What shall we talk about this week?
Work sucked all week, but I think that is a given at this point. The weather has been wonderful, so we have that covered. Last night was Halloween, and we never got a single trick or treater. This neighborhood used to get them by the hundreds and it lasted until absurdly late every year. My wife’s expert opinion is that there are so many more new neighborhoods these days that we are old news.
We decided to watch Jurassic World Rebirth. It seemed to have the right ingredients for us. It failed spectacularly. Scarlet Johansen was expected to carry this thing and just didn’t. It probably would have benefited from at least one other recognizable name to lend a hand.
I’m not a fan of inventing their own dinosaurs. Real dinos were pretty scary and it smacks of people who just didn’t want to do the research, or couldn’t even be bothered to ask AI about some. Designer dinos are possible, but they need to lean harder into the evil corporate gyrations for a tic or so. I think Michael Crichton must be rolling over in his grave at this point. Maybe we should recover his DNA so we can get some better stories.
One of these abominations had a head like a beluga whale and seemed to have six limbs. Does that make him an insect?
There was a scene where a tyrannosaur ripped into a rubber raft, but for some reason didn’t manage to puncture the damned thing. It was needed for the next scene.
It’s also getting pretty repetitive. We’re seeing a lot of things we’ve seen in the previous versions. Dino and helicopter interactions. Young girl saves the day. Weathered technology that seems to boot up like the day it was made after 30 years in the jungle.
Oh, and they always have to have that fish out of water group. You know the ones who parasail in, crash land, stow away with daddy, go on an unsupervised visit to a park that has a questionable safety record. In this instance it was a family who just happened to be pleasure sailing through a restricted area.
They keep trying to replicate the amazing scenes from the original like when Alan Grant sees a Dino for the first time. This version has 90 foot tall dinosaurs hiding in six foot deep grass. That’s like trying to hide my house in the lawn.
Gotta have flares, soooo many flares. Even the end credits replicate the pelicans from the original, only with dolphins.
In my mind, the whole thing could have benefitted from a tiny bit of backstory. These are new characters, but we really learn nothing about them so why are we supposed to care. One dude even got a throw away Easter egg line that most people probably missed. “Oh, he studied with Alan Grant.” How about you expand on that just a tiny bit?
This is the state of modern Hollywood. Popcorn flicks that are forgotten before the end credits even run. Just milk that intellectual property like a prize dairy cow.
What’s next? Will the crew of one of the various Star Trek versions beam down to Jurassic park so they can kill two birds with one stone. I think they should get the Golden Girls to take the tour. It is possible to move the dinos. Maybe they can show up in the next version of The Walking Dead.
Anyway, enough about that. We have a big family event tomorrow, so I just wanted to check in with everyone. I spent a big part of today playing a phone game, and didn’t manage more than about seven paragraphs on my manuscript. Don’t regret enjoying my game one little bit.
I hope all of you are enjoying yourselves whatever shenanigans you get up to.
