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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Classic flawed superproduction
I decided to write a review here because I think Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a typical exemple of what is going wrong in nowadays superproductions.
JWFK is not a bad movie. There are bad movies and very bad movies, but this one is not one of them. This one is in the interesting category in which lots of recent movies fit in of the technically good movies with almost non-existent artistic and scenaristic approach. And I'm writing a review of JWFK because it beats all the movies I've seen in this category. I will try to explain what point I'm trying to make and why.
First why is this a technically good movie ? The directing and acting are quite OK and encouraging, the action scenes are well edited and everything seems very fluid, a lot of different and interesting ideas are present making the movie varied and always exciting. The dialogs are good and so the overall scenario. And that's where everything starts to crumble.
I said overall scenario because in the mind of Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly and probably a lot of satisfacted spectators, I believe it was very clear. The scenario is supposed to be something like: "After JW, al the dinosaurs are going to die, which is very sad and so an organisation including the female lead of the first movie wants to save them. And then they go to the founder of JW who wants to save some dinos to put them on an uninhabited island. But he's being fooled by his good-looking good assistant who actually wants to sell them in auctions. So the two JW leads go inthe expedition to save some dinos but they discover the truth and then set free all the poor dinos and defeat the bad guys." I have nothing wrong with this, it seems perfectly fine to me. But the problem are not in the main structure but in the little details.
First the fact that an NGO wants to save the dinos does not make sense. Because the dinos are eventually all going to die because they cannot reproduce and the species will go extinct no matter how sad it is. And even to simply save a few (something like 12, I don't remember...), which is not the point of the movie ("Do you want your child to live in a world where dinosaurs are extincts?", well... duh, even if you save them, they'll eventually die way before the child...) it doesn't work because the dinos ALREADY have an uninhabitated island they're living on. Yes, there is a living volcano on this island, but I do believe some dinos will survive anyway (and probably more than the few that were saved) and the saved dinos will not survive very long in an island with just one of their kind (most of then lives in pack, at least in the movies).
But that's not the main point. Just an idea that doesn't works and will define everything at stake during the entire movie. And everything works like that: OMG a giant thing wants to eats us and we're trap in a pit of lava what can we do???? oh well, there was a ladder we simply didn't see during the whole time.
Or : This raptor lost to much blood, let's give it some T-Rex blood (is that real??) Or even better : Hmm, this incredibly strong and dangerous dinosaur trained to kill is returning safely in is cell, as the hero of the movie I must prevent this and then go away while I've put the most dangerous being ever born in the middle of a room full of people (but they're the bad people so it's ok I guess?). And then when the dumbest character opens the cage, nobody is trying to prevent him (because they're the bad people I guess??) But the worst is next: When all the dinos are going to die because some arsenic gas that have nothing to do here is released, a little girl (the grandchild of the founder) who just learned she was a clone, decide to set them all free in the continent, not because they're clones like her, but because they're ALIVE, like her. Well so were the hundreds humans you condemned by releasing lots (strangely a lot more than they saved) of deadly creatures in the wood. And nobody blames her and nobody calls the police or something. And eventually the army is gonna come in and kill all the dinos to prevent more hume deaths. IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MAKE SENSE?
To really sum it all, the only thing in the WHOLE movie that actually make sense is the villains' plot (and what says Jeff Goldblum) and that's very strange because it's quite rare. Here, the villains want to sell dinos as weapons of mass destruction and genetic materials using the money of an old gullible billionaire as fund. And this quite intelligent. If you look at it from a different angle what bad things the villains have done? They sold (tryed to) well treated surviving dinosaurs and the main villain killed the old guy. Pretty malicious I think. But then wht bad things the heroes have done? They condemned every surviving dinos and lots of humans to certain death and killed more or less involuntarily ALL the villains, even the scientists, even the rich buyers. The villains could have killed, on many occasions the good guys but have they done it? No. But the good guys killed mercilessly every other characters. And nobody cares.
But I do.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Another emotionless war movie.
While watching Kingdom of Heaven, I just had the strange feeling that I was watching The Lord of the Ring without stakes, good scenario, great acting, humour and good music, and so on... I just found myself bored by the stupid predictable story of a black-smith turning instantly into an over-skilled knight, who will loose every common sense to pursue an unjustified quest of purity and atonement. Bored also by the stiff and unoriginal directing, the 3D modeled cities that look nowhere near realistic and the lack of original elements to disrupt the monotony.
It had good elements, it's not a bad movie, but I'm just tired of always watching the same characters, doing the same mistakes, in the same hollow environments and I think that Ridley Scott can do way better than this.
Rodin (2017)
The hardest way of telling a story is never the best
With Rodin, Jacques Doillon gives us a very strange movie. While the actors are great, the light is OK and the cinematography is flawless, what ruin the film is the story and how it is told.
Rather than going through the events of the life of the sculptor, Rodin is only showing glimpses of it like Quotes, moments of works or moments of love. The problem with it is, though the chronological order is preserved, that the spectator is completely lost with untold names or missing events and you always need to think about what happened before in the movie to finally understand what took place an hour ago, which is completely annihilating the empathy for the characters because you can't feel the same as them because you have no idea what just happened.
In addition to that, the scenario have no real purpose, the movie is starting nowhere, and is ending nowhere. Moreover, there are totally useless nude scenes, which is sometimes embarrassing because its going nowhere and is never justified. I'm OK with that, but there must be at least 20 minutes of these, and because the movie is often boring and overall too long, it's annoying.
Only God Forgives (2013)
What to say?
At the beginning, I really have no idea how to consider this movie. Where the plot is going ? What is the meaning of all this ? Am I supposed to understand what's happening ? These are questions you should completely give up on to be able to enjoy the film. I don't fully understand why people are saying this have nothing to do with Drive because the two movie are actually closely linked and I see OGF as an even more brutal, pure and contemplative version of Drive.
The photography is beyond perfect, the atmosphere is magnificent and the action is intense. The pace is really slow and the scenario is lacking originality but it's because the movie has been thank this way, and there is no point in criticizing something the movie obviously didn't care about.
It's like criticizing the lack of color in a voluntarily black and white movie.
I think this is the reason why it's so hated, it's because it's not a regular movie, it's a one of its kind movie, something you'll probably never see somewhere else. People expectations of a movie are completely different. And because this was the goal, I must admit it's fully achieved.