Jurassic World – The Analysis

Jurassic World – The Analysis contains spoilers!

The cast of Jurassic World was ridiculously star-studded, almost to the point of losing the story. Some of them were great to see though!
BD Wong as Henry, the genetic engineer who is now in charge of the InGen lab on the island.
Vincent D’Onofrio as Hoskins, InGen’s weird unexplained special agent who is secretly working with Henry on genetic engineering side projects.
Chris Pratt as Owen, a former sailor in the Navy who has turned raptor-tamer.
Bryce Dallas Howard as aunty Claire, the director of Jurassic World.
There are plenty of other actors in Jurassic World i’m sure you’ll recognize.

Jurassic World’s plot setup and story arcs are a little strange.

For example, BD Wong’s story arc. So we see him in the beginning of the film and he explains to Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) how they created the Indominus-Rex to be a super predator with exaggerated predation traits. Then we get this half story of BD Wong and the InGen guy working together on all kinds of genetic side projects throughout the rest of the film. Then BD Wong gets on the InGen helicopter with the embryos and off he goes. His story arc ends so abruptly that you don’t even realize they’re trying to do the setup for the next Jurassic Park movie, where I’m guessing we’ll see some kind of conflict between InGen’s genetic research projects that apparently have military applications and most likely some kind of dinosaur saving squad led by what’s her face and Chris Pratt.

BD Wong’s story arc wasn’t the only weird one though. The whole film was filled to the brim with short story arcs, incomplete story arcs, and weird story arcs that don’t seem to fit within the Jurassic Park films. This might have something to do with the sheer amount of people killed in the film though (disposable characters just meant to move the movie along you know). Example, the kids. These two random kids go off to see their aunt Claire in dino-land while their mommy and daddy have marital issues. Problems of course being;

1. Why should we care about these new and unexplained kids (Gray and Zach)?
2. Who are their parent, what do they have to do with anything?
3. Who the hell is aunty Claire, yes we know she is the director of Jurassic World, but we know nothing else.

These relationship aspects are completely unexplored in the film. They’re all merely there to move the story along it seems. Meaning that something like 90% of the main characters in this film are not particularly important and do not contain much depth.

Next weird story arc, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Aunty Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard). We basically only get to know that they went on a single date, they don’t really show us any depth between them during the film beyond running from dinosaurs, and then bam! some witty comment and they’re together. It almost feels like Bryce Dallas Howard is merely there to be Chris Pratt’s love interest (because he needs one so the filmmakers can sell a fantasy to people and make the $$$). And no, I do not know what the whole running in heels thing was about when Owen and Claire were tracking down the kids. Like I said, it seems more like the directors were trying to sell the fantasy of being with Chris Pratt rather than add depth to the female lead.

I don’t mean to be overly mean here, but all the characters in this film lack the depth seen in every single other Jurassic Park film.

Now, the Indominus-Rex… So we’re told the Indominus-Rex has cuttlefish genes and tree frog genes in its genetic makeup. Henry (BD Wong) tells us that these were put in to fill in the DNA and create a better predator. We later in the film get a hint that they were actually put into the Indominus-Rex as part of Henry’s and InGen’s Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) side projects. What’s odd is that we never really see the Indominus-Rex use its color shifting abilities that it got from its cuttlefish genes or its thermoregulation thingy it got from frog genes. Instead, the film makers seemed to just use these traits to build up a sense of mystery… which was a mistake. You cannot create traits in your starring dinosaur and then barely use those traits! It makes the film, or dinosaur, feel incomplete. Watch though, I’m sure we’ll see and even more modified Indominus-Rex pop-up in the next Jurassic Park film.

Further on the dinosaurs, they looked great. However for you dinosaur lovers out there, I’m sure you noticed the raptors and such still do not have feathers. It seems people are still uncomfortable with feathered dinosaurs. In fact, if you remember, in Jurassic Park III they wanted to add feathers to the raptors to make them more realistic but had to compromise because nobody liked them. That’s where those little quill things and more colorful skin come from on the raptors in Jurassic Park III.

This is by far the most violent film in the Jurassic Park world. The closest to come to Jurassic World, was Jurassic Park III. I do not really understand why they thought increased violence, gore-y violence, was a good idea but apparently they did. I honestly am unsure if this level of violence is truly in the spirit of the Jurassic Park world. It was almost like what Shark Week has turned into… it’s now about sensational violence rather than a respect for the animals themselves. There were plenty of scared kids in the audience, but not many were excited about the dinosaurs themselves because the dinosaurs were no longer the emphasis in Jurassic World. The sensational, thriller like, “Indominus-Rex is on the loose!” story was the emphasis.

So the first movie, Jurassic Park, gave us an introduction to the Jurassic Park world.
The second movie, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, gave us more of the story.
The third movie, Jurassic Park III, gave us an adventure.
The fourth movie, Jurassic World, gave us… violence?

The ending of Jurassic World was something else. You’re sitting there thinking “wow this is weirdly dumb” but at the same time you’re rooting so hard for the raptor Blue and the T-Rex to just kick the Indominus-Rex’s ass. And the whole ending being Owen and Claire kissing… corny enough for ya?

While Jurassic World takes us away from the dino-adventure genre of the previous films into a new genre of dino-thriller (it almost has a Marvel film feel to it), I think it’s still a good film. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s not bad. Hopefully the next film will have a more complete story line for us to enjoy.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Jurassic World – The Analysis Article by Jordan Wunderlich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.