We just rewatched the original Jurassic Park as a family, and GODDAMN does that movie hold up. Every single beat is perfect, and when I think how appalling the new Jurassic World films were, I just want to walk into the sea. The franchise was ROBBED.
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Everybody is allowed to look like a person. There's no Sexy Hollwood Gaze on any of the characters; Ian Malcolm is louche and horny, but the camera doesn't hug him. Ellie Satler dresses exactly like a woman who does fieldwork for a living.
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And god, the sensawunda! Even on the umpteenth viewing, that initial reveal of the brachiosaurus is genuinely magical. And even better, the film lets the characters *keep* their awe at the dinosaurs even after they're endangered by them, like with the gallimumus flock.
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Nor are there any gratuitous shock-deaths. The closest we get is the lawyer's death - which petrified 7yo me when I saw it in cinemas - but it's the culmination of a long tense build, not a sudden gory kill out of nowhere.
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At a craft level, it's just a spectacularly well-made film. And it makes me so mad to think how the new movies, on every level, looked at each detail that made the original a success and went, "OK, but what if we did something EDGY and DIFFERENT."
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Jurassic Park: Ellie is kind, funny, brave, competent in the field, dresses for her job, calls out sexism and gets realistically dirty instead of Hollywood Hot-Dirty. Jurassic World: Claire has
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JP: Dr Grant is a gruff, sarcastic man who's awkward around kids, but opens up to protecting them while still maintaining his personality. JW: Owen is a showboating asshole.
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JP: Lex and Tim have distinct personalities and interact realistically as siblings. They are realistically terrified and vulnerable. JW: Zach and Gray's parents are maybe getting a divorce but it's never raised again, Zach is a baby sexist and we know little about either of them.
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JP: The dinosaurs behave like real animals, so that the same t-rex who menaced the humans ends up saving them by virtue of hunting the raptors. JW: Owen is a magic Raptor Whisperer and in the second film we get a t-rex roaring and killing instead of running from a live volcano.
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JP: Slow, emotional build before introducing the dinosaurs, so that the audience is captivated along with the characters. JW: Here's a bunch of CGI baby dinos with no introduction and no sensawunda, we're gonna pan away from them now bc the park is about Capitalism, Babey.
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ANYWAY I could do this for literal hours but the point is, Jurassic Park still kicks ass and the Jurassic World films suck dinosaur nutsack.
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End of conversation
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