The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The usual disclaimers apply here: I’m a Disney shill, love Pixar movies, and have a fondness for dinosaurs. I tend to cry buckets at each one of these films, etc. etc. Most of this is all still true, though quantitatively fewer tears were shed at The Good Dinosaur than at, say, Inside Out or Toy Story 3. And perhaps that’s emblematic of my reaction to The Good Dinosaur as a whole: it does a lot of the same things well that Pixar movies overall tend to do, but I’m left feeling a little bit less than I wanted.

In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and instead took up agriculture, young Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is desperate to prove himself to his family and make his mark on the world. After a storm separates him from his family, Arlo strikes up an unlikely bond with an evolving human he names Spot. Together, the pair has a whole lot of wilderness to cross before they can get back home.

Here’s the thing (and I know that I usually begin a sentence with that when there might be bad news to follow) – The Good Dinosaur is a bit of disappointment in much the same way (though certainly not to the same degree) that I was disappointed by the trailer for the dismal specter of Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: “Oh, this again.” I say the difference is by degree, for there’s little more soul-shattering than the looming threat of yet another squeaky-voiced milked-for-its-last-dollar insult to the word “comedy.” But there is, unfortunately for a studio otherwise prized for its innovation, something all too familiar about The Good Dinosaur. There’s a liberal amount borrowed from The Lion King, The Land Before Time (one of them, anyway), and even a bit from Disney’s own Dinosaur only fifteen years back.

This level of distraction, a kind of narrative déjà vu, is never a good sign on film, because it means that the story isn’t holding you as closely as it ought to be. And indeed, The Good Dinosaur retreads quite literally much of the same ground as some of Pixar’s better films – Toy Story and its sequel, Brave, Up, Finding Nemo, and to a degree Inside Out – in that it’s yet another story about someone traveling through somewhere to get home and learning something about themselves in the process. Yes, it’s a tale at least as old as Homer’s Odyssey, but there’s something less compelling about it this time around (I never, for example, noticed until now the repetition in Inside Out of the road story).

Rather than play backseat driver to the film and tell it what it should have done differently, I will say that the film isn’t a failure. It is simply, as the title indicates, good but not great. It’s a testament to the strength of Pixar’s abilities that even one of its less successful films is still quite good. Two things really stand out here, the first of which is the animation, particularly of the backgrounds. The backdrops are visually breathtaking, and it’s worth staying through the first round of end credits just to see these images unadulterated by the presence of animated figures in the foreground. Though the cartoony nature of the characters never quite resolves with the photorealistic settings, there are moments when it’s quite easy to forget that none of what you’re seeing is real; the mountains, skies, and running waters of the film are visually stunning.

Second, the tears. And yet, there are some to be had in The Good Dinosaur, and they’re in wordless sequences – first, when Arlo tries to communicate with the nonverbal Spot, and second, at the end of their journey together. Again, these scenes show us what the studio can do better than most other filmmakers by tugging at those heartstrings in unexpected yet profound moments. The drawing of a circle never felt so emotional before The Good Dinosaur.

It is, as I’ve said, good but not great – worth the watch, certainly, better than most of the animated drivel (do we need, for example, an Angry Birds movie?) ostensibly targeting the same demographic. The Good Dinosaur maintains the visual standard set by Pixar, even if the story never quite rises above the level of “serviceable.”

The Good Dinosaur is rated PG for “peril, action and thematic elements.” There are some mean dinosaurs in here, some bloodless violence involving such creatures, and a few implied dinosaur deaths.

Bonus review! The Good Dinosaur comes packaged with a delightful short named Sanjay’s Super Team. In it, Pixar displays their gift for wordless storytelling in a story about a boy whose love of superheroes comes into conflict with his father’s devout prayers, until the young Sanjay realizes the two are not wholly irreconcilable. Deeply personal, Sanjay’s Super Team is a worthy appetizer – better placed, perhaps, in front of the forthcoming Incredibles 2 – and a real treat for me, because I’m a very easy sell when it comes to both Pixar and superheroes. The video game-inflected animation is a unique addition to the Pixar canon, and its blend of family values and superheroism is over all too soon. Can we get a full-length Sanjay feature?

Jurassic World (2015)

When I saw the trailer for Jurassic World, I asked the same question twice, once of the characters in the film and once of the filmmakers themselves: “Why did you think this was a good idea? We saw what happened last time.” Honestly, why anyone would build an actual Jurassic Park seemed unfathomable, given the fate of the original, but I also wanted to know why the filmmakers were ostensibly remaking the original with a higher body count. Now that I’ve actually seen the film, I can say that the answer to both versions of the question is, “But this one’s bigger,” and I’m actually not as disappointed with that answer as one might expect.

Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) manages the successful theme park Jurassic World, with little on her mind but business. On the eve of the park’s newest debut, the genetically modified Indominus Rex, Claire’s nephews (Ty Simpkins, late of Iron Man 3, and Nick Robinson) visit the park, but it’s also the day before disaster in the park – disaster to which Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his trained velociraptors respond.

I’ll try not to get too philosophical about the difference between spectacle and storytelling here, though the difference is key on the subject of Jurassic World. It is, in short, the difference between The Maltese Falcon and Transformers. In The Maltese Falcon (the 1941 John Huston version, of course), we have a brilliant story and very substantial character work, leaving the audience feeling satisfied and accomplished by film’s end, even though (spoilers) very little is actually resolved. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the Michael Bay movies, which are spectacles turned up to eleven, with next to nothing by way of plotting or characterization. Both can be entertaining in their own right – though, of course, Transformers is patently offensive in some of its disregard for storytelling (and offensive in other insensitivities as well).

Now, Jurassic World clearly values spectacle more than storytelling. There was some controversy about whether or not the film chastises the character of Claire for being professional at the cost of her personal life, for not wanting to follow the cliché of marriage-then-motherhood. I don’t agree with that assessment of the film (I actually think her sister comes off quite poorly for nagging Claire to “settle down”), but I think it exposes a problem with the film – the characters are so thinly written that it’s quite easy to impose an interpretation like that onto the film. That is, the characters consist of one personality trait (Claire=business, Owen=badass, kids=imperiled), and the screenplay doesn’t quite bother with value judgments on those traits.

On the other hand, while the characters are fairly flat, director Colin Trevorrow is much more interested in the theme park atmosphere of Jurassic World, about the fleshed-out attractions such a park might include, and naturally about the ways all that could go horribly, horribly wrong. It’s almost as though Trevorrow has anticipated the detractors’ cries of “Been there, done that” and responds with, “Well, of course it goes wrong. That’s what this franchise is all about.” Jurassic World doesn’t have the same kind of cautionary allegory as the Michael Crichton source material.

Jurassic World is not better than Jurassic Park, nor, I would say, is it even as good. But it is good enough. Less than three-dimensional characters aside, the horror movie-inflected direction works surprisingly well, overcoming the cynical me that came to the theaters that day and giving me that “Oh, this isn’t good” feeling in the pit of my stomach. Trevorrow does something quite intriguing, by way of comparison to Jurassic Park, which began with a tour of the grounds and devolved into chaos. Jurassic World, however, intermingles the two; as the park’s security measures fail sector by sector, the film carries on in tandem with the ignorance of the park attendees. It’s a nice change-up that keeps Jurassic World from feeling too much like a retread of the original while substituting the escalating sense of menace borrowed from, I think, home invasion and slasher films.

You can sum up the film quite nicely with a key moment from its climax, in which the human characters step out of the way and let about a dozen dinosaurs fight it out amongst themselves. Indeed, the last word of the film (if we can call it that) belongs to a dinosaur. Trevorrow has said he’s not terribly interested in a sequel, but if one existed, a) would we call it Jurassic World 2 or Jurassic Park 5?, and b) would it consist almost entirely of dinosaurs? The lesson of Jurassic World seems to be that a skeletal narrative can support a spectacle, providing that the spectacle is diverting enough. Either Jurassic World 2 will dispense with the pretext of a human supporting cast, or it’ll find a way to use them more effectively; either way, I’m decidedly less cynical about more Jurassic films than I was before seeing the film.

Jurassic World is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril.” I’m not really sure what more to add by way of description: there are dinosaurs, some of them are scary, and a lot of them eat people.