Screen Junkies: Science and Jurassic World

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So the episode I mentioned is out! It’s a lot of fun, and there’s so very much that we talked about that they could not fit into the episode. See below. It is all about Jurassic World – a huge box-office hit. movie_science_screen_shotIf you have not seen it yet, and don’t want specific spoilers, watch out for where I write the word spoilers in capitals, and read no further. If you don’t even want my overall take on things without specifics, read only up to where I link to the video. Also, the video has spoilers. I’ll embed the video here, and I have some more thoughts that I’ll put below.

One point I brought up a bit (you can see the beginning of it in my early remarks) is the whole business of the poor portrayal of science and scientists overall in the film, as opposed to in the original Jurassic Park movie. In the original, putting quibbles over scientific feasibility aside (it’s not a documentary, remember!), you have the “dangers of science” on one side, but you also have the “wonders of science” on the other. This includes that early scene or two that still delight me (and many scientists I know – and a whole bunch who were partly inspired by the movie to go into science!) of how genuinely moved the two scientist characters (played by Laura Dern and Sam Neil) are to see walking living dinosaurs, the subject of their life’s work. Right in front of them. Even if you’re not a scientist, you immediately relate to that feeling. It helps root the movie, as does that fact that pretty much all the characters are fleshed out individuals who you rapidly get a sense that you know, and care enough about that you fear for their safety. In this film, Jurassic World, there’s none of that. There’s a bunch of screenwriting 101 character “types” that are thumbnail sketches waiting to be filled in, and they never are filled in. You care about nobody and could not care less when the bad things start to happen. Moreover, it is far less likely that anybody is going to come away excited or inspired by science (palaeontology, biology, or whatever) from this film because on the one hand science is just portrayed as a monster-making enterprise with a cardboard cutout “evil scientist” character who is not balanced out by wonder, or any human you care about who expresses wonder… and on the other hand the little science there is is used very inconsistently, which in my opinion one of the worst sins of all – insulting your audience’s intelligence by not even being close to consistent in your own universe.

Both Trevor and I talked more specifically about some interesting aspects of the science you’d need to do to achieve something like a Jurassic world, including not just biology ad genetics, but materials science too, and Trevor also talked about why feathers could have been both interesting and an important opportunity to do something really new… but sadly that did not make the cut either. Too much good stuff to cram into short web-films… I get it.

SPOILERS:- It’s just a big monster fight. Nice to look at here and there, but not even artfully or suspensefully rendered for the most part. There’s really no surprises to spoil… it is entirely predictable. That’s the big spoiler – the movie is more or less spoiler-proof because everything is just a cheap set-up for a monster fight, as though written and directed either by someone’s inner nine-year-old, by an actual nine-year-old, or deliberately only for our inner nine-year-olds, or for actual nine-year-olds. Missed opportunities to make something great abound.

-cvj

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