disappointedWhy am I giving you my dinosaur geek cred? Because I want to be clear that when Jurassic World was announced, I was one hundred and seventy percent on-fucking-board. I was there. Literally the only thing that kept me from the first showing on Thursday night was the fact that I had dental surgery Thursday morning, and did not understand how hands worked. When I saw the first trailer, I cried. I am not ashamed of that. I have been going to Jurassic Park for my entire adult life, and yeah, if they announced the opening of the Isla Sorna location tomorrow, I'd sell a kidney if that was what it took to get me there. Bets have been taken as to whether I will one day walk down the aisle to the Jurassic Park theme.
(I probably won't. But let's face it, a dinosaur-themed wedding would be pretty fucking sweet.)
But there was one thing that made me a little...let's go with "nervous" even during trailers, when I was shushing people who tried to talk to me during my special dinosaur time. And that was the fact that you had Bryce Dallas Howard's lovely Claire—and "lovely" is a necessary qualifier for a woman who's wearing solid white and high heels and putting that much effort into straightening her hair in Costa Rica—but that was, well. About it for humans of the female persuasion. (In the JP canon, most if not all dinosaurs you encounter will be female, due to the cloning process that makes them. This does not actually count as having gender balance. Honest.)
Wasn't going to stop me from going. After all, Jurassic Park III had lousy gender balance, with only Amanda and Ellie really keeping up the side, and it's generally regarded as the worst of the original three. Surely the filmmakers would look at that and say "Yeah, little girls found their way into the franchise through Lex as a viewpoint and Ellie as an aspiration, just like little boys had the combo of Tim and Alan! Let's make sure we keep everyone at the party!" Part of my passion for this franchise comes from the fact that when I was a little girl, Jurassic Park was actually willing to invite me in. Surely the trailers were leaving something out.
They weren't.
( Because while most of these spoilers are from the trailers, it's also polite not to spoil.Collapse )
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June 22 2015, 06:30:42 UTC 2 years ago
June 23 2015, 17:57:22 UTC 2 years ago
June 24 2015, 02:40:48 UTC 2 years ago
I think a lot of the trouble lies in a conscious choice by the moviemakers to concentrate purely on spectacle rather than on story, because there really isn't much of a story here beyond "The monster is loose! RUN!!!" (The feature-film side of Hollywood, with the occasional exception of the Marvel Creative Universe creators, seems not to believe that audiences will go for spectacle and story in the same movie. *sigh*)
Anyhow...to the extent that there's a reason that both kids are boys, I think it's specifically because the script needs them to ditch their minder ASAP, so that they can go Have Adventures -- because boys of that age do that...and they tend to do it with almost any female minder. (See also, Calvin & Hobbes.) If you make them a boy-girl pair (or both girls, for that matter), it makes it much, much harder to write the minder offstage -- weirdly enough, irrespective of whether the minder is male or female -- because in that dynamic one or both of the kids is far more likely to pay attention to the minder -- or, from another angle, as a writer you have to start thinking of the minder as an actual character rather than a plot mannequin. Here, what the writers wanted in that space was a plot mannequin, so Zara was what we got.
I'd have to see the movie again to confirm this, because I was busy shrinking back from the Indominus during most of the relevant sequences, but it seemed to me that there were very few to no women in the park ranger/security/paramilitary teams sent out on monster-fighting detail. That bothers me from a gender-equality standpoint as much or more than the two grafted-on attempts at kissing scenes (although it may also help explain why the monster-fighting teams were so totally unsuccessful).
And I suspect we're on much the same page as to Isla Nublar's corporate issues; there were way too few suits/executives on the island (especially with the CEO on site) given all of the elements in play. One really has to wonder what the InGen/Jurassic World org chart looks like, and what Claire's job title may actually have been; I'm not at all sure we ever see that properly defined.
June 25 2015, 15:00:02 UTC 2 years ago
July 16 2015, 11:40:37 UTC 1 year ago
July 20 2015, 16:00:18 UTC 1 year ago
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