For the week of September 17th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to Blu-ray. Why, oh why, does Universal struggle so much with making movies about ravenous dinosaurs terrorizing tiny humans? For such a can't-miss idea (people create dinosaurs, dinosaurs chase people, dinosaurs eat people. Rinse, repeat), the likes of Steven Spielberg, Joe Johnston, and now The Orphanage auteur J.A. Bayona have been able to make exactly one-and-three-quarters good movies in a now-five-film franchise. I will say this: Fallen Kingdom does represent an improvement over Colin "The Captain" Trevorrow's abysmal Jurassic World. Narratively, both movies stumble over "And then..." plotting and nonsense twists - the first Jurassic World plays like a bad Irwin Allen disaster picture in a theme park, while Fallen Kingdom artlessly grafts together a traditional Jurassic Park adventure (dinosaurs rampage on an island!) with a kid-friendly "Old Dark House" chiller - but at least Bayona is a far more expert craftsperson than the bewilderingly average Trevorrow. Bayona successfully invokes some Spielbergian wonder in the first half as his dinosaur cast tries to escape an island-destroying volcano (he mines more pathos than you might expect from a Brachiosaurus panicking as smoke and lava rush to overtake it), and he co-opts a lot of The Orphanage's haunted-house atmosphere as the human characters play hide-and-seek with a vicious new beast inside an isolated mansion. What he can't do is make us care about any of the proceedings. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard's bickering leads are just as obnoxious as they were in Jurassic World (she's still a nagging killjoy; he's still a bore when he isn't playing Andy Dwyer), while Rafe Spall and Toby Jones offer tired variations on the Jurassic series' long-standing repository of corporate douchebags waiting to meet the sharp end of a dinosaur mouth. Even the film's bifurcated structure doesn't work because the two movies nested within this one are so different from one another. And can we retire the whole "dumb scientists create dumb genetic monstrosity that eats everyone trope"? Dinosaurs are already inherently scary! You don't need to create a sociopathic super-powered raptor (the "Indoraptor" because YAWN) to make us worry about them! I'd say that Isabella Sermon's sweet, mysterious kid is the best thing in the film, except then you get to the third act, and the movie betrays her character for the worst of reasons. I'll say this: I'm going to echo Drew McWeeny's great review of the film and criticize Fallen Kingdom for taking a whole trilogy to deconstruct John Sayles and William Monahan's infamous Jurassic Park 4 script instead of having the guts to jump right into that screenplay's gonzo madness. I can't believe I'm saying this, but no more dinosaurs, please.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie is headed down the same well-beaten Jurassic path. It must be difficult to innovate the same basic concept: dinosaurs run wild, humans run for their lives, chaos ensues. Admittedly there are some new twists - the addition of an erupting volcano adds a fair bit of drama and a newfound source of intensity missing from the previous films - but it's not until the second half, which blends the stuff of dinosaur nightmares with some more heady ideas and concepts that the movie finally finds a distinction from the others in the pack. Perhaps most interestingly, the film offers a unique peek into the earliest history of Jurassic Park and introduces some of the brain-trust behind the original idea, those who were very close to, but previously unseen with, the old guard face of the franchise, John Hammond. The movie delves fairly deep, albeit with action still the main driving force alongside, into some interesting and dangerous ideas that concern both hard science and hard profiteering, neither of which, admittedly, are necessarily new to the series but that are presented in a way that advances the understanding of the world within the series while still allowing for plenty of bread-and-butter dinosaur action scenes and scares, the latter in particular in the film's final act."
From Warner Archive comes the prison docudrama Papillon, which comes on the heels of the now-out-of-print 2011 Digibook edition. Director Franklin J. Schaffner was a consummate journeyman and as such was more reliant than most directors on his screenwriters. Give him a masterful script, and you get something like his iconic Planet of the Apes (penned by Michael Wilson and The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling) or his striking biopic Patton (with its great Francis Ford Coppola screenplay); give him something of a lesser caliber, and you get Papillon. Keep in mind - I don't dislike the film. Schaffner gets a good, tic-heavy performance from Dustin Hoffman (as the mouse-like prisoner Louis Dega), and he directs McQueen to what might be his finest at-bat. As the title character, McQueen uses his taciturn intensity to keep us off balance. We can never fully read Henri "Papillon" Charrière, and so we're always wondering whether his silences hide a cunning escape plan or the psychological ravages of his brutal prison incarceration. However, the script - by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr. - doesn't match the labors of the film's leading men. You can't really blame Trumbo and Semple - prison movies are tough, especially when the historical record involves as much waiting and solitary confinement as Papillon's does. Still, the two writers struggle to give the movie much in the way of a formal structure, which Schaffner desperately needs. Most of the film plays as a slog, with McQueen and Hoffman oh-so-slowly drifting from one malady to the next, except the pacing makes us impatient in the worst way. To Schaffner's credit, he pulls off a nicely suspenseful/moving interlude at a leper colony, and I love how he ends the relationship between Papillon and Dega at Devil's Island. But you feel the miles on this one.
Of Papillon, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "works in spite of its length and deliberately slow pacing. McQueen and Hoffman make a rather odd couple as co-stars, and each makes occasional missteps. Hoffman doesn't seem to know whether he's channeling Bogart all of the time, and that makes for an at times uneven performance, though he has a couple of really incredible moments, including his tearful realization of what Papillon's loyalty to Dega has exacted from Charrière both physically and spiritually. McQueen doesn't even make a pretense at playing his character as a Frenchman, but if you can get past that disparity, he delivers a really haunting performance for the bulk of the film. He, too, occasionally mugs unnecessarily, including an uncomfortable sequence when Papillon and Dega realize they've been taken advantage of (for the second time) in an escape attempt and the boat they think is waiting for them turns out to be a dilapidated wreck."
Finally, Shout Factory is offering a new steelbook edition of Oliver Stone's wrenching Vietnam drama Platoon. It's funny - for a movie as acclaimed as Platoon was in 1986 (it won both the Best Picture AND Best Director Oscars), people tend to underrate it today. Part of that, I'm sure, is due to Stone's increasingly erratic reputation, but I also remember the tide turning as Hollywood began to experiment with more formal variations on the Vietnam drama. Compared to the horror-movie nightmare of Hamburger Hill, the icy surrealism of Full Metal Jacket, or the politicized polemic of Stone's own Platoon follow-up Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon can't help but seem a little quaint. And in fairness, Stone is using his own Vietnam memories as a backdrop for a more elemental morality play: how a green Army volunteer (Charlie Sheen, in the best performance he'll ever give) found himself pulled between the sweetly pragmatic Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe, all gentle reserve) and the nihilistic Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger, back when he was one of the most exciting American actors alive). It's Good and Evil personified, or Adam and Eve lost in the Garden (to borrow one of Stone's favorite metaphors), but to call what Stone does with this material "simple" does Platoon a huge disservice. Stone's execution is feverish, hallucinatory. Early on in pre-production, he and technical consultant Dale Dye decided that the skirmishes should play out in 360 degrees, a choice that puts the characters (and us) under constant fire on all sides. We better understand their paranoia and exhaustion, as well as why both Elias and Barnes behave the way they do. Elias sees this chaos and decides to become a lodestar for his men, and Barnes tries to embody all the evil surrounding him. And the scary thing is, both approaches seem reasonable. In their very different ways, Elias and Barnes want to gird themselves against an inhuman world. Stone builds the tension, crescendoing twice: the first time with a death that became the film's poster image (and that Tropic Thunder lampooned mercilessly), and the second time with an extended battle sequence that remains one of the most horrifying depictions of modern warfare I've ever seen. Revisit Platoon. See if you don't feel the same way.
Martin Liebman wrote of the film's 25th Anniversary Edition that Platoon "not a movie made with entertainment in mind; certainly it may be seen as such by more naive audiences who may lack the life experiences to truly appreciate the purpose behind Stone's work (read: many children and young adults), but most mature viewers will find in the film a transformative, or at the very least enlightening, narrative that desperately searches for what shred of good there may be in war, amidst what is not only chaos of the physical sort but the destruction of the very essence of man. In Platoon, Stone analyzes three critical elements: the destruction of the physical body, the corruption of the mind, and the disappearance of the soul (or humanity), all a result of the cumulative effects of war. So often it is only the first that is emphasized by those who criticize war, but it is truly those greater losses that occur on the emotional and metaphysical levels that leave the scars that truly never heal. Indeed, as the tagline for Platoon reads, 'the first casualty of war is innocence.' That is the essence of the film, but from the destruction of innocence and the necessary maturation that comes from it must yield that desire to 'to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning in this life.'"