Here are my thoughts on Jurassic World, look:
After the global financial crash, it became quite well known
that the dominant neoclassical school of economics does not have an explanation
for why slumps and depressions (which are euphemistically called ‘business
cycles’) occur. Capitalism is a perfectly functioning system and a perfectly
functioning system should run perfectly, so when the system stops running
perfectly the cause can’t, by definition, be part of the system. Keynesians
meanwhile, cleave to the view that slumps are actually endogenous to
capitalism, and can be understood, at least in part, as an interruption to what
Keynes called ‘animal spirits’: unpredictable changes in the mood of investors
and entrepreneurs. When this occurs, the system stops functioning as it should.
Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World, as it is called in the
most recent movie), is a little bit like this. The idea is that the theme park
is so well designed and operated that nothing can possibly go wrong: it is a
perfectly running system that runs perfectly well until the ‘animal spirits’
kick in. Of course, the thesis advance by both the first and fourth films in
the franchise (both films that feature a functioning theme park, rather than an
overgrown one trampled into desuetude as in the second and third films) is that
it isn’t the ‘animal spirits’ (the dinosaurs) that prevent the park from
running effectively, it is the park itself. Yes, the dinosaurs are the jokers
in the pack, but they are emphatically not the reason everything goes haywire
in the first place. Like capitalism, the fault is endemic to the system,
inscribed in its functioning. Something, somewhere, has to go wrong. The
dinosaurs just exploit the flaw when it does.
Michael Crichton’s original book pursued this argument using
the new minted-chaos theory fashionable at the time, a mathematical theory of
unpredictability predicated on the idea that tiny events potentially have
ripple effects that can drastically cascade, and the accumulation of
malfunctions leads to the total collapse of vast systems: perhaps
environmental, perhaps ecological, perhaps economic. In the first film this
came across more as a ‘for the want of a nail, the armour wasn’t made, for the
want of the armour, the knight didn’t fight, for the want of a knight, the battle
was lost’ kind of thing, rather than about the radical unknowability of systems
with too many unknown and interpenetrating variables, but it worked very well dramatically.
The book is less about the ethical quandaries of de-extinction and ‘playing God’
than it is about the hubris of believing oneself to have transcended something
as mundane as elementary human fallibility. Many Crichton stories are
orchestrated around scenarios that require rules, protocols, and then showing
what happens when those protocols break down (I read The Andromeda Strain recently and couldn’t put the little sucker
down).
The idea with Jurassic
World is that in some unspecified time in the near future, the Jurassic
Park franchise has been expanded from a glorified safari to a huge
dinosaur-centric theme park and the whole island is an enormous tropical
holiday resort. Things are different: de-extinction has been underway for so
long that everyone has got used to it and dinosaurs are now a commonplace. The
Jurassic Park brand has changed. It is no longer thought of as the place you
got to get eaten and don’t ever come back. It is now the place where you go to
have a drink by the pool while your kids go to stroke a baby brontosaurus and
then you go back home after a week or two. In this iteration, dinosaurs share
the same fate as many an expensive toy on Boxing Day, and now that the initial sense
of childish wonder at the walking biological impossibilities has evaporated,
the park constantly needs to up the stakes to keep its jaded clientele coming
through the door. Their solution to this is to up the ante and play fast and
loose with the genetic constitution of the new dinosaurs they create in order
to deliver progressively bigger thrills.
In one sense, the film is refreshingly candid about the
reality of theme parks: they are lame. The concepts behind them are trite and
tiresome (American Adventure?), most of the day is spent in long queues for
short rides, and everything is overpriced. Of course it’s ridiculous to suggest
that people would become so inured so quickly to the charms of resurrected
dinosaurs, but for literally anything other than dinosaurs the point is fairly
well made – these days the more astounding entertainments that people have at
their fingertips the less impressed they appear to be with them, when all the
Lumière brothers had to do to hold an audience captive was to film… well, anything.
So even though Jurassic World is like Chessington World of
Adventures to the power of ten million, it is still depicted as lame, and the
film plays with this conceit in various ways. We are introduced to two kids who
are sent by their parents to get them out of their hair and into their aunt’s,
who manages the park’s day to day operations and is therefore well placed to
give them the VIP treatment. One, who is about ten or eleven, is absolutely
potty about dinosaurs. His brother, who is about fifteen, could not care less
about dinosaurs. He is interested in fifteen year old girls, not dinosaurs. And
he can’t think of anything worse than being on an island full of dinosaurs,
because dinosaurs are for babies, not cool hormonal guys. The film makes a lot
of the fact that his major preoccupation is perving at teenage girls and
studiously ignoring the dinosaurs. True, he likes the mosasaur, but in reality
he gets a bigger kick from trying to take the weird, transparent viewing
vehicle he gets to drive in the herbivore paddock ‘off road’ than from looking
at the actual reptiles. The film then exploits
the notion that both the bored, daiquiri-sipping, teenage girl admiring
holidaymakers and the cynical, complacent staff who are stultified by the
efficiency of the systems they control, will provide a pleasing contrast to the
set of clever dicks in the first film who all predicted things would go tits-up
from the word go.
There is, however, a further comparison between the films
and their chosen tropes. Just like Jurassic World the theme park has to
generate bigger and bigger thrills to keep the punters coming, Jurassic World the movie also has to
trump its predecessor to be similarly profitable. And as is widely understood,
the way that the contemporary blockbuster achieves this is not to craft
something that is aesthetically superior, more daring, more complex and so on,
but to simply pile on spectacle, because while it’s acceptable for the film to
be less pleasing than its forerunner a piece of art (and its generally accepted
that sequels suffer from a deficit of imagination to begin with, except in rare
cases), it absolutely must surpass it as an ‘event’. This tendency is
illustrated in the film with a showdown between the executive CEO that owns the
park and the scientist that creates the dinosaurs. The executive deplores the
genetic tinkering that has called into being a super-predator called the
Indomitus Rex that can camouflage itself, mask its heat signature, and
generally play silly buggers with anything that might actually stop it. The
scientist replies that that was exactly what he was asked to create. This is
exactly the condition of the contemporary blockbuster, and not only the ‘soft
reboot’ that Jurassic World in fact
is. Since the imperative for bigger spectacle rescinds all other priorities,
all other consequences can just go hang. So Jurassic
World is a slave to logic it ostensibly deplores, and it actually complicit
with what it is superficially criticising. This disposition where the film
wants to have its cake and eat it is reinforced by its constant referencing of
people’s compulsion to check their phones rather than interact with the people
immediately around them or even look at dinosaurs: any attempt by Hollywood to
critique an over-mediatised culture always leaves a bit of a sour taste, as
does the heavy-handed exposition here that makes it clear that the park is beholden
to the whims of corporate sponsors and advertisers while simultaneously shoving
as many brands as possible down your throat (Starbucks and those fucking
headphones that Dr Dre thinks he invented feature heavily).
The thing is, once things go to pot, the film then has to
operate under typical Spielbergian constraints. There are annoying, precocious
children with recondite skill sets that end up saving the day (in past films,
teenage girls have been both adept computer hackers (!) and gymnasts, which have
allowed then to avoid velociraptors in all kinds of ridiculous ways – here the
two boys fix a jeep that has been mouldering in a garage for twenty years on
the basis of ‘remember when we spent summer fixing up that car?’). There is the
exhausting, monochromatic moral universe where only evil characters can be
eaten and good characters are merely allowed superficial wounds. In the film,
this is typified by the demise of the incompetent, arch, Brit PA who spends the entire film flapping her lip on the phone about
the various ways in which she intends to sabotage her fiancée’s happiness, and
Vincent D’Orofrio (more on whom later), who is guzzled when trying to pal up
with a velociraptor. The film also continues one of the series’ more asinine
traditions of killing off all the English characters in it, for reasons that
are not quite clear (in the first film Hammond is Scottish, a nationality that
people in the US, for no reason, consider honourary Americans).
The director of this film – some guy – is a hack incapable
of generating tension, and this is perhaps the movie’s most irritating
technical feature. It’s so pat from beginning to end. The dinosaurs turn up on
time and leave on time. At one point, thousands of pterosaurs fly the coop and terrorise
the island in a sequence that references Hitchcock’s The Birds (right down to the shots through the windows of the café,
which I presume was Spielberg’s idea). Some are taken down by about a dozen
sharpshooters, and after that scene there are no more pterosaurs in the movie. They are all gone. The Indomitus
Rex appears when it needs to for the plot, chases people when it needs to chase
then, and gives up when it needs to give up. Perhaps it had a copy of the
script? The velociraptors change their allegiances for a (reasonably effective)
plot twist and then change them back for no apparent reason. The Tyrannosaurus
is exactly there when it needs to be, as is the Mosasaur, the deux ex machina of the movie. For a film
which is essentially about grit getting in the oil, there’s a distinct lack of
grit in the oil. Do I really have to point out that a fluent and engaging
dramatic structure isn’t achieved by having a succession of things go
conveniently for the main characters but by having things go inconveniently for them?
De-extinction is a particularly capitalist distillation: it
fulfils a want rather than a need. It probably won’t happen (though I wouldn’t
mind a woolly Mammoth or two), and if it does it will either be motivated by
pure profit or by scientific bloody mindedness (‘we made it because we could’).
In the Jurassic Park films, it’s both
of these things. The idea that the parks in the first and fourth films operate
unashamedly for profit is never solidly questioned, although it’s implied that the
first one is too exclusive (and therefore the dinos will only be seen by the
very rich) and the second is too inclusive (the hoi polloi are portrayed
unsympathetically as unthinking consumers). The representations of the main
capitalist figures in the films are intriguing, since the schizoid Hollywood
position is that while capitalism is the omnipresent background that can never
be questioned, individual greed is often sanctimoniously condemned. In the
original book, Hammond was a ruthless, cynical autocrat which the first film
softened into a cuddly visionary, likeable but misguided. Attenborough’s
character in Jurassic Park had got
where his was through a combination of bootstraps, horse-sense and hard knocks,
and therefore on balance deserved both his success and his humbling nemesis. Cranky,
dictatorial ‘Book’ Hammond is deservedly eaten by a flock of compsognothi;
avuncular ‘film’ Hammond is airlifted to safety.
In this film, the CEO, Misrati, is played with rococo
flourishes by Irfan Khan very much in the mould of the blue-sky noughties
pioneer that companies like apple and google want you to think runs them. He is
introduced to us gamely learning to fly a helicopter while admonishing his
corporate staff to think beyond the bottom line, focus groups and consumer surveys,
and concentrate instead on instilling a sense of wonder into their customers.
The patter, though vacuous, is clearly meant to distinguish Khan’s character as
a likeable, empathic human being rather than a cynical hollow suit (the kind of
bullshit that Richard Branson wishes he could do), authentically passionate
about what he does and keen to deliver a quality product. For reasons that have
nothing to do with sensitive, creative scriptwriting, Bryce Dallas Howard’s
character, firmly straightjacketed in the brittle career-woman role, has to sit
in the chopper being lectured by the amiable goofball CEO as if she literally
has no conception of what he is talking about when he explains the importance
of customers actually enjoying the experience of the park. Later on, to
undermine their contempt for our intelligence, the filmmakers include a scene
where Dallas Howard bridles at being told what to do by the only person on the
world that can save her when she is lost in a tropical jungle being chased by a
forty-foot beast. It’s intended (I think) to show her wilfulness, but here it’s
a hamfisted attempt at character continuity that rings clunkingly hollow. What
kind of human being could reasonably be expected to behave like that? In that
situation I’d do everything Chris Pratt told me to and give him a blowjob afterwards. In any case, the Indomitus Rex
seizes on its opportunity to escape as a direct result of Misrati expressing
concerns about the security of its paddock rather than as a consequence of any
negligence, malfeasance, or complacency (save perhaps a corpulent security
guard taking his eye off the ball, more lazy shorthand than anything else). So
overall it’s a sympathetic portrait, and he gets a pretty sympathetic death
(noisy and colourful while trying to do the right thing for the good of all).
What’s interesting, however, is that quite a lot is made of Khan’s character’s
investment in the dinosaurs first and foremost as repositories of wonder and
delight rather than as profitable entities (again, nauseatingly, the mind flits
to instantly to branding strategies favoured by apple). When introducing
Misrati, the film is punctilious to depict him as a worthwhile custodian of the
dinosaurs who eschews treating them as commodities, instead understanding that
their true value is not monetary. Not twenty minutes later, with the Indomitus Rex
stoating freely around the island and consuming everything in sight, Misrati completely
disregards this passionately held ethical conviction and turns down the chance
to liquidate it with an airborne chaingun, citing its substantial multi-million
dollar value as the reason. The total contradiction between these two positions
isn’t highlighted as being significant in any way, neither mined for irony or
illustrative of hypocrisy (it’s very obviously an example of the filmmakers
doing the most expeditious thing for the script even if it means having
characters behave in an inconsistent way); nonetheless it can be interpreted as
the film’s unconscious articulation that, all blue-sky bullshit aside,
capitalism is just capitalism and capitalists should be expected to behave like
capitalists when it comes down to it.
The film’s subplot references the one that runs through the Alien series, namely that a venal
company seeks to acquire and exploit dangerous and unpredictable creatures palpably
beyond their control for military applications. Vincent D’Orofrio plays a
military contractor who harbours ludicrous, Alan Partridge-style fantasies
about training velociraptors as a kind of special forces US infantry contingent
and deploying them in warfare, where they will consume the enemy ‘belt buckle
and all’. Chris Pratt is an honest, ex-navy type who is appalled by D’Orofrio’s
proposal, but who still has a job where he apparently trains four velociraptors
to move in unison, hunt things and basically obey all his commands, so it isn’t
clear why he is spending his time doing that unless it is for some creepy form
of prehistoric dressage. At one crucial point the plot hinges on a
confrontation between D’Orofino and Pratt, where the former tries to persuade
the latter to use the velociraptors to hunt and dispatch the Indomitus Rex as
both an end to the carnage and a demonstration of their military potential.
D’Orofrio’s character makes the most hollow and nonsensical threat of all time,
facing down literally the only person on the face of the planet that can
prevent the velociraptors from killing everything that moves when they are
turned loose (he is imprinted on them at birth as the alpha male), by looking
stern and saying ‘this is going to happen with or without you.’ There is then a
jump cut to Pratt releasing his scaly charges, presumably because the
screenwriters (all four of them) couldn’t think of any plausible way to make it
appear that Pratt’s character wasn’t a total douche for agreeing to do something
that he had no reason to. It’s worth noting, in consideration of the film’s
politics, that D’Orofrio’s character is not actually from the US military per se but actually represents some
ill-defined military contractor, which is again illustrative of the way that
Hollywood carefully shields its audience from anything that could be
potentially critical of US moral purity. Yes after all the worldwide invasions,
occupations, militancy and imperialism, the idea that the US military would be
dastardly enough not just to kill, but to kill and eat its enemies, is
considered unthinkable.
Quite often in Hollywood films, the disaster is a proxy for
sorting out family issues. In the first film, Dr Grant hates kids at the outset
and enjoys toying with a corpulent young kid about how a velociraptor would
fillet and then ingest him. (The film casts a somewhat portly and unathletic kid
in the role so that the audience conspires in the teasing.) After having to look
after Hammond’s grandchildren throughout the film, by the end Grant appears to
recognise that he is ready for fatherhood. In Jurassic World the boys’ parents are poised to divorce and are both
sent to their aunt as a way of reconnecting etiolated branches of the family
tree. Dallas Howard, being a woman, is not allowed to be good at her job and a normal human being capable of
maintaining meaningful relationships at the same time, so when the kids arrive
she gives them short shift and keeps supervising the park like she is paid to.
Here the dinosaur attack serves a threefold purpose. First it brings the older
sisters closer together as Dallas Howard successfully protects her nephews and
cements the family previously atomised by distance and the pressures of
high-profile jobs (it’s highlighted that the mother has to take time out of an
important meeting to make a phone call to check up on her kids). Second, it
pairs the prim, repressed career-woman with a down-to-earth hunk that can
finally help her enjoy life and not be so uptight all the time. Third, it
brings the parents back together as they collect their errant children and,
it’s implied, prevents their divorce. So once again monogamy and the nuclear
family are reasserted. That the film’s treatment of gender politics can be
aptly described as Palaeolithic is no surprise, but really conservatism seeps
from every conceivable pore (to the point where the relatively new but
completely incontrovertible fact of feathered dinosaurs is totally ignored, an
open goal I’m astounded that the filmmakers miss).
I love dinosaurs and always have. But I don’t love Jurassic World, because like the park
itself it traduces their transcendent wonder for money. In fact it sucked.
Except for the mosasaur. I’m a bit like the teenage boy character in that
regard. It all sucked except for the mosasaur.
