DVDs and Films You Have Watched Recently 3 - The Final Insult

[TildeGuy~!]

Watched Tomb Raider this morning, Alicia Vikander makes sex noises for 110 minutes 

4/10

[Keith Houchen]

Three Billboards.

Really enjoyed the film and the performances were all spot on, bar Sam Rockwell.  

[zep81]

Italian knock off of Escape from NY/Mad Max with a sprinkling of Planet of the apes thrown in or not; this was fun. The low budget of it adds to it's charm and despite the cheapness of it, the dubbing and the blatant stealing of ideas, its a charming film that you just sit back and enjoy.

[BomberPat]

Music by Oliver Onions too, that sounds bloody brilliant.

I don't think I've heard of that one before, I'm going to have to check it out - there was this cottage industry of Mad Max/Escape From New York/The Warriors coming out of Italy for a while, and I absolutely adore all of it. Bronx Warriors, A Man Called Rage, Escape From The Bronx/Escape 2000, Warriors Of The Wasteland, it's all gold.

Definitely going to have to check out this one!

Edited June 6, 2018 by BomberPat

[BrodyGraham]

Finally got round to watching Solo last night. Enjoyed it. It feels to me like the plan is to do a series of Star Wars Underworld stories within the anthology films with the Crimson Dawn thread running through them. Wouldn't be surprised if the Boba Fett movie doesn't address that heavily or the rumoured Kenobi movie.

Of course that's if they happen.

Edited June 6, 2018 by BrodyGraham
Bloody autocorrect.

[HarmonicGenerator]

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom... I hated it ☹️ . I really, really hated it. I’m actually upset by how bad it is. I have so many problems with it. I was so close to walking out. I wish I had.

[Devon Malcolm]

Not really a great surprise, Jurassic World was dreadful as well.

Still will probably see it on Saturday with the kids though.

[HarmonicGenerator]

30 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Not really a great surprise, Jurassic World was dreadful as well.

Still will probably see it on Saturday with the kids though.

I’m such a fan of the series - I can forgive Lost World and JP3 all their flaws, and even watching JW I’ll go “y’know, other than this and this and this, it’s really pretty decent”, but Fallen Kingdom’s on another level. It’s worse than I could have ever imagined. 🙁

[Scott Malbranque]

Devastated to read that, Genny! Have heard a few shit reports now, and I was really looking forward to it, especially with Ian Malcolm returning.
I'll still go see it, but I'm hearing that it turns into an unnecessarily bizarre Alien rip off?

[WyattSheepMask]

I’ve got visions of Ian Malcolm’s “return” being that one scene that was in the trailer and that’s it.

No matter what reports/reviews are like, and not to discredit Harmonic’s opinion as they’re entitled to it, it’s still going to be one of the biggest films of the year. The Vue in my town have got 70 showings of it between tomorrow and the end of Sunday, Christ knows how many over at Cineworld.

The wife’s more excited than I am for it, she liked the last one whereas I wasn’t as keen so I’ve lowered expectations for this one. Interested to see if they can put-do themselves on the product placement front this time around

[Devon Malcolm]

I enjoyed Jurassic Park 3 to a certain degree but aside from the first one it's actually a really bad series.

I'm sure some halfwit on here once said that 3 was far better than the original.

[WyattSheepMask]

I enjoy 3 more than I do Lost World, it has a bit sense of adventure about it, but again that’s just personal opinion.

Having said that, bettter than Jurassic Park? Who said that? Jurassic Park is the perfect monster movie

[HarmonicGenerator]

5 hours ago, Scott Malbranque said:

Devastated to read that, Genny! Have heard a few shit reports now, and I was really looking forward to it, especially with Ian Malcolm returning.
I'll still go see it, but I'm hearing that it turns into an unnecessarily bizarre Alien rip off?

I could go more into why I hated it so much but it would venture into major spoiler territory.

Regarding Malcolm:

 

It’s just the scene from the trailer.

Edited June 6, 2018 by HarmonicGenerator

[Rey_Piste]

7 hours ago, johnnyboy said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

a dinosaur is going to do something but then another dinosaur comes in at the last second to save the day

 

  Reveal hidden contents

they've genetically engineered another super dangerous dinosaur!

 

I'd watch Bryce Dallas Howard read the Argos Catalogue.  The two best bits of the film were her running down a hill and laying on her front in a moderately low cut top.

It's amazing to think that she is from the same gene pool as Ron Howard and his uglier younger brother Clint Howard.

 

[HarmonicGenerator]

I need to have a moan about Jurassic World. I'll try and keep it in some kind of coherent sense but it could be a rambling mess within the tags. Huge spoilers for the entire film within. It's not every thought I had but it's a start... TL;DR I hated it.

 

First of all, if you've seen the trailers, you've essentially seen the film. Pretty much every major plot point and development is covered in the trailer, despite the director explicitly saying the trailer gives nothing away. Jeff Goldblum makes a cameo, there's a volcano on the island, baddies are selling off dinosaurs, they've made another scary hybrid, it breaks out in a big house, dinos get out in the real world.

That's the film. Save yourselves two hours and watch the trailer instead.

Speaking of Jeff Goldblum, I really don't exaggerate when I say his entire part is in the trailer. It's about a minute at the start - really shoddily edited, it felt like - and then half a minute at the end. That's it. If you're going for Goldblum - don't.

Now, I said pretty much every major plot point. There's one they've kept back.

HUMAN CLONING!

Yes, that's what this film about dinosaurs needs! Fucking Westworld style 'Oh no I'm not a proper human' existential crises.

Well, I say that, the clone in question, who I'll get to below, finds this out in some shockingly bad expositiony dialogue from Rafe Spall and is given no time to react or process it (she's about 10, incidentally) because of the big scary Indorapter who's after them all at the same time. 

The only other time it's referenced by her is when there's a weird poison gas flooding the horrid tiny cages the baddies are keeping all the dinos in. Bryce Dallas Howard, who's spent the entire film banging on about saving the dinosaurs (more on that later), at this point decides that actually, it's better that they all die in a gas chamber - and fuck, never noticed that parallel until just now, seriously, a Holocaust allegory? Is that what they were going for here? It's worse than I thought if so - than be free out in the world. This despite the fact that 90% of them are herbivores and they've all got tracking chips that, despite the film insisting earlier that they can only be tracked if you're on Isla Nublar, should make it relatively easy to find them and round them up and put them somewhere safe. That and the fact they're fucking MASSIVE. She decides that yes, we're going to watch all the dinosaurs who haven't already been brutally killed onscreen (more on that later) be brutally killed onscreen. Cool.

So anyway, clone presses the freedom button and says "They're alive. Like me." Profound. I think this was the point I audibly went "for FUCK'S sake" in the cinema.

Here ends the human cloning storyline. Except for the fact that the clone girl now has no living family, no conception of who or what she is and no way to find out. All she's got is Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.

I should explain the cloning thing. So James Cromwell's character Richard Lockwood is John Hammond's business partner from before Jurassic Park. Or during, considering he's got a scale model of the park in his bedroom. It's quite an uneven partnership, because Lockwood has a portrait of Hammond up in his house and never shuts up about him, but Hammond never mentions Lockwood or makes any reference to him in the first one. 

Anyway, they fell out because of oooh mysteries, which is actually because Lockwood's daughter died in a car crash so he used their genetic technology to CLONE HER AND RAISE THE CLONE AS HIS GRANDDAUGHTER.

The granddaughter is 10 and that's obviously a big age gap between her and Lex and Tim. So either the clone is 10 forever or she's not the first clone. They don't explain that. Lockwood also says his daughter visited Jurassic Park so I'm totally messed up on the timeline here. It's shit. It's all shit.

The clone reveal is painfully obvious from about an hour before they actually tell you. "You look just like your mother", mysterious photo of old housekeeper with granddaughter but the housekeeper is young, blah blah blah, THIS IS MEANT TO BE A FILM ABOUT DINOSAURS. IT'S NOT ATTACK OF THE FUCKING CLONES. If I wanted this I'd watch Westworld, and I don't even want this from Westworld as it is.

Don't worry about Lockwood though, because in a horrendously drastic heel turn, Rafe Spall decides on the spur of the moment to smother him to death with a pillow in his bed. Cool.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the trailer.

So the trailer gives everything away other than the clone stuff. There is some misdirection too, though.

At the start of the film, there's a prologue aping the prologue of Jurassic Park, with a team retrieving something from the island in the dark and it goes wrong and someone all but says "SHOOOT HERRRRR" and the Mosasaurus eats some of them. It's been an indeterminate amount of time since the first Jurassic World. The Indominus Rex is a skeleton at the bottom of the lagoon, and they say it's been long enough that nothing'll be alive in there. Except Mosasaurus is. And the gates have been closed the whole time, so you have to wonder what it's been eating.

The marine team gets eaten so they don't close the gates to the lagoon again and Mosasaurus swims away. This takes place long enough in the past for the Indominus bone they retrieve to get sent to Rafe Spall, who gets Dr Wu to use it to make the Indoraptor. Ignoring the fact that apparently you can make dinosaurs just from bones now, which would have saved a fuckton of effort in the amber mines, the Indoraptor needs time to be created, hatch, and grow up. So this prologue must happen a decent stretch of time ago.

Mosasaurus should have wreaked havoc on the world's oceans in that amount of time. But there is no mention or reference or sighting of it until the closing montage when you get that shot of it with the surfers. That's all the Mosasaurus you're getting.

That shot also negates the whole closing argument of ‘dinosaurs are now in our world whatever will we do welcome to shoehorned in reference to the first film’. Mosasaurus has been happily living in our world for up to three years without any trouble. So everything’s not that bad really. No sequel needed. Please? No more. I already want to forget this one exists.

That closing sequence, by the way, must surely have been a competition at ILM of who can come up with the silliest thing to have a dinosaur do in the real world.

Mosasaurus swims right up to the coast so it can appear dramatically in a wave and eat some surfers!

Velociraptor - sorry, Blue, who is referred to by name by EVERYONE, even the fucking baddies - looks out from a cliff over a small town like it's deciding to move into the suburbs!

T-Rex wanders into a zoo and she and a lion roar at each other!

It's AWFUL.

I do think I understand what they were trying to go for with a "we now have to live alongside our genetic monstrosity creations" vibe. I didn't get this at the time because I was just being bowled over by the atrociousness of it all, but a few days later I did have an "oh, Ohhhh, that's what they were going for" moment.

However, some problems with that:

 - For starters, there's really not that many dinosaurs left. They're not going to cause huge disruptions and irreversible damage to the ecosystem when there's only about 12 of them.

 - Yes, the carnivores might eat some people. But they're far more likely to be hunting the herbivores, seeing as that's what they're used to eating on the island for the past three years. It'll be like when I used to play Operation Genesis, make loads of dinosaurs and take away their enclosures to see what happens. The numbers are only going to go down.

 - This plus the fact that, for the most part, there's only one of each kind of carnivore anyway. So once they're dead they're extinct again.

 - Most of the dinos were herbivores who, yes, might eat loads of plants and things, but Isla Nublar isn't that big and they all managed to live there for years without it turning into a wasteland so it's probably gonna be okay.

 - Even for the ones where there's more than one, it's not like Site B where their numbers will grow through breeding. One breeding pair? It's not going to be bullfrogs-in-Australia or anything.

 - So we're looking at a one-lifespan problem here. The effect of man can destroy nature in one lifespan but I wouldn't lay that level of world-altering destruction at any other life form.

 - We also saw in the other films... I want to say III particularly... that a lot of these dinosaurs are pretty territorial, so worrying about them spreading across the world shouldn't be too strong in anyone's minds.

 - The Dinosaur Protection Group still exists as far as we know, too, plus Cromwell's Island wasn't just made up - he genuinely had one unless that was all a long con by Rafe Spall SILLY - so they could just carry on their original plan.

 - Even if the dinosaurs did spread geographically, none of them are getting off the Americas. 

 - Don't mention the pterosaurs. Apparently there was a post-credits scene of them in Vegas (I fucked off the second the credits started rolling so didn't see it) but they're not flying over oceans. If they could do that, they'd probably have ventured the 120 miles to Costa Rica before now.

 - Plus we saw that exact same ending already in III with them flying off to who knows where. Like with Mosasaurus, those guys haven't seemed to be a problem.

 - If Blue fucks off to eat a load of kids, Chris Pratt's going to be in so much trouble as The Only Human She Listens To for just letting her fuck off to eat a load of kids.

But that's the end, I was only at the prologue (which is arguably the best five minutes of the film).

I mentioned it apes Jurassic Park, and johnnyboy mentioned this too. It lifts so much from the first film, but what's weirder is, it completely copies shots from Jurassic World too. Utterly non-iconic rubbish shots.

Our first shot of Bryce Dallas Howard is identical to her introduction in JW. Camera on shoes. Pan up to her face. She's on the phone in the lift. JUST LIKE THE OTHER FILM SO CLEVER. Only this time she's doing her very best to save all the dinosaurs! Considering she couldn't have given less of a shit in the last film, it's a complete 180 and is given no explanation or background whatsoever. Just accept CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT even though we see none and she undergoes none again this film.

Chris Pratt's exactly the same as he was in the last film as well. She sees him for the first time in an exact copy of what they do in the last film.

They've apparently got together and then broken up again in between films, but honestly, you don't need to know that because it adds nothing to anything either of them do. Then they might get together again in this one. Nobody cares, but goddammit are you supposed to. The human characters and Blue. Care about them, fuck everything else. Fuck it to death with lava. (more on that later)

The contrast between the likes of Alan Grant, Ellie Satler, every other character in the first one, hell, even Macy and Leoni in III, and the characters in this one, is staggering. You just don’t give a shit about Owen and Clare - at all, even less than in JW1 - or about anything they do or that happens, because all is death and no goodness exists in the world. That’s an exaggeration but the hopefulness that permeates the first three films despite the scary and bad things that happen just isn’t present here. I think it’s supposed to be - I think that might maybe be what they were going for - but it does not come across at any point at all. What’s the point in anything when a volcano’s just going to come along and kill everything anyway?

Other humans:

There's a 'paleovet' who's never actually seen a dinosaur. Why Bryce couldn't get any of the actual vets from Jurassic World to help her out, I don't know. She has to do a blood transfusion on Blue who, when it's successful, the characters are tearing up with joy. IT'S A VELOCIRAPTOR WHAT ARE YOU DOING. The blood comes from the T-Rex because interspecies blood transfusions work when it's dinosaurs? Anyway, we're all so worried that Blue might not pull through here. Bryce is told to clamber over the T-Rex and ride it like a rodeo bull. Which she does. I know that T-Rex is (1) extincti and (2) in this film, fictional, but it's intensely disrespectful to one of the greatest monsters in movie history to use it for a rom-com bit here. 

Blue,by the way, despite having been shot and hemorrhaging blood and being in mortal peril for most of the middle part of the film, shows absolutely NO SIGN OF ANY INJURY when she goes up against the Indoraptor shortly afterwards. So that whole plotline was fucking pointless too.

She then runs off into the woods giving a little sad last look back at Pratt before she does, like she's a fucking Labrador or something.

RAPTORS ARE NOT DOGS.

The filmmakers think they are. There's several scenes flashing back to Chris Pratt training the baby raptors to respond to him and he treats them like they're puppies. They're trying to make Raptors cute. THIS FILM IS TRYING TO MAKE US GO 'AAAAWWW' AT RAPTORS. WHAT IS THIS.

That's far from the worst example of unnecessary anthropomorphism with the dinosaurs. Jurassic World was bad for it. This is worse.

There's a bit where Indoraptor lures Ted Levine's character (more on later) into its cage and the camera pans all the way around it, which is when I notice something.

The dinosaurs have no bumholes.

This might seem an odd thing to notice.

But they're animals.

They should have bums.

We saw the big pile of Triceratops shit in the first film.

But these CG dinosaurs HAVE NO BUMHOLES.

WHY.

Anyway, it's playing dead and he goes over to it to take one of its teeth out.

That's his thing, that's his one piece of character - and this is the most well defined of the goons in this film. Lost World this is NOT. There you had Stormare, Postlethwaite, the Jack Horner palaeontologist guy, and the InGen guy all with clear characters and motivations. Here you get one person and all you're having is 'he likes money and collects dinosaur's teeth'. In one of the numerous dinosaur abuse/torture scenes, he rips a tooth out of a Stegosaurus' head because he's a cunt, the filmmakers are cunts, everyone involved with the process is a cunt, and I DID NOT COME TO THIS FILM TO WATCH DINOSAUR TORTURE PORN. It's honestly at times like you're watching a feature version of those horrific animal charity ads that go on over Christmas.

Sorry, where was I?

Levine goes to get this tooth because, as we established with the Stegosaurus, that's what he does, but all of that existed solely as prelude for this oh so clever bit. He leans over its head and it lifts its tail up. He looks behind him and it opens its eye (facing the camera), then he looks back and it closes its eye again. Tail up, look back, eye open - as the Telegraph review says, it basically winks at the camera- and then it eats him and nobody gives a shit because if they've any sense they're reeling at the idea of a dinosaur acting like it's in a fucking panto.

Indoraptor chases clone girl through Lockwood's house, she manages to escape to her bedroom. It goes along the roof, and somehow knows exactly which room is hers. It opens the window in a deliberate and hamfisted ripoff of Jurassic Park and the kitchen doors, which the director has claimed was inspired by Frank Langella's Dracula. Honestly, they could have just CG'd Indoraptor over the top of Langella because it's the exact same thing.

Remember that scary shot of Indoraptor's claw creeping towards the bed that made it seem this film could have a genuine scare moment in it? Bull SHIT. There's no menace because of the whole massive chase that's preceded it. Clone has not been asleep and wakes up to find a terrifying monster in her room - she's been running from it the whole time and chose to hide in the bed while it continued to chase her. Urgh.

I was talking about humans, wasn't I?

Franklin.

FUCKING Franklin.

He could be the worst character of any film, ever.

Imagine what a male screenwriter in his 40s thinks are all the worst traits of millenials.

Combine them.

Now make them 100 times more unbearable.

You begin to estimate just how appalling the character of Franklin is.

He's quite good at computers, so they have to bring him to the island to rescue the dinosaurs (more later). He, despite working for the fucking Dinosaur Protection Group, actually hates dinosaurs and doesn't really mind if they die. He's scared of everything, he's sensitive to everything, he's a wuss, a wimp, a coward, his character traits, his motivations (his dad got him the job or some shit), just everything, he's got the worst scream in the entire world that's somehow not even the most annoying scream in this film (hi clone girl, for whom most of the dialogue is 'high pitched scream') and EVERYTHING HE DOES IS AWFUL. I can't even begin to list the irritating things he does.

(Incidentally, there's a bit where he and Bryce are trapped in a bunker, the volcano's gone off and a Baryonyx is lurching towards them, escaping the volcano but also wanting to eat them. Once they eventually escape up a ladder and through a hatch, they slam it shut, leaving the Baryonyx to slowly boil to death with no escape from the bunker as the eruption continues. Well done, Dinosaur Protection Group. Well done.)

Franklin is so annoying you don't even want them to waste screen time seeing him die. He should not exist.

Oh! 

When the volcano's going off, there's a physical comedy bit with Pratt, who's been tranquilized, logrolling himself away from the spreading lava. Star-Lord could get away with that, probably. But here it's just cringeworthy nonsense. Plus the fact that, while I don't know much about volcanoes, being that close to lava would still fucking burn your skin off. Also he gets engulfed by the ash clouds but manages to run through them, jump into the ocean, shoot a gun underwater at the gyrosphere with Bryce and Franklin inside, tragically missing Franklin's fucking pissing fuck fuck face, then KNIFES THE GYROSPHERE OPEN WHILE UNDERWATER to get Bryce and Franklin out.

Meanwhile, DOZENS of dinosaurs are plummeting to death over the cliff as they desperately flee for their lives from the volcano. That's your background effect, people. Mass dinosaur suicide. So cool.

Because while the whole set-up of the first half - which turns out to be meaningless because the real point is capturing the dinosaurs and auctioning them off to arms dealers - is that Isla Nublar is about to erupt and they need to save the dinosaurs. They fail on every count.

Seriously, if you like dinosaurs (or animals or happiness or life) do not see this film.

The volcano thing is unnecessary even within the plot. Did they just want a cool effect? This is no Last Jedi style 'let the past die' stuff. This is 'FUCK EVERYTHING WE'RE BLOWING IT UP THAT'LL TEACH YOU TO FIRE ME FROM EPISODE IX KATHLEEN'. The baddies could have nabbed a load of dinosaurs and sold them to arms dealers without blowing up the island and killing most of the dinosaurs in a fiery hell.

Secondly, the villainous under-plot of WE'RE NOT ACTUALLY SAVING THEM HAHAHA is SO blindingly obvious even Franklin should have figured it out. The fact they'd already captured most of the ones they wanted before the goodies arrived should have been a clue.

(They try and pre-empt this by claiming it's all about getting Blue because she's the last Raptor left and they need her alive because Pratt trained her and she can train the Indoraptor and only Bryce's handprint on a computer can unlock her GPS location but fuck that convoluted nonsense.)

Bryce agrees to go because Rafe Spall says they're taking the dinosaurs to a new sanctuary island Lockwood has where they'll be free from human interference. Clearly they've forgotten all about Isla Sorna, Site B, or did that get a convenient case of volcanitis too?

Anyway, it's all for nothing anyway because they're too late and we see dinosaur after dinosaur after dinosaur destroyed and killed by the volcano. It's horrific.

There's one bit in particular. This bit almost made me cry. Not in a good way. In a "what have they DONE" kind of way.

We see a Brachiosaurus quite early on, in another blatant rip from the first film. The scene in the first film is my favourite scene in any film, ever. It's cinematic perfection. This is not. Everything Spielberg does right, Bayona gets spectularly wrong here.

But that's not it.

Once they're on the boat back to the mainland they see the Brachiosaurus, alone on the end of a pier, looking out plaintively towards them as Isla Nublar is reduced to ashes behind her. She gives out a mournful cry and slowly, barbarously, torturously, is engulfed by the volcano. It's devastating, and not in a way that brings you into the emotions of the film. 

I'm trying my best not to sound like an angry Twitter man baby shouting about "killed my childhood". But dinosaurs, living dinosaurs, was my ultimate childhood dream, that Jurassic Park brought to life. That moment in this film saw my childhood dream burn up and die in front of me.

Oh, and half the dinosaurs that survive all this end up in the private collections of the arms dealers, so you know they’re going to be in intense suffering for the rest of their existences even having escaped the volcano and everything else. So, so cool.

Shit! I almost forgot about the Trump references. The bluntest, crassest, so-misjudged-you-almost-want-to-vote-for-him-to-show-these-twats-up references there could have possibly been. They feel so out of place, and in their attempt to be relevant and topical consign this film to already feel more dated than the original three even though it's only been out for a day. The first one is on a ticker tape during a news update about the volcano which reads 'President states he does not believe dinosaurs existed even before this' or some shit like that. It would have fit in as a background joke in one of the shitter recent Simpsons episodes, but here it's just cringeworthy. Then later on Ted Levine calls paleovet a 'nasty woman' in a reference that's supposed to make you go "yeah! Feminism! Go Hillary!" but the world's moved on since Trump said that and it feels so wincingly self-aware I let out an audible groan in the cinema.

One more thing - a lot of positivity's being made of the action sequences, presumably because Bayona did The Impossible and that's genuinely very good, and he also did a scary horror film. Don't expect any of that goodness here. There's nothing even close to approaching the level of the T-Rex scene with the glass of water, the Raptors in the kitchen, or the long grass attack in Lost World. It's unequivocally from the Baldrick's War Poem school of action cinema. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. Nothing exciting or thrilling about it, just lots of noise.

Christ, that was long, sorry. That's the tip of the iceberg but I've been writing for an hour now and need to stop thinking about this film and forget it ever existed. Don't go. Save yourselves. I urge you.

Edited June 9, 2018 by HarmonicGenerator
I forgot even more stuff. Additional paragraphs