JURASSIC WORLD

JURASSIC WORLD. Colin Trevorrow, dir., co-script (with three others). Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, script and story, from characters and premise by Michael Crichton. Derek Connolly, fourth credit on script. Ed Verreaux, production design. See [1] for filmographic details. USA/China: "A Universal release presented with Amblin Entertainment in association with Legendary Pictures. Produced by Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley. Executive producers, Steven Spielberg, Thomas Tull. Co-producer, Trevor Waterson," quoting Variety [2] on production.

Sequel[3] to JURASSIC PARK. With Indominus rex and other Jurassic critters stomping around (and flying and swimming), containment within human-produced artifacts of a large range of technological sophistication is mostly positive, though, of course, of limited use in this movie for the preservation of non-Jurassic life. And high-tech devices from implants and heat trackers to a helicopter and various non-lethal and supposedly-lethal weapons also are of minimally efficacy for protection against dino-inflected Nature and at most annoy Indominus rex (or perhaps that should be regina since Indominus is female). Of interest are the velociraptors "imprinted" on the great-white-(reluctant)-hunter hero routinely held in what look like veterinary compression devices for holding animals for treatment, although it is never made clear why the velociraptors are being so tightly restrained and constrained. This is a significant silence, or at least of interest in Clockworks 2.0. Since the restraining devices aren't required by the plot, they function almost entirely as an image, and they image restraining and muzzling semi-tame dangerous beasts that have body-cameras attached to their heads — and their heads only are visible — and what may be other «apps» (our term). The muzzling is a variation on the theme and image identified by feminist critics of the silencing of women by literally gagging them. The velociraptors are both male and female, but the beta animal Blue is female and only she has a name and not just a letter, and the name is common as a gender-neutral dog's name. (For the more recent muzzling of men, see the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film THE RUNNING MAN (film) (1987) and 2015 reboot of the Mad Max series, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.) On balance, it is A Good Thing in JURASSIC WORLD when the velociraptors are freed of their close restraint and high-tech gadgets. JURASSIC WORLD is instructively retro concerning gender and its Spielbergian focus on the family and also in its return to the closely related theme of attempts to confine Nature within human (masculinist, technological) boundaries and bonds — and the danger for people when the old goddess Natura inevitably breaks those restraints.

           (For the complexities on gendering Nature, though, note Euripides's play Bacchae of 405 BCE, where the god Dionysos is an androgynous and woman-friendly Father Nature; note also that Indominus rex and the other Jurassic predators are emphatically not "girly" and only one dying [4] seems gendered female. The closing image has a large Indominus-type dino on the roof of what looks like a standard-issue lab building for a nefarious government or, in this case, government/corporation nefarious enterprise. They are messing around with Mother Nature, and that threatens/promises a sequel (to the threat, and, of course, another movie).

RDE 29July15