Tag: Justice Smith

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.

Last summer I watched two really good teenage romance films that involved death based on books. The Fault In Our Stars and If I Stay. I was surprised at the quality of both films and how I was able to still connect with them despite not being in the target demographic.

Of course, John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars and wrote a few books besides that one. Before that one, he wrote one called Paper Towns, which my wife has assured me is fantastic.

Really, as long as it avoids the normal cliches, it will probably make me happy. And knowing my recent track record with any sort of romance film or drama, it will probably just end up making me cry in public again.

It does feature some amateur level hallway creepin’ though, so that’s a plus.

Quentin/Q (Nat Wolff) has always lived a typical lame boy life. He does what he is supposed to, does good in school, has nerd friends and no love life. He does have love in his life, however. He loves Margo (Cara Delevingne), who moved across the street from his house when they were both kids. Back then they hung out and started to do adventured, but she did it way more and eventually they lost touch. Still, he hoped and dreamed.

Then one night, she appeared at his window! She needed someone to drive her around Orlando, get revenge on her ex boyfriend and so called friends. A night of adventure and a night to remember!

And then? The next day? Poof. Margo was gone. She ran away again, Q thought they would start to hit it off, so soon to finishing high school. But luckily, Margo always leaves some clues for her friends when she leaves so that they know where they can find her. Now it is up to Q to put himself out there for once and do something out of his comfort zone! With the help of his two best friends (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith), the old best friend of Margo (Halston Sage), and the girlfriend of one of his best friends (Jaz Sinclair), he will hopefully find true love and happiness.

Also featuring the amazingly accurate kid versions of our leads, Hannah Alligood and Josiah Cerio, and Cara Buono as Q’s mom. Seriously, I am willing to believe they just filmed the kid scenes many years ago and decided to give them fake imdb credits and names so that people wouldn’t think it was weird.

Jokes on you, I think everything is weird!

Alright, before the movie I had two hopes. First of all, I can say that Paper Towns definitely avoided cliches. It had a huge “nice guy” boner going throughout it, but by the end it was certainly not your standard story. Which was fantastic!

Unfortunately, it didn’t make me cry. No tears at all, not even a little. Come on John Green. You destroyed me with your last film, this one only gave me chuckles and contemplation.

Here’s the thing. Our two leads were fantastic. Wolff and Delevingne felt like real people for the most part with genuine expressions and appropriate reactions to everything. They made their characters awesome. The supporting cast however is not able to get on their level. I thought the chemistry between Wolff and friends felt real, but the other two actors just didn’t feel real. One character in particular was more annoying than funny.

Again, I am all for surprises along the way, and in fact, the twists in this film are generally good overall. It just didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped. Thankfully the leads were still great and oh so charismatic.