Another week and another film review. The title of this post may lead you to believe that I didn’t enjoy the new Jurassic Park or World film. Well I bloody well did. Big dinosaurs, a sweaty Scarlett Johansson, what more could a guy ask for. It was fun and that was what I was expecting. Got to see some cool dinosaurs and some cool mutant dinosaurs. Some were nice, there was a little pet dinosaur for the kids that was cute and some were not so nice, like flying raptor mutant dinosaurs which were meant to be scary. That was all expected. And our heroes won the day and the baddies got eaten with some ‘red shirts’ getting eaten also along the way. Again expected. I knew what I was getting in for, I got what I expected and I ate a Five Guys afterwards. A decent Tuesday evening in my book.
Now, as I’ve described there was some mild peril throughout the film but never any real jeopardy. I never got the sense that our pony tailed hero would be guzzled down by a hungry t-rex. Never got the sense that our nerdy, yet slightly hunky scientist / palaeontologist would be ripped to shreds by the long extinct creatures he so loves. And I never got the sense that our bad guy would get away with it. However there was one moment which completely dropped me out of the surrealism of the film. This fantasy world so lovingly created and a throwaway line in the first act just dropped me on my arse.
With there being so many Jurassic Park or World films now, the dinosaurs have escaped multiple times and ended up all over the world. So to make the world of the dinosaurs smaller and more manageable the conceit is that the dinosaurs that escaped have all been dying off because mankind has fucked up the climate of the earth and / or the climate has also changed naturally over the millennia so that the dinosaurs can’t withstand today’s weather systems… apart from a strip that runs around the equator. So the dinosaurs that were on some islands close to the equator have all survived. And then the throwaway line was uttered, ‘all the world’s governments agreed that the strip of the earth running round the equator with the islands full of dinosaurs was off limits (or something like that).’ All the world’s governments. All. Every single government in the world agreed. Every single one. All one hundred and ninety five of them.
Fuck off. Absolutely fuck off. And when you’re done fucking off, fuck off some more. This one line about the world’s politics was the most unbelievable thing in the whole movie. I can get on board with bringing dinosaurs back from the dead. I can get on board with scientists then thinking, what if we spliced two killing machines together to create an even bigger killing machine. I can get on board with Scarlett Johansson making doughy eyes at some English actor nerd. But I cannot comprehend every single government on the planet agreeing to the same thing. Fucking no way, give it a rest.
Anyway, I liked the film, go and see it if you like dinosaurs. O and Mahershala Ali is in it and he’s always a good watch.
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