5) The Cast/Characters
Colin Trevorrow and Jurassic World’s casting department must have high-fived life as they watched the steady unfolding of Chris Pratt’s path to super-stardom over the last few years. Ty Simpkins has also been making a solid name for himself with Insidious and Insidious Chapter II, and by playing the boy who essentially tells Tony Stark to get a bloody grip on himself in Iron Man 3. Bryce Dallas Howard, meanwhile, gave an admirable turn as the hateful Hilly Holbrook in the Oscar winning The Help, and has rising star written all over her. There is also a lovely dose of nostalgia in the form of B.D. Wong’s Henry Wu (who clearly learnt absolutely nothing from the first time around, but still, it’s nice to see him again).
Simply put, there is no doubt that the cast of Jurassic World are going to carry a lot of this movie.
But, the cast cannot be used as a smokescreen for failings in other areas. Names are not enough – Trevorrow has to use them somehow, in a way that is organic to the movie. It is true that in-depth, character development was never going to be the first priority of the Jurassic Park movies – but characterization in the first and second movies was actually very good. The novel (or novels….sort of) provided a neat collection of a range of personalities, including everyone from the perpetually sceptical, sarcastic Malcom, to the moved-to-the-point-of-passing-out Alan Grant. There were money-obsessed exploiters (Dennis Nedry), and children to represent the crucial naive wonder. The Lost World was similar in variety (even if the main character did have to be raised from the dead.) The principal actors for both movies were (with the exception of Jeff Goldblum and Richard Hammond) relatively unknown at the time – including Samuel L. Jackson as Ray Arnold in Jurassic Park, and Vince Vaughn as Nick van Owen in The Lost World.
Overall there were only really two criteria for the characters. They had to be able to run, and they had to be able to make spectacularly poor decisions. In terms of the cast, this translated into being able to run, and being able to convey terror while the model operators battered them with bits of foam and cardboard. Generally, this approach worked well for allowing the audience to care enough about the characters while not drawing focus away from the action.
Jurassic Park III, however, is a perfect example of how not to approach your characters. The third movie made the wise move of bringing back Sam Neill’s Grant, but then attempted to step up its acting credits by putting slightly more mainstream names – Tea Leoni, fresh from the Deep Impact disaster (read that how you will), and Oscar nominee William H. Macy – in two of the other roles. It also made some kind of movement towards introducing an entirely separate subplot, involving Leoni and Macy’s characters reuniting after a failed marriage in order to find their missing son (you can see it if you watch the movie upside down, and squint).
Unfortunately, Leoni and Macy’s pallid portrayal of this was so unbelievable that it made the T-Rex’s appearance in San Diego look like the nightly jaunt of an urban fox. With the level of character development at zero, most of the cast were basically out-acted by the dinosaurs. And not the model ones either. Viewer reactions to Macy’s character surviving the final spinosaurus attack were less likely relief, and more likely the thought that the least the spinosaurus could have done was rip that moustache off his face. Ultimately, the audience just did not care.
Jurassic Park III is also proof that without decent characterization, any plotholes are likely to be a significant amount more obvious. If Joe Johnston thought that including an Oscar nominee in his cast would distract the audience from the fact that while the spinosaurus can easily crash its way through a giant steel fence, it fails to get through an old door secured with three rusty locks, he was wrong. Nor did the happy family scene on the homeward plane divert attention from the man-eating, airborne pterosaurs heading gracefully off to presumably populate the rest of the world.
The lesson for Jurassic World, then, is: Choose your actors carefully – and for goodness sake, create some characters that will not make the audience want to side with the dinosaurs.