Jurassic World is an absolute delight, mixing the best elements of the original movies with the talent and energy of a new ensemble, and incorporating Gareth Edward’s particular brand of inventive pacing and enigmatic dialogue. I ended up seeing this movie twice: the first time with my monster where I discovered that their fear and shouted observations about the genre violations gilded the entire story in myriad ways, and then the second time with Bestie where second viewing yielded a lot of meta observations that made the movie even more pleasant to watch and re-watch. Spoilers.
The first thing to bring up is how superior this reboot is to any of the three Jurassic World movies that came before it, because Scarjo, Mahershala Ali, and supportive but out-of-his-depth Latino dad > Crisp Rat. There’s a scene that lives on loop in my brain even now (not the Altoids scene, although that got amazing after second viewing when Bestie mutters in horror, “Absolutely horrible” as she listens to him chomp away in a completely unhinged (apparently?) misuse of those mints) in which Scarjo is underneath a vehicle and the Bad Pharma Bro is shooting in vain at some mutant aerial raptors and she shouts,” You’re missing, give me the gun,” and then in the very next scene when she slips into the sewers to pursue one of the aerial raptors, she pulls a gun out of her side holster and fires at it and suddenly I’m like DID SHE HAVE THAT GUN THE WHOLE TIME? In which case, was she lying to Pharmabro to disarm him? Was she conserving her own bullets? Does she just pick up the gun when he drops it? All of the options are really cool and subtle.
The best scene of the movie is probably the Jaws-homage family cutaway: the colors, the shot-for-shot send-ups to Spielberg’s previous film, the licorice and family drama, and the ways that entirely non-dinosaur related dangers seem so scary and impactful, but the second best scene is actually the one right before Scarjo does that magic with the gun under the car in the third act, and it was originally cut by Edwards and then asked to be put back in by the studio because in their telling of it, “the whole movie up until that point once they get on the island is run, run, run, and then we get this little breather at the gas station with the pin drop”. It’s such a magical moment in the film and to think that it might’ve been cut for time is a testament to how ruthless and disciplined Edwards is to the rest of the movie’s editing. Kill your darlings, folks.
I love the structural simplicity of three acts and three mega dinos (it’s something that even my monster could grasp from their explanation at the beginning and then for the rest of the movie anytime a sample was in danger of being lost, even if it seemed like it could be recovered easily in some other way, they screamed DON’T DROP THE SAMPLE at the top of their lungs), but then the way that each sample doesn’t take equal time or involve equal danger is very similar in its playfulness to Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets in which volumes are of variable length and take advantage of audience expectations about the length of a story arc. The true stars are actually the dinos in between the megas: the T-rex scene especially.
That candy bar wrapper at the beginning is absolutely amazing.
I hate that little guy in the backpack, don’t need him at all. Friend says that the movie understands nothing about finance or pharmaceutical research. I said something about how it seemed like it relies a lot on the way that they can sequence the genome quickly and then use unspecified magic Jurassic Park technology to resynthesize proteins in labs and he sent me something about the Gila lizard and I kind of lost the thread of what was going on.
I hardly ever see movies in theaters twice but I would gladly see this one again and again because of the ways that it has a little something for everyone.
