Tag: Jurassic World

When Jurassic World came out a few years ago, it was a big deal for me. Jurassic Park is probably the first movie theater expirence I remember. Jurassic World was, at the time, the biggest movie I was able to see early as a member of the press.

And unfortunately, that film had issues. It had some new things, but other elements just felt rehashed, and them we had the ridiculous assistant death and heels fun.

Needless to say, I didn’t care much about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The story had a volcano and seemed to sort of give away a lot of the film. I couldn’t tell from the trailer if it really had anything new to say.

Look, there’s most of the same cast with the same magical travel balls.

Jurassic World has fallen, from that last film, because the dinosaurs got out and people had a bad time. They had to pay a lot of law suits to cover the costs, and didn’t really fight it too much. But now they are defunct and everyone basically agrees to leave the island alone.

Well, nature doesn’t want to leave it alone. The dormant volcano there has become active, and is ready to fuck a lot of things up. It is riling up, it is getting explosive, and now the dinosaurs might all become extinct, again. Should we save them, or let nature fix is course? The government decides to not intervene, so it is up to private groups to pick up the cost.

Namely, Lockwood estate. It is an old man (James Cromwell) who helped Hammond (Richard Attenborough) back in the day with their initial research to open Jurassic Park. He wants to save several species on the island, more if there is time, and put them on a new island. One that isn’t a volcano, has its own natural borders and it can be a sanctuary where dinosaurs can live peacefully. Something not for tourists. Time is of the essence. They also have a great need for Blue, the velociraptor, as they feel it is the second smartest creature on the planet and the only one left of its kind.

Getting the creatures back is one difficulty, especially when it involves an exploding volcano. Once they are on the ship and ready to get out of the island though, that is where the real drama and intrigue begin.

Also starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Daniella Pineda, Justice Smith, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldbloom, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, and introducing Isabella Sermon.

Herein lies the sins of Jurassic Park’s past. Dey be ded, now. Again.

JW:FK seems to have heard some of the biggest complaints about the last film and respond appropriately. For example, the footware is more appropriate in this film. But how could they respond to the assistant death? How could they fix something like that?

I don’t know. How about by having that same giant dinosaur do a very similar thing, once again, to an undeserving character. Technically it is acknowledging the controversy by doing it a second time, although a bit less graphically.

JW:FK is certainly an entertaining movie. You will have some thrills, some screams, and some laughs. But overall it doesn’t offer anything really new. Last movie we had a man made T-Rex looking dinosaur that was too smart and caused problems. It was defeated by OG T-Rex. This film replaced T-Rex with Velociraptor. The same shit happens in different scenarios.

It also enforces normal Jurassic franchise tropes. Military people are always bad. Ugly people are always bad. People who aren’t bad but just working are expendable.

Overall, not enough new. What was new was obvious early on, but it didn’t go hard enough into it leaving more for sequels. But hey, Smith was better than expected as well.

It’s safe to say 2015 has been one of the craziest years ever in terms of box office history. If you haven’t been paying attention to movies at all this year, first of all, why weren’t you on this website and secondly, why are you on this website now?

You may have heard a record or two thrown around in your every day life but in reality there are more than a handful new records for both the best and the worst films ever.

And because the best stories are rags to riches, I think it is appropriately if we start are way on the bottom and work our way up.

Here’s looking at you, kids.

Not making a lot of money when you only open on a dozen or less screens is expected. Unless you are The Grand Budapest Hotel, you will only get several thousand bucks. What is important in tracking failure is for the movies that don’t make a lot but open a wide release in the US. Usually the metric that people care about is at least 2,000 theaters across America. You probably never heard of Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure or Delgo, but they are the number 1 and 2 worst openings ever for films that have reached 2,000 theaters and have been there for a few years now. Those are both animated films.

Instead, this year we received We Are Your Friends, a live action movie with Zac Efron about electronic dance music. It opened to a measly $1.76 million. It was the worst live action opening of all time (that wasn’t a re-release). Unfortunately, it couldn’t even hold on to its fame for that long. Just two months later, two more films on the same weekend decided to suck harder. Rock The Kasbah had only $1.47 million and Jem and the Holograms $1.38 million. Before this year, the live action winner was P2, a shitty thriller from 2007 and even that made at least $2 million.

If we change our standards, November saw the worst live action film opening of all time with at least 2,500 theaters. Victor Frankenstein, starring Professor X and Harry Potter, managed to win that title.

Just for getting the whole picture, there are two other great movie mentions. United Passions is the story of FIFA, starring Tim Roth, and it came out right when FIFA was being bombarded with corruption claims. It opened to only 10 theaters and made $607 its opening weekend. Even better, it made only $9 in Phoenix, meaning in the first three days only one person decided to burn his money and waste his time.

More recently, a small time thriller named Momentum opened up to also 10 screens in the UK. It’s opening weekend take translated to about $69. Ouch. And that one had Morgan Freeman in it.

I heard she was competing against the bear in The Revenant for Best CGI Female.

Overall, not as many films can be represented in the best money makers, because it is hard to get people out of their couches and into the theaters. With VOD and high food prices and shootings, people would rather stay in their homes. And yet, here we are, studios making bank.

The biggest winner of 2015 (so far) is Jurassic World. This film is part of a franchise that, realistically, only had one great film with Jurassic Park and two average sequels. But nostalgia and a return to the park at the right time in the summer was the key to its success. The most important record it broke was the Biggest Opening Weekend Domestic, with $208.8 million, just a hair over The Avengers at $207 million. It also won Biggest Opening Weekend Internationally and of course, Biggest Worldwide Opening Weekend. .

Jurassic World finished third all time in the domestic box office, only about $6 million behind Titanic. It was the fastest to reach basically every milestone you can think of monetarily.

But a new challenger approaches. Most people think that Star Wars: The Force Awakens, coming out this Friday will break all of the records Jurassic World crushed and more. There are even official odds for record breaking potential and plot points, because who doesn’t like to gamble. I know I do. I made a bet with someone that it wouldn’t beat the 3 day weekend Jurassic World domestic record. I am probably going to lose $20 now. Mostly because it has broken pre-sale records and other ridiculous things.

The hype is running this film to the ground. No matter how good it actually is, I can’t imagine anyone speaking bad about it for months. It is like they forgot The Phantom Menace hype and disappointment. Some people just want to set themselves up for sadness, I guess.

And the CGI for John Candy is absolutely stunning here.

Now, Jurassic World isn’t the only film to make money this year. A handful of films broke a billion worldwide, and a lot of films became surprise successes with relatively low budgets.

The biggest winner overall, hands down, is Universal Studios. Jurassic World, Furious 7, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Minions all broke $1 billion worldwide, and outside of Avengers, all three of them come from Universal.

It was the fastest studio to ever reach $1 billion (domestic) in only 165 days. As of August, it had over $5.5 billion from its films, making it the best year a studio has ever had. I don’t know its official end of year numbers now, but basically every movie they released was a box office smash. They had the best of luck with Straight Outta Compton, Pitch Perfect 2, Fifty Shades of Grey and Everest.

Their only loose end was Jem and the Holograms. Yes, the biggest dud of the year. But with profits like that, they wouldn’t even bat an eye at the film.

And Pitch Perfect 2 wasn’t even the best Anna Kendrick musical this year!

The main purpose for this article is to highlight how extreme the box office numbers were from this year. With overall theater attendance going down, it is refreshing to see such high box office totals for a wide variety of films. People might be going to the movies just as often as before, but they are also refusing to see anything that may be bad or mediocre. That is what Redbox and Netflix are for after all.

2016 is looking to be the first year mostly controlled by super hero films, with roughly 1,000 being released and no more Hunger Games. I can’t imagining anything being as high or low as this year has turned out to be.

Thanks for reading!

In honor of Jurassic World, I too am going to open my own theme park. I won’t fill it with dinosaurs though, I will fill it with greek legendary monsters. It makes sense, if you remember you are reading this review on Gorgon Reviews.

I don’t have the funds yet for it. I don’t have the feasibility either. I thought about CGI, but that doesn’t make sense in real life. Although if the entire park was an entire green screen overlaying the sidewalks and buildings and grass, I could buy the material in bulk.

After all, if they can successfully make a park with monsters despite a whole bunch of deaths right off the back twenty years ago, more power to them (and me). Afterall, Jurassic World is going to be a strict economic drama about the costs that go into large island parks, right? And about how everything is awesome?

About how everything is cool, when you’re part of a team?

Set 22 years after the first Jurassic Park or so, this movie takes place on the exact same island. Now the island is a bustling theme park! The idea was a success! Everyone gets dinosaurs and no one dies!

This version of the park still took some time to happen and it has only existed for 10 years or so. They occasionally release a new exhibit, which spikes up business and gets everyone about dinosaurs again. But kids today, with their Pac-man video games and MTV and hula hoops have attention spans that can be measured only in nanoseconds. And they aren’t afraid of dinosaurs anymore. They are basically like slightly more exotic elephants at this point.

So they went bigger. Better. They made up a dinosaur. Taking DNA from several big dinosaurs and filling in the gaps with some crazy shit, they made a big, intelligent dinosaur that is going to make everyone shit their pants and the investors dive in piles of gold coins. They just have to pass a few safety tests before the big day in a few weeks. And sure, wouldn’t you know it? We got ourselves a highly intelligent killing machine that is not just a mere animal, but almost a dino-god. And he is now loose on a regular park day with 20,000 guests.

Guests like, Gray (Ty Simpkins) and Zach (Nick Robinson), who are there for the weekend with their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a big wig who helps run the park. We have Henry Wu (BD Wong) as our head scientist who made the creature, the only returning member from the first film. Our rich park owner who doesn’t care about profits (Irrfan Khan), some people who work in the control room (Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus), a bad baby sitter (Katie McGrath), the emotional mom of the kids (Judy Greer), a guy with nefarious intentions (Vincent D’Onofrio), and a raptor handler (Omar Sy), are also involved in some way or another!

Hmm. Am I missing anyone? Oh, I guess there is Owen (Chris Pratt), an ex military man who thinks dinosaurs are thinking, intelligent creatures who just want the respect they deserve.

The orca’s at Sea World, however, don’t deserve respect and don’t deserve great white shark food like this big guy.

Welcome to 2015, where everything is CGI and the point doesn’t matter. I am one who would say that Jurassic Park still holds up to this day, animatronics and all. CGI has the ability to get dated pretty quickly because it is constantly evolving and getting better, while animatronics have staying power. From a basic movie watching point of view, I think every single dinosaur was done with CGI. And it shows! The Pterodactyls were horrible. They were at least diverse looking, but every time they flew onto the screen, I cringed a bit. Sure the raptors and the T-Rexes and the bigger guy are much better CGI, I feel like something amazing was lost in the process.

Jurassic World is definitely scarier than the first film, as the threats are bigger and badder with a potential much higher body count. Given that Spielberg is directing it, somehow the kids are able to run through everything with more or less invisible shields protecting them, which is kind of annoying, because any tension in their scenes is a bit diluted. Speaking of tension, despite it being a rich and well funded island park, cell service goes out quite frequently, enough to make it quite annoying at times at how frequently they use it as a crutch. Cell service AND walkie talkies, for double trouble.

One annoying aspect to make it scarier is at one point, it was a bright and sunny early afternoon setting, but the very next scene suddenly made it middle of night. It didn’t need to skip ahead several hours, and made very little sense because most of that time must have been them waiting for it to get dark. But being dark served no purpose outside of making it scarier for the viewer, despite risking time continuity to do so.

I am a bit surprised, however, at some of the characters who did die. One character I noted from above actually died after several bites, flying through the air, drowning, in such a grotesque fashion, you would have thought they were the most evil character ever. But of course, nothing was inherently bad with them.

Despite all of this, there were still quite a few entertaining scenes. I was delighted that Pratt’s character didn’t just feel like Star Lord or Indiana Jones, but a new and unique entity. There were also good moments for our people in the control panel.

Overall, this is probably the best movie in this franchise not called Jurassic Park, but given the quality of the other two films, it doesn’t actually say much.