DINO DIRECTION HOME

Now in theaters:

Jurassic World: Rebirth--Dinosaurs, it turns out, are soooo '90s these days. Having been revived by cloning in 1993's Jurassic Park and eventually loosed on the modern world throughout the sequels, they have become public hazards and nuisances. Worse yet--by Hollywood standards--they've lost their commercial appeal; they've become so commonplace that people are bored with them, and museums are packing up their skeletons.

In this latest, a pharmaceutical company nonetheless sees potential in the beasts to create a medicine that will end heart disease. An exec (Rupert Friend), who is far too handsome not to be rotten, hires a team of soldiers of fortune led by Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, along with a mild-mannered paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), to travel to an equatorial area where the creatures still thrive. The mission is to collect blood samples from three of the most massive prehistoric reptiles. First up is the marine Mosasaur, then, on a island, the towering sauropod Titanosaurus, and finally the airplane-sized pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus.

This allows for three big showcase scenes, with many side action sequences. A family unwisely cruising through the area on a yacht--Dad, two daughters, and elder daughter's irritating boyfriend--ends up joining the expedition as well. Maybe the best episode in the movie involves this lot encountering a T-Rex who, having just woken up from a rather luxurious nappy-time alongside a river, chases them down the rapids, grabbing at them as if bobbing for apples.

As usual when reviewing a movie in the Jurassic franchise, or indeed any movie with significant dinosaur content, I feel the need to add a disclaimer: I'm a lifelong sucker for dinosaurs. Any movie with prehistoric creatures in it starts at an advantage with me, just as any movie about, say, auto racing starts at a disadvantage with me.

As objectively as possible, though, I can say that the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies consistently offer good summer blockbuster value, with high-end actors and high-end production values--underwritten, no doubt, with lots and lots of blatant product placement--and dialogue that isn't too much of an embarrassment. Most importantly, they get the dinosaurs right, with seamless special effects and imaginative, sometimes crazy set piece sequences.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script credited to David Koepp, who has done tidier work, Rebirth may be the corniest of the series to date, and the least plausible-seeming. The finale, which involves a gargantuan mutant horror and other hideous dino-hybrids, feels like something from another movie, and it's slightly off-key. But overall, the movie is still a hearty and entertaining helping of paleo-action.

Be warned, though: your hackles may raise a bit when the younger daughter befriends a cute little baby dinosaur; the series, you realize, has finally knuckled under and had its Ewok moment. But it isn't really much of a drag on the film, any more than the clockwork owl was on the original Clash of the Titans. It has the feel, rightly or not, of a marketable element imposed on the movie from above. The filmmakers seem to spend as little screen time as they can get away with on the creature, and it's easy to ignore. Besides, the kid names the baby "Delores," which somehow is, if nothing else, a really good name for a dinosaur.

DINO EXIT

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Jurassic World Dominion--Before discussing this supposed finale to the Jurassic Park series, I should offer my usual disclaimer: I'm a lifelong dinosaur geek. A movie with dinosaurs starts at as much of an advantage with me as, say, a movie about fighter jets does with a military aviation buff.

So take this into account this when I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed Jurassic World Dominion. Which I did.

The premise here is that dinosaurs have become a regular fact of contemporary life, usually as a danger or a pest. The movie begins with an enormous Mosasaur ruining the day of a commercial fishing boat, and from there director Colin Trevorrow, working from a script he co-wrote with Emily Carmichael, serves up one sequence after another of Mesozoic mayhem, as the revived reptiles cause traffic accidents, harass children, intrude on industrial sites and so forth. The beasts are also, of course, poached, illegally bred and otherwise exploited by humans.

The plot mixes the characters from the recent chapters, like Chris Pratt's raptor whisperer and Bryce Dallas Howard's Jurassic Park administrator turned dinosaur-liberation activist, with the heroes from the first film, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. Pratt and Howard are attempting to recover their adoptive daughter, the cloned child of a deceased JP scientist, as well as a young velociraptor, the offspring of Pratt's beloved Blue. Both have been kidnapped by a bio-engineering firm headed by creepy CEO Campbell Scott, and spirited off to an isolated research facility and dinosaur preserve in the Italian Alps.

Meanwhile Dern, startled by an invasion of locusts the size of baguettes that are decimating crops across the U.S., also suspects that the bio-firm is scheming, in the words of Simon Bar Sinister and Tears for Fears, to rule the world. She recruits her old pal Neill to help her infiltrate the facility, where Goldblum is gadfly-in-residence, and get proof. Eventually both sets of characters, along with an extremely glamorous pilot (DeWanda Wise) and a handful of other sympathetic parties, converge.

Along they way they are menaced by dinosaurs and other genetically-engineered perils. Raptors stalk our heroes through the streets and over the rooftops of Malta like assassins in a Bourne thriller. Dimetrodons chase them through amber mines. A giant flying Quetzalcoatlus attacks a plane in midair. Monstrous Giganotosaurus and sentimental favorite Tyrannosaurus Rex brawl like Japanese kaiju.  And that's aside from the worst outbreak of giant grasshoppers since 1957's The Beginning of the End.

Best of all, maybe, is an eerie, dreamlike sequence in which Therizinosaurus, a beast that resembles an enormous downy pheasant with claws like giant salad forks, towers over Howard as she lowers her pin-up-beauty face into a swampy green pool. This scene is a good example of a strength that has benefitted the whole series but is particularly pronounced in Dominion: the superb sound effects. For all of the movie's visual effects splendors, it's the sounds of the creatures, from the enveloping yet somehow muted bellow of the T-rex to all of the distinctive squawking and hissing and clucking and chittering of the others, that really make them scary.

On the downside, with as much objectivity as I can muster as a sucker for dinosaurs, I must note that the dialogue in Dominion seems bland and inexpressive; even Goldblum has to push his comically diffident delivery harder than usual to wring laughs out his lines. And the story is so unnecessarily scattered that the movie loses momentum at times.

Trevorrow is an admirably free-wheeling talent; he made 2015's Jurassic World a wild ride. With a tighter, more streamlined rescue-mission plot, this one could have been similarly edge-of-the-seat. On the other hand, if it was a tighter movie, it might have lost some of its eccentricity, and therefore some of its magic.

RAP(TOR) STAR

With Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is the "Indoraptor," yet another genetically-engineered hybrid dinosaur, combining the nastiest aspects of the tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor. The creature is depicted here...

...on collectable cans of my favorite pop, Dr. Pepper, which probably isn't much better for my health than an encounter with an indoraptor would be.

BLADE RUNNER

With Jurassic World still in theaters…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to this genetically-engineered velociraptor which adorns my current can of Barbasol:

This is a clever bit of product tie-in; you’ll remember it was a fake Barbasol can in which Wayne Knight tried to smuggle out the dinosaur embryos in the original film.

RIP to a couple of greats: My Mom’s favorite actor Theodore Bikel, passed on at 91, and Alex Rocco, passed on at 79. Of Rocco’s many fine turns, I especially loved him as the sheriff in The Stunt Man; it’s excellent (and rather accurate) when, near the end, Peter O’Toole off-handedly greets him with “Hello, sexy.”

THE WORLD IS MORE THAN ENOUGH

RIP to an all time great, Christopher Lee, departed at 93. More on him later, of course.

Opening wide today:

Jurassic World—Near the beginning of this summer blockbuster, one of the bigwigs at the title theme park complains that the public is no longer impressed by live dinosaurs, that kids don’t see them that differently than they’d see an elephant. It is, after all, twenty-some years since the disastrous events of Jurassic Park the first, so in the timeline of the franchise we’ve all had time to get blasé about giant extinct reptiles.

It’s hard not to sense that behind this is the dilemma of the filmmakers—back in 1993, Jurassic Park gave us CGI/animatronic dinosaur scenes so convincing that, at the time, they seemed almost like documentary footage. Between that and the dazzling showmanship of director Steven Spielberg, the original swept us briskly past logical and logistical gaps and stodgy, banal dramatics.

But two decades and two (enjoyable) sequels later, how to revive the franchise? Both the movie and its characters use the same approach—build a better dinosaur. And by better, of course, they mean more badass.

The premise is that Jurassic World is now up and running, funded by a gushy billionaire (Irrfan Khan), as a major international tourist attraction, with dinosaur petting zoos and boat excursions and a Sea World-style show with a mosasaurus leaping for a hanging shark like a porpoise leaping for a sardine. It also has, for that matter, a Starbucks and a Pandora jeweler and a gallery sponsored by Samsung—this movie has more product placement than Clueless, and to a similarly disingenuous satirical point.

Anyway, in response to the public’s yawn about dinosaurs, the park’s geneticists (led by B. D. Wong from the original film) have created a 50-foot tall genetically-engineered dino-hybrid monster dubbed Indominus Rex. This toothy titan breaks free, kills people and other dinosaurs, sets other creatures free in the wake of his destruction, and generally unleashes pandemonium.

So, how is it? Look, I’m a dinosaur geek, so it’s hopeless asking me for a balanced view of a dinosaur movie. But I remember being intrigued by the choice of the director, Colin Trevorrow, whose only previous feature was the sweet but low-key romantic comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. He seemed like an offbeat choice for a special-effects-bloated spectacle.

He was just the right choice, as it turned out. He has a peculiar sense of humor and, better yet, no significant sense of decorum, and after setting us up with a relatively straight-faced opening quarter, he starts putting funky little spins on notions from King Kong to the Japanese monster flicks to the earlier films in this series, and he gradually lets the movie go crazy. In a good way.

He even gives us a villainous corporate creep (Vincent D'Onofrio) who thinks the velociraptors would make excellent American soldiers. I seem to recall something like that in the Weekly World News years ago.

The showpiece dinosaur scenes have a buoyant exuberance that's really fun. The one in which the two boys, riding in a transparent observation sphere, are bounced around like a pinball between a herd of panicking ankylosaurs is ready made to be a ride in Universal's own theme park.

But Trevorrow's nutty sensibility may be best displayed in the way he handles his leads. Bryce Dallas Howard starts out as a stereotypical lacquered career woman who doesn't show enough interest in her visiting nephews (the boys in the ball). As she spends more time in the company of hunky dinosaur trainer (yes, dinosaur trainer; you read that right) Chris Pratt she accrues glamour until, by the time she's leading a T-Rex with a traffic flare, she's like a de-victimized Fay Wray. It would be retrograde if it weren't for the sense that it's a put-on.

As for Pratt's brawny raptor whisperer, he gets to ride a motorcycle and lead a pack of four voracious female predators. It's been a while since a leading man has had it this good.

Opening today at Harkins Camelview:

The Farewell Party—Yehezkel, an inventor and good-heartedly meddlesome neighbor, lives in a Jerusalem retirement home. With the help of a couple of friends from the building—and to his wife’s horror—he develops a Kervorkian-style euthanasia machine and uses it to put a man out of the misery of a protracted terminal illness (with the man’s wholehearted consent). Word gets around among the geriatric community, and pretty soon people are approaching Yehezkel and pals asking for the same service.

This Israeli film, co-directed and written by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, may sound grim, and it certainly has its heartbreakingly poignant moments. But it’s not a downer at all—it has at least as many sly, ironic laughs as it has tears. Although it seems firmly in the right-to-die camp, the film is fully awake to the thorny complexities that come along with this right, and employs them for both comic and dramatic power.

And good grief, is it well acted. Every member of the cast, led by bourekas star Ze’ev Ravach as Yehezkel, is effortlessly vital and convincing, and they have an ensemble chemistry that’s tense and crisp and more sexy than you might expect. There’s no patronization of the aged here. These people aren’t cute oldsters, nor are they tragically venerable—the word for them is cool. I wanted to hang out with them.

SO REXY IT HURTS

With Jurassic World opening this weekend, check out my list, on Topless Robot, of the best Dinosaur “Cameos.”

Also…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge “Indominus Rex...”

...the genetically-modified hybrid superdinosaur who stars in Jurassic World…

PARK & REX

The realization that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park turns twenty years old this year left me feeling pretty prehistoric myself. I was in my early thirties when the film of Michael Crichton’s bestseller came stomping into theaters, but I had been a dinosaur geek since childhood, to which the movie sent me back.

Now Jurassic Park has returned to the multiplexes, in a re-mastered 3-D version. I still love dinosaurs, but two decades have made it easier, now that astonishment at the truly convincing special effects has faded, to pick the movie apart logically, and to acknowledge the middle-class banality of its dramatics. Granting all this, however, I still say that Jurassic Park is one of the most thrilling special effects spectacles of all time, and that it remains the best showcase of computer-generated effects to date.

I say this in full awareness of James Cameron’s Avatar, which astounded so many people a couple of years ago. Avatar was an absorbing sci-fi romance, preoccupied with the human ability to disrupt nature—a theme it shared with Jurassic Park. But Cameron used the story to wow us with CGI effects which, though impressive and sometimes even lovely, were always obviously virtual phantoms. Spielberg used his rock-solid virtual effects—seamlessly blended with animatronic puppetry—to draw us into the story.

In case you’ve forgotten or somehow missed it the first time, the film concerns a theme park on an island off Costa Rica featuring real live dinosaurs, cloned from blood extracted from ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber. Prior to opening this ill-advised attraction, the founder (Richard Attenborough at his jolliest), invites several scientists (Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) as well as his own grandkids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) to endorse it. A bit of industrial espionage and a power outage lead to dinosaurs on the loose.

Because of Spielberg’s brilliant timing and theatrical flair, I didn’t notice until I’d seen the film several times how vague and malleable the geography of the park is: steep retaining walls suddenly appear when they are needed dramatically, characters strike out across open country when it would make more sense to wait where they are for help to arrive. But when you’re watching the movie, Spielberg’s confident touch, and the effects, hustle you past these inconsistencies.

There are eccentric moments that still play beautifully, as when one velociraptor quixotically lunges to the defense of another against a much larger tyrannosaurus. The gag involving the rear-view mirror, which even people who disliked Jurassic Park had to admit was pretty good, is now being used in the poster, presumably to tout the movie’s new 3-D status.

But here, alas, I have to note that the re-release gains nothing in particular from the addition of 3-D. I can’t think of one scene that was enhanced by the effect in any way I noticed. Again, not that it matters—my ten-year-old, no particular dinosaur fan, joined me for the screening and was properly spellbound. With or without 3-D, Jurassic Park still has teeth.

GWANGI-SPOT

With Jurassic Park 3-D opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to Gwangi, awe-inspiring allosaurus and title character of the 1969 Ray Harryhausen spectacle The Valley of Gwangi…

…in which cowboys find a hidden valley full of leftover dinosaurs, and which at 6 or 7 I would surely have told you was the finest movie ever made. I still love it.

I also love the Italian posters for it, in which it’s titled La Vendetta di Gwangi (“The Revenge of Gwangi,” presumably):