Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hit theatres this weekend harder than Stiggy the Stygimoloch. The latest film in the franchise has brought in big numbers at the box office and finally pushed the series into new territory. The future is wide open for the once-extinct Jurassic period creatures, but lets pause for a minute to talk about something:
That f###ing lever.
And now for an explanation featuring some mild spoilers
During the climax of Act 2, Chris Pratt’s character slides into action to prevent the shipment of the prototype indoraptor by flipping a lever. Err, throwing a lever. A 5-foot, yellow and black striped base-in-the-ground lever. But why should it even be there? The renovated black market dinosaur auction house cost millions to “covertly” (Read BS) create and yet that was the solution to crate movement? To hire a heavily armed guard (that’s $500 – $1,000 per day) to actuate a lever manually when it could’ve been tied dynamically to the action of the door opening. Or controlled remotely in the control room. Or even managed by the auctioneer. I mean, kudos to the team for investing the money to create the dino auction house software… But it’s obvious a different team was responsible for this mechanism.
The lever is on the side of the crate you can’t see.
I have no issue suspending belief to watch movies about aliens, dinosaurs or even scientologists. As long as I know the rules of the alternate reality (or can learn them) then I will happily sit and watch and try to see if the characters react the way I would. And in many cases the movie is better because the characters push the concept even farther than I would imagine (See Her). But in the case of Fallen Kingdom, everyone is smarter than that lever. No one would sign-off on that design. And the B movie trope-of-sorts absolutely subverted what was happening on-screen.
Maybe the Jurassic franchise can turn the corner on the next film. Even outside all the levers (maybe I do draw the line here), Fallen Kingdom felt like it was built on a 75% complete script. Striking visuals replaced real characters. Important moments were handled with the deftness of, well, me doing anything athletic. But the movie still made a killing at the box office. It might be a long shot, but fingers crossed that’s reason enough to up the quality instead of a mandate to do more of the same.
Patrick Hill
Timed Edition
Patrick is a frontend developer and 1/3 of the Master of One podcast. Making digital stuff is good, but he would rather meet new people and learn about them. When not sitting in front of a computer screen for work, he's still found sitting in front of a computer screen. Except for pickleball. This dude loves pickleball.