I’m cautiously positive after seeing the full trailer for Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. But since it’s a new, VFX-heavy installment in a beloved franchise, the film is catching some flak for its full-CGI spectacle shots (that gate shot is the talk of the town), disaster film scale, and the lack of levity in Chris Pratt’s character.
What a lot of you may not know is that Jurassic World sprung a minor leak yesterday. Universal did a great job of playing video whack-a-mole, and the leak didn’t get a lot of press. Perhaps the reason we saw the full trailer today (instead of the intended Thursday) is that leak. Disney did the same thing with the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer. After all, it is to the studio’s benefit that we see a more accurate representation of the final product. The cat was on its way out of the bag, so Universal may have decided to just yank that fucker out. Voilá!
What some of us saw yesterday was an earlier cut of the trailer, with a lot of incomplete VFX. Some person who was watching the trailer on a monitor at some marketing firm recorded what he saw in several increments, and posted it on his Instagram account. It was quickly deleted, but some eagle-eyed and quick witted person ripped those video files and published them to a few places. Somehow, I didn’t see the story pop up on any of the major movie blogs. Embeds and links quickly went dead. I won’t post the video here, since it’ll likely get squashed, but you can probably find it if you look hard enough.
Let’s talk about what got cut, because it might flesh a few things out for some of you naysayers. FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, BEWARE OF SPOILERS.
The scene with the mosasaur eating the shark was there, but cut a bit differently. We hear the show announcer say “Okay, folks! She’s a little shy, so give her a hand when she comes out.” The mosasaur bursts from the lagoon, and her jaws slam shut. Cut to black.
We hear Bryce Dallas Howard’s character deliver a variation on that classic line: “Welcome to Jurassic World.”
There’s another shot of the two main youngsters in their gyrosphere, but the big acrylic bubble is missing. The blue roll cage is there, and the vehicle appears to be a real, moving prop. The acrylic bubble and reflections will be added later.
Chris Pratt’s character, holding a rifle and flashing a roguish grin, says “Like takin’ a stroll through the woods… sixty-five million years ago.”
Some people are complaining about the film’s “tame” raptors, but that’s not the word for them. Like tigers or wolves, they can be trained, but they’re still wild animals, and very unpredictable. We see a raptor about to pounce on a man (possibly a park worker) in a blue outfit. Chris Pratt’s character, panicked, intervenes at the last second by rushing between the raptor and the man. “Stand down, girl!” He says with a raised hand. The raptors surrounding him back up a few paces. “Good!”
We get a shot of B.D. Wong as Dr. Wu, describing the film’s monstrous dinosaur baddie: “She was designed to be bigger than a T-Rex.”
We see a minigun, mounted in a blue helicopter, firing down into the jungle.
Chris Pratt makes a remark about “(inaudible) thousand people… they have nowhere to go!”
There are additional, swooping POV shots over the panicked masses running through the park.
Several pteranodons are latched onto a helicopter, which spins out of control. This reminds me of a deleted sequence from The Lost World.
Chris Pratt says (in typical action hero fashion), “We’re goin’ after it with everything we’ve got.”
The two main kids are strapped in their gyrosphere, as the POV of a large predator comes down at them. They scream, much like Lex and Tim seen through the sunroof of the Explorer.
That’s the gist of it, folks. To those of you unhappy with Chris Pratt’s dialogue: these are trailer lines, the bland action hero stuff. And yes, they’re uninspiring. His character definitely won’t have the irreverent sense of humor we loved in Guardians of the Galaxy, which makes we wonder where this film’s comic relief is. I have a suspicion it’ll be Jake Johnson, who has been absent from the film’s marketing so far.
I’ve also read some complaints that this looks like all the other JP films mixed together; a rehash. Allow me to counter. This appears to lean on the structure of the first film, and it will make some big cinematographic homages, but what I’m liking about it is that it’s delivering on the promises of the first film. We all thought the franchise would eventually veer into dinosaurs on the mainland. Widespread dino terror, like the ending of The Lost World, but that third act is pretty widely reviled by series fans. I was ten when I saw The Lost World in the theater. I despised that San Diego sequence then, and I still despise it now. Jurassic belongs in the park (at least for now), and I’m glad screenwriting partners Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow managed to convince Universal of that.
Like I said… cautiously positive. We’ll get lots more outta this marketing campaign before June 15, though.