Jurassic World, Surviving Progress and Still not Learning our Lesson

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 22, 2015

Jurassic World was an entertaining movie with quite a few pacing problems, along with plot holes and one dimensional characters.  The dinosaur effects were pretty good, certainly not the leap one would expect from the ground breaking effects of Jurassic Park, but for the most part believable.  Chris Pratt’s Owen was the best part of the human side of the movie while the two boys, Gray and Zack, and most of the other characters were forgettable.  The two control room operators are oddly the most three dimensional in the movie with about only ten minutes of screen time between them.  Pretty well everyone else are hollow stereotypical characters that don’t really act like people do.

Bryce Dallas Howard’s character Claire was the typical corporate, inhuman boss that doesn’t see the dinosaurs in the park as animals.  She sees them as products for which she calls assets.  When there is a wall breach and a monstrous mega-dinosaur escapes, her main concern is containment of the animal without alerting the 2000 visitors in the park she is managing.

Jurassic World is about a thriving theme park, which is Disney World-like, housing a large number of genetically engineered dinosaurs.   The facility is on the same island as in the first movie, off the coast of Cosa Rica, Isla Nublar.  The new park is managed by Claire, who works with the scientists to create a new genetically modified dinosaur called Indominus Rex.  This new dinosaur is made up of the DNA of several predator dinosaurs.

They create the Indominus Rex to raise attendance to the park because it is their belief that the current collection of dinosaurs in the park, no longer dazzles the consumer demands of the spoiled first world public.  They feel that something bigger and with more teeth will draw in more guests and thus boost revenue.  The theme of the Jurassic series is the consequences of not only taking science too far but also our dreams.

What was so wonderful about the first Jurassic Park movie was the spirit of John Hammond, the man made his dream of a park filled with dinosaurs come true, without sparing any expense.  Hammond was an old man but had the inspiration, and naiveté of a child.  

Jurassic World is a very modern action movie.  It is deeply trenched in a hyper-individualistic culture, where greed, self-centeredness, vanity and blame exists. So it is not surprising that wonderment here is replaced with corporate greed.  John Hammond wanted to make children happy, he was a Santa Claus type figure.  In this latest installment to the franchise they deserve their fate, not only because of what happened to the park in the past but also the fact they all didn’t learn a thing from it.

Greedy, power hungry human beings are still under the illusion that they can harness the power of the environment without there being any repercussions.  There still exists this push forward, chasing progress, while this planet and all its wildlife, humans included, suffer so the one percent can control the world. 

The Indominus Rex is a killing machine, much in the same way as a great white shark.  Its instinct is to survive and feed but it’s also a murderer killing for sport.  Here the movie fails to learn the lesson of its own story.  In the story InGen goes too far for the sake of upping the excitement and suffers the consequences as does Universal Studios.  Like in the movie, the studio feels that their audience has seen it all before with the past three installments so they too up the carnage to appease a growing detached, narcissistic audience.  An audience whose attention span increasingly grows narrower.

Jurassic World is a billion dollar success so sadly the lesson that can be found here will be all but smothered by the weight of the money it makes.  Universal will continue with their multi billion dollar franchise, they will up the ante in the fifth installment to maintain interest from their massive movie going audience.  Like the movie Wall Street, the lesson of going too far in the H.P Lovecraft sense will be lost and then replaced with the mantra of the 20^th and 21^st century; greed is good.