The original JP as the hubris of man put on exhibition is a great way to describe it! I think LW was meant to explore and appreciate the natural evolution of the abandoned project, but perhaps that was a little tough to put on screen. JP3 tried to do that as well, but maybe it was the wrong time. I actually kind of like the idea there, if not the execution...
Jurassic World was visually stunning, and contained a lot of "fun". It captures the vastness of the world well, by illustrating it once again through the wondrous eyes of tourists to a theme park.
But in other ways I was left fuming. I expected much better than the rote theme of cartoonishly evil villains whose flaws of extravagant corporate greed, excessive militarism, and being jerkwads are easily diagnosed by everyone around them. It wasn't even that, though. It was the treatment of women. I don't know why it hit me especially hard, but man was it awful.
*** SPOILERS/length warning ***
I: Women in Jurassic World
If
JP was a movie about the downfall of man's hubris, this one was about the downfall of woman's. Its "protagonist" goes on a beautiful journey of realizing that she was wrong to put career first, wrong to not pop out kids, and wrong to reject douchebags. Once completed, she gets to enjoy becoming the docile, amply-bosomed trophy of Chris Pratt's character, a male role model if we've ever seen one.
It's okay to disrespect women for choosing not to date you, as long as you're kinda a badass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ymfquU840
"Look at my chest, Owen. Look at it!"
It's not only Claire. Every featured woman character in this movie falls to utter shambles when confronted with terror. There are two scenes where the folks in HQ are watching or reacting to the stuff that's going down. The woman sobs,
you know, as is the wont of women while even the comic relief guy is stern, resolute, and in command. He's the guy that takes the honorable "I'll go down with my ship" stand near the end, while she coldly rejects a kiss and goes off to save her own skin. What a b!^@h, right? And really, Jake Johnson is darn well capable of playing comedic meltdown guy, as anyone who's ever seen a hint of
New Girl would know:
Then there's Zara. Claire's assistant, hired largely for being a Brit (a woman rejecting the motherly role can't be expected to make responsible child-related decisions). Like Claire, she's a working professional and equally inattentive to the kids she's meant to be in charge of. She ends up losing them while wrapped up in her own business of telling some lady friend about how *obviously* her nameless fiance won't have a bachelor's party. Wow -- another opportunity for audiences to practice using the b-word on women.
In her defense, the two boys were trying to lose her, and they were hoisted upon her by Claire to begin with. (There are female children at the park, too. Entirely there to roll their eyes and not give the older boy the time of day. How stuck-up of them.) (He also had just kissed his girlfriend good-bye, and spends the rest of the film oggling every single chick he lays his eyes on. But he takes good care of his brother, so he's alright, I guess?)
Back to Zara. They didn't really spend a lot of time on her; she's a very minor character there largely to illustrate Claire's degree of duty-shirking. When she finally reappears, she's frantically calling Claire in her desperate search for the boys. Eventually, she does run into them -- by coincidence, of course; it wasn't her achievement. Only to get immediately subjected to a very extended, grotesquely horrible death scene. This shook me up so much, and not in a good way, that I tracked down an article on it later and I nodded along to almost everything written here:
The Strangely Cruel and Unusual Death in JURASSIC WORLD
In summary, there's a language used in movie deaths and this one breaks harshly with rules that are otherwise strictly observed in the rest of the movie, and movies such as this one. Here, it's not really about her being a woman anymore -- that death had no place in the movie at all. Not one of the characters reacts to it. The next thing Claire does is get a load of Chris Pratt's tongue, while the boys ask her about who that is.
Back to Claire. She's a woman full of bad ideas. While the professional men of this film are either paragons of corporate morality (Chris Pratt/Owen, his buddy, Nick Miller/Jake Johnson, and even the company CEO) or outright evil (Wu, the investors, & the "Raptor Weapons" guy), Claire's a blind drone. She alone is unable to see through the stupid simple flaws in the company's approach as she follows orders and serves the shareholders.
When she's out searching for the kids with Owen, she's the one who falls to pieces and runs behind him in protection with Big Bad Indominus comes lurking. She's the one yelling their names out in the open and has to be told by a remarkably patient Owen that this will get them killed. Owen, of course, had just stepped out of the car to slowly and dramatically inspect a clearly dead sauropod, telling Claire to stay in the passenger seat. That of course wasn't a bad idea. He's a man who kind of knows what he's doing -- Claire's the idiot for not listening. What exactly was Owen's plan if danger came, I wonder? -- "Sense of danger" also seems to be a mixed bag in JW, but this can't be pardoned as a plot hole or cinematic convenience. Not when Owen made a point of lecturing Claire about safety in the same scene.
At that point, she's been told what by Owen enough times that it's apparently sunk in. Ref youtube video above, she half-strips and invites Owen to stare at her boobs with a literal statement of "I'm ready." Thanks to his scolding, she's found the power to stand up and be an equal partner in the field, the breast-laden proof of which obviously needed demonstrating. She's literally submitting them for his (and our) approval, and it's seriously the movie's portrayal that this is the only asset she has up to that point, so good on her for using it?... After the kiss, Owen owns her completely. The boys are staring in awe at Owen for the rest of the film. As they all watch Owen & a troop of military men take the fight to the Indominus, they compliment Claire by saying, "You're boyfriend's a badass." They're not really dating, and Owen was being a complete a$$ to her a few hours ago, but it's OK: he *is* a badass, and Claire smiles coyly to herself. She, of course, is on baby-sitting duty in the safety of a van. Are you kidding? It's *scary* out there! And she's learned better to question stay-put orders from men at this point.
I also tracked down
a reddit discussion on Zara's death, and one comment stood out to me. It summarizes the odd gender language of the film quite well, and specific to Zara's role, it says this:
In this regard, Zara acts as a stand in for Claire. She's career focused, on the phone all the time, doesn't really care about kids etc. With Zara's death, we get to punish Claire as mercilessly as possible, but without actually killing Claire herself.
I think that's a great way to put it. This entire movie is about Claire's comeuppance, but Owen's a stud of a man who needs a trophy, and JW needs to pretend to have a female protagonist.
This is about Owen, too. They didn't
need to make Owen someone who could only snap or make obscene gestures at women who decline to sleep with him. But they did, and it's part and parcel to his badassness.
Again, I don't know exactly why this gnawed at me as completely as it did. But it left me completely unable to square with a movie that, otherwise, had a lot of entertaining dinosaur stuff. I could complain somewhat about the continuing degradation of the Tyrannosaur in the JP series, but maybe I'll save that for another post. Next to the blatant and unforgiving treatment of its female characters, almost everything else seems like a minor movie sin easy to discard in the name of enjoying a solid effort.
2: Women in Jurassic Park
JW is 2015.
JP was 1993. So, how did it do in comparison?
Dr. Ellie Sattler is a total badass. She's more than a match for Alan Grant. Neither are exactly trained fighters, but in a survival situation both rise to the task. Ellie might've beeen the bravest, toughest character in the movie. She risks her neck unflinchingly, over and over, to save others -- and succeeds! She's devoted her life to her work, and is celebrated for it just as her male peers are. The film also even features an awkward attempt at chivalry on John Hammond's part, which she briskly rejects.
Of the two kids, Tim's a bit of a child, but he's what, 8? Lex is 12 and is another strong female character who takes great care of her brother. They both would've been raptor meat had it not been for her moment of ingenuity, and she later saves
everybody with her Unix wizardry.
There are moments where men and women alike panic in this movie. Malcolm's survival skills are not very good. He spends most of the film disabled and decidedly *not* masculine, while still being the star of the show. Then there's Nedry and Gennaro, of course. It's kind of amazing how much more balanced and inclusive the 1993 film was. Once the power goes out, gender ceases to be an issue and character makeup becomes the defining factor.
There's just no excuse, in my eyes. 2015's
Mad Max: Fury Road stands in stark contrast -- another reboot set in a far-fetched survival situation for its characters. And it's not like that was bold. Resident Evil? Alien? Terminator? (I don't know those movies quite as well, but it just seems not uncommon...)
Jurassic World must own the fact that it is a movie about how women should be women and leave the men stuff to men. It is *stunningly* backwards.
Anyway, I hope not to offend if you thoroughly liked Jurassic World. I wanted to love it, too, and I did enjoy its bright spots. What I see as fatal flaws were just too much for me. It's become the least worthy successor to the name for me, and that was a major surprise after the records it broke and the good things I'd heard but not dug into.
Sorry for the rant! I guess I really, really took exception to this one.
Jurassic Park is a franchise that's a little near and dear to me, and I didn't appreciate what the JW team did with those keys.
Links again, for reference:
1.
(Article) The Strangely Cruel and Unusual Death in JURASSIC WORLD
2.
Reddit discussion on the same scene, specifically Cerebrist's comment
Here's what I wrote up after I saw Jurassic World. I'd really, really recommend getting the making of jurassic park book - it's like $2-3 on Amazon and the context it gives is so, so cool. My roommate and I read through that, then got Jurassic Park on blu-ray, and it was like watching it brand new for the first time all over again.
