Jurassic World has a subversive anti-capitalist message
A little while ago I drank an entire bottle of white wine and rewatched Jurassic World and I got to thinking.
I’ve been a defender of JW since it came out. Not that it needs my help. The movie grossed 1.6 billion dollars worldwide and has a respectable 71% on Rotten Tomatoes. But nearly every review is middling at best and pretty much everyone arrives at the same conclusion: it’s a big dumb action spectacle with dinosaurs fighting each other, and little else.
But there’s some subversive subtext going on in Jurassic World that makes a surprisingly cogent anti-military, anti-capitalist statement.
“Hold on Steve, you piece of shit, how can a movie that’s basically one long ad for Mercedes and Verizon be anti-capitalist?” It’s true, like most big-budget films today, Jurassic World is chock-full of product placement, including prominent use of a Margaritaville restaurant.
That brings me to my first point: Jurassic World is, first and foremost, self-loathing. Jake Johnson is there to be the put-upon screenwriter’s surrogate, bemoaning the corporatization of the park, saying lines like “Why not just name it the Verizon-saurus Rex?” He wistfully recalls when “dinosaurs were enough” while wearing an actual Jurassic Park t-shirt. The idea of corporate sponsors chafes him and Chris Pratt’s Owen, who openly mocks the new dinosaur’s name, Indominous Rex, for being chosen via focus groups.
The Indominous Rex is a metaphor for the modern blockbuster. The dinosaur has been grown in a lab to ensure a thrill for the greatest number of consumers, delivering a maximum ROI for its corporate overlords. Everyone in the film hates the Indominous, including the Indominous itself. It’s a tragic figure that just wants to be a real dinosaur, but it was made only to generate revenue, and it can never escape the reality of its existence. Such is true of the film itself.
Much of the criticism of the film was about the insanely dumb choices the characters make throughout. The arguments boil down to, “surely a billion-dollar operation like this would have more fail-safes in place!”
It’s a fair point, to which I’ll answer with the economic collapse of 2008, when capitalism shit its own pants and destroyed countless lives in the process.
To look at the history of capitalism is to look at a history of completely avoidable human misery at the hands of total dumbasses. The people running Jurassic World act like short-sighted idiots, just like the people who ran Enron, Lehman Brothers, Sally Mae, GM, AOL Time Warner, Theranos, Volkswagon, Countrywide, Wells Fargo, Firestone, Coca-Cola, Soylent, and on and on. Just recently it was revealed Uber paid to cover up a massive leak of consumer data. Foxconn has suicide nets. Remember when everyone got sick from eating Peter Pan peanut butter? Christ, look at the Triangle shirtwaist factory. Corporate dipshittery is a time-honored tradition. Of course a company in charge of dinosaurs would fuck it up.
The criticism that seemed to get the most traction was Devin Faraci’s (haha whoops!) tear-down of the poor secretary’s brutal death. It was deemed overly cruel and unnecessary. To me, that’s exactly the point. The end result of capitalism run amok, as we’ve seen with 2017’s endless health care battles, is deaths that are needless, cruel, and avoidable.
Irrfan Khan plays the eccentric billionaire owner of Jurassic World/InGen, clearly modeled on Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Khan’s Masrani spouts high-minded platitudes without actually understanding the nightmare his company is creating. My favorite heel turn of the franchise is BD Wong’s Dr. Wu, the quiet scientist who oversaw the raptors hatching in the first film. Now sporting a Steve Jobs-esque turtleneck, Wu haughtily sneers his lines as Masrani confronts him about the Indominous. The problem is, Wu is right! Guys like Masrani build seemingly incredible things without considering the vast unseen costs they may bring. Look at Tesla’s recently announced driverless trucks. What happens to all the truckers if this “incredible technology” goes into mass production? Billionaires like Elon Musk and Masrani are “risk-takers” because they know none of the risk is their own. It will always fall on the little guys (in this case the sweaty mass of tourists who just wanted to see a T-Rex eat a goat.)
That Masrani ultimately gets his comeuppance is, to me, the least believable part of the film. These guys are never the victims of their own hubris.
Another major criticism was about how dumb Vincent D’Onofrio’s Hoskins is. His idea is to weaponize the raptors that Owen has been training since birth. He wants to use them in Afghanistan to hunt down terrorists. It is definitely a dumb idea, and multiple people throughout the film tell him exactly that! What annoyed me was that critics pointed this out as a plot hole or lazy screenwriting. No! The movie straight up says, several times, “this guy is a dummy! We want you to know how dumb he is!” So why do people get mad about it and say “the military would never do this! They’re not that stupid!”
Oh?
Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Arms deals to Saudi Arabia (currently causing a famine in Yemen). US drones wiping out a Doctors Without Borders hospital. US drones wiping out a wedding party. Abu Ghraib. The torture of Chelsea Manning. The continued quagmire of the F-35 jet.
That was just off the top of my head. I’d be willing to bet money that if the US military had access to velociraptors, it would absolutely try to weaponize them, and then it would fuck everything up and they’d eat an entire Syrian village. Then they’d try to blow up the raptors with drones, miss and hit an orphanage, and then the raptors would eat the survivors.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, a whole genre of anti-war films were openly antagonistic towards the US military. Since 9/11 though, we’ve had a big uptick in Michael Bay-style “rah-rah-rah”-ism. The truth is that the military is full of alpha dipshit bullies like Hoskins who believe themselves to be strategic geniuses while jerking off to aerial footage of aircraft carriers. It’s incredibly refreshing to once again see a giant-budget movie like Jurassic World treat the military in the time-honored tradition of Kubrick, Stone, and Coppola.
Jurassic World isn’t a perfect movie, but it deserves some damn respect. Also the dinosaurs are cool.
