Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t seen the movie, and want to see it, then by all means see it before reading this post.
Okay, I lied in the title of this post. ”Jurassic World” wasn’t actually a dumb movie. It was pretty good. In fact it was probably great for what it was, a movie about dinosaurs eating people. The reason I thought it was dumb was because of the death of Vincent D’Onofrio’s character Hoskins.
From the moment you see Hoskins you know that this guy is the equivalent of Wayne Knight’s character Nedry from ”Jurassic Park”. He’s the antagonist, he’s a jerk, the handsome main character doesn’t like him, he’s going to get eaten. He actually has a tattoo on his arm that says “Bite Me”. I suppose there’s some backstory to that tattoo, he probably grew up in the 80’s when “bite me” was still a phrase, or maybe he was a fan of ”Twilight”. Ironically it is his arm that is eaten first. Knowing that he would get eaten is what was so annoying. Here is this movie telling me, “This guy is going to get eaten by a dinosaur, so let it be known that ”you” want this guy to be eaten by a dinosaur.”
Well I’m sorry to tell you, movie, I didn’t want that guy to be eaten by a dinosaur. I wanted him to live. I don’t know who you are, movie, that you think you can tell me what I want! You make me angry movie.
Well he gets eaten and the movie says to me, “Hey! He got his comeuppance.” Well… It was a lame comeuppance that made me even more angry. To put things in perspective let me go a little earlier into the movie when a man falls into the raptor cage, at which point the protagonist, Owen, walks into the raptor cage, among ”four” raptors, and saves the man. The same situation happens to Hoskins, he’s about to get eaten by ”a single” raptor, and Owen watches it happen. Great hero there. He conveniently is too afraid to coax the raptor away. The movie told me to hate Hoskins, but honestly, I just hated Owen.
Basically what I’m saying is that I refuse to listen to a movie when it tells me who I’m supposed to hate. It’s got to do something more than just tell me. If it had actually demonstrated in some way that I should hate this guy, maybe I wouldn’t be so critical of it, but even then killing off villains with dinosaurs is a little too deus ex machina for me. Owen was probably the character I wanted to see get eaten the most, but he also had a tattoo, and it said, “Too Cool to Die”. So yeah, I think it would have been a much more interesting film had Hoskins started out as a jerk, then learned something about himself, then lived. And it might have even been an excellent film if Owen had been eaten, and even better if Owen’s death was meaningless. I guess it’s just not a very deep film. I guess it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be about people getting eaten by dinosaurs, and it is. Yeah, I guess it’s an okay movie. Oh, and yeah, I made up the tattoo thing.