got reminded of it and jurassic world 4 is such a bad movie it makes me want to pace around my house like i'm in the angry dome. it has all the usual annoying hallmarks of a jurassic park sequel: meaningless side characters you couldn't care less about, hack sentimentality, hideous animal design (the mutant rex thing is so unbelievably ass), bad/no character development, cutting away to subplots that are trash. i accepted all of this as my due, i know what i'm in for
but i think there are two utterly unacceptable things about it. like, i think scarjo actually turned in a pretty good performance of a nothing character, wasted mahershala ali, stop making me try to sympathize w the military. so i was already fighting a losing battle here. BUT
dr henry loomis. the exceedingly handsome and charming jonathan bailey. this is our richard levine, our ian malcolm, the guy who knows ball. he's the anticapitalist who respects the dinos as living animals. okay. that's a great character archetype for a jp movie. so. why is he in the pocket of big pharma? he's introduced as a broke museum curator who has a reverence for dinosaurs and desperately wants to see more of them, great broke academic vibes, but... he's being paid... for pharmaceutical research? this guy is willingly working for big pharma? and that's supposed to make sense? and i'm supposed to not hate him? i don't get it. it's like a psyop to make me not hate big pharma. when he cried seeing the titanosaurs, that was the closest thing this movie had to making me feel anything
and by extension. the plot of this movie is that our team of military badasses and their singular scientist are scouting out the last "wild" colonies of dinosaurs bc big pharma wants to harvest them for profit. this is what our Heroes are doing. but this is literally. the villain plot of the book lost world?? dodgson's argument is that dinosaurs are a commercial product, they were created in a lab, so they can be tested on and harvested and exploited bc they are a product and not an animal with inherent rights. this was correctly understood in the book to be reprehensible, selfish, capitalistic, and cynical. but it's Literally what our Good Guys are doing in this one!! they're trying to get ahold of these dinos for profit!! specifically profit from big pharma!! how do you take the villain's storyline and give it to the heroes without changing almost anything?? i don't want big pharma to get ahold of these things!!
and the usual bullshit. why do pterosaurs act like tanks when those wings would be fragile? why is every dino species immediately and suicidally aggressive? do not even get me STARTED on "distortus rex" that thing sucks so much ass i don't even have words for it. there are predators chasing them into sewers. why does everything want them dead so bad?? these dinosaurs are so aggro it makes no sense. none of them feel like real animals. i guess the titanosaurs are okay bc they're so big they don't do anything
i have a moderate tolerance for series going on too long and getting stupid, i'm a star wars fan after all. my fave star wars movie is attack of the clones and i'm not kidding. i think my disgust is that jurassic park is a series that DOES have an underlying theme, it DOES have something to say. and admittedly that something is less than the books (hammond in the books says "personally i would never try to help anyone" bc he's not a misguided idealist, he's a ruthless capitalist) but the first movie at least says SOMETHING. don't put the dinos in prison. even if the reasons for not doing that are different okay i'll take what i can get. rebirth is such a slap in the face like it's fine (i guess) to just blatantly Miss The Point the way the other jurassic world movies do but it feels like it's explicitly spitting in the face of the books esp lost world (one of my favorite books ever) and oooooough i'm mad
