This movie. I saw this movie.
If you've been on the Internet or spoken to other human beings lately, you've probably heard that the newest installment of the Jurassic-But-Actually-Mostly-Cretaceous Park franchise earned decidedly mixed reviews. Critics praised the stunning CGI and special effects, while panning the movie's feeble attempts at minor things like 'having a storyline' and 'being scientifically accurate' and 'being even slightly plausible'. It's the kind of summer blockbuster movie that's a lot of fun if you shut your brain off and don't think too hard about it.
Thinking too hard about things is what I do best.
So buckle up, and take a look at these four reasons why, story-wise, Jurassic World is a movie that deserves to go extinct.
Thinking too hard about things is what I do best.
So buckle up, and take a look at these four reasons why, story-wise, Jurassic World is a movie that deserves to go extinct.
Spoilers ahead. Duh.
1. Using dinosaurs as weapons is an objectively terrible idea.
In the fourth installment of the "man's hubris gets multiple people eaten by angry lizards" franchise, the director shakes things up by adding in a military subplot. Specifically, Claire, Owen and Masrani spend the entire movie being dogged by an overzealous military man who wants to weaponize dinosaurs and throw them into the battlefield. He claims that current unmanned drone technology is hackable and therefore "useless", because apparently the US Military puts about as much effort into guarding its multi-million dollar death machines as Sony puts into guarding its users' personal information. Instead, he proposes that they hatch raptors like ducklings and fling them onto the battlefield, trusting that the ancestor of the modern chicken will be intelligent enough not to turn on its masters. In fairness to the main characters, they recognize what a rock-fucking stupid idea that is - at first. Right before caving in.
Never bring prehistoric beasts to a drone fight.
In the movie, dinosaurs are considered attractive by the military because they are large, powerful, fast, vicious and have no qualms about killing humans. In real life, there is currently one species on the face of the earth that is known to actively hunt and eat humans - the mighty polar bear. And if you went to the military and suggested they ditch all this 'drone' nonsense for an army of tamed polar bears, they'd look at you like you'd just grown a third fucking nipple on your forehead. If you tried to reassure them by saying you'd genetically engineer a polar bear to be fifty feet long and capable of changing color, they'd send you out of there with a lollipop and a picture book on bear safety, because you are obviously a deranged five-year-old.
This is not the soldier we need, OR the soldier we deserve.
Taking a polar bear into a warzone would be nothing short of a Napoleon-style nightmare; they're unpredictable, hard to control, insanely volatile, nearly untrainable, and since they've adapted to live in a very specific environment, they're going to need a lot of insanely specialized care just to survive. How will you keep them cool? Where will you house them? How will you transport them? How will you keep them in fresh meat? What's the game plan for when the bears realize that they weigh 600lbs and have gigantic teeth and probably don't have to put up with your bullshit? The best possible outcome of this situation is that you spend a lot of money to give a bunch of bears heatstroke. Instinctively, we know that the deadly polar bear has no business being in a warzone, and that should be doubly true of dinosaurs.
Oh, yeah, by all means, put this fucker in an aircraft carrier. That'll go well.
It's hard to even find words to explain how bad an idea this is, but since this is a written blog, I'll at least make an effort. See, as a brief period called 'literally all of human history' has shown us, we aren't nearly as good at taming nature as we think we are. There's a big difference between domestic animals like dogs, and wild animals like bears and dinosaurs. My enormous dog (hypothetically) takes orders from me because for thousands of years, any dog that didn't feel like listening to humans was Ol' Yeller'd out of the gene pool. Our 110 lb Newfoundland cross might be physically capable of gnawing out my kidneys at given moment, but she probably won't, because all those years of selective breeding have taught her that she needs to rely on me for food, water, leadership, shelter, companionship, and an endless supply of rubber squeaky toys shaped like giraffes. But even after thousands of years of breeding and training, we still hesitate to bring dogs - a species that we frequently trust around our newborn infants - into situations like war zones and police departments. You can't just pick up a random mutt from the pound and strap it into a kevlar vest. These dogs are carefully screened multiple times and undergo years of training before they're allowed to set foot on the job, because at the end of the day, this is an animal, and if you freak the shit out of it by taking it into battle, there's always a chance that it'll flip out and turn on you.
And if that's true of Fido, how do you suppose that principle applies to a 1,000 lb lizard with its head stuck in a fucking basket?
This is not the face of an animal that's had quite enough of your bullshit, thank you.
Vic Hoskins, a man with the brains and body shape of a butternut squash, is the driving force behind the 'raptors are totally ready for military use' idea, a conclusion he reaches after Owen is just barely able to keep the pack from savagely devouring himself and another member of the park staff. And that's how well they behave under absolutely ideal conditions. In the noise and confusion of a war, they aren't going to take the time to puzzle out who is a friend and who is a foe; they're just going to eat the first meaty, screaming human they can find. And of course, when Owen finally caves in to Vic and take the raptors out to hunt the Indominus Rex, that's exactly what happens.
On top of that, we tend to fight most of our wars in deserts these days. The raptors in the movie, you may have noticed, did not spend a lot of time in deserts. You would have to keep them hydrated and fed with thousands of pounds of raw meat that you somehow have to keep from spoiling in a land where storing things like pork and shellfish is so dangerous that most local religions ban them altogether. You also have to find some way to keep these things warm at night if you want to do any kind of battling after dark, since raptors may have been cold-blooded and won't do much more than nap once the temperature drops. Getting them killed or injured is also a big no-no, because unlike multi-million dollar war machines, multi-million dollar dinosaurs can't be repaired or scrapped for parts if something bad happens to them. You'll also have to expand your payroll, because unlike drones, which can be successfully operated by a single pilot and a handful of maintenance people, your dinosaurs are going to need trainers, handlers, veterinarians and veterinarian assistants, maintenance workers and construction workers for their enclosures, scientists, transportation workers, some poor bastard to shovel away six metric tons of dinosaur shit each week, and a team of slick PR people to beat back the thousands upon thousands of protesters who turn up to tell you that what you're doing with these animals is despicable. You'll need to build an incredible amount of infrastructure to transport, house and treat the wounds of these things, and you'll have to find somewhere for them to live once they're too old or too injured or too pissed-off to keep fighting for you.
Or you could just invest in better drone security. Your choice.
I have two dogs, named Max and Guinness.
Seen here.
Both of my dogs are mutts, created from the unholy unions of breeds that should never have been combined. Max is a "Sheagle" - half shih tzu, half beagle - and Guinness is a Newfoundland/rottweiler/Labrador combination that we've dubbed the "Newfweilador". Both of my dogs are made up of random combinations of their parents' traits. Take Max. Max has the markings of a beagle, but his fur is made up of random patches of long shih tzu fur and short beagle fur, making him look permanently mangy. He has floppy beagle ears and he howls like he's summoning the Moon Goddess instead of barking. His tail curls over like a shih tzu's, and his scrunched-up nose makes him snore like a grown man. I have no idea how this dog eats food, because all of his misshapen teeth are crammed randomly into his weird little mouth. He's almost a perfect mix between two dogs that should never have been left unsupervised together, but by the luck of the draw, some of his siblings ended up almost entirely resembling their beagle mother or shih tzu father. Guinness is like that - she lacks the classic 'bear face' of a purebred Newfie, but otherwise she's got the weight, build, temperament, webbed feet, waterproof coat and limitless drool-producing capabilities of Atlantic Canada's favorite water rescue dog. That's just how random sexual reproduction works.
This is not how gene splicing works.
Neither is this, but that's a rant for another day.
'Gene splicing' refers to a process where we take an extremely specific gene from one organism and insert it into the genome of another organism. If this was a medical operation, it would be an extremely delicate brain surgery, not a drunken backyard hacksaw amputation. Randomly shoving genes from one species into another isn't going to give you a wacky cross-breed with unexpected powers; it's just going to give you a series of dirty petri dishes, because chances are, that thing isn't going to have the right genes to even exist. On the off-chance that your genetic mad science does result in an animal, you're more likely to get something like a Liger; an interesting-looking animal plagued by birth defects, sterility, disease, health problems and early death.
Issues we're more than happy to overlook because they're just so freaking cool.
The kind of gene splicing that the movie refers to actually exists in real life, and we've made way cooler combinations than stitching together a pile of reptiles and invertebrates. Right now, as you're reading this, there are goats out there that contain pieces of spider DNA. Scientists wanted a more efficient way to produce large quantities of spider silk - and spider farms are impossible, since two spiders living in close proximity will murder the shit out of each other - so they carefully cut out the part of the spider genome that codes for silk production, and slipped it into the part of the goat genome that codes for milk production. The result? Goats that produce milk containing spider silk fibres, which are extracted and used to create biosteel. The goats themselves are perfectly normal-looking; there is absolutely no risk of accidentally producing a goat with eight legs, or compound eyes, or an exoskeleton, or the scientifically questionable ability to talk to spiders. You could safely eat these goats and the meat would taste no different, assuming that you're the sort of person who knows what goats taste like.
Ordinary goat, or spider-hybrid Super Goat? This smug bastard will never tell.
Gene splicing only happens when scientists know what each gene codes for, and combine genes in ways that lead to predictable effects. This is not a "fuck it, let's see what this does" process, especially when you've been entrusted to make an impossibly large beast that can't climb out of its enclosure and start devouring children. The head scientists should know exactly what the Indominus Rex's capabilities are, because if they don't want it to be able to change colour - which they probably don't, since the whole point of making it is so people can see it - they are perfectly capable of not inserting the cuttlefish's colour-change genes into it.
Behold, the secret of the mighty Indominus Rex.
The idea that they'd keep the dinosaur's 'ingredients' a secret from everyone, including the park's manager and owner, is equally ridiculous. There's not a fucking chance that Masrani or Verizon Wireless, the I-Rex's would-be sponsors, are going to risk some disgruntled scientist quitting the park and replicating the animal for some short-sighted billionaire with poor taste in pets. That means they're going to have to patent the I-Rex's genes, and when you file a patent for something, it means that basic information about your invention can be accessed by the public. Finding out what was in the I-Rex should have been a non-issue, and not a long, agonizing process hindered by a belligerent, sketchy scientist.
3. Not every woman needs to be a family woman.
Claire Dearing is the operations manager of Jurassic World, which means that it's her job to call the shots and prevent the park from collapsing into an unsustainable money hemorrhage. And while there are probably several legitimate criticisms one can make about the way she handles her job, the movie wants you to know that Claire's biggest failing as a human being is the fact that she's not actively trying to get pregnant.
Big deal, now let's see you make your own hybrid with Chris Pratt.
Jurassic World is the film equivalent of a psychotic mother secretly poking holes in her daughter's condoms. Seriously, this is the only movie I've seen this year that's actually palpably furious that some women don't have babies. Somewhere in the world, right now, a woman on birth control is working on her resume, and just thinking about that would be enough to drive the entire screenwriting staff of Jurassic World to self-immolate in a fit of rage. Yeah, this whole franchise is about man's gross overconfidence in thinking that he can control an animal that weighs roughly as much as a Costco, but this movie in particular also wants you to know that if you're a woman and you're not actively wiping snot from the face of a child, you will be punished.
Ladies, this is your only legitimate life choice in 'Jurassic World'.
There are three main female characters in this movie: Zach and Gray's mother; Claire; and Claire's assistant Zara. The fate of each woman is determined by how good of a mother she is.
Let's start with Zach and Gray's mother, whose name I won't list, partially because I don't actually remember what it is, and partially because anyone who names their child after a monochromatic shade should lose name privileges forever. Her parenting starts out a little shaky; she's letting her ten-year-old open mail from her divorce lawyer, and also she's getting divorced in the first place, because she's a homewrecking trollop. And at first, things don't go well for her. Her son is moody. No one answers their phone, which is the next rant I'm about to go on. Her children don't get to have quality bonding time with their aunt. But then we see a "good mom" moment; she leaves a work meeting in order to talk to her sons on the phone. Behind her, a comically impatient roomful of inconvenienced people tap their watches and sigh, but Good Mom literally turns her back on work to hear all about the tedious, bullshit details of her children's trip to the zoo. And as a result, she's rewarded. Her entire family survives the movie more or less unscathed, and at the end, she even embraces her estranged husband, all thoughts of divorce apparently forgotten, because everyone knows that the best cure for a marriage that's slowly suffocating your dreams and bleeding out every trace of your identity is to have your children nearly eaten by dinosaurs.
See, don't you feel better now?
Contrast Mom's fate with that of Zara. Zara is Claire's assistant, and she's assigned to do a half-ass job of babysitting the boys while their aunt is busy running the place. As far as mother figures go, she's less "Mary Poppins" and more "Aunt Petunia"; she spends virtually every moment of screen time with her nose buried in her cellphone, far more interested in her work than in the tiny human lives she's responsible for. She ignores the boys, takes them on rides that are far too young for them, and struggles to make any kind of conversation with them. She's every rich mom you've ever seen at Starbucks, tapping out an email with with French manicured fingers and snapping at her young son to stop slurping his steamed white hot chocolate, because he's going to spill it and she doesn't want any smudges on the seats of her new SUV. She fails the ultimate test of motherhood when the two boys wander off while she's distracted, and nearly get themselves killed. Her punishment? She's fucking killed by multiple dinosaurs in front of them.
Next time on Supernanny: Jurassic Edition.
While trying and failing to protect the boys from undead flying monsters, the movie has quite enough of Zara's inept pseudo-parenting, and she's snatched up by a passing pteranodon with impossibly strong feet. (Quite literally. There's no way one of those things could have lifted a full-grown human.) Unlike most of the casualties in the Jurassic Park franchise, Zara does not receive a quick, off-screen death consisting of little more than a scream and a crunching sound. Oh, no. Her death is possibly the most brutal one in the entire film. We see her snatched up into the air, where she screams as a second pteranodon tries to wrench her from the grasp of the first. When they've had enough of playing human tug-o-war, one of the pteranodons drags her into the nearby water, and she gasps and struggles to breathe as it pulls her in and out of the water. Just when we think the worst might nearly be over, the gigantic horror-shark from the deep leaps out of the water, devouring both her and the pteranodon in one giant bite. That's apparently what you get for having shitty maternal instincts.
Sorry, Zara, you may have a fiance and an important job, but your babysitting just isn't up to snuff.
But the most complicated instance of this theme is Claire herself. At the beginning of the movie, we see that Claire has an incredibly important job. She's single-handedly responsible for the safety and well-being of dozens of dinosaurs, hundreds of employees, and tens of thousands of guests while her boss dicks around in a helicopter all day. She's the one - apparently the only one - keeping an eye on the park's bottom line, to make sure it doesn't end up as a sun-bleached wasteland in the middle of the ocean. And at first glance, she's doing a decent job of things; the place is thriving, she's got 30,000 happy guests, and she's on the cusp of clinching a $50 million sponsorship deal that will ensure the park's future. Her job title is basically "Queen of the Dinosaurs", a position that my five-year-old self would have drowned both of my siblings to obtain, and based on the indestructible designer heels she insists on wearing throughout the movie, she's being generously compensated for her work. But she's not happy. She's a woman, you see, and no matter how much great shit a woman has going for her, she'll never be happy until she has babies.
This movie was directed by Colin Trevorrow, but Claire's need for a tiny human larva of her own is presented as subtly as a Michael Bay robot explosion. The idea that Claire's high-powered dream job is just a temporary holdover until true happiness comes rocketing out of her birth canal is beaten into us over and over again like a sledgehammer made of misguided maternal instincts. For one thing, there's the conversations with her sister; the sister reminds her that her worldview will change when she has kids, which Claire responds to with a very firm "if, not when", in a tone of voice that tells us this topic of conversation leads to the entire Dearing family staring silently into their mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving every year. And if Claire's fumbled interactions with the boys had you worried for the future of Claire's fallopian tubes, have no fear! For the slower members of the audience, they added in a full fifteen-second scene of Claire standing in her multi-million dollar facility, surrounded by employees who hang on her every word, in her decidedly non-child-friendly white designer suit... staring wistfully at a mother and child embracing.
Just seeing this image fills my uterus with joy.
This movie was directed by Colin Trevorrow, but Claire's need for a tiny human larva of her own is presented as subtly as a Michael Bay robot explosion. The idea that Claire's high-powered dream job is just a temporary holdover until true happiness comes rocketing out of her birth canal is beaten into us over and over again like a sledgehammer made of misguided maternal instincts. For one thing, there's the conversations with her sister; the sister reminds her that her worldview will change when she has kids, which Claire responds to with a very firm "if, not when", in a tone of voice that tells us this topic of conversation leads to the entire Dearing family staring silently into their mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving every year. And if Claire's fumbled interactions with the boys had you worried for the future of Claire's fallopian tubes, have no fear! For the slower members of the audience, they added in a full fifteen-second scene of Claire standing in her multi-million dollar facility, surrounded by employees who hang on her every word, in her decidedly non-child-friendly white designer suit... staring wistfully at a mother and child embracing.
Although to be fair, she uses the exact same expression when looking at Indominus Rex, so it's entirely possible that she just wants to put the child on display in a paddock.
I'm not saying that there aren't women in positions of power who secretly yearn for children. I'm sure there are. Somewhere out there, a corporate CEO is probably taking a business call on her cellphone while staring longingly at the secret mountain of baby shoes she keeps hidden in her closet. But holy shit, there are also a lot of women in power who are just fine without children, thank you, because children smell funny and wine is great and grown women are adults who are perfectly capable of choosing the kind of lifestyles they want to lead and the responsibilities they're prepared to take on. Turning Claire Dearing into a tired stereotype of the career woman who longs for a man and a family is a cop-out. There are much more interesting things to do with the character. But the movie doesn't give her a whole hell of a lot of choice in the matter, because every time Claire dares to forget her natural female nurturing instincts, the story swiftly punishes her.
When we first meet Claire, she's anything but motherly. She's got a world-famous park to run, dammit, and her busy, 25-hour-a-day schedule doesn't give her a lot of time to wipe runny noses and fix after-school snacks. The first time we meet her, she fails to meet Zach and Gray at the airport, and is forced to back out of dinner plans at the last moment. She earns the boys' ire when she tells them that she won't be able to personally ferry them around the park, because her nephews are apparently the only teenage boys on earth who are disappointed at having free reign of the world's greatest theme park instead of spending time with an aunt they barely know. But not to worry, her failure to mother does not go unpunished. From the moment she sends the boys off with Zara, Claire's entire life goes off the rails. Her prized dinosaur escapes into the park. Her nephews escape their handler and end up lost in the jungle. The safety of her guests is seriously jeopardized, just as she's trying to woo a critical investment deal. Everything goes to shit all at once, and every single thing that goes wrong can be blamed squarely on Claire.
But things quickly turn around for Claire when she gets her head in the game and starts acting like a first-class parent. She's in the midst of the biggest crisis her park has ever faced in her time there, and her leadership is more badly needed than ever. She should be back at headquarters, coordinating the evacuation, talking to the media, arranging for backup to arrive and keeping everybody calm and focused. Instead, she decides to stomp through the fucking jungle in a pair of six-inch heels, searching for her nephews. She has no experience in the field, no clue what she's doing, grossly improper attire for the job, and she's actively slowing down the trained professional who is trying to find the boys. It's an objectively stupid decision, and it should end with everything in the park dying of dinosaur-tooth-shaped wounds because no one is actually in charge and the boys' rescue team keeps having to stop and wait for Claire to get her stiletto out of the mud. But from the movie's weird moral standpoint, she's apparently right on the money. In fact, the more time Claire spends hiking in businesswear, driving ambulances, patching wounds and dragging the boys away from things that want to taste them - all tasks she could not be less qualified to do - the more the movie rewards her efforts. The Indominus Rex is contained, she gets the guy, her sister doesn't hate her, and Zach and Gray survive by miraculously starting a broken-down truck that has sat untouched with a rotting battery since 1992. And best of all, Claire finally learns the value of family.
At the end of the movie, Claire is standing in an enormous warehouse full of people who've been injured by her park's own negligence. The dinosaurs are loose, the military is taking over, and she's literally surrounded by the beginnings of the class-action lawsuit that will ruin her. But she kisses Owen and smiles at children, and that's the important thing.
White designer suits: not the official uniform of moms.
When we first meet Claire, she's anything but motherly. She's got a world-famous park to run, dammit, and her busy, 25-hour-a-day schedule doesn't give her a lot of time to wipe runny noses and fix after-school snacks. The first time we meet her, she fails to meet Zach and Gray at the airport, and is forced to back out of dinner plans at the last moment. She earns the boys' ire when she tells them that she won't be able to personally ferry them around the park, because her nephews are apparently the only teenage boys on earth who are disappointed at having free reign of the world's greatest theme park instead of spending time with an aunt they barely know. But not to worry, her failure to mother does not go unpunished. From the moment she sends the boys off with Zara, Claire's entire life goes off the rails. Her prized dinosaur escapes into the park. Her nephews escape their handler and end up lost in the jungle. The safety of her guests is seriously jeopardized, just as she's trying to woo a critical investment deal. Everything goes to shit all at once, and every single thing that goes wrong can be blamed squarely on Claire.
Although really, these two went out of their way to make sure they'd get eaten by dinosaurs.
At the end of the movie, Claire is standing in an enormous warehouse full of people who've been injured by her park's own negligence. The dinosaurs are loose, the military is taking over, and she's literally surrounded by the beginnings of the class-action lawsuit that will ruin her. But she kisses Owen and smiles at children, and that's the important thing.
Parenting done right. Apparently.
Here's a handy hint: if you only want children after you've had your job, family, lifestyle and stylish outfit torn apart by miles of merciless jungle and several impossibly large homicidal reptiles, you probably don't actually want children. You're just going through some stuff.
4. It's time for screenwriters to accept the cellphone.
For most of recorded human history, our inability to instantly communicate with one another across long distances has caused all sorts of wacky hijacks, along with so, so much death. And writers from all over the world took notice. Most of the stories that we love today are only possible because the characters are unable to just pick up the phone and contact anyone they want. Romeo and Juliet would not have been a tragedy if Juliet was able to just text her lover a quick "lol, faking my own death brb. BTW plz don't kill urself". Cinderella would be the dullest love story ever told if the prince had just added her on Facebook and sent her a message in the morning. The entire Harry Potter franchise would be reduced to a single children's picture book if effective communication existed in that universe. Every single 80s and 90s sitcom to ever exist in the history of ever had at least one episode that revolved around the characters trying to locate one another and having a series of near misses.
But the problem is, we haven't lived in a world without instant communication for over fifteen years now. And writers still have no idea how to deal with that.
Above: pure sorcery.
For years, writers have come up with hackneyed ways to keep cellphones out of their scripts. Phones get broken. They get lost. Buildings that I can personally guarantee have flawless reception somehow gain magical signal-blocking properties.
Jurassic World uses every single one of these tricks.
Jurassic World uses every single one of these tricks.
Chris Pratt, single-handedly blocking cellphone reception.
Almost every single time someone tries to use a cellphone in Jurassic World, something goes wrong. Zach refuses to answer his phone when his mother calls, because he's a moody teenage boy, and at that age, speaking with your worried mother in public is the social equivalent of having a pubic hair stuck in your braces. Everyone involved in the production also suffers from the classic 'lack of reception' problems, as if they were vacationing in a Soviet bomb shelter instead of a highly popular resort. At one point, Zach and Gray get a phone call that sounds like it's being transmitted through a haunted baby monitor, which they chock up to the plexiglass bubble they're sitting in. Y'know, the exact same plexiglass bubble that gets wireless emergency broadcasts and informative videos of Jimmy Fallon. And while fighting with a dinosaur, Zach drops his phone and shatters it, putting an end to that pesky 'iPhones exist' problem once and for all.
Above: apparently less difficult to transmit than a goddamn text message.
Smartphones and texting are clearly not going away, as we draw closer and closer to the day that communication chips are implanted at birth and social security numbers are issued by the Google corporation. Every attempt to get around them in movies and on television is clumsy at awkward at best. C'mon, guys. This is a world where genetically engineered dinosaurs are possible. You can figure out the smartphone.
Bonus Outrage: Why the hell does PETA support this movie?
A few days after this movie was released, PETA ventured onto Twitter to praise the filmmakers of Jurassic World for not using any animals during filming, which is a bit like praising the directors of Beauty and the Beast for not using any real talking mantlepiece clocks during the production. Hilariously enough, it's not even an accurate claim - half of Noah's Ark was used to record sounds for the movie dinosaurs, including the sound of two allegedly inbred pigs fighting one another for food. A glaring error like that is hardly surprising for an organization that fails to do even basic fact-checking before, say, euthanizing kidnapped pets, but it's a big deal for them to get behind a major blockbuster movie regardless. They're trying to usher in a new era of animal rights in filmmaking, and apparently, they feel Jurassic World has achieved that.
Which is how I know that absolutely no one from PETA actually watched the fucking thing.
And 'Titanic' is proof that you don't need to kill thousands of people in an actual marine disaster to make a great movie.
Sure, on the surface, this is a movie about animal rights. Claire is reminded over and over again throughout the movie that her dinosaurs are living, breathing animals, and not just expensive, pooping toys. And that's a really great lesson. Or at least, it would have been, if she had actually learned it.
See, as I previously discussed, Claire spends most of her time doing the insanely necessary tasks that the park desperately needs her to do; all of the other characters spend the movie chastising her for doing this, because apparently every single one of them is keen to embrace financial and administrative ruin. Since Claire is not actually several small people stuffed into one trenchcoat, her job leaves her very little time for one-on-one bonding with the massive dinosaurs she's responsible for, and she starts to feel a little detached from them. Although you are currently reading this on the loveless void of the Internet, you know that there are some people out there who do find value in basic empathy, and Owen sets out to teach Claire how to feel for these dinosaurs. And she does. For exactly one moment. Claire and Owen stumble across a mortally wounded apatosaurus - and so help me, if I hear anyone incorrectly referring to it as a 'brontosaurus', I will sign you up for every dinosaur-related mailing list I can find - and as she cradles its dying head in her arms, she realizes that holy shit, it's sad when things die.
Thanks for the 'Land Before Time' flashbacks, assholes.
Since this is movie-land, we're supposed to understand that this single moment of feeling sad for the only Jurassic-era species in this entire film represents a fundamental change of heart for Claire. From now on, she's going to spend her time personally sponge bathing the animals and sending them off to sleep with gentle lullabies. At this point, every PETA member in America was apparently so overcome with approval that they left the theatre to masturbate into their vegan popcorn in the bathroom, because this is the last time anyone in the film has even the slightest concern for animal welfare.
You know you're probably not watching an animal rights film when there is animal abuse on the freaking poster.
When you keep an animal in captivity for your own personal gain, you have a responsibility to take good care of it. Hell, when you bring a living thing into this world - whether it's an animal or a tiny human - you are responsible for making sure that that living thing is safe and well-cared for and reasonably protected from being dismembered by a living fossil. A dog owner might spoil the shit out of their beloved little dog, but if they give a hungry boa constrictor free access to that dog while he sleeps, they're a shitty fucking pet owner. Likewise, if you genetically engineer a homicidal cuttlefish-raptor behemoth that turns out to be impossible to control, forcing your other dinosaurs to fight it to the death makes you a shitty fucking dinosaur owner.
"Yeah, so I know your only hunting experience is chasing after a domestic pig, but I'm going to need you to kill something thirty-seven times your size."
If one of your children grows up to be a serial killer, the solution is not to arm your next child to the teeth and send it out to gun down its murderous sibling. The Indominus Rex was specifically designed to be an unstoppable predator that shits all over Mother Nature while literally eating her other creations for breakfast. It's a super-T Rex with arms and a disdain for living things that Ted Bundy would find extreme. Siccing a T-Rex on it is not going to solve your problem; it's just a great way to end up with a dead T-Rex. And that would be how the movie ended, if it weren't for the Deus Ex Sharklord popping up from the deep to devour the Indominus. PETA are supposedly all about movies that show the proper handling of animals, but the only animal rights message that Jurassic World sends is 'if you fuck up, it's a-okay to make your animals pay for your mistakes by having them fight each other like overgrown Pokemon'.
'Jurassic World' used CONCERN FOR ANIMAL WELFARE! It's not very effective...
But maybe it's the anti-captivity stance that PETA loves. At the end of the movie, as humans sail away from the island with rags clasped over their bloodied stumps, the dinosaurs are left with free reign over the island. For the fourth time in as many movies, mankind realizes that we have vastly overestimated our ability to tame nature - from the mighty Tyrannosaurus to the fungal infections growing under our toenails - and perhaps it's time for us to stop meddling in things we don't understand. The dinosaurs will be free to live out their days as nature intended, without being gawked at by chubby kids in gift-shop t-shirts.
Freedom is a great thing to have if you're a human being living in slavery, or a freshly-kidnapped wild Orca doing backflips in a Seaworld tank, but it's not particularly useful if you're a genetically engineered amusement park sideshow who has spent your entire lifespan eating nothing but goat carcasses that mysteriously appear on the end of a chain in your paddock. These animals were born in captivity, and are adapted to live in a world that hasn't existed for over 66 million years. The carnivores have no idea how to feed themselves, and since every single dinosaur was meant to exist in a climate that vanished shortly after a fucking meteorite falcon-punched the world into a different biome, they probably all rely on specialized machinery and veterinary care to be comfortable. At the very least, the T-Rex has severe injuries that probably need urgent medical attention, and the lone surviving raptor is now going to starve to death, because her entire hunting strategy is dependent on her packmates being there to help her corner prey. Hell, they're all going to starve to death, because every single dinosaur on that island is female; when the carnivores finish eating all the herbivores, they're fucked, because they sure as hell won't be breeding more.
Because this thing would definitely give up free shark in exchange for privacy and image rights.
Freedom is a great thing to have if you're a human being living in slavery, or a freshly-kidnapped wild Orca doing backflips in a Seaworld tank, but it's not particularly useful if you're a genetically engineered amusement park sideshow who has spent your entire lifespan eating nothing but goat carcasses that mysteriously appear on the end of a chain in your paddock. These animals were born in captivity, and are adapted to live in a world that hasn't existed for over 66 million years. The carnivores have no idea how to feed themselves, and since every single dinosaur was meant to exist in a climate that vanished shortly after a fucking meteorite falcon-punched the world into a different biome, they probably all rely on specialized machinery and veterinary care to be comfortable. At the very least, the T-Rex has severe injuries that probably need urgent medical attention, and the lone surviving raptor is now going to starve to death, because her entire hunting strategy is dependent on her packmates being there to help her corner prey. Hell, they're all going to starve to death, because every single dinosaur on that island is female; when the carnivores finish eating all the herbivores, they're fucked, because they sure as hell won't be breeding more.
She looks as shocked as you are.
Now with all my nitpicking aside, Jurassic World really is a visually spectacular movie. It's fun, it's fast paced, and if Jurassic World was a real theme park, I would sell one or both of my siblings into slavery to go there. If you haven't seen the movie, despite having just read a 6,000 word critique of it that's lousy with spoilers, I recommend that you get up right now and go see it immediately.
And if you have seen it, I recommend that you join me in line for the next one.
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