Jurassic Park Franchise (1993-?)

[domino harvey]

Agreed, though Passengers probably works even better if you hate Pratt!

[Orlac]

This one better have dilophosaurs in it or I'll sue!

[domino harvey]

This one better have dilophosaurs in it or I'll sue!

You may want to watch the trailer then!

[Orlac]

Just have...and yay!!!

Now if they could eat Chris Pratt...

[Mr Sausage]

The Guardians of the Galaxy films (and associated Marvel stuff) are squarely in Pratt's comic wheelhouse and more what people probably expected of him post Parks & Rec.

[Never Cursed]

Interesting Twitter thread about this movie's atrocious moment-to-moment editing (probably the result of larger issues either during production or as a result of a late-game re-edit), including one of the worst cuts I've ever seen in a modern blockbuster

[soundchaser]

Holy hell, you're not kidding; that's atrocious. That cut has gotta be emblematic of a larger issue, because no editor would let something that egregious slip otherwise.

[cdnchris]

It gets even worse. I swear this film is made up of at least four or five different films and how the film moves from storyline to storyline is absolutely atrocious with no flow or sense of time and place. There are subplots that introduce characters that feel like they may have some bigger part only for them to disappear and the subplot not to have served much purpose (like the underground dinosaur smuggling and such) other than lead to an action scene. You could cut out large chunks of this film and not have that big an impact on the story, though it might make it more streamlined.

I know I'm one of the few but I thought the last one was a well made monster flick and I had fun, and it may go down as the only one of the whole series I don't mind watching again. But this was just a shit show.

And also, fucking Christ on who Campbell Scott's character turned out to be.

SpoilerShow

[Matt]

The whole film seems to have been shot between February and November of 2020, so I imagine working amid sudden and drastic Covid restrictions necessitated all these weird cuts to people already in the previous shot or the establishing shot with none of the stars in it. I’m inclined to be forgiving, but then I’m not sitting through this thing either.

[swo17]

Is this what it was like to be alive when Antonioni first broke the 180-degree rule?

[Orlac]

This film is noticeably timid on the body count, even by the standards of the previous films. And Holy Christ, but why is that bratty girl not in jail?

[The Curious Sofa]

After the terrible reviews I braced myself for the worst and I thought it was.....OK. Accidentally avant-garde editing choices or not, this isn't the worst blockbuster of the year and it isn't even the worst of the Jurassic Park/World sequels. The original JP cast carries this along nicely and some of the criticisms which worried me aren't really true (it's all about locusts and neglects the dinosaurs, it doesn't deal with dinosaurs having escaped into our world, it's this franchise's The Rise of Skywalker) Trevorrow's flat direction was less of an impediment to my enjoyment than the eye-searingly ugly effects work , franchise overreach and general aimlessness of recent MCU films. Not saying this is a good film, it's plenty dumb and goofy but I somehow found it more likeable than a lot of recent blockbusters and there is something gonzo about how hard it tries to please. I could understand if it hovered around 60% on review aggregators, I just don't get the vitriol.

[tenia]

I do love how RT's consensus says Dominion might be a a bit of an improvement over the first 2 JW but its score and its average is way lower.
I found JW 1 and 2 absolutely awful, and the above Twitter thread gives me 0 reason (except a possible hate-watch) to submit myself to another 150 min dumb and awfully crafted blockbuster.

[domino harvey]

I know I'm one of the few but I thought the last one was a well made monster flick and I had fun, and it may go down as the only one of the whole series I don't mind watching again.

I think it may literally just be you and me who thinks that— I’d go farther and say it’s the best of all the sequels, which… isn’t saying much. But it actually got the dinos off a goddamn island and moved them to a novel enclosed space and everyone was like, “No, I need leaves shaking, go back”

[Toland's Mitchell]

Haha, that Twitter thread is a goofy blooper reel of technical errors that plagued this train-wreck of a film. My companion and I didn't discuss those exact shot/editing choices after seeing it last month, but our overall assessment was that Dominion was clumsily pieced together. Of course we wouldn't be noticing such things if we had reason to invest in anything in front of us. Seriously, one could go on a feihong-sized post about how many things went wrong here. As cdnchris points out, the plot is actually several half-assed (and half-assed is being generous) subplots thrown together without adequate development to them. It's as if Trevorrow was trying to make Jurassic Worlds 3, 4, and 5 at the same time. Part 3 could have been the movie we all expected, about humans adjusting to sharing the planet with dinosaurs, while raising the question of what should humanity do in response; wipe them out, round them up and put them on reserves, or let them roam freely? Part 4 could have been about new dinosaur cloning and smuggling operations. And Part 5 could have been about a bio-engineering tycoon who seeks to take over the world's food supply by releasing genetically-modified locusts who only target his competitors' crops. Notice how the plot of Part 5 lacks the word "dinosaur." Somewhere in second act of Dominion, this became the dominant plot-line as the other two were cheaply summarized or discarded. Consequently, the main attraction of the movie became lost. No longer were the dinosaurs the stars of the show, re-cast as sideshows who only serve as obstructions to our protagonists. Getting back to the issue about framing and editing, we see this sideshow status reflected in how the dinos appeared on screen. The camera rarely lingered on them in static or slow-moving shots, like in every other Jurassic movie. Instead, many of their appearances were in frenetic Fast and Furious-style action sequences consisting of whip pans and rapid-fire cutting where we don't really get a very good look at them. I mean, if that doesn't bother the viewer, fine. However, I didn't find much compensation from the main story-line. Even though it had surface-level potential that could have made more sense in the Bond franchise, it was so muddled in with other story-lines (two others I mentioned, the angsty teenage clone child, the baby Raptor, Dr. Wu redemption, probably six others I'm not mentioning or forgetting) that it only had enough expository screen time to force the audience to take it at face value without questioning its internal logic. Similarly to the twitter thread showing numerous examples of blocking and editing bloopers, there can be (and maybe there already is?) another twitter thread dedicated to how many times the internal logic in Dominion was eye-rollingly dumb.

I'm trying to think of anything that worked in this movie. And I'm struggling.