Some lessons in franchise-building, from the prehistoric era
A few decades ago, a film about dinosaurs, which muses on courage and family and the virtues of sticking together, opened to critical praise and box office success. Ostensibly for children but with enough charm to win over adults, the film would spawn decade-spanning sequels, of wildly different quality, as is usually the way with such things. That film was. Perhaps the animated feature, about dinosaurs just trying to stay alive, whet cinema-goers’ appetites.
Rewatching the blockbuster in 2023, what surprises most is its homeliness. The film was shot on the Hawaiian island Kaua’i: intimate nature shots and real-life storms give the blockbuster a lived-in feel, as though it were your dad’s holiday recording, if your dad were an Oscar-winning director. The movie’s ideas – of nature vs. man, capitalist greed, the responsibility of science – are intellectual enough to sell the premise, but not deep enough to distract from the main action.
If you wanted to make the case that Hollywood has run out of ideas, you would cite 2015 as evidence. The highest-grossing movies were reboots , sequels , and the final gasp of young adult franchises . And soAt the start ofcontrol room worker Lowery Cruthers , who works at a functional dino-park, buys a vintage T-shirt emblazoned with the logo from the’s ill-fated theme park. His boss, this film’s hard-nosed heroine Claire Dearing , tells him it’s a little inappropriate.
Plonking the dinosaurs in a theme park with actual visitors injects some life. Howard is game, and even Chris Pratt, who plays this trilogy’s hero, Owen Grady, is tolerable. But these films just look horrendous, plastic as a McDonald’s toy and as throwaway too. They are also boring. So boring. Boring in ways you cannot imagine. There are no jokes, no scares, no stakes. The over-saturated visuals are off, the dialogue is flat. The pacing is killer.
They are not particularly compelling. Childlike awe emanates from the screen when Dern, Neill and Goldblum first set eyes on the roaming Brachiosaurus. Just enough horror comes later. Once that card has been played, it’s dodgier territory. Spielberg’s investment in the characters and visual inventiveness sustains the initial interest for a movie and a little into a second. But by the time the second trilogy comes around, that revelation is difficult to ignore.
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