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Showing posts with label Chris Pratt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Pratt. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2015
Friday, June 12, 2015
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Much as I try not to be a sap for franchise nostalgia, Jurassic Park still tugs at my heartstrings. I vividly remember being an incredibly excited dinosaur obsessed ten year old in 1993, astonished and thrilled by what I saw on screen. Time has proved Jurassic Park to be a genuinely great film; a weird mixed-up science fiction monster movie that switches gears from adventure movie, to disaster movie, to slasher movie and finally back to adventure as the T-Rex boomingly roars and "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth" fluttersdown around it. God-damn it's good.
Now, 22 years later, we're heading back. Jurassic World is essentially a direct sequel to the first film, paying little attention to the mediocre The Lost World and the godawful Jurassic Park III. The conceit is that while the original Jurassic Park may have ended in menaced children, severed arms and chewed up lawyers, the basic concept was sound. Now (with beefed up security) we have Jurassic World: John Hammond's dream fully realised.
Jurassic World is established, popular and successful; boasting thousands of visitors each day who're in thrall to a process now known as de-extinction. Cheering visitors sit in Seaworld-a-like auditoriums as a colossal mosasaur munches down great white sharks whole, children ride baby triceratops about in a petting zoo and visitors can roll between the legs of sauropods in transparent gyrospheres.
Though the visitors are happy, the shareholders aren't. Growth has begun to stagnate, so the board decides to cook up a new excitingly dangerous dinosaur. Working from a T-Rex base, the fiendish Dr Wu (BD Wong) stirs up a genetic soup and creates the I-Rex. Or, to give it its full name: the Verizon Wireless Indominus Rex. The park's manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) has mixed feelings about this; on one hand the corporate sponsors are ecstatic, on the other she's now responsible for a psychotic murder monster that really, really, really wants to escape and start eating people.
No prizes for guessing what happens next. Fortunately Claire has the services of animal trainer Owen (Chris Pratt) who's gained the trust of the velociraptor pack. As chaos snowballs it's down to Owen to corral the raptors and hunt down the escaped I-Rex, and maybe save Claire's nephews if he's got a minute
Jurassic World is roughly half dumb and half perceptive. According to the director, the genesis of the film is "What people were kind of over seeing dinosaurs? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass." It's a clever way of looking at the Jurassic Park metatext; while realistic computer generated dinosaurs were astonishing in 1993, after 22 years of ever more clanging CGI we take these things for granted.
This makes Jurassic World a battleground between old and new; the bombastic and cynical modern blockbuster versus the sincere, nostalgic classic. The forces of the new are represented in part by omnipresent (and for once thematically appropriate) product placement, security Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who wants to militarise the dinosaurs to use as living drones and; most obviously, the I-Rex itself.
Whereas the 'classic' Jurassic Park dinosaurs have a weird dignity; the I-Rex is a complete asshole. It indiscriminately kills the other dinosaurs, behaves in a straightforwardly villainous way (they should have engineered a moustache for it to twirl) and, most egregiously, isn't even a real dinosaur. Within the text it's an abomination, bloodily tearing its way through our nostalgia, dragging the film away from Spielbergian wonder to everything-exploding Bay-hem maximalism.
And boy oh boy does Jurassic World ever get silly. There's a tonne of ultra-cheesy dialogue throughout, though it becomes weirdly palatable when delivered by one-man charisma machine Chris Pratt. The idea of repurposing killer dinosaurs for military use is Saturday morning cartoon stupid - the highlight being Vincent D'Onofrio staring admiringly at the velociraptors and saying "can you imagine if we'd have had these things in Tora Bora?" You know what Vince, I actually can't.
Everything climaxes in a pro-wrestling match where the goodie dinosaur dukes it out with the baddie dinosaur. I could forgive anyone who's thrown up their hands in disbelief by this point - the dinosaurs are now less animals ripped from time and more toothy, leathery superheroes. But well, despite all this dumbness, I kinda enjoyed it.
Jurassic World wears its heart on its sleeve - it's a B-movie where a massive genetic dinosaur monster eats lots of people. It achieves the goals of the B-movie with aplomb; providing laughs, scares, excitement and lots of action. There's also the commentary on franchise-rot bubbling away in the background, which makes it just aware enough that it squeaks into 'good film' territory.
This is obviously nowhere near as good as Jurassic Park, but it's certainly better than the previous sequels. It's forgettable and perversely moronic, but at least it's fun.
★★★
Jurassic World is on wide release now.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
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In James Gunn's excellent Guardians of the Galaxy the human race gets to be the coolest kid in the playground. Set in a universe populated by the moronic, the pompous and the self important (all with surreal haircuts) we come out looking like intergalactic Fonzies. Even better, is that our most effective weapons aren't guns and bombs, they're Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and David motherfucking Bowie.
This is an old school space opera that's much more a 21st century evolution of Flash Gordon than any po-faced hard science fictioning, the kind of setting where a few blobs of latex and a bit of facepaint on an extra and they're a whole new species. This blob of weirdness set within the same filmic universe as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, but this is a clean slate in every sense of the word. Gone is the desaturated dullness of The Winter Soldier and the atrocious flattened cinematography of The Avengers. In its place is a riot of colour and imagination, shot with an eye for the epic and a desire to embrace comicbook ridiculousness.
That Marvel are willing to release a tentpole summer blockbuster starring a talking raccoon, a tree man that only says three words and an obscure-to-everyone-but-ultra-geeks supporting cast of comic book space dudes says an awful lot about their current level of confidence. I consider myself relatively up on comics - I know my Stilt Man from my Hypno-Hustler - but even I drew a blank on what the hell the Guardians of the Galaxy's deal was.
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| Drink in that lovely colour. Mmmm. |
The centre of the story is Peter Quill aka Starlord (Chris Pratt). Abducted by aliens as a young child he's grown up to become space Indiana Jones. His life consists to be zooming around the universe in a cool spaceship, stealing alien archaeological relics and living the Kirkian dream of banging multicoloured spacebabes. After tracking down one particularly important item he becomes involved in an intergalactic war, one side wreathed in darkness and flying around in a sinister ship that looks like a floating Castle Dracula and the other a miniskirted, greenery covered utopia run by a magnificently coiffed Glenn Close (you decide who the baddies are).
Space MacGuffin in tow, Quill is suddenly the focus of a lot of attention. Courtsey of some impressively organic screenwriting he's soon the leader of a fractious group of losers bound together by either psychoses or greed. They are; green skinned assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), gun-wielding smartass raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the childlike tree man Groot (Vin Diesel) and hulking moron Drax (Dave Bautista).
They've got to band together to keep the space whatsit from falling into the hands of the evil Kree Empire led by the sinister Ronan, his cybernetic half-sister Nebula and their muscle Korath who all serve the Darkseid ripoff Thanos who wants nothing more than to master the Infinity Gems and blah blah blah.... you know what? None of that rubbish matters in the slightest.
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| Here's 'yer baddie. He's a bit pantomime. |
Refreshingly the entire intergalactic conflict takes a backseat to well constructed set pieces, cracklingly good dialogue and excellent music. This whole science fiction universe is one ginormous straight man to our everyman hero as he bounces from one ridiculous situation to another with only his sense of comic timing saving him from disaster. By the end you've realised the less seriously Quill treats the plot the more success he has.
Highlights are passing off the Kevin Bacon classic Footloose as one of Earth's epic tales, an inpromptu dance-off in the face of certain death, a perfectly timed jizz-joke, Drax's inability to comprehend metaphor, a Simpsonsesque foreground vs background gag involving Groot and the confident, logical assertion that no person can truly be "a 100% dick". Gunn essentially treats the Marvel space comics like his personal playground, fitting in more idiosyncrasies and bizarre elements than anyone could ever have expected Marvel would allow.
Underscoring all that is a firm vision of epic adventure. Cinematographer Ben Davis frames his glittering space vistas with a care and attention to detail that'd make Jack Kirby blush. Everything is vibrant and alive, frames are packed with miniature details that bring the world to life and crucial imagery is composed with an artist's eye for drawing the eye through a frame. Great blooms of colour fill the screen during the action sequences, purples, red and yellow flames blossoming around the characters to stunning effect. For the first time in a Marvel film even the 3D is worthwhile, the fruit of Gunn taking an active interest in the post-conversion process.
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| ^ this is good shit ^ |
On top of all that is the genius idea to soundtrack the film with hits from the 70s. The conceit is that when Quill was abducted in 1988 one of his few possessions was a cassette Walkman loaded with a mix of his mother's favourite tunes. The music makes the film accessible, the familiarity of the songs giving audiences a foothold in an this alien universe. Not to mention that the careful chosen songs all kick ass - as characters plan out their next move to the snarling howls of Joan Jett it's difficult not to get keyed up.
Guardians of the Galaxy ends up feeling like a sharply delivered riposte to critics (and I include myself in this) who've written off Marvel Studios movies as unimaginatively formulaic and stylistically bland. This is light years beyond garbage like Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2 and The Avengers; if Marvel really are trying to figure out a formula to stick to they could do a hell of a lot worse than making their subsequent films more like this. This is brimming over with things I enjoy - imagination, good nature and the most ridiculous hairdos this side of The Fifth Element.
★★★★
Guardians of the Galaxy is released on the 31st of July.
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