Movie Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

The first PG-13 movie I ever saw was the original Jurassic Park back in 1993. I've been a fan of the franchise ever since--I saw the first sequel Lost World in middle school, Jurassic Park III in high school, and Jurassic World when it came out. I reviewed it and even participated in a podcast dedicated to the film. So even though the advance buzz wasn't so hot, I definitely made plans to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

The Plot

In the aftermath of the events of Jurassic World and the massive payouts the company had to make to those harmed, Isla Nublar has been abandoned again. However, it's not a paradise where once-extinct beasts can roam around freely--at least not for much longer. The island's dormant volcano has came to life and the US government, which based on Jurassic Park III seems to have been doing the lion's share of keeping the islands quarantined, has been listening to Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and is inclined to let the volcano destroy the dinosaurs.

This doesn't sit well with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is now running the Dinosaur Protection Group dedicated to protecting the dinosaurs like they're an ordinary endangered species. She allies with the late John Hammond's former partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to transport the dinosaurs to a new sanctuary, with her former boyfriend Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) along for the ride to help find his velociraptor pet/surrogate child Blue.

Unfortunately they--and the timid computer geek Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) and the take-no-shit "paleo-veterinarian" Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) from Claire's organization--find that the sinister plots to weaponize the dinosaurs (one of Jurassic World's weaker points) are still in play and drastic action might need to be taken to save them...

The Good

*I will give the film credit for taking creative risks. The island gets blown up halfway through the movie and the rest of it takes place in California, with the climax occurring at Lockwood's mansion way out in the woods. No more formulaic "how can we get people to these quarantined dangerous islands" films now. The film also gets pretty dark--there's deliberate murder (or attempted) murder of humans by other humans. Even when Malcolm and his crew sabotage InGen's attempt to capture Isla Sorna's dinosaurs in The Lost World, InGen's mercenaries rescue them from the falling trailers and include them in their attempts to get off the island rather than abandoning them to die or deliberately killing them.

*The visuals are stunning, including the dinosaur effects.

*The last quarter of the film, however ridiculous it often seems, comes off like a Gothic haunted-house horror movie, just with dinosaurs.

*Like before, Howard and Pratt are quite amusing together. And Claire has become quite the bad-ass since then. No more running around the jungle in heels for her. :)

*In general there's a lot of nice laugh-out-loud moments.

*There's a scene with a brachiosaurus that's legitimately sad, just like in the last movie. I think the last movie did it better in terms of eliciting an emotional reaction from me, but a whole lot of people found what happened poignant.

*A new type of dinosaur actually seems to have a personality and almost demonic cleverness.

The Bad

*How is the mosasaurus (really a kronosaurus due to its size) still alive if the park has been abandoned for three years? It doesn't seem like it's capable of climbing out of its pool. It would have long since starved to death trapped in its enclosure unless the pool was already stocked with fish, animals keep conveniently getting close enough for it to snag, or somebody's been feeding it.

*Apparently a tie-in in-world website of the Dinosaur Protection Group that provides a lot of the back-story, but I didn't know it existed. Consequently, I was wondering for much of the movie about Isla Sorna, which should be unaffected by the impending destruction of Isla Nublar. This is a problem--if it's that much of a plot hole, it should be explained in the movie. All they'd need is a throwaway line about how after "the spinosaurus incident" Isla Sorna's ecology collapsed and the surviving dinosaurs had to be relocated to Isla Nublar for the new park.

*There's some needless political commentary, like one of the mercenaries (a villain, unlike the awesome Roland Tembo from the second film) referring to Dr. Rodriguez as a "nasty woman." Where have I heard that before?

*There's a scene involving transfusing blood from one species of dinosaur to another. That's...not going to work. You can't transfuse from one human to another if the blood types are different and humans are all one species. The almighty TVTropes said this was like using rabbit blood in humans.

*Ian Malcolm is even more of an annoying pantheist than he was before. It's my understanding that his worries about chaos theory from the first movie had to do with the overconfidence of Hammond and his entourage that they could control these wild and dangerous animals so easily, but there was still the "nature SELECTED them for extinction" stuff. He's still on that kick in this one, even though he explicitly tells the Congressional committee that God isn't involved here. News-flash: In a purely naturalistic world (Malcolm is not a religious man, something made quite clear in the novel The Lost World), there is no "meant to be" or "wrong side of history. Things happen and people have to deal with them.

*It would have been better if the "rescue the dinosaurs" plot had taken up the entire movie--one last return to the park, rounding up the dinosaurs, some close encounters of the worst kind with big carnivores, etc. could have taken up quite a lot of time. One of the more creative features of The Lost World was the depiction of the carnotaurs as having chameleon-like camouflage, which they could have included in this one. The betrayals that take place halfway through could be a cliffhanger ending to set up the events of a third Jurassic World film, which would cover the events of the second half of the film and the consequences of those.

*Things got kind of draggy after they get off the island all the way to the dinosaur auction going badly.

*They hype up the possibilities of the dinosaurs getting loose as some kind of apocalyptic event when they're really not. Most if not all of the dinosaurs are female and there are so few dinosaurs period they wouldn't be able to create a viable breeding population even if they became established somewhere. And if the lysine contingency is still in the genes of the new batch (it's certainly still there with old-school dinosaurs like the T-Rex), many of them will die unless they can find the proper foods. The only ones I anticipate being a real problem are the kronosaurus, since it has the whole ocean to hide in, or the pterodactyls due to their ability to fly and the fact enough of them escaped Isla Nublar (and Isla Sorna earlier) that they could establish a viable breeding pool. The big carnosaurs in particular will be in zoos or trophy racks within a month or two.

*Weaponizing the dinosaurs is still a dumb idea. Unless they could teach raptors to use guns (or engineer them into creatures similar to the wolf-baboon-human chimera ghouloons from S.M. Stirling's Draka novels), it seems pretty pointless. They need too much food, the fixed costs of creating them are huge, etc. A "war raptor" might be able to do more damage on the battlefield than a "war dog" (more physically destructive, more intimidating) but it doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

The Verdict

Worth seeing once. It's not a bad movie, but it could have been done better. 7.5 out of 10.

Geekly Oddcast: The Prequels Nobody Wanted

I'm not a regular participant in The Geekly Oddcast the way I am with Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, but I do show up from time to time. The last episode I appeared in was another game like turning children's stories into horror movies, making animated children's films into live-action movies (I'm holding out for Bart the Bear in costume as Little John), and casting a 1970s version of The Avengers. For this, one, the focus was on prequels nobody wanted. The idea was that we'd agree on one film and then "Rogue One" it, plotting out a full story and actually try to make it good.

The film we ultimately chose was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Time travel gets put to all sorts of interesting uses in that one, plus I annoy everybody by bringing up Denver the Last Dinosaur. Here's the full episode if you want to hear more, including some thoughts about a prequel to Friday the 13th featuring Pamela Voorhees in the vein of Cher in the film Mask (if Cher's son had died due to camp-counselor negligence and Cher went violently insane). However, it was my understanding we were to come with a few ideas already. Here're the two I provided for the podcast itself:

Highlander-A prequel focused on the Kurgan or Ramirez would have been pretty cool without much effort, but making one about young Connor would be tricky. Maybe a back-story of the feud between the Macleods and the Frasers, with the Kurgan making a dramatic entrance by killing a bunch of people in the vein of Vader's appearance in Rogue One? You could have the love story between Connor and Kate (you know, the one who later demanded he be burned at the stake) and perhaps go with the fan theory that Dugal "comforted" Kate after Connor's death and their insistence Connor was demon-possessed or a witch was driven by guilt.

Since the ultimate goal is potentially making this into a good film, it could be some kind of semi-Braveheart, possibly with a teen love triangle thrown in for good measure, and an occasional appearance by the Kurgan to remind us that this is actually a Highlander film.

The Guyver-The protagonist could be Tetsu Segawa, the scientist father of love interest Mitzi Segawa from the original film. We see how he got involves with the Chronos Corporation, how he became a Zoanoid, and how he ultimately attempted to steal a Guyver unit and defect to the CIA. You could get an early appearance by the Zoanoid gangbangers of the first film and even the dragon-like monstrous form of evil CEO Fulton Balcus much like how Rogue One gives us some of the pre-Alderaan outings of the Death Star. It could give Mark Hamill a chance to reprise his role as the CIA agent Max, although he's aged so much since the movie was made that this really wouldn't be a good idea unless they CGI de-aged him a la Tony Stark in Captain America Civil War or Rachael in Blade Runner 2049 or went full-blown Tarkin or Leia like in Rogue One.

(Granted, you could do an all-new cast, but including Mark Hamill might be the only way to get this off the ground.)

I never really got the chance to contribute any more ideas, but other notions I had included expanding the 1970s opening of Master of Disguise into a full movie, making a prequel to That's My Boy that's basically a Lifetime Original Movie about creepy teachers with the genders swapped, making a prequel to Stargate about how Kurt Russell's character's son killed himself with his dad's gun (basically an "issues movie" about accidental shootings), and making a prequel to Gigli (probably one of the worst movies ever made) following Ben Affleck or Jennifer Lopez's characters before the kidnapping that dominates the film's plot.

Movie Review: Jurassic World (2015)

Last Friday for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood's special month-long Jurassic Park series, we watched Jurassic World. Now that the podcast is up for you to listen, here's my usual review...

The Plot

Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Hammond's dream has come true. There's a functioning dinosaur park on Isla Nublar where children can ride baby dinosaurs in a petting zoo (there's a particularly cute bit where a child hugs an infant sauropod), people can kayak down rivers where stegosaurs and hadrosaurs drink, massive enclosures where herds of giant herbivores like the triceratops roam, and feeding the mosasaurus a la a bloodier Sea World is always a big crowd-pleaser.

However, as park manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) points out to some visiting dignitaries, the park, though profitable, is not profitable enough, and focus groups suggest the people want something bigger, scarier, and with more teeth. So Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) and his staff have played mix-and-match the dinosaur to create a creature they call Indominus Rex. As you can imagine things get difficult--with Claire's visiting nephews caught in the mix no less--and it's up to trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his pack of semi-trained raptors to save the day...

The Good

*Once we actually get to the island with the dinosaurs, the movie is never boring. I had some issues with what they did with the plot, characters, etc., but the film was really entertaining.

*I liked how Owen pointed out that the Indominus is so dangerous because it never interacted with any other creature (other than a sibling that it ate). The book The Lost World depicts the raptors of Isla Sorna being particularly brutal and anti-social with one another because they were born in a lab without socialization from parents, other members of the pack, etc. The Indominus was basically raised alone and fed meat from a crane, so we might be dealing with a creature that has the dinosaur equivalent of Reactive Attachment Disorder. After all, when dealing with aggressive and dangerous animals (I'm thinking primarily of dogs), bad animals are generally the fault of bad training or upbringing.

(Granted, we are talking about a customized tyrannosaur here, unlike dogs that have been bred for generations to be human-friendly...)

*There's a bit of social commentary about how people grow bored with what were once marvels and constantly want more and more interesting things. I thought it ridiculous that people would be so spoiled they'd get bored with living freaking dinosaurs, but perhaps I'm being unduly optimistic. There'd be a whole generation (the park has been open for ten years, with the events of the first two films happening before that) to whom this isn't new. There's also commentary on focus groups and the focus on short-term profitability. I agreed with this message far more than the pantheistic nonsense Malcolm spouted in the earlier films (or Grant's implication in Jurassic Park III that the people who created the park were outright evil). See director Colin Trevorrow's quote here.

*The scene where Owen and Claire find a mutilated, dying sauropod was legitimately sad.

*I liked how they brought back Dr. Wu from the first film. Although I don't like what they did with his character, it provides a nice bit of continuity. Furthermore, as one of the senior (surviving) InGen personnel from the original park and the one with the most technical knowledge of the cloning process, that the company would bring him on-board makes a lot of sense.

*And Wu provides a great explanation for new park owner Simon Mizrani (Irrfan Khan) about why the dinosaurs, among other things, don't have feathers. The lack of feathered dinosaurs in the original film is a product of the lack of knowledge at the time, but the writers managed to explain this understandable oversight in a really clever way.

*I liked Mizrani as a character. He's the inheritor of Hammond's dream (Hammond seems to have passed the torch onto him personally) who has brought his vision to reality. Furthermore, he's learned from Hammond's mistakes in regards to the velociraptors at least--when ambitious InGen security chief Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) wants to use them to hunt the Indominus, he flat-out says there will never be free-roaming velociraptors on Isla Nublar, ever. He's also eager, brave, and confident, which comes back to bite him in the end but still reflects well on him.

*Of all the cast, Owen is the most purely fun character. He's strong-willed enough to tame the raptors and his interactions with Claire are a really funny bit of odd-couple. Like a a good trainer of big predators, he knows damn well how dangerous these creatures are and unlike many other characters, he actually respects them. This works out for him later on, when things all go to hell.

*The writers do a good job of showing, not telling, how distant Claire has become from her family. She can't remember how long it's been since she's seen her nephews, she doesn't know how old they are, and falls back on treating them like the little-little kids she remembers later on.

*There are a lot of humor. The interactions between the laid-back and irreverent Owen and the anal-retentive, hyper-organized Claire are funny and in one scene, there's actually a cameo by Jimmy Buffett. Yes, the god of beach music has come to his people.

*I liked the greater variety of prehistoric critters. For example, in the pterosaur aviary, not only is there the classic Pterandon (which we know from the end of The Lost World and from Jurassic Park III that InGen had cloned too), but also the Dimorphodon. My dinosaur knowledge has clearly decayed since elementary school--in the podcast I refer to it as a Rhamphorhyncus. The Mosasaurus (which due to its sheer size would probably be a Kronosaurus actually) was also cool.

*There are a lot of good callbacks to the original film, including a scene involving the T-Rex and flares. The T-Rex also still has the scars she got fighting the raptors at the end--yes, that's the original T-Rex, 22 years older and still kicking. And as one of my fellow podcasters pointed out, the way the blood drips onto an InGen security guy's wrist is just like how Malcolm dripped water on Ellie's wrist in the original film. Go to the TVTropes page to see them all, but beware of spoilers...

*They don't retcon the middle two films. They just don't mention them at all (with the minor exception of Ian Malcolm's book, mentioned in JP III, that some characters are reading). Those of us who enjoyed LW and JP III (I liked LW, but I doubt JP III held up) can believe that Isla Sorna is still out there under military quarantine as a neo-Mesozoic nature preserve (with Malcolm's book as proof the middle films are canon) and those who didn't can believe that the book is something completely unrelated and the middle films never happened.

The Bad

*The beginning is a little slow in a way that the original film never was.

*The Indominus is far too capable. In the scene where Owen and Claire come across a dying sauropod, they soon find the Indominus has wiped out several more. This isn't a spoiler, since this is from the commercials/trailers--the "she's killing for sport" line. The Indominus is as big if not bigger than a tyrannosaurus rex, but you don't see single lions killing one adult elephant, let alone four or five. A group of sauropods with their sheer bulk and whipping tails should have been able to absolutely destroy the Indominus. After all, an Ankylosaurus puts up a pretty good fight against it, and it's significantly smaller and alone.

And then there's the initial interaction between the Indominus and Owen's raptor mafia. Seriously, we're getting to Villain Sue territory here. Plus since the Indominus is an unsocialized, isolated monster, how does it know pack behavior?

*The Indominus could have been much more simple. Instead of a chimera of multiple animals, have the park find the DNA of a Giganatosaurus, a carnosaur that's bigger than the T-Rex. This would let them keep the whole "people want bigger creatures" plot and do it more simply. They could simply depict it as being more monstrous and aggressive (killing its sibling, needing to be contained more strictly) rather than some kind of less-sympathetic Frankenstein monster.

*There's this whole subplot involving Hoskins wanting to train the raptors for war that could be eliminated completely. Hoskins is obnoxious (and some people on TVTropes are convinced he caused the whole catastrophe to happen), Wu's participation (which leads into an obvious Sequel Hook) makes him into a semi-villain when in the original film he seemed like a pleasant and chipper young man, etc. They could have just simply had "Indominus escapes and evades or destroys attempts at capturing or killing it and the only thing standing between it and 20,000 tourists is Owen and his trained raptor pack" as the plot. No need for Hoskins, his conflict with Owen, and making Dr. Wu into a (mildly) Fiendish Dr. Wu at all.

*To that end, they could have referenced the Isla Sorna quarantine from the middle two films. Owen and his raptors have to stop the Indominus before military units from Isla Sorna (which is part of the same island chain) invade the park to protect the tourists--something that would definitively prove InGen too incompetent to run the park ever and likely lead to its closure. Owen and his raptors represent the park's chance to deal with the problem on its own and keep Hammond's vision alive.

*Claire's nephews get lost in the park and come across the ruins of the original Visitors' Center and a lot of leftover gear from the original film, including Tim's night-vision goggles and the original gas-powered Jeeps. It seems really foolish and wasteful that InGen would allow the nearly completed park to just rot while they built a completely new park elsewhere on the island.

(Apparently some extra materials suggest it was years between the failure of the original park and the building of the new one, but even if the original buildings were too far gone, they could have tried to salvage stuff. Maybe they helped finance the new park by selling all the metal and what not from the original to China?)

I like the callbacks to the original generally, but not this one.

*There's CGI blood. That never ends well. If you ever make a movie, dear readers, please use real fake blood.

The Verdict

A generally entertaining movie, but with some issues. See it once, preferably at a matinee price. 8.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

For the special Jurassic Park series leading up to the release of Jurassic World, my friend Nick's podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood has just done the film The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park loosely based on the novel of the same name. Here's a link to the podcast. And now my review...

The Plot

After a vacationing family stumbles upon InGen's Site B on Isla Sorna, where most of Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were manufactured prior to being shipped to Isla Nublar to be displayed, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough)'s "unscrupulous" nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) uses this as a pretext to take control of InGen. In order to foil his bid to capture the dinosaurs (who have been roaming free after a hurricane for years), Hammond contacts the disgraced Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and persuades him to join an expedition to Site B to document the dinosaurs in their habitats. Malcolm agrees once he learns his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), who studies African predators, has already gone to the island. Off they go, to an island with dangerous predators and an InGen team ready to take the dinosaurs to their planned new zoo in San Diego...

The Good

*The opening scene where the little British girl Cathy Bowman (played by Camilla Belle, who is still an active actress) encounters and feeds a compsognathus, only to attract the attention of a swarm of them, is very well-done. The writers did a good job of showing rather than telling the disagreements between her parents (the mother is overly protective and the father objects), depicting Cathy's kindness (she tries to befriend the first dinosaur by feeding it), and her innocence and fear (when the swarm appears and starts behaving aggressively, she tries to tell them there's not enough food to go around, not knowing, she's the food).

*The hunter Roland Tembo (Peter Postlethwaite), one of Ludlow's minions, is more sympathetic than many of the ostensible heroes. He's a lot more competent in wilderness survival than Ludlow (I liked his "base camp or buffet" line when Ludlow ignorantly wants to set up camp on a game trail) and chivalrous toward Sarah Harding, whom he helps up the cliff after the trailers are destroyed (along with her male compatriots too, I might add) and later expresses his concerns about her when he thinks she's injured. There's a deleted scene (which I thought was in a prequel comic) where he gives a slimy customer harassing a waitress a violent lesson in manners. Here's the scene if you want to watch it, which also builds on his relationship with his friend Ajay. He's also the only character in the film I'm aware of who has an arc--he initially wants to kill the male T-Rex like it's another trophy animal and after another character is killed, instead opts to tranquilize it so it can be captured for Ludlow's proposed zoo. He then rejects Ludlow's offer of employment, stating he no longer wishes to be "in the company of death."

I'm not familiar with most of Postlethwaite's career, but I do remember seeing him in some bits of the 1980s television series Sharpe on YouTube. He played the vile Obadiah Hakeswill, a Napoleonic sergeant who abuses his soldiers, sucks up to the officers over him, rapes and steals, and is generally a depraved scumbag. Hell, his introduction to the television series features him attacking Sharpe's girlfriend immediately upon seeing her (and then trying to kill her with a pitchfork when she fends him off), so we know he's bad news. The fact he plays a much more honorable and non-misogynist character shows his range.

*There's a good match cut juxtaposing the screaming Mrs. Bowman with the yawning Ian Malcolm--who has been reduced to borderline hobo status--on the subway early in the film.

*I liked the scene where Malcolm senses the approaching T-Rexes and the water ripples in the puddles on the ground. That's a nice call-back to the original film.

*I liked how the scene where we first meet the raptors is shot. We see them start to stalk a group of InGen employees and then there's an overhead shot showing them closing in from all angles, with the InGen team completely unaware they're there. It's very well-done. Don't go into the long grass indeed.

*I liked the shot where we first meet Sarah. It's very well-done and funny.

*There are some good shots where a character's death is revealed by blood in the water rather than an on-screen gnawing that would get the film rated R.

*The producers of the film clearly remembered the "lysine contingency" (the animals were made deliberately deficient in this enzyme so they'd die within days if not fed properly) from the first film. The herbivores have learned to eat certain foods rich to lysine and the carnivores eat them.

*The film does build on Malcolm's family life, referenced in the first film when he talks about how he has three kids and he's always on the lookout for "the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm." Here we actually meet his daughter Kelly, adapted from another character from the novel. The film shows how he's not the most attentive father, but does give him a really good line about his daughter being (or not being) on the school gymnastics team.

*Kelly is black, but nobody seems to really care other than one person who makes a comment about there not being much of a family resemblance between her and Malcolm. It's not done in a mean way or even in earshot of the characters (where it might offend them), but it does honestly show that somebody might be curious.

*We see an older Lex and Tim at Hammond's home in a brief scene. Good callback to the original movie.

The Bad

*There is a major plot hole when the InGen ship the SS Venture (a nice King Kong allusion there) arrives in San Diego with the crew dead, Dracula-style. There's nothing aboard the ship that could have done it--the dinosaur they're carrying is too big and contained in the hold. I remember reading somewhere that there was this deleted plot (TVTropes claims it was cut from the shooting script) involving a group of stowaway velociraptors, but they either cut it out or never filmed it at all! Seriously, either reshoot the ship's arrival completely or don't cut out the second batch of dinosaurs that killed the crew and made said arrival possible!

*The film starts to drag in the middle. Given how the film is supposed to be entertaining--and quite often is--this is a bit of a problem.

*The problem with the beginning--which as I said was great--is that the dinosaur attack on the little girl would probably be a much bigger deal than a pretext for Hammond's nephew to take control of the company. Seriously, a cute little girl was attacked and injured by dinosaurs. InGen might not find out about it until it's too late, and the family seems wealthy enough that bribes or legal threats wouldn't stop them from making a stink. I imagine it would be a major news story, there'd be media swarming about, etc. Perhaps Costa Rica (which doesn't have a standing military but does have a small security force for border policing, etc.) quarantines the island and Hammond's unauthorized expedition has to sneak onto Isla Sorna in a suspenseful scene? The larger InGen force then comes as a nasty surprise, as they didn't expect the Costa Ricans to let them in. Upon seeing the helicopters and vehicles coming in, Malcolm could then make some nasty comment about money making the world go round, which would answer any audience questions about how they got in.

Instead of trying to pre-empt his nephew, Hammond could send the scientists in as part of a plan to document the dinosaurs in their natural habitat and pre-empt any attempt to exterminate them that might result from the attack on the girl? We can see Ludlow and Hammond arguing (foreshadowing InGen's attempt to capture the dinosaurs), but Hammond never explains what they're arguing about, to make their arrival a surprise. The first film depicts Hammond as being close with his family and the second film continues this by having Lex and Tim visiting him. He might not want to tell Malcolm there's trouble at home, especially if he and Ludlow had once been close (they work together and Ludlow seems to have the same dreams and ambition Hammond once did) and had become estranged. Furthermore, making the arrival of the InGen team a surprise could be suspenseful--the scientists hear the sound of the helicopters and assume it's the military coming to kill off the dinosaurs.

*The movie depicts Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughan)--an eco-terrorist--in a far too sympathetic light. Heck, this movie, like the first, goes out of its way to vindicate Malcolm's insistence that displaying dinosaurs as a tourist attraction will never, ever work (which he has no logical reason to believe--it's all based on his pantheistic version of Chaos Theory) and Nick's Greenpeace shenanigans. InGen's team, rather than capturing a few smaller dinosaurs and leaving the island immediately, instead goes whole-hog trying to capture all of them (or at least most of the major herbivores), which would cause most of the carnivores to starve and destroy the neo-Mesozoic ecosystem completely.

Seriously, Nick and Sarah freeing all of the dinosaurs wrecks InGen's camp and nearly kills Tembo and Ajay. Nick later steals Tembo's ammunition, which would have come in handy when they're attacked by the T-Rex. TVTropes points out that Nick is indirectly responsible for all of the (human) deaths in the film. Honestly, to make Van Owen sympathetic, the filmmakers made Ludlow and InGen (once he takes over) into massive straw-men, even though the film does give him a chance to defend his position (the dinosaurs are InGen property) and gives Tembo a scene where he calls out Nick as "an Earth First bastard." See here for the whole dialogue. TVTropes points out that although he's condescending and unpleasant, Ludlow isn't truly bad and nothing he's doing is illegal.

Another problem with the film is that Van Owen disappears for the last act. Maybe they could depict him getting arrested for what happened on the island? There's a lot of destruction of property, reckless endangerment, and possibly even multiple counts of negligent homicide. If the producers want to gin up audience sympathy, perhaps he claims sole responsibility and takes the fall for Sarah, who was also involved in sabotaging the InGen team. In the event any InGen survivors claim she was there too, he could claim that she followed him into the camp to try to stop him or that even that he somehow coerced her. Given how he claimed to have joined Greenpeace for the women, falling on his sword to protect a woman from jail would be a good arc for him.

*The film does not explain any possible relationship between Sarah Harding and Jurassic Park's original veterinarian Gerry Harding. Hammond references Harding traveling to Costa Rica to meet the hospitalized Malcolm for years before, but how would she know what happened? Some of the games and other material do establish that she's Gerry's daughter, but the movie doesn't. I've theorized on the blog somewhere that perhaps Harding kept the non-disclosure agreement in public but told her what happened on Isla Nublar privately, which would explain her interest.

*Speaking of Sarah, she's incredibly hypocritical. At one point she straight up interacts with (even touching) an infant stegosaur, but then tells the other members of the expedition they're not there to interact with the dinosaurs and to not to bend even a single blade of grass (!).

Also, for someone Hammond thinks is an expert in surviving predators, she doesn't abandon the jacket covered in blood from the baby T-Rex, which is probably what brought Mom and Dad Dinosaur down on them later in the film. Hypocrisy is a character trait, true, and the bloody jacket explains why the T-Rexes found them, but the stupidity of the latter bit in particular undermines her character.

*The fate of most of the InGen team. Yes, they're panicked, but they're still armed. I would have expected them to put up a better fight than they did.

*When Malcolm's crew arrives on the island, finds Sarah's damaged backpack, and assume she's been attacked, Goldblum doesn't sound too terribly upset when he's shouting "Sarah!" His delivery in that scene wasn't very good.

*Some of Kelly's dialogue when she's arguing with Malcolm is too spot-on and verbally advanced for someone who is, at most, in her early teens. Yes, she has Malcolm for a father (and presumably anybody Malcolm would be interested in dating would have to be smart herself), but still.

The Verdict

See it once, especially if you want to get the complete film series in before seeing Jurassic World. 7.5 out of 10.

December 2014 Writing Contest: The Results

The revival of my earlier writing bets with a couple friends is now in its second month, so it's time to update you on how the first month went.

In the first month, I wrote 3,838 words of fiction. This doesn't compare well with a previous December in which I wrote just under 12,000 words, but I can plead extenuating circumstances. I was editing a novel for a client, which will be available on Amazon sometime soon. Between that and the end of an editorial internship I had with a magazine company, I had significantly less writing time than in 2013, but I made more money. :)

Here is what I did accomplish:

*Although I only finished bulking up The Thing in the Woods in preparation for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award this morning, I got much of the work done over December. One of the better critiques I'd received from my writing group is that a character introduced at the end of the novel in the first draft should have been introduced earlier. The technical term for this is a Chekhov's Gun--if you see a gun in the first act, it had better be fired in the third, or don't include it. In this case, it was the reverse. I plugged the scene introducing him (part of which I wrote in November and part in December) around two-thirds into the book and had his earlier appearance play a role in driving events toward their climax. He's going to play a much bigger role in the sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, so this will help set him up for that.

*I finished and then after writing-group critique heavily revised a chapter in my new novel project. I'm keeping this one more quiet until it's finished so I won't go into a lot of detail but now I've got four complete chapters. I've plotted out a fair bit more and this project plays to my strengths (imaginative situations, world-building) rather than my weaknesses (characterization), so I have high hopes for it.

*Little People, Big Guns got the short end of the stick, I'm afraid. Just under 200 words written. This is something I thought I'd be able to finish quickly. I start class again Monday, but maybe I'll be able to do more this month.

*Added a link to the sequel Needs Must to the "back matter" of Übermensch, my supervillain-protagonist short story. For independently-published authors, "back matter" is something quite useful to have. That's your chance to link people to related projects, encourage them to leave reviews, etc. Hopefully this will lead to more sales for "Needs Must," especially during periods where I give "Ubermensch" away for free.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Land Before Time (1988)

As part of the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood podcast produced by the Dudeletter, I watched the Don Bluth animated classic The Land Before Timethe other night. Set during the Cretaceous period, in a time of geological upheaval and climate change, the diminishing herds of herbivores gather to seek out the possibly mythical "Great Valley" where it's still green. After being separated from the rest by an earthquake, the young sauropod Littlefoot and his friends must seek out the Great Valley on their own, all while being stalked by a homicidal Tyrannosaurus Rex that killed his mother. I saw the movie in theaters when I was four years old and hadn't seen it in probably two decades, so let's see how it held up. Podcast here.

The Good

*The battle between the Sharptooth and Littlefoot's mother is well-done. She's clearly significantly bigger and stronger, but he's a better adapted fighter. They depict the Sharptooth wounding her in such a way that it's obvious what happened (we see the shadows of flying flesh after he bites her), but it isn't explicitly bloody and can thus still be rated G. It's not 100% clear how Littlefoot's mother actually dies though--I remember reading online it was infection (similar to the now-debunked theory that someone bitten by a Komodo dragon would die from the nasty bacteria in the rotting meat between the critter's teeth), but blood loss and shock might also do it. If they're all hungry due to limited foot on their journey through the desolation, she'd be physically weakened as well.

*I liked how decisive Littlefoot got when they were attacked again by the Sharptooth. He straight-up plots to lure it into deep water and drop a boulder on it to drown it. None of the usual "the hero refuses to kill so the villain does something evil and causes their own death" nonsense that I've complained about before. It's the equivalent of a bunch of elementary schoolers taking on the non-superpowered Freddy Krueger and it is awesome.

*It makes some surprisingly thoughtful statements about religion. Littlefoot wonders how it is that his mother knows about the Great Valley even though she has never been there and she says it's something she's seen, not with her eyes, but with her heart. Later on Littlefoot has a flashback to something his mother possibly told him offscreen about how the Great Valley is beyond a distinctive rock formation and a ridge of volcanoes, so her faith is based on more than her own desires and imagination. Later on, Cera rejects Littlefoot's vision to go her own way and the other young dinosaurs follow her because it's "easier." Instead Cera leads them into a volcanic desolation (aka Hell) and it's up to Littlefoot, the one individual who had the right idea, to rescue them.

*Although the film's subtlety is lacking, it does make good statements against prejudice. Littlefoot and Cera play together at first, only for Cera's prejudiced parents to stop them and fill her head with nonsense about how three-horns only socialize with other three-horns. Even Littlefoot's kinder mother, who saves Cera as well as Littlefoot from falling into the abyss with the Sharptooth early on, tells Littlefoot that their species are different and there will be plenty of children of his own kind to play with. However, when the young dinosaurs are separated from their parents by the earthquake, they have to stick together in order to survive and it's Cera's arrogance, not Littlefoot's cosmopolitanism, that causes problems. And when the time for the confrontation with the Sharptooth comes, it takes all of them together to pull it off.

*Petri, the neurotic pterodactyl whose fear of heights keeps him from actually flying, has a character arc. We see a scene from his point of view (when they're all standing on top of each other trying to get leaves from the trees) in which heights are terrifying, but he eventually overcomes this fear. The proud and racist Cera learns humility too.

The Bad

*One of my fellow reviewers commented the film felt disjointed and said that material had been cut from the movie against Bluth's wishes. I reviewed the Wikipedia article, which references some scenes of violence being cut out to attain a G rating. It cites this article, which references the T-Rex scene as being trimmed. The area that felt the most disjointed was when Cera leads them into the dangerous volcanic area--the group is separated and we cut from Littlefoot rescuing some of the others to Cera being attacked by a group of territorial pachycephalosaurs without much explanation. I remember seeing a picture of some of them fighting each other in a storybook version I read as a kid and I'm wondering if there was a missing scene where Cera stumbled onto them fighting each other.

*Speaking of Cera, she was the most thoroughly obnoxious character in the film. I can understand the film trying to teach lessons against prejudice, but she was so unsubtle it got old really fast. I guess if you're trying to make a point to children you can't be subtle, but it was so incredibly aggravating.

*There's a completely unnecessary recap of various uplifting events from earlier in the film (Littlefoot hatching, the little dinosaurs cuddling against the cold, etc) at the end.

The Verdict

It's a good movie for children and a good film to see once if you're nostalgic. Seven out of 10. Here's the actual podcast.

Blast from the Past Movie Review #2: Jurassic Park (1993) (SPOILERS)

Last Saturday, I saw Jurassic Park 3D with a friend and some of his friends. Given how I first saw the movie in 1993 in the theaters, it seemed an appropriate time for another "blast from the past" movie review.

(Before we begin, one caveat. I spent a substantial chunk of the movie outside of the theater when I first saw it at age 8. The scene at the beginning with the raptor killing the worker was frightening and I wasn't inclined to see more, so I didn't really see a lot of it the first time around. I did watch the whole thing on video many times later.)

The Good

The film moves along incredibly quickly and is almost never boring. The dinosaur attack sequences, especially the T-Rex chasing the Jeep, were really well-done. And there is so much foreshadowing, especially where the raptors are concerned. One of the biggies is that Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) tells the obnoxious kid at the beginning of the movie how raptors would hunt by ambush and later Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) is killed that way.

There's a lot of subtext I never noticed before--namely how Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) has his hands all over Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) much of the time. He uses his explanation of chaos theory as an excuse to play with one of her hands and at another point, he's playing with her hair in the middle of the conversation. And although it's implied Ellie and Dr. Grant are an item, I didn't pick up on the massive "territory issues" going on between Grant and Malcolm before the T-Rex escapes. Also, Malcolm's foolhardy attempt to distract the T-Rex from the kids and Dr. Grant makes a lot more sense--not that long before, he'd told Grant he had three children. He's reacting a lot more emotionally than the superficially child-unfriendly Grant is.

And Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) does display some foresight. When he makes his bid to steal the dinosaur embryos, he is sure to leave the power on for the raptor pen. Ironically it was undoing his work by rebooting the system that allowed them to escape. This shows he'd at least considered the possibility that he wouldn't be able to turn everything back on in fifteen minutes after delivering the embryos and for reasons either selfless (not disliking Hammond and friends to the point he wanted them dead) or selfish (not wanting to get in trouble) he didn't want to risk their lives.

Also, when Donald Gennaro is attending the presentation on how the cloning actually works with the others, he uses the word "auto-erotic" instead of "animatronic" when he is wondering if the scientists were real or if this was a mock-up of the lab.

Finally, the park's veterinarian is named Gerry Harding. Sarah Harding, who becomes Malcolm's girlfriend later (in both the book and film), is also an animal scientist of some kind. Given how Harding becomes involved with Malcolm even though most people think he's a conspiracy-theory nutbag for trying to reveal what really happened in Isla Nublar, if it turns out she's related to that Harding (Crichton apparently said she's his daughter), that makes a lot of sense. The senior Harding might have followed his non-disclosure agreement in public but told his daughter what really happened in private.

I don't recall anything specific that was improved by the 3D--I don't even recall anything jumping out at me--but I do remember seeing a lot more detail on the T-Rex at the end when she roars in the middle of the visitor's center. There's blood on her teeth from killing the raptor and there are some wounds on her shoulder from when the raptor leaped on her and started clawing. That was cool.

The Bad

Malcolm's theory about how the park was destined to fail makes no sense. If he focused on Hammond's cutting corners to save money (i.e. no moats or other passive barriers to contain the dinosaurs if the fences failed, automating everything, etc), that would make a lot more sense. Instead he comes off as a borderline pantheist--nature will rebel against any attempt to control it, the project is destined to fail for that reason, and dinosaurs should not be cloned because nature "selected" them for extinction.

(Ahem. Absent God, the extinction of the dinosaurs was a cosmic accident. Had the space rock been knocked off course just a smidge, it would have missed the Earth entirely and it'd be an evolved Gallimimus or something typing this blog post about some other movie.)

Yes, the park did fail, but he had no way to really know that. It's like the young-earth people correctly pointing out the Piltdown Man was a fraud. Yes, they were right, but for the wrong reasons.

And then there's him calling discovery "the rape of the natural world." Yes, scientists have sometimes been careless and destructive (the "bone wars" that saw many fossils destroyed come to mind), but he was denouncing exploration of the natural world categorically.

Also, it seems like they abandoned the park for no reason. Relatively few people (Nedry, Muldoon, Arnold, Gennaro) actually died, the power was restored, the most dangerous animals (the raptors) were dead (with the possible exception of the one locked in the freezer, which would probably be a lizard-sicle within a few hours), and subduing the too-big-to-hide T-Rex wouldn't be that difficult. The San Francisco Zoo didn't get (permanently) shut down due to a couple tiger attacks, after all. In the second film InGen people reference spending over $120 million to destroy the park (including language implying they'd killed the dinosaurs)--surely it would have cost less to recapture any escaped dinosaurs and clean up the mess they'd made.

The Verdict

Overall, it's a very well-done and entertaining movie. 8.5 out of 10.

Another Note

The computers used in the movie are incredibly dated, with Lex (Ariana Richards) going gaga over a computer having a CD-ROM, which I remember being a new and awesome thing at the time. Obviously that's not something that can be helped given how the movie was made in 1993, but it's interesting to see how computers have evolved in a relatively short time period.

A Dinosaur Playing Basketball...

For the five-year-old in us all...



I remember this commercial from awhile back, when the Toronto Raptors were new.  Very cool.

Some "Destroyermen" Fan-Art For You

http://ridley100.deviantart.com/art/quot-Destroyermen-quot-Boarding-Action-272876710

Here's the first drawing I posted on DeviantArt in some time.  It's based on the boarding action of the Grik ship at the end of the first Destroyermen novel, Into the Storm.

Consider it more true to the spirit of the scene than the scene itself.  If I remember right, there were a lot more Grik and lemur-people involved in the boarding action, as well as more U.S. sailors.  However, the bridge is still there, and I was sure to get the number of the ship right.

Maybe Taylor Anderson will host the image on his Web site?  There are several fan-made pieces of artwork there.

A Very Moving "Calvin and Hobbes" Fan-Fic

I found Reminiscence, a one-shot "Calvin and Hobbes" fan-fiction today courtesy of TVTropes.  I wasn't aware there even was "Calvin and Hobbes" fan-fiction until today but I've been a lifelong fan of the comic (my parents read it to me before I could read myself), so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

It's really well-done.  The author clearly knows the comic strip--he or she refers to "Uncle Max" (a minor character Bill Watterson ultimately got rid of) and gets the name of Calvin's babysitter's boyfriend correct.

The story is equal parts funny and moving.  After all, it's about Calvin growing up and what ultimately happens to everyone.  I won't go into detail, but although I hate sad things, this is both sad and beautiful.

Enjoy!

I Got to Interview Don Bluth...

One of the improvements of working in North Fulton as opposed to Griffin is that there is a lot more going on.  A few weeks ago, I learned about the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and how they would be screening An American Tail in Johns Creek, which is my primary area of responsibility.  The movie is a metaphor for the American Jewish immigrant experience (Fievel's family standing in for Jews, the cats standing in for the persecuting Cossacks), so it's appropriate.

One thing that is particularly awesome is that director Don Bluth and producer Gary Goldman would both attend the festival and would speak to those attending afterward.  I got the opportunity to sit down with Bluth and Goldman at a nearby tapas bar while the movie played and speak to them at length.

Here're the two articles I got out of it:

Don Bluth, Gary Goldman Discuss "An American Tail"

Renowned Producer, Director visit Johns Creek for Jewish Film Festival

My first experience with the films Bluth, Goldman, and others who left Disney with them produced was probably when I was around four years old and saw  The Land Before Time in the movie theater.  I remember it being awesome, but on the other hand, I was four years old and particularly interested in dinosaurs.  I also remember seeing An American Tail on VHS probably around the same time and I can still remember the cat assault on the Russian mouse village, "There Are No Cats in America," and "Somewhere Out There."  Two-odd years later, I saw The Secret of NIMH toward the end of kindergarten and found it terrifying (the scene where the escaping rats fall down the air duct and when Mrs. Brisby is captured and caged, sans clothing).  I saw it again a few months ago and it obviously wasn't scary (being 26 as opposed to six helps), but it was really well-done, especially Mrs. Brisby's voice-acting.

I never saw Anastasia or his lesser-known 1990s films like The Pebble and the Penguin, but I did see Titan A.E.  It is unfortunate the movie failed at the box office, because it was really good and its failure severely hurt traditional animation (which I prefer to the Pixar style).

I greatly admire Bluth, Goldman, and the others who left Disney when the bean-counters wouldn't let them produce quality animation because it involved actually spending money.  They decided to follow their dreams and produce quality films in the tradition of Disney himself despite the difficulties (resources and not having Disney's marketing machine), something they succeed at.  And apparently their success helped convince Disney to not shut down its animation division (something that would have been a gross insult to Walt's memory) and begin producing quality films once again, I believe starting with The Little Mermaid.

I think some of my story ideas (in particular the Gates of Vasharia novels, which I've described as "Lord of the Rings with tanks" and would be insanely expensive to produce live-action) would be quite awesome if adapted via traditional animation.  Maybe someday I'll get to work with Bluth, Goldman, and company...

A Chat With a Fossil Salesman

I went to the The North Atlanta Gem, Mineral, Fossil, & Jewelry Show held at the North Atlanta Trade Center in Norcross this afternoon.  I'd hadn't been to any show/exhibition of this nature since the Scout Shows I'd go to at I think the Georgia World Congress Center when I was a wee lad.

It was really interesting.  I wasn't really interested in all the jewelry available, since that seems like the kind of gift one gets a girlfriend and I'm single right now.  I focused most of my attention on the fossils that were available for sale.

Alan Stout, who has a Web site selling fossils, was a particularly social dealer, so I decided to interview him.  He apparently is really well-known for triceratops horns--he's sold around ten this year.  He had one for sale for $3999, although I think he was willing to go as low as $3700-ish.  He said although a lot of people came to look at his wares, there were relatively few buyers.  Due to the poor cost/benefit ratio, he said he probably won't do any more shows like this one.

He did have a lot of really interesting stuff available, including an actual wooly mammoth tusk for $4500.

"It's a perfect piece, all solid ivory," he said.  "It's really nice.  It even has the normal wooly mammoth shape."

(Not quite sure what that means, but I think he said it was curved.)

The tusk was originally from Siberia, where it had been dug out from under the permafrost.

He also had the toe of a camarasaurus, a Jurassic-era sauropod.  He found the toe himself.  He said he could distinguish fossils from ordinary rocks because they're typically lighter (although they're heavier the more mineralized they are) and rocks tend to be more rounded.  He gets most of his dinosaur bones by traveling out west and buying from fossil hunters.

He also had a whole Keichousaurus hui, an extinct aquatic reptile from Central Asia.  That one was $299, a dollar cheaper than the other keichousaurs on display at the show.  He said he had a friend in Washington State who imported them, so he didn't have to travel to Asia to get them.

"He gets them legally because he's a government official," Stout said.  "He sells them out of China."

Stout said that 70 percent of his business is done abroad, with 30 percent done in the United States.

I didn't buy anything from Stout because however interesting and unique his wares were, they were very expensive, even the little fossils like the ammonities and trilobites.  I did ask him if he had any display cases I could buy--I've got a lot of small fossils in an old I Spy box at home and they should probably be displayed.  He didn't have any with him, but I could find some on his Web site.

I think once I have some free time, I'll go to http://www.dinolandplus.com/ and buy a display case.  That's Stout's Web site, by the way.

I did buy a pair of ammonite fossils on a stand from another vendor.  I think I'll set them up on top of my bookshelf and when I get the display case, set the other fossils up there too.