** ATTENTION -- POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS OR JURASSIC WORLD I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU STOP READING HERE**
2015 has felt like one prolonged throwback Thursday. Bush and Clinton are running for President, Polaroid cameras were a hot ticket item on this year’s Christmas list, and Mad Max Fury Road, Jurassic Park and Star Wars were all poised to overtake cinemas. If we judge the merits of a film off of its monetary success then Jurassic World is the best film of the year and Star Wars The Force Awakens will inevitably take the crown. Is financial gain, however, the best determiner of a movies merit? I hear an overwhelming 'no'. This, nevertheless, is a fact that studios such as Disney and Universal do not understand. So they produce films such as Star Wars and Jurassic World that become a part of the enfranchisement of cinema that ignores originality in favor of crowd pleasing tropes and stereotypes to make the money that ensures their success.
Reaching into my pocket I pulled out my IPhone 6s to check the time. 8:50 pm: my friends and I had arrived to the local AMC over an hour before the start of J.J. Abram's Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens. We could hear the rumbles of the bass outside the theater door, the sounds of a great epic as it reaches its climax. I was tempted to walk in to catch a glimpse like skipping to the end of the book because the suspense is too much to bare. The door burst open and a furry of people exited the auditorium. I made no eye contact, and covered my ears to prevent any significant details from being divulged. First ones in the theater my friends and I picked the best seats in the house. A perfect distance from the screen accompanied by such an optimally audible position that Sheldon Lee Cooper would be proud. As the lights dimmed the anticipation in the room could be felt by all. A tension that had been slowly building for ten years since the last films was release.
Flash back seven months and the lights fade in as the credits role on another long anticipated Hollywood reboot: Jurassic World. I exit the auditorium with an unexpected flurry of thoughts racing through my mind. My attention mostly surrounding the gratuitous product placement. It was everywhere, littering each scene with unprovoked images of Coca-Cola glass bottles (which I didn’t even know they still made), Beats headphones, Mercedes Benz SUV's, Samsung’s “innovation center,” and my personal favorite Verizon Wireless presents the Indominus Rex.
The theater has gone quiet, a darkness hangs in the air until Lucas Film Limited wipes across the screen in its glossy finish. It fades to black. The silence is abruptly shattered by the thunder of an orchestra, bright yellow titles and the passionate cheers of the crowd. The film has barely started and yet many of the people in the room who cannot contain their own emotions are already crying unrelenting tears of joy. I know this because I am one of them.
Unprepared I burst through the doors into overwhelming daylight still processing Jurassic World in my head. I was pleased by the stimulating action sequences and nostalgic tip of the hat to the original film that forced tears into my eyes. But I kept returning back to the overwhelming product placement. The hyper realism in Jurassic World imagined what the park would look like if it opened today. The result is an uncomfortable reflection of our overly commercialized society. The center of the park, similar to down town Disney, riddled with franchised chains: Starbucks and Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. A simple way to generate revenue for a park that was slowly seeing drops in ticket sales.
Eager to please shareholders, Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, along with a team of scientists, invent a new dinosaur to reinvigorate interest in the park. “Let’s be honest,” she says “No one is interested in Dinosaurs anymore.” This emblematic boredom initiates a competition between brands for our fleeting attention spans using any means necessary. The older brother in the film is the embodiment of this boredom. He remains completely uninterested despite being surrounded by living dinosaurs. Howard's character is the realization of the desperate brands. Her solution to this problem – give the people what they want a stronger, faster, smarter, genetically modified monster.
I’m most of the way through The Force Awakens and an unpleasant feeling has settled into my gut. I have seen this movie before. No really I just saw it earlier today when a friend and I hashed through a marathon of the original trilogy (his first time not mine). The movie opened to a rebel pilot feeding a sensitive map to a droid telling it to escape into the night away from the Empire who forces their way through a small village in search of the very information. The "new" villain is Kylo Ren, the Darth Vader imitator, who sports an almost identical mask. Ray (new Luke Skywalker) is forced to leave her desert planet Jakku (Tatooine) despite her desire to stay. She must escape the clutches of the First Oder (the Empire) and return the droid to the resistance (the rebels) which possesses the information that could lead to their victory. The most blaring similarity is the new Death Star, a significantly larger planet-machine hybrid, which harness the energy of the sun to destroy an entire planetary system. The weight of responsibility falls on our new heroes to destroy it forcing the movie to take the same exact trajectory as the original Star Wars films. At this point I’m ready to get up and leave.
Jurassic World followed basically the same formula as its predecessors, two siblings caught in the carnage of the indubitable escape of the islands dinosaurs and the adults who come into rescue them. The movie does have one unique exception, an extreme self-awareness. Like the park who needed to get visitors back by building a bigger dinosaur, so the movie had to get the audiences back into the theater with the promise of outdoing the older films. Driven by profit margins Colin Trevorrow, the director, is forced to make the movie the studio wants him to make. A copy and paste film plagiarizing the original story.
The genius of Jurassic World is that the movie recognizes this and turns it on its head. Delivering the same basic tropes and action sequences we've seen but not without heavy criticism from the filmmakers. In a commercialized world every brand has to scream for your attention just as this movie does. The Indominous Rex is the personification of commercialism. Its invention for the purpose of making money. The result, however is an untamable beast that kills for sport. The old park evoked imagination the new dinosaur threatens to destroy that ideal, because franchises like Jurassic World and Star Wars VIII threaten to destroy that ideal.
The creation of this brute (Jurassic World) is the destruction of originality. It is a franchise similar to Starbucks. The job of a franchise is to minimize risk and maximize profit while sacrificing individualism and originality. Control comes not from the ones making the drinks but from the ones who profit from it. Every Starbucks must serve the same drink as the next, it is what the customer demands. Trevorrow and Abrams have little to no control, their movies are franchises and must follow the same recipe as the ones before it. Except that Trevorrow is the barista who spits in your drink. Franchises make it increasingly more difficult for original content to establish itself. When major franchises preform so economically well, distributors are less likely to take risks with unestablished films. It is also the nature of competition to put your competitors out of business. Quentin Tarantino has talked about this recently when Disney wouldn't allow his film to play at the Cinerama Dome so there film could play there instead.
Jurassic World diverges from its predecessors when it opens its gates to guest. Eventually we discover that it is us, the audience that are the guests. We feed the machine and insure nothing changes when we stand in line hours before we even knew what the movie was about. Did we even care? The studio machine will continue to churn out uninspired material so long as we continue to support them. When the dinosaurs escape they consume the consumers. We will ultimately be the ones who suffer because we are the ones ultimately responsible for their inception because we buy the tickets.
Art is a reflection of society. Franchises dominate the economic landscape so is it any wonder that they now infect our art as well. The original Star Wars and Jurassic Park serve to implicate their reboots. We loved them because they were inspired and creative. They possessed in them the individuality of their creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Art should build off of itself, progressing forward. Instead today it now tears down the beautiful house that was built, recopying itself from the rubble into its familiar shape only weakened from decay. This is the result of franchise, the same recipe copied time and again. Disney has plans to release Star Wars films every year for as long as they can. To some that may be exciting news, to me that's horrifying. The more we continue to consume these exploitive movies the deeper our creative bankruptcy becomes.
