Jurassic World (2015)

Jurassic World's overbearing jabs at itself have led some to suggest, in line with the film's director, that it intends to attack the audience who comes to see carnage.  The most graphic death in the film is that of an irrelevant character.  We know who she is but she barely has any lines and remains offscreen for most of the movie.  Three pterosaurs pick at her, ending in her being devoured by the mosasaurus.  We can hear her screams even over the loud score and sound effects.  The brutality makes it a bit jarring.  It's personal yet random, and too late in the film to introduce any new stakes.  It's a bizarre choice of what to emphasize, so it raises the question of whether it relates to anything else the film is going for.

Indeed it does.  You see, Jurassic World is "self-aware."  Therefore, according to director Colin Trevorrow, this scene is "subversive."  It's intended to subvert the audience's sensibilities.  It constantly calls attention to the fact that it's a movie by showing us characters who talk about the fact that it is a movie.  These characters are not visitors to the theme park, but its owners and operators.  Even though it uses the visitors as a metaphor for the viewers of the film, they hardly matter or even appear in the film at all. Insofar as the movie's plot indicts anyone, it's the corporate executives.

It's worth noting that this is exactly the right place to lay the blame.  But this conflicts with its method of subversion: it's one of those movies that tries to subvert by being the thing it attempts to criticize, which implicitly blames the audience.  Furthermore, one always wants to ask of a movie that tries to do this why the filmmakers didn't just make a better movie, if it bothers them so much. 

Jurassic World includes the genetic scientists who created the dinosaurs among those responsible for the violence.  But this doesn't come across as any kind of self-aware commentary.  This is just because the film hates scientists, presumably because of how it intends for the dynamic between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard to play out.  

Pratt's character is the dinosaur trainer.  The other characters think about the consequences of their actions and that is why they fail.  His character drifts inertially through the film, and his only job is to make everyone else look bad for bothering to think, or for being insufficiently masculine.

Howard's character is a scientist who is initially portrayed as uptight and self-aggrandizing.  The side of her that believes in careful thinking is the bane of this film's existence.  Until Pratt's character teaches her to behave otherwise, she's arrogant and puritanical.  Pratt insults her for using words he doesn't understand.  Pratt's interaction with her consists almost entirely of him berating her for not being like him, not just because she knows big words but because she wears high-heeled shoes.  She achieves "redemption" by saving Pratt's character from being killed, then they kiss.  This was predictable, but not because there was any chemistry between these characters.

While the film celebrates Chris Pratt's posturing, the scientists can only redeem themselves if they abandon their role as scientists.  The film is not a cautionary tale.  Cautionary tales are ultimately not so mean-spirited as this.  There is no nuance to the film's dismissive attitude toward people who think, especially if they're women.

Perhaps the misogyny is deliberate too.  Maybe it too is satire, as a criticism of the audience through the implicit assumption that that's what they wanted to see.  Maybe it's bad on purpose.  That might have the benefit of protecting the film from criticism.  I would call that a waste of effort and $150 million, and I think saying detractors are missing the point is like saying you shouldn't complain when someone punches you in the face if the reason they did it was to teach you how much it would hurt.

The camera is incapable of making sense of the scale of the dinosaurs, and any realism that might have been achieved by the quality of the visual effects is undermined by the heavy-handed way the film tries to anthropomorphize them.  This is also, sadly, a case where the film shoots itself in the foot: part of the significance of Chris Pratt's character is his supposed to be respect for the dinosaurs as living things, specifically living things that are not humans, but they're more like humanized cartoons.  These are not the Ohm, and Chris Pratt is no Nausicaä.

Jurassic World is dreadful.  It also had, when it came out, the most successful opening weekend at the box office of all time. I suppose it's good that it was able to recoup the money wasted on its production.