West Karana

The header image is used with permission by the artist, ArtFromTheHeart.

This new film review series will cover movies that might have had Chris Pratt in them, but don’t.

Just an aside, I was looking into why posts from this blog are hardly ever featured on the Daily Blogroll, a program that I wrote. I sent an AI in to dig around in it, and it suggested a rewrite. I said that was crazy and would just bring all NEW bugs, and of course it agreed and said rewrites were a bad idea. AI will just always agree with me. Well, we’ll see if this post makes it in at some point. I am just continually astounded at what should have been a simple, straightforward program has just developed into whatever this is (waves hands vaguely at the computer).

I spent the entirety of the time watching War Machine last night convinced the main character was Chris Pratt. I only found out this morning that it was someone else — Alan Ritchson. Which is good, because I’d have wondered if War Machine was meant to be some sort of prequel to The Tomorrow War, which stars Pratt as the same sort of character.

Ritchson’s unnamed character is an Army staff sergeant assigned to a mobile support unit in Afghanistan. He meets up with his brother, also deployed to Afghanistan, when his brother’s convoy is stopped due to mechanical issues. There they both agree to apply to join the Rangers, an elite Army fighting brigade. The convoy is attacked by Taliban missiles, killing almost everyone and mortally wounding Ritchson’s brother, whom Ritchson carries back to the forward base, collapsing just short of it. When he wakes, his brother is dead and he is awarded the Silver Star for bravery in combat.

Time skip to RASP (Ranger Assessment and Training Program) intake, where it’s revealed Ritchson has been applying to the program every six months, like clockwork, but has been denied due to his PTSD until now, his last chance before he ages out of elibility and is separated from the Army. All RASP candidates are referred to only by number — Ritchson’s being 81 after refusing the team leader role (and lower number) earned by his rank. (This is the only name by which we ever know him, which becomes a bit of a joke by the end of the movie).

Training montage. The final test is a deployment exercise; be dropped into (simulated) enemy territory, destroy a downed aircraft, and rescue its pilot from a village of hostiles. Their weapons hold only blanks.

Things go well until they accidentally miss the downed plane and attempt to destroy a very unusual craft nearby. Their C4 charges are ineffective, but the craft awakens, transforms into a giant mech and immediately kills half the squad, and things progress from there.

I watched this thinking, “This has got to be an Army recruitment film.” Even though the Ranger survival rate in this film is extremely low, the cameraderie and “can do” attitude is hard to criticize. And so I won’t. My daughter is a Marine; there is no bad word I am going to say about those who serve.

Still, it was hard to become really invested in a movie that was so “rah rah” all the way through. The enemy mech was super tenacious, but its motivations were unclear. Saving Private Ryan meets War of the Worlds? Maybe.

Jurassic World Rebirth earns the “rebirth” title by not featuring dino-whisperer Chris Pratt and by consciously returning to the themes from the very first movie. My partner called it a remake of Jurassic Park, but it really isn’t.

Chris Pratt’s Avengers Endgame co-star Scarlett Johansson stars as the leader of a mercenary band hired to bring a good scientist and an evil corporate goon to a heretofore unknown island where the scientists behind the dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park developed both the original dinosaurs as well as hybrids, including the mutant Distortus Rex, a six-limbed Tyrannosaurus hybrid. There, they will take blood samples from the largest dinosaurs on land, sea and air in order to produce a drug that will eliminate heart disease.

I spent the first twenty minutes wondering how they were going to manage to get kids in danger in this film. It seemed impossible until they cut to a dad, his two daughters and the eldest daughter’s stoner boyfriend sailing a boat on a long ocean-crossing voyage. “Yup,” I said to myself. “Here we go.”

Kids are great. You can guarantee they’ll survive. Jurassic World is not going to kill kids, so they can put them in the riskiest situations since they understand the audience will know up front that they’ll get through this, and they will not face any emotional or physical trauma from it. That aura would of course extend to the family, and so the filmmakers saved the most exciting stuff (and some of the funniest stuff) for them to deal with.

Adults, of course, are expendable. I figured they’d be killed in dialogue order — if someone only has a few lines and no personality, they will be eaten, and they were.

You don’t watch a Jurassic Park movie for character development. You watch it for the dinosaurs, and especially dinosaurs that have only one desire: to eat humans.

I gotta admit that the dinosaurs were incredible. The scene with the Titanosaurs was wonderful, and the T-Rex chasing the family down some rapids with them in an inflatable raft was epic. The Quetzalcoatlus encounter was brilliant. I could almost forgive them the Distortus Rex encounter at the end. It was always going to happen, that was never in doubt. But what if it hadn’t?

With all that, I enjoyed the film more than I thought I might. It’s not cinema, but it’s fun, the bad guys get theirs, the family survives, and plot holes are forgotten by the next dino encounter. I’d watch it again. In fact, I did, with my son.