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Jurassic World

4.21 Life Still Finds A Way in JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

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After 25 years (!) since the original film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom showed that the Raptors still have box office pull but have poor reviews brought the future of the franchise in jeopardy? This week, dino-fan Ben Dower returns to talk with Steve about how the franchise has changed, science and awe, and whether or not life really finds a way.

Want to continue to conversation at home?  Click the link below to download ‘Fishing for More’ — some small group questions for you to bring to those in your area.

4.21 Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom

Thanks Ben for joining us!

Jurassic World: Chris Pratt Vs. The World

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The highest-grossing film of 2015 – the third highest-grossing film of all time – is available on 3-D, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD. I think I must’ve been the last person alive to see it [okay, slight hyperbole] but the truth is that this is simple math in several scenarios. Let’s examine a few.

First, there’s the headliners: Steven Spielberg plus Frank Marshall plus Chris Pratt equals …. billions. Helming the ship are hand-picked leaders who have been here and done this before. And they put the camera front and center on stellar artificially created, life-like looking dinosaurs, and Chris Pratt.

Fresh off of his universe-dominating turn as Star-Lord, Pratt could’ve (and still might) make a run at one of those untouchable franchises, Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series. Starring as Velociraptor trainer Owen Grady, Pratt gets to be witty, compassionate, buff, and courageous, all while hauling around on a Harley. Starring opposite him is the ‘straight man’ Bryce Dallas Howard as park operations manager Claire Dearling, who allows complete chaos to occur in a not-so-controlled adventure park with flesh-eating dinosaurs, while her nephews (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson) tremble in the background.

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Second, there’s the plot. While Grady and Dearling (Dearling!) are trying to stop the bleeding and Vincent D’Onofrio’s security operator is D’Onofrioing, there are these two photogenic kids who get treated like chew toys. [Seriously, anyone who has seen the earlier films knows that the scene in the cafeteria is still sleep-defying, right?] Children in danger is a surefire way to ratchet up the tremors, the thrills, and the investment. It’s what makes Prisoners so horrifying and The Sandlot or The Goonies so powerful. Our childhoods matter, our children matter.

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Third, there’s the sheer weight of what Grady et al. are up against. They have no business messing with the Indominus. All you have to see is some action from the trailer, and you know that humanity is child’s play compared to this thing. It’s like Predator or Alien, only bigger. It’s a reminder that nature is not to be controlled, that we aren’t in control, that the creative process was designed by God… and when we play with it, we mess things up.

This is the ‘awesomeness’ of science fiction. Whether it’s uncontrolled cloning or random new technology that we don’t quite understand, there’s danger in what we don’t understand. But we’re heady, knowledgable, cocky – the human race that is – and we think if we can dream it, we should do it. Daedalus, be damned.

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Fourth, … yeah, we’re back to Pratt. As Grady, he’s brave, selfless, cool, and protective. He’s smarter than your average dinosaur and more collaborative than any of the previous ‘stars’ of the Jurassic Park films. He’s darned near perfect, who we’d hope to be in that situation. He’s everyman but the better man. Is he Christlike? I don’t know but he’s the one we want to emulate, replicate, duplicate.

It’s fair to say that the producers put the film on Pratt – with some dino help. But the special features of the Blu-ray combo pack put it all on him as well. The deleted scenes and other ‘normal’ special features pale in comparison to the ‘all-access pass’ that Pratt gives us in his tour of the Innovation Center. Sure, there’s still plenty of stuff to learn about the dinosaurs – aren’t they always cool? – but Pratt is front and center, as he should be.

Guardians of the Galaxy might’ve put him on the map in an ensemble cast, but Jurassic World proves he’s currently in a universe few have explored.

Jurassic World: A Whole New ‘World’?

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$208.8 million dollars.

Let’s just let that number sit there for a minute.

While it was no surprise that it took top spot at the box office, the fact that Jurassic World has literally shattered every box office record in its opening weekend is nothing short of staggering. While there was high anticipation for the first Jurassic Park sequel in fourteen years (and, arguably, the first good one since the original), no one expected the response that this film has received.

But does popularity also necessarily mean that the film has anything to say?

In this case, maybe.

Directed by Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed), Jurassic World returns us to Isla Nublar, the site of the original Jurassic Park. Now a fully operational theme park with over 20 000 visitors a day, Jurassic World has become an incredible success. Although, due to the fact that it has become so accessible to the public, the dinosaurs have become commonplace as attractions. As a result, the park’s operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) ambitiously seeks to create excitement by developing the Indomitus Rex, a new hybrid dinosaur, to terrify and delight new visitors. However, when the Indomitus eventually escapes from its pen—an ‘inevitability’ claims the park’s CEO, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan)—Claire must enlist the help of rugged raptor trainer, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to prevent the rampaging beast from killing innocent park patrons.

While far from a perfect film, World finally delivers the sequel that the franchise has needed, offering the right balance of new direction and nostalgia that has been lacking from previous entries. At long last, the raptors are both dangerous and have a purpose in the story. Once again, the narrative seems to have something to say about our current culture. Even the decision to return to Isla Nublar deliberately signaled a desire to return to the magic of the original film. (What’s more, if Guardians of the Galaxy wasn’t enough proof, Jurassic World fully establishes Chris Pratt as this generation’s lovable action hero. And yes, if the rumors are true, I am fully onboard with him taking on the whip and fedora in the inevitable Indiana Jones reboot.)

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Produced by Spielberg through his Amblin label, Jurassic World very mucy feels like a throwback to the adventure films of the 80s and 90s, a fact which both plays out as a strength and a weakness. As a strength, it reveals a sense of light-heartedness and pure adventure that is often missing from today’s darker, more brooding tones. However, as a weakness, it has been argued that the character development plays out in a sexist manner; a charge that I feel isn’t fully accurate. While it is true that Owen’s character plays hero to Claire most of the film, the power dynamics have balanced out by the end. (Even if Claire’s character may not have the fearlessness of someone like Furiosa in Mad Mad: Fury Road, she’s also far from ‘weak’.)

Thematically, a lot has changed in the past twenty-two years as well. Whereas Jurassic Park stemmed from a culture just breaking the science of DNA, Jurassic World is born out of an era where people have grown accustomed to these sorts of technological advancements. Gone is the overall sense of wonder in the first film, replaced with a feeling of general malaise. Though, this is where the film dips its toe into theological territory. While Park asks whether or not man should attempt to play God, World begs the question of what happens when man gets bored of doing so? In other words, in a culture where human scientific achievement has become an everyday occurrence, Jurassic World reminds us that there is something wondrous about the very nature of life itself. In this film, the moral dilemma of the science isn’t the core problem.

The real issue is that they are no longer impressed by it.

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By arguing that their ‘triceratops is seen the same [by kids] as an elephant’, Claire constantly pushes her team to invent something new. However, in the process, she also loses sight of the astonishing nature of what they’ve accomplished, a theme that echoes our own culture of self-satisfaction and entertainment. Frequently losing sight of the miraculous and emptying our world of a spiritual connection to God’s creation, too often we break down the nature of life into one giant scientific equation. As a result, by subtracting the Divine aspect to science, we are left with little view of anything larger than ourselves. (Incidentally, Jurassic World counters this error in self-absorption through the character of Owen who recognizes that these dinosaurs ‘don’t know [they were created in a lab]’ and acknowledges that they fact that they are alive makes them more than mere experiments.)

In the end, Jurassic World delivers what it promises – a fun ride with a nostalgic feel. Most surprisingly though is the fact that it also has something new to say in a franchise that had seemed to run its course over a decade ago.

Despite the fact that we may not have learned from our mistakes, it really is a whole new World.hgxfysec5xcn2odalxro

Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Repeat After Me, ‘There Is No Jurassic Park II’

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lost worldAfter the explosively entertaining Jurassic Park, audiences everywhere were salivating at the prospect of more velociraptors, more comedy, and more (dare I say it?) Jeff Goldblum. But whatever the entertainment and theological value that the first film based on Michael Crichton’s ‘amusement park-with-dinosaurs’ idea had, the second one is a laughable, awful mess. The Lost World was a rushed book, and a rushed film, and a story that Steven Spielberg himself said, “I beat myself up… growing more and more impatient with myself… It made me wistful about doing a talking picture, because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie… I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is? It’s not enough for me.'”

And yet, they made a third film?

This third film finds Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) hellbent on ‘saving’ his girlfriend, paleontologist Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore, Still Alice). The park’s creator, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), has sent her with a team of scientists and hunters to ‘Site B,’ the island where the dinosaurs. She’s thrilled to be interacting with animals she’s only studied in theory; Malcolm knows all too well about the real danger that the dinosaurs pose. And that has nothing to do with the dangerous agenda of Roland Tembo (Peter Postlethwaite, The Usual Suspects, The Town), a big game hunter.

lostworld2All of that is probably well and good. Until we realize that the film’s main aim is to get the dinosaurs to the main land a la Godzilla. Somehow, the incredible nature of the special effects that cause these dinosaurs to walk across the screen cannot save the lack of viable dialogue and plot points. But someone thought this film was good enough that millions of dollars piled up and the studio had to make another. Are you one of them?

Ultimately, you probably fall into two camps: you either think that Goldbum is a wonderful, sad sack of laughter or… he’s a terrible actor. Honestly, I usually fall into the first category, having devoured Independence Day and his turn following Vincent D’Onofrio on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And the rest of the cast is reasonably awesome as well, past Moore and Postelthwaite: Richard Schiff (The West Wing) as an engineer, Vince Vaughn (in his follow-up to Swingers) as a cameraman, and Peter Stormare (everything…) So, if it’s not the cast, then it must be the story, the script, the creativity behind it, right?

Consider this selective filmography of screenwriter David Koepp. On one side, you have Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man (the first Tobey Maguire one), Angels & Demons, Men in Black 3, and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. On the other side, you have Zathura, Premium Rush, Secret Window,  Mortdecai, and … Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now, that’s a mixed bag, but it shows the general unevenness of what a script can bring (or not bring) to a movie. Obviously, it’s not all on Koepp because it’s based on Crichton’s novel – one which he was originally disinterested in writing – but the story here just isn’t as earthshaking, and the idea isn’t as earth shattering as the original.

lostworld3Still, we can learn from The Lost World. The overwhelming lesson revolves around hubris, around pride, around the belief that if it exists, that we, humanity, can control it. Better yet, it investigates the smug assurance, here by Hammond and Tembo, that not only can we control it but that we should control it. The whole idea reminds me of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11, where people got the grand idea that they could build something that reaches heaven. And yet, they fail there in the terms that the early followers of the Bible understand, because God mixes things up for them so that they can’t complete their project. It’s not that they can’t accomplish it but rather that they shouldn’t.

In this second story, the middle one for another few days, we see that we should not create dinosaurs even if we can. We see that there are reasons why boundaries and natural laws exist, to keep us safe and make us better. Thanks to Jurassic Park: The Last World, we can see that there are some things we should leave to God. Like dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park: 22 Years Later We Still Have Not Learned

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With Jurassic World set to be released this week, let’s take a look back at the movie that started it all. In its time, it was a remarkable film with great action sequences and incredible-looking animatronics dinosaurs. It was a film that kept you on the edge of your seat while also engulfed in the possibilites and scenarios that it brings up. One can consider it a film ahead of it’s time, something Spielberg has done plenty of times.

I’ll be honest: I can’t remember the last time I saw the film, so sitting down to watch it again brought back some nostalgia, but also let me appreciate how far we have come in technology. The film is still a wonderful film, but it no longer holds that majestic feel it did back in the early ’90s. Taking another look twenty-two years later, as a more “seasoned” movie watcher, the dinosaurs are not as scary and the acting really is sub par. Yet, through it all, I still enjoyed rewatching it, while thinking to myself, “mankind hasn’t changed in twenty-two years.”

jurassic park2When we look at a film like this, where man is attempting to play God, the first thing we think is “this won’t end well.” Why is that? Because it never does! History has told us and proven to us that nothing good comes out of man trying to take the role of God. Jurassic Park is a perfect example of it. They constantly remind us that they have loosely and irresponsibly taken control of forces they don’t understand and have no idea how to control it. How can they possibly know? There isn’t enough science in the world that tells us we can bring dinosaurs into today’s world and control them, yet here they are trying to do exactly that.

Now the concept is wonderful and the idea that one can take fossilized mosquitos and draw out strands of DNA to clone animals that lived billions of years agao is fascinating. But how smart is it? These aren’t cats and dogs we are talking about, but these are animals that will make the fiercest of lions look like a kitten.

Jurassic_Park_raptorsDr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) voices his concerns perfectly in the film in that they decided to play with some of the greatest scientific and genetic forces in the universe and wield them like a child that finds his dad’s loaded gun. There is no sense of responsibility in it. At the same time, they are so preoccupied with the idea of “can we do this” that they never stopped to ask “should we?”

I look at this film and these aspects and fast forward to today and we still see these things happening. Man is still attempting to play the part of God and wield the power of nature. We are so fascinated with the possiblities and so blinded with socially driven agendas that we don’t stop to ask, “Should we?” Should we mess with the natuaral order that God intended? Should we throw out morality in order to create new rules and a false morality? What power or right do we have to do all these things?

jurassic parkAs I sit back and watch this film and think of how irresponsible mankind can be, it reminds me how much we tend to be more like Satan and less like Jesus. “How you have fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cut down to the earth, You who have weakened the nations! But you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north. “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ Nevertheless you be thrust down to Sheol, to To the recesses of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12-15).

Satan’s sin was pride and a sense of entitlement. He thught he could and had the right to ascend to the throne and replace God. Isn’t that what man is guilty of? Aren’t we a prideful bunch that feel that we are entitled to do whatever we want whenever we want? That pride and entitlement has us slowly destroying the land. Our sins are scarttered to every corner of the earth but God says, “If my people, who are called by may name, will humble themselves and pray seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (Chronicles 7:14). Our prideful and sinful ways have not been working.

And just like Jurassic Park, the “dinosaurs” are out and looking to devour anyone and anything they find. Maybe it’s time to turn away, stop trying to be God, and start following God.

Has Steven Spielberg Forgotten His First Love?

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What happens when creativity gets replaced by redundancy and reiterations? With the impending arrival of Jurassic World, following years of exec producing the terrible Michael Bay Transformers films, has Steven Spielberg finally given up on telling original stories that transport us to other worlds? Is he no longer interested in taking us there so he can turn us back to see ourselves without pretense here?

Before we come to any real conclusions, let us quickly (if possible) recap the forty-year career of one of the greatest cinematic minds of all time. Briefly.

Steven Spielberg has generated 8.5 billion dollars worldwide with the pursuit of his art, netting a solid 3 billion plus himself (per Forbes). The writer, director, and producer made a name for himself by directing Roy Schneider, Richard Dreyfuss, and a mechanical depiction of a shark around in Jaws (1975). He stormed out of the gate in the sci-fi department with an extended, remade version of his independent film, Firelight, remastered with Dreyfuss as the star in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-original11In 1981, Spielberg teamed up with his Star Wars buddy, George Lucas, and Lucas’ star, Harrison Ford, to direct Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). A year later, he returned to the science fiction with E.T. the Extraterrestrial (the same year he wrote and produced the original Poltergeist which he ‘technically’ didn’t direct).The two sequels to Raiders sandwiched his producer role on Back to the Future (and the sequel), a writing role on The Goonies, and directing The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, and Always. He delivered the Robin Williams-led fantasy, Hook (1991), and the first Jurassic Park (1993) to cement his place in the science fiction/fantasy Hall of Fame.

Schindlers-ListSoon, Spielberg was diving into more practical, realistic material like 1993’s Schindlers List that saw him win an Academy Award for Director. Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (another Academy Award in 1998) soon followed. Average human fair like Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), and Munich (2005) consistently provided some degree of entertainment, but certainly at a lower level than what we’d come to expect from the bearded savant. Yes, Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005) broke up the realistic monotony, but the trend had turned. Following his failed attempt to meld Indy with his sci-fi love (the dreadful Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), he directed War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012) to critical acclaim (and produced The Hundred Foot Journey for good measure).

But Jurassic World, the film which looks to follow on the commercial (but not necessarily critical) success of the previous Jurassic Park films, looms on the horizon like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It’s been a decade since Spielberg tackled a science fiction film (I refuse to count the absurd result of Indy’s latest adventure) even though I believe that sci-fi is the one, true love of Mr. Spielberg. The passion of the outsider included when their true value is revealed plays well in stories concerning artificial intelligence (A.I.) and aliens (Close Encounters, E.T.) Those stories resonate in the heart of a man who grew up as the bullied son of Orthodox Jews, who captured stories over and over again that remind us of the deeper things in life.

Jurassic WorldThere’s a freedom in science fiction that you can’t find when you’re telling a historical story. You can’t find it when you’re basing it in reality in the midst of the world the way it really is. It’s much easier to take those truths, those beliefs about the world in its best and worst, and wrap them up in an entertaining tale that takes the personal out of it and lets people consider them. Your audience no longer realizes you’re critiquing them, at least not until it’s too late.

In the long run, I think Spielberg is more sci-fi prophet than historian. I think he uses science fiction the way that Jesus used parables about an agrarian lifestyle. In the long run, I think that’s what makes Spielberg the consummate storyteller. It’s why others want him to executive producer their horribly botched, overloaded CGI insults of film. We want to know truth the way Spielberg sees it: to know with conviction that we’re not alone, that we’re not as bad as we sometimes think we are, that one day the world will be made right again when we recognize that we’re all in this together.

If we can survive the dinosaur attack.