Matt Singer wrote an amusing little list of all the ways in which the characters of Jurassic World are big ole dumb dumbs. My favorite entry?
To be fair, those margaritas were probably, like, $20 a pop. One can understand why Jimmy would want to hold onto them even as death swooped down on him from the sky.
Anyway, the piece was funny because it was true: literally everything that happens in Jurassic World is predicated on dumbness. Monumental, enormous amounts of stupidity. It's a dumb movie in which very few things happen that make sense. As Singer noted in a follow up piece, it didn't have to be that way. Indeed, we have a model for a much better version of this film: Jurassic Park. Yes, Jurassic Park is predicated on the hubristic folly of man—but that's far different from stupidity. JVL makes a version of this point over at Acculturated while discussing the philosophical underpinnings of Spielberg's 1993 classic:
For all intents and purposes, Ian Malcolm is channeling bioethicist Leon Kass. Like Kass, Crichton (via Malcolm) argues that the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason over tradition and theology has failed because science—which is reason’s stalking horse in the practical world—is unequal to answering the most important questions. And the most important question for humans is "Why?" not "How?"
I recently re-watched Jurassic Park and was pleasantly surprised by how noticeably not-dumb everyone in the film is. Sure, some of them make mistakes, but they're the sort of mistakes that are rational in nature. From Hammond's hubris to Nedry's avarice, these are, for the most part, people who are doing things that make sense. They actually seem like, you know, actual human characters. There's no comparison between them and the Hallibushiterlian contractor played by Vincent D'Onofrio in Jurassic World, an irredeemably stupid character who believes raptors would make great war animals despite literally seeing with his own two eyes that they are uncontrollable beasts in the opening act of the film.
Of course, pointing out that something wildly popular* is also wildly stupid tends to be wildly unpopular. People don't like to be told that what they're watching is dumb, especially if they enjoy it. So they lash out and demand that their dumb entertainments not be judged as such. Here's Singer again:
But there was a small vocal minority who hated this piece down to its very core, not because they necessarily disagreed with my opinion but because they objected to my having any opinion in the first place. One reader on Facebook suggested I should revise the list to include myself at the very bottom "for the colossal overthinking of a popcorn movie." That was a slight variation on the most common complaint, one any writer or cinephile who’s ever dared to criticize a big, moronic blockbuster knows very well:
"Stop thinking so much! It’s a movie. Just turn off your brain and enjoy it."
Such statements are why the hashtag #decline is so popular. But it didn't have to be this way! As Glenn Kenny notes in a reminiscence of Jaws, which is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, the summer blockbuster wasn't always destined to be a dumpster fire of awful, tension-free stupidity:
Jaws takes its time, letting the horrors wrought by the shark’s destructive path sink in. Actress Lee Fierro, as the mother of a young child killed by the beast, has one of the film’s most memorable moments when she slowly approaches Roy Scheider’s Sheriff Brody and then slaps him in the face, saying: "My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that."
Seven and Gone Girl director David Fincher once said: "I’m always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about Jaws is the fact that I’ve never gone swimming in the ocean again." What Spielberg achieves in the early Jaws scenes is a visceral anatomy of destruction, making the ocean as frightening as Alfred Hitchcock’s motel-room shower. It’s a fear that revisits us each time a great white surfaces off Chatham.
Don't tell me to turn my brain off just because you're happy being force fed slop. You're better than that. And if you aren't? Well, I am.
*Jurassic World has grossed almost one billion dollars worldwide in just ten days of release.