Thursday, June 18, 2015

God Help Us We're In The Hands Of Engineers

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As a little boy I would make piles out of the blankets on my bed and imagine them as landscapes. Mountains and caverns, valleys in which to prop and parade all the dollar-store plastic dinosaurs I could fit upon them. Rawrrr went the itty bitty T-Rex, ambling along on spindly little feet and arms. Usually somebody, probably the Stegosaurus, bore my own teeth-marks in its hide - they might've once been the kings of their prehistoric jungles but here, in the land of Jason's Comforter, I was the top of the food chain.

All I want from the Jurassic Park movies is for them to grab me by the scruff of the neck and to drop me back into that heap; to make that child's eye view come back to life, a mid-life Frankenstein sort at this point sure, but I can make it, with effort. It's like the scene in every sex-comedy where the lady needs everything to be just so, the candles and the music and the erect penis moving at precisely a 97 degree angle - if things are just right, then hello sweet sweet ecstasy for all involved!

Even though half a million exhausting think-pieces have dropped in the past two weeks on the strange Mars Man Venus Woman relationships Jurassic World puts on display it does seem kind of ripe for me to bring sexual dynamics into it, since such moments in the film just sit there, like exposed genitals on a subway car, inexplicable. I don't know if I'll see a moment as crusty in a mainstream movie this year as the one where Bryce Dallas Howard Triumphantly Saves The Man and the movie stops and stands still and just stares at what's happening for like fifteen empty seconds, as if time itself has folded in upon itself. Look at what that lady did, it seems to say! A lady did that! A LADY!

It's not that Steven Spielberg's movie doesn't tackle the subject -- Dr. Ellie Sattler would still like to discuss sexism in survival situations when she gets back, thank you very much. But there the themes at least seemed semi-coherent; purposeful. Jurassic World is just too sloppy to end up making any points. ("I am crying about divorce suddenly! I will never talk about it again though!") And it's just too sloppy to get me to my orgasm place. There's no Lex, there's no Tim, hell there's no dip-shit Gennaro even. I had some empty-calorie jump fun here and there but a sense of awe, a sense of respect for the power this place (again all due credit to the ever-quotable Ellie Sattler), well we didn't have respect for it and that is out now. It had hung one of those little signs up on the cage telling us the beasties were getting a bath or their shots inside, and we should come back later. The blankets done collapsed down all around me. Oh well. Maybe next time. Let's light the candles and give her another go; I'm always willing if you're always able...

5 comments:

Dave R said...

Sloppy is not the word. This is a totally non-thinking "A" ride action adventure. If you don't park your brain at the door, you might start asking things like 'how did that raptor get into the lab?'

padric said...

Saw the movie last weekend and agree that it's not particularly great cinema. I enjoyed it more than you, though, probably because my expectations going in were a lot lower. I've posted some nonsense about it on my blog, if you care to read it:
https://whatwouldjuliado.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/looking-up-the-dinosaurs-skirts/

Anonymous said...

I thought it was godawful. A colossal waste of time. Uninspired and lacking any kind of excitement.

Anonymous said...

Is it great? No.. but I did find it very entertaining. I'm not a philistine but I can enjoy the rare action movie once and a while. It's not exactly the kind of movie I go into excepting to see brilliantly written characters. Maybe I enjoyed it more because my expectations were so low and really after parts 2 and 3 how could they not be?

Anonymous said...

Even as an old man I continue to love dinosaurs, but this movie was so bereft of thrills and so disgustingly pandering in its pursuit of big box office that I doubt that I will attend the inevitable Jurassic World 2. I would love to see an R-rated Jurassic Park movie that dared to scare me. But it wouldn't even need to be rated R to do that; "Jaws" did it partly by featuring victims that could be anybody, not just bad guys and faceless drones in uniforms. The raptor in Jurassic World, having read the script, executes the bad guy simply because he is bad, turning its back on the good guys to do so, and then runs off, its mission accomplished. It's like the shark in Jaws holding off on its attacks until the mayor enters the water.