker out (you know that guy still had it in his pocket), clicked twice, and said, “Good girl.” That would’ve been awesome.

• Girl Systems Tech Had Stuck Around

Did they need two systems techs in that last scene? God no. Frankly they kind of didn’t even need one, if Claire had had an override code that could’ve worked on the T-Rex pen. But their interactions were funny enough earlier that I wish they’d kept it all the way through. At the same time, I respect that Vivian put a value on her personal safety. I mean, jeez, people were really bad about closing doors behind them, and I’m still surprised that raptors didn’t get into the control room and start fucking around with the computers.

“Clever girl!”