Thursday 25 February 2016

Jurassic World Review

Here are my thoughts on Jurassic World, look:

After the global financial crash, it became quite well known that the dominant neoclassical school of economics does not have an explanation for why slumps and depressions (which are euphemistically called ‘business cycles’) occur. Capitalism is a perfectly functioning system and a perfectly functioning system should run perfectly, so when the system stops running perfectly the cause can’t, by definition, be part of the system. Keynesians meanwhile, cleave to the view that slumps are actually endogenous to capitalism, and can be understood, at least in part, as an interruption to what Keynes called ‘animal spirits’: unpredictable changes in the mood of investors and entrepreneurs. When this occurs, the system stops functioning as it should.

Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World, as it is called in the most recent movie), is a little bit like this. The idea is that the theme park is so well designed and operated that nothing can possibly go wrong: it is a perfectly running system that runs perfectly well until the ‘animal spirits’ kick in. Of course, the thesis advance by both the first and fourth films in the franchise (both films that feature a functioning theme park, rather than an overgrown one trampled into desuetude as in the second and third films) is that it isn’t the ‘animal spirits’ (the dinosaurs) that prevent the park from running effectively, it is the park itself. Yes, the dinosaurs are the jokers in the pack, but they are emphatically not the reason everything goes haywire in the first place. Like capitalism, the fault is endemic to the system, inscribed in its functioning. Something, somewhere, has to go wrong. The dinosaurs just exploit the flaw when it does.

Michael Crichton’s original book pursued this argument using the new minted-chaos theory fashionable at the time, a mathematical theory of unpredictability predicated on the idea that tiny events potentially have ripple effects that can drastically cascade, and the accumulation of malfunctions leads to the total collapse of vast systems: perhaps environmental, perhaps ecological, perhaps economic. In the first film this came across more as a ‘for the want of a nail, the armour wasn’t made, for the want of the armour, the knight didn’t fight, for the want of a knight, the battle was lost’ kind of thing, rather than about the radical unknowability of systems with too many unknown and interpenetrating variables, but it worked very well dramatically. 



The book is less about the ethical quandaries of de-extinction and ‘playing God’ than it is about the hubris of believing oneself to have transcended something as mundane as elementary human fallibility. Many Crichton stories are orchestrated around scenarios that require rules, protocols, and then showing what happens when those protocols break down (I read The Andromeda Strain recently and couldn’t put the little sucker down).

The idea with Jurassic World is that in some unspecified time in the near future, the Jurassic Park franchise has been expanded from a glorified safari to a huge dinosaur-centric theme park and the whole island is an enormous tropical holiday resort. Things are different: de-extinction has been underway for so long that everyone has got used to it and dinosaurs are now a commonplace. The Jurassic Park brand has changed. It is no longer thought of as the place you got to get eaten and don’t ever come back. It is now the place where you go to have a drink by the pool while your kids go to stroke a baby brontosaurus and then you go back home after a week or two. In this iteration, dinosaurs share the same fate as many an expensive toy on Boxing Day, and now that the initial sense of childish wonder at the walking biological impossibilities has evaporated, the park constantly needs to up the stakes to keep its jaded clientele coming through the door. Their solution to this is to up the ante and play fast and loose with the genetic constitution of the new dinosaurs they create in order to deliver progressively bigger thrills.  

In one sense, the film is refreshingly candid about the reality of theme parks: they are lame. The concepts behind them are trite and tiresome (American Adventure?), most of the day is spent in long queues for short rides, and everything is overpriced. Of course it’s ridiculous to suggest that people would become so inured so quickly to the charms of resurrected dinosaurs, but for literally anything other than dinosaurs the point is fairly well made – these days the more astounding entertainments that people have at their fingertips the less impressed they appear to be with them, when all the Lumière brothers had to do to hold an audience captive was to film… well, anything.

So even though Jurassic World is like Chessington World of Adventures to the power of ten million, it is still depicted as lame, and the film plays with this conceit in various ways. We are introduced to two kids who are sent by their parents to get them out of their hair and into their aunt’s, who manages the park’s day to day operations and is therefore well placed to give them the VIP treatment. One, who is about ten or eleven, is absolutely potty about dinosaurs. His brother, who is about fifteen, could not care less about dinosaurs. He is interested in fifteen year old girls, not dinosaurs. And he can’t think of anything worse than being on an island full of dinosaurs, because dinosaurs are for babies, not cool hormonal guys. The film makes a lot of the fact that his major preoccupation is perving at teenage girls and studiously ignoring the dinosaurs. True, he likes the mosasaur, but in reality he gets a bigger kick from trying to take the weird, transparent viewing vehicle he gets to drive in the herbivore paddock ‘off road’ than from looking at the actual reptiles.  The film then exploits the notion that both the bored, daiquiri-sipping, teenage girl admiring holidaymakers and the cynical, complacent staff who are stultified by the efficiency of the systems they control, will provide a pleasing contrast to the set of clever dicks in the first film who all predicted things would go tits-up from the word go.

There is, however, a further comparison between the films and their chosen tropes. Just like Jurassic World the theme park has to generate bigger and bigger thrills to keep the punters coming, Jurassic World the movie also has to trump its predecessor to be similarly profitable. And as is widely understood, the way that the contemporary blockbuster achieves this is not to craft something that is aesthetically superior, more daring, more complex and so on, but to simply pile on spectacle, because while it’s acceptable for the film to be less pleasing than its forerunner a piece of art (and its generally accepted that sequels suffer from a deficit of imagination to begin with, except in rare cases), it absolutely must surpass it as an ‘event’. This tendency is illustrated in the film with a showdown between the executive CEO that owns the park and the scientist that creates the dinosaurs. The executive deplores the genetic tinkering that has called into being a super-predator called the Indomitus Rex that can camouflage itself, mask its heat signature, and generally play silly buggers with anything that might actually stop it. The scientist replies that that was exactly what he was asked to create. This is exactly the condition of the contemporary blockbuster, and not only the ‘soft reboot’ that Jurassic World in fact is. Since the imperative for bigger spectacle rescinds all other priorities, all other consequences can just go hang. So Jurassic World is a slave to logic it ostensibly deplores, and it actually complicit with what it is superficially criticising. This disposition where the film wants to have its cake and eat it is reinforced by its constant referencing of people’s compulsion to check their phones rather than interact with the people immediately around them or even look at dinosaurs: any attempt by Hollywood to critique an over-mediatised culture always leaves a bit of a sour taste, as does the heavy-handed exposition here that makes it clear that the park is beholden to the whims of corporate sponsors and advertisers while simultaneously shoving as many brands as possible down your throat (Starbucks and those fucking headphones that Dr Dre thinks he invented feature heavily).

The thing is, once things go to pot, the film then has to operate under typical Spielbergian constraints. There are annoying, precocious children with recondite skill sets that end up saving the day (in past films, teenage girls have been both adept computer hackers (!) and gymnasts, which have allowed then to avoid velociraptors in all kinds of ridiculous ways – here the two boys fix a jeep that has been mouldering in a garage for twenty years on the basis of ‘remember when we spent summer fixing up that car?’). There is the exhausting, monochromatic moral universe where only evil characters can be eaten and good characters are merely allowed superficial wounds. In the film, this is typified by the demise of the incompetent, arch, Brit PA who spends the entire film flapping her lip on the phone about the various ways in which she intends to sabotage her fiancée’s happiness, and Vincent D’Orofrio (more on whom later), who is guzzled when trying to pal up with a velociraptor. The film also continues one of the series’ more asinine traditions of killing off all the English characters in it, for reasons that are not quite clear (in the first film Hammond is Scottish, a nationality that people in the US, for no reason, consider honourary Americans).

The director of this film – some guy – is a hack incapable of generating tension, and this is perhaps the movie’s most irritating technical feature. It’s so pat from beginning to end. The dinosaurs turn up on time and leave on time. At one point, thousands of pterosaurs fly the coop and terrorise the island in a sequence that references Hitchcock’s The Birds (right down to the shots through the windows of the café, which I presume was Spielberg’s idea). Some are taken down by about a dozen sharpshooters, and after that scene there are no more pterosaurs in the movie. They are all gone. The Indomitus Rex appears when it needs to for the plot, chases people when it needs to chase then, and gives up when it needs to give up. Perhaps it had a copy of the script? The velociraptors change their allegiances for a (reasonably effective) plot twist and then change them back for no apparent reason. The Tyrannosaurus is exactly there when it needs to be, as is the Mosasaur, the deux ex machina of the movie. For a film which is essentially about grit getting in the oil, there’s a distinct lack of grit in the oil. Do I really have to point out that a fluent and engaging dramatic structure isn’t achieved by having a succession of things go conveniently for the main characters but by having things go inconveniently for them?

De-extinction is a particularly capitalist distillation: it fulfils a want rather than a need. It probably won’t happen (though I wouldn’t mind a woolly Mammoth or two), and if it does it will either be motivated by pure profit or by scientific bloody mindedness (‘we made it because we could’). In the Jurassic Park films, it’s both of these things. The idea that the parks in the first and fourth films operate unashamedly for profit is never solidly questioned, although it’s implied that the first one is too exclusive (and therefore the dinos will only be seen by the very rich) and the second is too inclusive (the hoi polloi are portrayed unsympathetically as unthinking consumers). The representations of the main capitalist figures in the films are intriguing, since the schizoid Hollywood position is that while capitalism is the omnipresent background that can never be questioned, individual greed is often sanctimoniously condemned. In the original book, Hammond was a ruthless, cynical autocrat which the first film softened into a cuddly visionary, likeable but misguided. Attenborough’s character in Jurassic Park had got where his was through a combination of bootstraps, horse-sense and hard knocks, and therefore on balance deserved both his success and his humbling nemesis. Cranky, dictatorial ‘Book’ Hammond is deservedly eaten by a flock of compsognothi; avuncular ‘film’ Hammond is airlifted to safety.

In this film, the CEO, Misrati, is played with rococo flourishes by Irfan Khan very much in the mould of the blue-sky noughties pioneer that companies like apple and google want you to think runs them. He is introduced to us gamely learning to fly a helicopter while admonishing his corporate staff to think beyond the bottom line, focus groups and consumer surveys, and concentrate instead on instilling a sense of wonder into their customers. The patter, though vacuous, is clearly meant to distinguish Khan’s character as a likeable, empathic human being rather than a cynical hollow suit (the kind of bullshit that Richard Branson wishes he could do), authentically passionate about what he does and keen to deliver a quality product. For reasons that have nothing to do with sensitive, creative scriptwriting, Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, firmly straightjacketed in the brittle career-woman role, has to sit in the chopper being lectured by the amiable goofball CEO as if she literally has no conception of what he is talking about when he explains the importance of customers actually enjoying the experience of the park. Later on, to undermine their contempt for our intelligence, the filmmakers include a scene where Dallas Howard bridles at being told what to do by the only person on the world that can save her when she is lost in a tropical jungle being chased by a forty-foot beast. It’s intended (I think) to show her wilfulness, but here it’s a hamfisted attempt at character continuity that rings clunkingly hollow. What kind of human being could reasonably be expected to behave like that? In that situation I’d do everything Chris Pratt told me to and give him a blowjob afterwards. In any case, the Indomitus Rex seizes on its opportunity to escape as a direct result of Misrati expressing concerns about the security of its paddock rather than as a consequence of any negligence, malfeasance, or complacency (save perhaps a corpulent security guard taking his eye off the ball, more lazy shorthand than anything else). So overall it’s a sympathetic portrait, and he gets a pretty sympathetic death (noisy and colourful while trying to do the right thing for the good of all). What’s interesting, however, is that quite a lot is made of Khan’s character’s investment in the dinosaurs first and foremost as repositories of wonder and delight rather than as profitable entities (again, nauseatingly, the mind flits to instantly to branding strategies favoured by apple). When introducing Misrati, the film is punctilious to depict him as a worthwhile custodian of the dinosaurs who eschews treating them as commodities, instead understanding that their true value is not monetary. Not twenty minutes later, with the Indomitus Rex stoating freely around the island and consuming everything in sight, Misrati completely disregards this passionately held ethical conviction and turns down the chance to liquidate it with an airborne chaingun, citing its substantial multi-million dollar value as the reason. The total contradiction between these two positions isn’t highlighted as being significant in any way, neither mined for irony or illustrative of hypocrisy (it’s very obviously an example of the filmmakers doing the most expeditious thing for the script even if it means having characters behave in an inconsistent way); nonetheless it can be interpreted as the film’s unconscious articulation that, all blue-sky bullshit aside, capitalism is just capitalism and capitalists should be expected to behave like capitalists when it comes down to it.

The film’s subplot references the one that runs through the Alien series, namely that a venal company seeks to acquire and exploit dangerous and unpredictable creatures palpably beyond their control for military applications. Vincent D’Orofrio plays a military contractor who harbours ludicrous, Alan Partridge-style fantasies about training velociraptors as a kind of special forces US infantry contingent and deploying them in warfare, where they will consume the enemy ‘belt buckle and all’. Chris Pratt is an honest, ex-navy type who is appalled by D’Orofrio’s proposal, but who still has a job where he apparently trains four velociraptors to move in unison, hunt things and basically obey all his commands, so it isn’t clear why he is spending his time doing that unless it is for some creepy form of prehistoric dressage. At one crucial point the plot hinges on a confrontation between D’Orofino and Pratt, where the former tries to persuade the latter to use the velociraptors to hunt and dispatch the Indomitus Rex as both an end to the carnage and a demonstration of their military potential. D’Orofrio’s character makes the most hollow and nonsensical threat of all time, facing down literally the only person on the face of the planet that can prevent the velociraptors from killing everything that moves when they are turned loose (he is imprinted on them at birth as the alpha male), by looking stern and saying ‘this is going to happen with or without you.’ There is then a jump cut to Pratt releasing his scaly charges, presumably because the screenwriters (all four of them) couldn’t think of any plausible way to make it appear that Pratt’s character wasn’t a total douche for agreeing to do something that he had no reason to. It’s worth noting, in consideration of the film’s politics, that D’Orofrio’s character is not actually from the US military per se but actually represents some ill-defined military contractor, which is again illustrative of the way that Hollywood carefully shields its audience from anything that could be potentially critical of US moral purity. Yes after all the worldwide invasions, occupations, militancy and imperialism, the idea that the US military would be dastardly enough not just to kill, but to kill and eat its enemies, is considered unthinkable.

Quite often in Hollywood films, the disaster is a proxy for sorting out family issues. In the first film, Dr Grant hates kids at the outset and enjoys toying with a corpulent young kid about how a velociraptor would fillet and then ingest him. (The film casts a somewhat portly and unathletic kid in the role so that the audience conspires in the teasing.) After having to look after Hammond’s grandchildren throughout the film, by the end Grant appears to recognise that he is ready for fatherhood. In Jurassic World the boys’ parents are poised to divorce and are both sent to their aunt as a way of reconnecting etiolated branches of the family tree. Dallas Howard, being a woman, is not allowed to be good at her job and a normal human being capable of maintaining meaningful relationships at the same time, so when the kids arrive she gives them short shift and keeps supervising the park like she is paid to. Here the dinosaur attack serves a threefold purpose. First it brings the older sisters closer together as Dallas Howard successfully protects her nephews and cements the family previously atomised by distance and the pressures of high-profile jobs (it’s highlighted that the mother has to take time out of an important meeting to make a phone call to check up on her kids). Second, it pairs the prim, repressed career-woman with a down-to-earth hunk that can finally help her enjoy life and not be so uptight all the time. Third, it brings the parents back together as they collect their errant children and, it’s implied, prevents their divorce. So once again monogamy and the nuclear family are reasserted. That the film’s treatment of gender politics can be aptly described as Palaeolithic is no surprise, but really conservatism seeps from every conceivable pore (to the point where the relatively new but completely incontrovertible fact of feathered dinosaurs is totally ignored, an open goal I’m astounded that the filmmakers miss).


I love dinosaurs and always have. But I don’t love Jurassic World, because like the park itself it traduces their transcendent wonder for money. In fact it sucked. Except for the mosasaur. I’m a bit like the teenage boy character in that regard. It all sucked except for the mosasaur.  

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