Blazehgehg

This is a weird movie. It's pretty good, but it's like... it's a shark attack movie with a strangely high budget. It's obsessed with showing our heroine's phone and watch in this super fancy visual effects overlay like a video game HUD. So we see her looking at her phone, but we also see the phone's screen hovering next to her, where we see who she's facetiming, along with a little picture-in-picture of her face.

There is also, as you might imagine, pretty significant CGI for the shark, the fish, the water, and a lot of other things in what is clearly the worst day of this woman's life. Even if you take money out of the equation, this is, at the very least, a very high effort movie, and I don't really think it needs it.

It's a simple movie. A woman travels back to a secret beach her mother used to visit, and encounters a particularly big and nasty shark while surfing. Everything that can go wrong, does. As to be expected.

And, I dunno, some of those effects just feel like a lot of unnecessary song and dance. It's kind of distracting and weird.

Movie's fine otherwise, though. But maybe just fine.

This is a pretty fun movie that unfortunately I struggled to connect with. It's just slightly too silly for its own good. Maybe it's just the fact that so, so many cartoons I watched growing up leaned on this concept -- that a single bump on the head can switch a person from loving friend to angsty rival.

Geena Davis plays a happy suburban mom, who, after a car accident near Christmas, is suddenly haunted by memories of being a stone cold assassin. It turns out she's a sleeper agent that never woke up, and she wants answers.

I suppose the thing is... this feels like the kind of movie that Last Action Hero was trying to parody. Everybody is playing things just, like, 2% more over the top than they need to. It's fun, but it does feel like a little too much sometimes. It really skirts the edge of being kind of goofy, and normally I'm down for that, but something about this movie hit me a little weird and I'm not sure what it is. I think it straddles too many lines without committing. It's trying to be funny, cool, and serious, but something about the mixture is just a bit off.

But only a bit. This is still a pretty good movie, and it's got a couple really good explosions.

A few things bother me. One, is the realization that the reason "Jurassic World" took over to supersede "Jurassic Park" is because they wanted an excuse to make mutant dinosaur movies forever without having it be about theme parks anymore.

Two, these movies (this one in particular) have become way too science fiction. Rebirth opens with a genetics lab scene that feels like it belongs in an "Aliens" movie, with a Xenomorph stalking its sterile halls. We are shown incredibly futuristic, space-age looking sets contrasted with computers that are so retro they feature amber monochrome monitors. This mash up of future and retro technology annoys me, and Jurassic Park used to feel more grounded than this. Jurassic World is an excuse to push things further into the realm of fantasy.

I will at least give them this, though: once this movie finds a rhythm, it's better than every other movie bearing the "Jurassic World" title. Characters are stronger, more heartfelt, and the cinematography is occasionally striking. At the end of the day it's just an excuse to go back to Jurassic Park again, but at least its a better excuse than some of these movies have.

I just... don't like the kid in this movie. I get it, there have been kids in these movies since all the way back in the first one. Kids like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs sell toys. But, man, the way they handle the kid here feels very pandering. She adopts a cute little dinosaur and the whole thing feels like it only exists for merchandising. Heck, the whole civilian family in this movie kind of feels like that -- like they're just here to check a box for marketing. They are only tangentially related to the movie at large.

Where a lot of the movie's problems come to a head are in the last 30 minutes. This is the most where it feels like Jurassic World, not Jurassic Park, in that we start getting away from dinosaurs and back into that futuristic fantasy land the movie opens with. Anachronistic technology at odds with itself, and big scary scifi monsters. It's a direction I really don't want these movies to go in. Hybrids were an idea previous Jurassic Park media experimented with and decided against, and I'd rather it stay that way.

Ultimately, I don't think this is what I was looking for in a Jurassic Park movie, but I guess I can't really say I hated it. Again, it's easily better than the entire Chris Pratt trilogy, and I think I had a good time, but it doesn't feel "right." More than ever, this is the start of a new branch for this franchise, for better and worse. Jurassic Park is dead. We live in a Jurassic World now.