Jurassic Park is Hollywood’s Most Tired Franchise

0:00 The original Jurassic Park is not only one of, if not the single greatest blockbuster movie ever made, but one of the best movies ever made, period. It is completely and utterly without flaw. A great premise, a perfect cast, all-time special effects work, one of the most iconic film scores ever produced, a thoughtful and deep script, a unique broad audience appeal, a perfectly paced 2-hour runtime, an all female cast of dinosaurs. I mean, come on. There really isn't anything to criticize with it. It's just that good. There is tangible movie magic baked into it unlike almost any movie ever made to the point where you almost get emotional watching it if for no other reason than just appreciating how incredible it is. That scene where Sam Neil first sees the dinosaurs will forever give you chills

0:46 no matter how many times you watch it. And for me personally, it's one of the only movies I've ever seen that I thought while watching it, is this the best movie I've ever seen? Now, I've seen far too many movies to truly ever answer that question in any kind of definitive way, but Jurassic Park is certainly in that conversation, and it is for a whole lot of people. It's Steven Spielberg at the absolute top of his game where the same year he released it, he also won best picture for a different all-time great movie. All this to say, it's a pretty damn good movie. Okay, we all know this. It is that [ __ ] You've got to be one of the most contrarian hipsters on the planet to not like it. But as is the case with many great individual movies, Jurassic Park was simply too iconic and too successful and made too much money to be left alone

1:32 for long. And out of a once humble movie about dinosaurs and the hubris of humanity came perhaps Hollywood's single worst franchise. This is T-Rex P. How'd you get it? You don't want to know. Now, when I say worst, I don't necessarily mean the overall quality of the movies. If I did, they would most certainly not be in this conversation, as there are far far worse franchise films out there. I mean, just try and watch like half of the Halloween movies and you'll get a taste for some real garbage, okay? Things can always get worse. Trick or treat, [ __ ] Now, to be clear, the Jurassic sequels aren't great by any means, and we'll get deep into that, trust me. But what I

2:19 mean by worst franchise is that it's the biggest major Hollywood franchise out there that has absolutely no business being a franchise. None. While there might be plenty of other franchises like Star Wars that feel totally rung dry at this point, or Ghostbusters that have been coasting solely on nostalgia for like the last decade, or Terminator that just feels sad and embarrassing, or any number of horror franchises that almost only produce unwatchable garbage. see Halloween again. Jurassic Park, unlike any of them, has felt empty as a franchise ever since its first sequel, and it hasn't gotten any better since. Despite having one of the greatest films of all time as its foundation, and consistently making big money at the box office, it's just never been able to

3:04 produce anything even half as good or relevant as that first film, which has really baffled me for the longest time. because almost every other franchise has at least one truly great sequel. Some that even surpass the original. I mean, Terminator, for how bad that franchise is, has T2, and that alone makes it almost worth it. Films like Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, Prisoner of Aszaban, Last Crusade. I mean, there's tons of movies like this, but none in Jurassic Park. And you know, I'm not expecting anything as good as that original movie here, but how hard can it be to make a decent sequel to the dinosaur movie? Well, apparently pretty hard, actually. And now that I've recently gone back and rewatched all these movies, I think I finally

3:50 understand why. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses uh to accomplish something as fast as you could. And before you even knew what you had, you you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox. And now you're selling it. You want to sell it. Well, so when it comes to Hollywood franchises, there's essentially two different types, planned and unplanned. Planned ones are obviously thought of in advanced and adapted from a series of books or games or comics and are built that way from the first movie on. Things like Harry Potter, the MCU, DCU, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, they're almost these pre-ordained things that are basically hits before they ever actually come out. Now sure if they don't do well they won't go on but they are designed with the intention of

4:36 lasting 5 10 15 plus years if they can as long as they are doing well financially there's never going to be a question of what is next because they have this road map already laid out for them in the form of what they are adapting it's all just about keeping that ship steady and not getting too far off track. Now the unplanned ones on the other hand are a whole different ballgame. Those franchises come from a sudden overnight success and things that are such big hits, the studios have no choice but to try and milk it for all it's got. This is where you find your Star Wars, your Fast and Furious, your Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course, also Jurassic Park. Now, in my estimation, it's in these unplanned ones where the real strength of franchise filmm is tested. Because unlike a Harry Potter, where you have

5:23 this perfectly crafted, easily laidout plan to produce entries based on each of the seven books it's based off of, all these unplanned ones have to make it up all on the spot. And that is where things can start to get out of hand. Because as good as many of these original movies are in these unplanned franchises, they don't all necessarily have the foundations to support a whole house of sequels. Now, to be fair, some do. Star Wars really is the end- all beall example of this because that original movie was a totally self-contained, simple space adventure film that just so happened to find this incredible blockbuster success. And as it turned out, the world that movie took place in had essentially unlimited potential for growth and expansion and was also immediately able to top the

6:10 original movie with its very first sequel. It perfectly transitioned from a standalone film to a trilogy to a multi- trilogy, multimedia long saga without missing a beat. to the point where there are people out there who are not aware that A New Hope was just called Star Wars back in the day and was just this simple self-contained thing. There really isn't anything else like it because when it comes to all the other unplanned franchises, their sequels and spin-offs and trilogies are more or less just the same movie over and over and over and over again. And that can work too as it has with very simple premises like Fast and Furious or Mission Impossible or James Bond where each movie is this totally new self-contained adventure. But that formulaic repetition

6:57 really only works with things that simple and that loose in concept. Where it doesn't work is with things like Jurassic Park. And that's the issue with Jurassic Park as a franchise. Yes, it is based off a book, but that book is a standalone installment that then only had a sequel as a result of the massive success of the movie adaptations. So, even though Michael Kiteon wrote a sequel to be adapted into another standalone movie, it never really had any long-term plan material to go off of beyond that first movie. And as far as a repeatable formula goes, all you have to work with are dinosaurs on an island. And as we'll find out with all these sequels, that's not as deep of a well as you might think. Now, to be fair, it's certainly a concept that does not fail

7:43 to put butts in seats, as the series averages damn near a billion dollars per entry. So, clearly, it works for some people, but when it comes to its actual qualities as a franchise, it really doesn't have any. There really isn't much lore to build on or side characters to flesh out or mysteries to solve or new adventures to go on. That first film is just such a perfect self-contained thing that it leaves pretty much nothing left to be explored. It doesn't even leave a formula to go off of and repeat forever because the gimmick an entire first half of that first movie is the newness of it all and the rediscovery and implications of dinosaurs in the modern age. Once you uncor that, all you have left is the second half of that

8:29 movie, which again might sound like enough, but it really isn't. And you don't have to wait long to see why. Fight. Now, if there ever was a sequel that proved not every hit movie is franchise material, it would be The Lost World. Now, is this movie terrible? No. It's fine. But what it is is an exercise in how limited this franchise is. In the first movie, we see this charismatic, wealthy businessman, John Hammond, round up some scientists to come to his mysterious island to help him get past some red tape and legal roadblocks, only to find out that the main hangup with his island is in the fact that it's a literal island of recently unextinct

9:14 dinosaurs that have been brought back by the awesome and terrifying power of science. There is fierce debate over the ethics of what Hammond is doing, the safety of his park being potentially opened up to the public, the hubris to think he or anyone else is capable of containing these creatures and playing god. We also rediscover these creatures at the same time our main characters do. And that's the real magic of the movie. The first time we, the audience, are seeing a T-Rex or a velociaptor or any of the rest is also the first time for Grant and Sadler and Ian Malcolm. And it's moments like that that makes that movie so iconic. The dinosaurs aren't these simple movie monsters or cuddly cute mascots. They're something else entirely. Something totally beyond the

10:00 control or understanding of humanity. It's all perfect. Then you jump to the Lost World and all of that is just sucked right down the drain. And not intentionally, mind you. It's not like Spielberg or David Kemp or Michael Kryen did a big zag out of nowhere just to spice things up. They pretty much did the same movie again, but by simply doing it, it takes away everything that first movie had going for it. Mainly in that everyone in this world is now aware that dinosaurs are a thing. This is an issue that only gets more irritating the more these movies go on. But by simply having Jurassic Park exist as a franchise, the status quo for the universe it takes place in must shift to include dinosaurs as a normal part of life. And that completely undermines what their presence represented in the

10:47 original movie. Their very existence in this time period is impossible and horrifying and a complete affront to nature, no matter how wonderful they are. But at a certain point when they've been back in action for half a decade, a full decade, multiple decades, they just end up being nothing more than like big dogs or bears or tigers or any other animal that just so happens to be this gigantic prehistoric creature. Now, it's not as hyperexaggerated in this one as it gets in the following ones, but you still feel that shift as soon as the movie gets to the island. Everyone on the mission has either seen dinosaurs, knows dinosaurs exist, or has been on the island for a few weeks already and takes pictures of them and interacts with them like they're bird watching.

11:33 There's still a few oo and a's to be had, but for the most part, the wonder of these creatures is just gone. As is the wonder of Ian Malcolm, by the way, who gets totally neutered in this allah Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. A man who was once one of the coolest characters in any movie ever is reduced to a whiny, worrying dad that spends the whole movie freaking out and not being charming at all. Dad, are you mad? No, I'm not mad. I'm furious. What is this? This looks like your room. Who's going to clean it up right now? So, without any of the discovery and newness of the dinosaurs and all of our characters already having grappled with them being a thing now, the only thing the movie has left as its foundation is

12:18 mostly just running around in the woods. They run around taking pictures of dinosaurs. They run around poaching dinosaurs. They run around trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs. There is no lack of scenes of people running around trying not to get squished. And to be fair, there's also a decent amount of uh dangling off cliffs and even some use of gymnastics to fight dinos, which is uh something. But what I'm trying to illustrate here is like 90% of this movie is characters are somewhere in the woods walking around, then a dinosaur shows up, then the characters go from a walk to a run, then eventually they escape said dinosaur. Repeat. I mean, at times it feels like watching The Walking Dead, and I do not mean that as a compliment. Now, am I being a bit uncharitable here? Perhaps. I mean, it's

13:05 not like all those scenes are boring. In fact, a few moments like the trailer hanging off a cliff sequence is actually quite engaging. But the problem is that's all the movie really has to offer. There really isn't much of a plot to speak of. At least not one for like the first twothirds of the movie. Now, there appears to be one at first with Hammond now having grown a conscience, getting a team together to document the dinosaurs so the public is aware of their existence and can therefore put pressure on the company to leave them in peace. But as soon as Ian, Malcolm, friends reach the island, the whole thing immediately devolves into complete chaos, and any reason for any of the characters being there goes totally out the window. You just forget about all of it. Now, they do add a new wrinkle in the form of the company sending their

13:50 own team of people to poach the dinosaurs and secure the island for future evil business shenanigans. So, there is that, but similar to the Jeff Goldblum team, their mission is also almost immediately sabotaged and reduces them to, you guessed it, running around the woods for the bulk of the movie. And the film actually has a few nice concepts for characters in there like Ian Malcolm obviously and Vince Vaughn's radical pro- dinosaur activist and the big game hunter that wants to test his metal against a T-Rex. But since there isn't any time devoted to anything aside from dino action, none of them get to really do anything. They're all in the same boat the whole time. So it doesn't matter what any of them think or want to do about anything. The movie skipped right past all the parts of the first

14:37 movie that actually made us like those characters and just left us with a bunch of placeholders and empty vessels. So, like I said, most of the movie is spent watching these people run around the woods waiting to be rescued and periodically getting eaten by T-Rexes and velociaptors until out of nowhere in the last like 20 minutes or so, the movie just decides to be King Kong. Now, the company somehow captures and packs up a T-Rex and ships her off to San Diego to be put on display at the famous San Diego Zoo, which is somehow not even in the argument for the dumbest thing this franchise has done. This then, of course, leads to the T-Rex stomping around San Diego for a bit until famous action hero Jeff Goldblum can get it back on the boat and send it back to the

15:22 island from whence it came. The whole thing is just a big goofy mess. And even though we're only two movies deep at this point, it's already blindingly obvious that there really isn't all that much more juice you can squeeze out of this premise. What are they going to do? Go back for a third [Music] time? So, a few years back now, legendary filmmaker Martinzi got in a bit of hot water for comparing Marvel films to theme park rides. And sure, while that might be true in a lot of ways, especially when you consider how some audiences consume the uh big event films in the MCU, I never totally agreed with that statement. Not saying he's like 100% wrong. In fact, he's mostly right. But I'll always stand by a few of

16:07 the Marvel entries as being above that kind of broad sweeping generalization. Jurassic Park 3, on the other hand, might be the most theme park adjacent movie ever made. This movie is literally like riding the dinosaur ride at Disney World Orlando or like playing those co-op on Rails arcade games. I am not exaggerating. It is a 90-minute wallto-wall dinosaur action movie and not 1 ounce of anything else. Now, in that way, it's a very watchable movie. You swap out Jeff Goldblum for Sam Neil, bring in a whole new cast of side characters in the form of William H. Macy and his annoying family. And you go back to the island yet again for one more adventure. This time to rescue a kid that's been stranded on there for a

16:54 couple months. It needs to get off. It is about as simple of a Jurassic Park movie you will ever see. There is no evil company plot or anything to do with John Hammond or any mind paid to any of the ethical debates of the past. That is all gone now. And with it is any nuance to the dinosaurs beyond them being generic movie monsters, which is pretty much all they are now. They now only exist to eat people and prevent our heroes from getting done what they want to get done. But that's it. And now that we're even further into the dinosaurs being a common thing in this universe, no one seems to really bat an eye at their existence. You could replace all the dinosaurs in this movie with common modern animals that fill the same role and literally nothing will change. They are no longer special. Though, I will say the best thing about this movie is

17:40 that it appears to be very aware of all this. Spielberg is out and replacing him is competent working director Joe Johnston, a man that knows his limits. He is not shooting for the stars here. All he's got is Sam Neil and some dinosaurs, and he knows exactly how much he can ring out of this, which isn't a whole lot, but hey, at least he keeps it nice and simple. And frankly, it's not a bad movie to catch like halfway through if you just happen to see it on somewhere. Every scene is some kind of dinosaur action setpiece, and most of them work pretty well. The pterodactyl bird cage sequence especially is this really awesome moment that I found very entertaining and creative. And though all that stuff might be simple, that's what Joe Johnston brings to the table by not depicting the dinosaurs as the wondrous magical creatures the earlier

18:27 films doing and having their job just be generic movie monsters. It allows the movie to create some pretty great moments like that. Moments you don't get to do when they operate as sympathetic animals. Now, is it a better way to show the dinosaurs than the first couple? Not really. But what it is is honest. This movie is not pretending to be anything aside from what it is. And for that reason, I can't really say too much against it. I mean, it's stupid. And every character, save for Sam Neil, is maddeningly annoying. And there's also this weird moment. But hey, you know, it's a fun little movie. They even roll up tanks on the beach at the end, which is just hilarious. Wow. You have to thank her now. She sent the Navy and Marines. If the series ended here, even though

19:13 the second and third films left a whole lot to be desired, I really don't think I would have much to say about it. Sure, there's a lot of disappointment and let down, but the studio just threw a few ideas at the wall to see what would stick. And I can't really blame them for trying. They weren't good, but they were something. Plus, the real stress test for this franchise wouldn't come until the next installment. And that, my friends, is where [ __ ] starts to get pretty wild. Now, when it comes to Jurassic Park as a franchise, it didn't really hit that point until this movie. Sure, The Lost World and three were trying to cash in on the IP, but neither of them were really doing the franchise building thing. There is never any bait for

19:59 sequels or breadcrumbs being laid around or really any plot beyond what they needed to get characters to come back to the dinosaur island each time, which apparently doesn't really take all that much in these movies. What they are are pretty standard Hollywood sequel cash grabs. Watchable, short-sighted, and overall fairly inoffensive. Not at all meant to accomplish anything aside from squeezing out a couple more bucks out of what that first movie gave them. Jurassic World, on the other hand, is where this IP radically tried to morph itself into a franchise that could pump out a billion-dollar hit every 3 to four years, which to be fair is exactly what it's done ever since this movie came out. There is no denying that this is a money-making machine. And hell, they might be in for yet another billion

20:45 later this year. Who knows? But again, the franchise as it exists today is all downstream of this movie. Hell, even beyond just this series. is Jurassic World is essentially the like Rosetta Stone for the modern-day Hollywood franchise film. Everything it does has been repeated ad nauseium for the last decade in virtually every major franchise going today, which for the most part is a total waking nightmare, and we'll get deep into that. But despite all that being true, this is still probably the best movie in the series outside of the original. Granted, it's uh not exactly a high bar to clear, and it might clear it mostly by default, but there is some actual good stuff going on in it, mainly in its premise. One of the major issues with Jurassic Park as a franchise is it completely lacks a formula to lean on. It has a

21:32 nice gimmick in the dinosaurs, but there is no default way to actually use them that can be repeated over and over again. Every subsequent sequel has to think of increasingly dumber ways to get people to willingly go to a dinosaurinfested island. And that can only last so long as we saw with two and three. But this movie does the one obvious slam dunk great sequel premise that actually can build off what that first movie established. What if the park actually opened? What if despite all the many incidents that have happened on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna over the years, corporate greed and human arrogance eventually won out and opened the park anyway, leading to this volatile powder keg just waiting to blow up where not a few people are in danger, but thousands. It's a great way to raise

22:18 the stakes for a sequel and still deal with all the same themes of the original. Now, does it execute as well as the original movie? No. But a lot of it is there. There's actually a surprising amount of like decent meta commentary on the nature of sequels like this and the oversaturation of all these brands where they talk about how kids in this universe simply do not care about dinosaurs anymore because they've been back for their entire life. They're no longer these special mysterious ancient wonders of the world. They're basically just like zoo animals now. And because of that, just like how all these ongoing film franchises have to continually up the ante and go bigger and bigger in each sequel, the scientists in Jurassic World have to literally create bigger and better and new dinosaurs just to get people to come and see them. But like

23:05 all this stuff, the snake will eventually eat its own tail. That is all really great and what makes this the best of all these sequels. It has a real level of awareness and uses it to reboot the universe in a familiar but creative way. The problem though is that this movie is very very very stupid. The script is stupid. The characters are stupid. Their solutions to problems are stupid. It's just a big stupid movie. Sure, it's all standing on a good foundation and it has ideas, but it's completely unable to execute them in any kind of satisfying or logical way. Like Chris Pratt's character is this dinosaur wrangler guy who has been training velociraptors as essentially dogs, which while very much a stretch of logic I can

23:52 buy for the purposes of a big dumb movie, I mean, who cares? It's cool. But the way the plot with them unfolds is Vincent Denafhrio, who plays this evil military contractor/ mercenary dude, sees this and wants to weaponize the velociaptors along with all the other dinosaurs and bring them into the military as like tactical, hyper inelligent animal soldiers, which is just the dumbest thing ever. I mean, forget the cost of it all, which is just the tip of the iceberg here, and forget that there's breeding and training and how they possibly replace these things if one goes down. Forget all of that. And just think about how in the modern age of warfare when you can kill someone via drone halfway across the world in a

24:37 box in Arizona and the general level of technological advancement that's only getting higher every year. Why anyone would want to go back to using wild animals in war. I mean, look, I'm no military strategist here. I don't know anything. But I'm pretty sure that way back when when humans used elephants and horses in warfare, that was in the absence of things like planes and tanks and aircraft carriers. They are a completely obsolete strategy outside of like bomb sniffing dogs. It's just the dumbest idea ever. Unless your only goal in war is to just be the biggest dick possible and have your enemy eaten to death. I guess if you want to go that direction, it works. But uh yeah, the whole thing just ends up being this total distraction from anything good the movie is doing with all the chaos in the

25:24 park and you know the normal dinosaur action which is annoying because all that stuff is pretty good. There are some genuinely great moments of the park in complete chaos and the hybrid Indominus Rex just wreaking havoc across the island. When they keep it simple, it works. But they can't help but shake the stupid idea of dinosaurs as like weapons of war or black market products. And that only gets more annoying and more stupid in its two sequels. They get so fixated on all these random stupid ideas that they lose sight of why people actually like these movies and how to properly use the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs transform from these jaw-dropping otherworldly creatures in the original to King Kong parallels in the Lost World to generic movie monsters

26:09 in three to basically puppies in the Jurassic World movies. Well, either puppies or like evil hybrid abominations, but none remain just normal dinosaurs. They become these regular docile animals that can be talked to and reasoned with and can be stopped by simply holding out your hand and doing that one stupid stance. That move is like a goddamn kill switch for their entire species. They're all just dogs waiting for Chris Pratt to tell them what to do. Stand down. Hey. Hey. What did I just say? Now, it doesn't get too out of hand in this first one, but you can see all the seeds of it being sewed. I mean, the Raptor Blue is literally Chris Pratt's dog. You can also see the modern franchise movie trend of bringing back random side

26:55 characters from the old movies to give the illusion that the franchise has depth. Case in point, Jurassic World drags BD Wong back into the mix and elevates him from a random scientist man in the first movie that has like three lines to full-on head scientist that's hellbent on creating these horrifying dino hybrids. Now, did this character need to be Wong? No. But it makes a couple of nerds in the audience say, "Oh my god, it's that guy. That's the guy from the first movie that has the pen and clipboard and he's smirking." "Oh my god, it's that guy. I know him, so that's all that matters. All of this exists because of me. If I don't innovate, somebody else will. Overall though, while this movie

27:41 may be as dumb as rocks and likely set in motion many of the dreadful current movie trends we all have to deal with, it has enough going for it that it's mostly forgivable. It's a safe, simple, back to basics soft franchise reboot in the same vein of something like The Force Awakens. In fact, all three of these Jurassic World movies mirror the Star Wars sequel trilogy in a whole lot of ways. And yes, that does mean we're in for some Rise of Skywalker parallels, you ain't seen nothing yet. [Music] So, if Jurassic World is like The Force Awakens, where it's a very safe, very nostalgic movie whose purpose is mainly to revive its respective IP for further franchise milking, Jurassic World:

28:27 Falling Kingdom must then be this franchise's version of The Last Jedi, right? Well, not entirely. It's not as focused on subversion like The Last Jedi was, nor did it drive fans off the edge of sanity like The Last Jedi did. Nor is it as good as The Last Jedi, which is not to say that Last Jedi is great or anything, just that it's a better film than Falling Kingdom. Thought it'd be fair to point that out. There are levels to this after all. What it does have in common though is the way it turns the Jurassic Park franchise firmly towards the cliff and puts the pedal to the godamn metal. This movie takes Jurassic Park on a Theelma and Louise style descent into the abyss of franchise stupidity, the likes of which we might

29:13 never see again. It is that crazy. Now, a big part of that is that it's basically two movies shoved together. The first half and the second half have almost nothing in common. Almost like they just got bored of the initial plot and decided to change it halfway through writing it because it actually starts off fairly normal in premise. Carrying over the events of the last movie, the dinosaurs now live free on East Lenublar and the park has never been reopened. It's all back to the old status quo. But the volcano the island sits on has all of a sudden become active again and threatens to re-extinct the dinosaurs unless humanity decides to do something about it. So you have this ethical debate over if we have an obligation to save them since we brought them back or if this is nature's way of correcting

30:00 the playing of God that led to all this in the first place. Now, logistics of somehow saving gigantic, uncooperative, dangerous animals from an exploding island aside, I actually don't think this is a terrible premise. It presents a genuinely interesting ethical dilemma and sort of brings the dinosaurs back to how they were always meant to be portrayed, something beyond the control of humanity. Just like how we have no ability to contain them, we also have no ability to save them. Nature always wins in the end, no matter how much we don't want to admit it. So, a movie focused around that idea and that inevitable conclusion of the dinosaurs becoming extinct yet again due to a natural disaster that we simply cannot change would actually make for a very fitting

30:46 ending to this franchise. It would be a sad but effective way to close the book on all of it. But this movie doesn't do any of that [ __ ] Instead, the height of what this previs leads to is Chris Pratt and friends running around on an island while a volcano is going off, which might look good for a trailer, but boy oh boy is it stupid. And that is just the tip of the goddamn iceberg. So, it starts off, like I said, with all the debate over if humanity should do anything about the dinosaurs. And people like Bryce Dallas Howard are pro- dino and want to save them. While others like Jeff Goldblum, who's in this for a couple scenes, are like, "No, this is nature's way of dealing with these

31:32 animals, and they should have never been brought back in the first place." So all that's going on. Then Bryce Dallas Howard gets invited to this giant mansion in the woods to meet with James Cromwell, who apparently is the secret longlost business partner of John Hammond. And this is where the stupid really starts to show itself. Just like how the last movie brought back Bey Wong to give this franchise some sense of relation to the original, now we are fullon recconing the established lore of this universe to essentially have John Hammond 2.0 because god forbid we have some new kinds of characters. Did someone say Snoke? So not John Hammond and young businessman who is most certainly not evil tell Bryce Dallas Howard that they have a plan to save the

32:18 dinos all on their own. But they need her to go with them since she used to run the park and has access and yada yada. And they also need someone that has experience wrangling raptors so they can save Blue who I guess is now this Disneylike franchise mascot. And as it turns out, she knows just the guy and she goes to get her boy Chris Pratt, who is happily building his cabin in the woods. So she gets there and they chitchat and then she's like, "You got to come back." And he's like, "No, I'm happy now." And I have no reason to do that. Why would I ever do that? And also, sure, I guess I'll do that. Why not? Cut to our crack team of heroes on the island coring up all the dinos they can, including Blue. It's high fives all around. Things are looking up. And then as the island starts to explode, Chris Pratt and friends get double crossed by

33:04 the company and are left for dead. Oh no. Then there's some running around and hamster ball stuff and they eventually hitch a ride on the last ship off the island at the last second. Now it might seem like I zoom past all of that pretty fast, but that is about as fast as the movie goes past it, too. The entire initial premise and what you think this movie is going to be about is just ripped through as fast as humanly possible and wraps up about an hour into the movie. All of that is just done now. Forget the island. Forget the dinosaurs on the island. That's all for the trailer, baby. What this movie is actually about is dinosaurs in a Resident Evil style mansion. That is in no way an exaggeration. This is officially where the franchise jumps the

33:50 shark because once the boat gets back to the mainland, all the dinosaurs that the company rounded up get stuffed in these cages in the boughels of the mansion in the woods. We have not only a giant mansion above ground, but an entire research facility, rooms to house untolds amount of dinosaurs and an auction room to display and sell the dinosaurs on the black market. I mean, it is just the biggest complex on the planet. So much so that James Cromwell, who lives there, didn't even know any of this existed. And apparently, this complex is also so large that he can't hear the sounds of monsters in his basement either. So, the entire second half of this movie is our heroes running around this Resident Evil mansion trying

34:36 to stop the bad guys from selling the dinosaurs on the black market slashkilling this one new evil hybrid dinosaur slash also saving this random little girl who is revealed to be a human clone of James Cromwell's daughter. So, on top of everything else, the whole human cloning can of worms gets opened up. Beady Wong is also back and even evil Toby Jones shows up to run the auction. The whole movie just gets totally turned upside down. It goes completely bananas. It's one stupid insane thing after another that you can't even process it in real time. And while sure our characters have these goals like not dying and you know stopping the bad guys, there really isn't any plot happening. It's just this

35:23 loose collection of scenes of people running around this mansion. But there's no actual thing happening beyond that. Like there's no big button they have to press or timesensitive thing to stop. It's just scenes of random chaos. As if the script just said, "And now they run around for a while and fight." Also, this movie's hybrid dino, the Indoraptor, which is like this super velociaptor thing, is trained to kill anything that has the red crosshair light from a gun fixed on it, which might seem to make some sense at first, but if you think about it, if you're close enough to your enemy to get the crosshair of your gun on them, would it not be easier to just shoot them rather than having this psychotic, unstable killing machine monster go eat them? I

36:09 don't know. Maybe I'm the crazy one here. These movies keep trying to make the dinosaurs as trained military weapons work, and it only gets dumber the more they try and justify it. Like, I can see there being some black market potential for dinosaur poaching for their hides and teeth and whatnot. But no one is going to use these things as weapons of war. Okay, just stop it. It's far too stupid. Perfect weapon for the modern age. built for combat with tactical responses more acute than any human soldier. So, after an hour or so of our characters running around the Resident Evil mansion, they eventually kill the Indoraptor and stop the bad guys. Hooray. But that's not all, folks, because then the clone girl, who is now aware that she's a clone and therefore

36:56 feels a connection to the dinosaurs, decides to release all of them into the wilds of the mainland United States. I had to They're alive like me. So now dinosaurs aren't just back from extinction. They have now been unleashed on the modern-day ecosystem in a sudden and random way that will likely lead to the total and complete collapse of the food chain and the extinction of countless modern-day species. To say the series had jumped the shark wouldn't even be doing the ending of this movie justice. It's a movie so uniquely damaging to a franchise that any following installment is almost doomed right from the jump. And as we'll see with this last one,

37:43 that was most certainly the [Music] case. Now, as someone who's been alive in the era of Hollywood where the franchise film reigns supreme and virtually every random8s movie is getting sequels and prequels and soft reboots, I've seen a lot of these things crash and burn. We all know the go-to examples here, but perhaps the king of all franchise film disasters is 2019's Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. A film that's not just bad, but bad in a way that's never been done before. like it's an anti-mov designed to make people hate movies. The permanent damage that movie did to the brand of Star Wars is hard to fully put into words. I mean, it is the disaster of all disasters. Something

38:29 that we never thought we would see again. And I'm fairly certain that's true, but godamn does Jurassic World Dominion give it a strong run for its money. This movie is one of the most confusing things I have ever watched. a film that is comparable to The Rise of Skywalker in all the worst ways. It just doesn't make sense. I don't even know how to describe it because I know this much. It's not a movie about dinosaurs. No sir. That pretense has been thrown totally out the window. What this is is more like Mission Impossible meets Star Wars with a very, very small hint of Jurassic Park thrown in there and that part is hanging on by a thread. I mean, yeah, there are dinosaurs in the movie, but the way Dominion uses them is almost

39:14 solely as like window dressing. They might show up for a scene here and there, but the focus of this movie is watching all of our Jurassic Park characters of the past go on globe trotting spy adventures, busting underground black market operations, traversing dangerous mountains, doing corporate espionage. There's some stuff with human cloning that uh carries over from the last film, but that's pretty much it. The dinosaurs are not even the main threat of the movie. That would be the new form of locust that threatened to collapse the world's food supply. Not the dinosaurs that have been recently unleashed upon the globe, mind you. They apparently pose no threat to the balance of nature. What does though are locusts, which of course makes sense because this movie is called Locust World. I mean, I don't know what I'm complaining about here. What should I expect? And I know

40:01 I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but this is not a stretch. The dinosaurs in this movie only show up whenever a shot for the trailer is needed. And I know that because all the scenes that actually have dinosaurs in them are in the trailer. The characters will go down to Malta to get a lead on something and a chase ensues. And I guess while they're there, they might as well have some raptors chase Chris Pratt so they can keep up the illusion that this is a dinosaur focused franchise. Or Chris Pratt and this new lady will be walking around on a frozen lake and the scene needs some more attention. So, here's a dinosaur to chase him around for a bit. All they are are just action extenders. They don't even need to be dinosaurs. Chris Pratt could have been chased around by dogs or had a bear attack him on the frozen lake and nothing would

40:47 have changed. Nothing about the scenes with dinosaurs are designed with them in mind. They could be random animals. They could be robots. They could be pretty much anything you want them to be. Their dinosaur qualities mean absolutely nothing. And I know I just keep saying the same thing here, but it's important to stress just how much this movie does not utilize the dinosaurs. It has essentially no interest in any of it, which is very strange because the rest of this movie is a typical modern franchise sequel where its main focus is shameless nostalgia bait. They bring back all the old characters like Sam Neil, Laura Durn, and Jeff Goldblum. They bring back Bey Wong yet again to do the same amount of nothing he did in the last two movies. They obviously bring back all the current characters like

41:32 Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard and the clone girl. And they even shove all these characters together in a scene that I guess is supposed to make fanboys heads explode. They even go so far as to make the main corporate villain of this movie. The Barbazol guy from the first film, which might be the dumbest, most random pole of a character in any movie ever made. This guy literally showed up in one scene in the original movie in which he was covered by a hat and glasses and said like two lines to Newman. And the only reason he was even named in that movie is because of a throwaway joke in that scene. Dodson. Dodson. We've got Dodson here. To even refer to that guy as a character in that movie would be a stretch. And yet, this

42:19 is the big bad they drag out as this amazing reveal. and he still has the can of Barbazol. Why? The movie goes through all the nostalgia hoops it can possibly go to and brings back every character they can. And yet, they don't use the most nostalgic thing about the franchise, the dinosaurs. It's just one of the most counterintuitive things you can think of. When people watch a Jurassic Park movie, they're not crossing their fingers hoping to God that Dr. Alan Grant and Chris Pratt are going to meet and high five. They just want to see some dinosaur action. Instead though, we have this bizarre plot where in the wake of dinosaurs being unleashed on the planet, this company led by the Barbazol guy, again, what the [ __ ] is that about? Establishes

43:06 a dinosaur sanctuary for them to live safe and be protected. But actually, their real purpose has been using the dinosaurs to fuel their evil genetic research, which they then use to modify a species of locust to eat crops that aren't produced by this company. So, that would eventually lead them into having total control of the world's food supply. But then, the locust get out of control and threaten to collapse the entire food chain. So, they backtrack on all of that and need to get the human clone girl from the last movie for some reason because her DNA is the key to somehow stopping the Locust. Not sure how that relates, but it results in her being kidnapped by the Barbasol guy. And the whole movie is this Mission

43:51 Impossible adventure where Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Han Solo jump around the world trying to save her. Meanwhile, the OG crew is doing corporate espionage on the Barbazol guys company to figure out what's going on with the whole Locust issue, which doesn't really go anywhere, but eventually all parties converge. And they save the day with the help of BD Wong, who I guess is a good guy now. The end. So again, not about [ __ ] dinosaurs at every level. Complete systemic corruption in in the executive ranks. Systemic corruption. Got that. Write that down. Now, it's a watchable enough movie, I guess, and the uh extended cut makes it make a bit more sense, but it's just this long, bloated, insane, stupid mess that has no

44:38 direction. It drives this franchise straight off the cliff into full-on goofy cartoon territory. The characters are complete parodies of themselves. There's no time paid to any of the ethical debates of the past. The magic of the dinosaurs is so far gone that the movie doesn't even bother to show them all that much. And the lore of the world is so stupid now that the possibility of a future grounded normal sequel is next to impossible. Like, how can you possibly go back to a simple Dinosaurs on an island movie after you unccork all of this? I honestly don't know if you can. I mean, if you get to the point in a franchise where you're bringing back random throwaway side characters that no one remembers as a form of nostalgia, that's got to be some indication that

45:24 the bottom of the barrel has been hit. Thing is though, when it comes to Jurassic Park, it's kind of always been there. Yes, Dominion is unique in how empty it feels relative to the rest of the franchise, but if we think back to each of these sequels, the series never really had any legs to stand on. Every single installment feels hollow and pointless and uninspired. And even if some reach slightly higher heights than the rest, it's not like any of them gave this franchise any real life. It simply was never meant to be a franchise. But because of how popular the IP is and how much money it consistently makes, it's been forced to be that. So, in a weird way, it exists as this like anti-ranchise, a series of movies that must keep going for financial reasons, but never seems to have any interest in

46:12 any real franchise building. Every single one of these sequels could have been the last one, and they all would have felt like a finale because they were never building anything. They were all just one last cash grab that made too much money to stop. And that train appears to be poised to keep on trucking later this year with Rebirth. that by name alone seems to be an indication that it's a start of a whole new era. It's pretty much a threat. It took him 3 years to start this whole thing over again. How it's possible to keep all this going, I have no idea. But my guess is that it's going to be as empty and pointless as ever. Which considering that's the only consistent theme across all these movies, I guess you wouldn't want it any other way. Plus, at this point, just having dinosaurs in them might be considered a new and fresh

46:58 idea. The bar really can't get much lower than that, people. [Music]