I Have Been Bitten and Fooled So Many Times
If you're going to keep doing that to it, why can't you just let it rest instead?
They keep digging up the corpse of a beloved, lifelong friend. That’s never a good thing. There’s never a dignified follow-up to digging up a corpse. It makes me sick every time I think about it.
It’s partially on me, though. Because when they tell me, “Hey, we just dug up the corpse of your beloved friend and we’re gonna do something with it,” I shouldn’t respond, “Can I see?”
I’ve been a quitter in my life before. Who hasn’t? As I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to be more of a completionist. I try to finish things once I’ve started them out of principle – at least important things. I try to see through the things I tell people that I’m going to do.
It’s good to do that. It’s a righteous thing to make good on your promises and show that your word carries weight. It feels good to finish something that you put your mind to, even if it was hard.
But there’s a line.
It’s also good and healthy to know when to quit something – to recognize when something is unhealthy for you and to avoid the sunk cost fallacy of it all.
It’s a worthwhile trait to recognize when you’ve been fooled once and avoid the shame reverse-Uno-carding onto you.
I loved the book Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. They turned it into a movie with Natalie Portman, who I also love. I wasn’t sure how they were going to turn it into a movie, because the whole book deals with some metaphysical shit that the human brain can’t comprehend, let alone recreate on film. It’s one of the rare 21st century works that seems best fit – or perhaps only fit – for the written word. I read the whole thing in one sitting on a flight from Philly to Vegas, and I think that made me like it more. There was no interruption in the plot, the moods swung while I flew over flyover country.
Loved it. Told everyone they should read it.
Then I checked out the sequels.
Vandermeer apparently wrote all of the “Southern Reach” trilogy, as it’s called, knowing it would release as a trilogy.
I have not written any books yet, but I feel like even when your plot deals with clandestine, shadowy government agencies and other-wordly entities that our puny ape brands cannot begin to comprehend, you should at least know how to land the thing. You should have an ending in mind.
Otherwise you’re just writing LOST, which I also watched all of.
I read the second “Southern Reach” book, Authority, on the beach in Jamaica as I was gearing up to have my guts ripped out on account of the cancer. It was a difficult read. All style, no substance. No real plot to speak of. If you asked me what it was about I’d struggle. Surface level characters. And, the worst part, it was just fucking boring. But middle sequels in a trilogy can often be the necessary bridge between two epics. The vegetables. The palette cleanser before the big finale. Fine.
The final book, Acceptance, was somehow worse. The same boring, the same clunky, the same self-satisfaction. I wanted to throw it into the river, and I told everybody to do the same.
My favorite movie of all time is Jurassic Park. It is the first movie – the first real movie, at least – that I loved, and continue to love it today. I could go on and on, and have, about how well it holds up, the reasons it holds up, blah blah blah. Guess what? The book also rocks in its own different ways and similar ways, too.
But then there are sequels. Sequels, inherently, are not a bad thing. There are many good sequels. But returns diminish. You can only return to the well so many times. I’m not here to rehash what other movie critics have written over the years about the quality of the Jurassic Park franchise.
All I know is that when they dug the series back up, dusted it off a little, cast some of today’s biggest and most handsome stars and, to quote the movie, spared no expense with the visual thrill ride, it didn’t work. To quote another movie, sometimes dead is better.
But I kept going. I kept watching. I saw the first one in theaters and, after it was over, I was like a little kid who was so excited for something only to be let down, putting on a facade and brave face that it actually isn’t as heartbreaking as it is, because I was an adult who was so excited for something and was let down. They brought back my favorite movie, and I was able to see it in theaters opening night.
We walked out of the theater and I tried to find compliments for it. At least Jimmy Buffett made a cameo. At least … I don’t know, they said a line from the old ones.
The second one sucked, too, and I’ll limit my words here because I know you’re all worried that I’m going to stray from the point and this will become even more of a rant-fest than it is.
The third one, I once again saw in theaters and my hopes, once again, were high.
Shame on me. I have been bitten enough times that I should have known to be shy by now, but apparently I am just a gullible rube.
After bringing back the original Power Trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, they still managed to find new ways to defile a beloved corpse by doing things like making the central plot about bugs, throwing characters (importantly: played by beautiful movie stars) at problems and leaning too heavily on the Michael Bay sections of the production budget.
Hoooo boy was I mad. I almost left. I’ve never left a movie theater, I don’t think, and I was pretty damn close. I huffed and puffed all the way home after that one. I might’ve even cried. I had just had surgery where they ripped my guts out on account of the cancer so I was in a vulnerable state at that point.
This past Christmas, I went in to the Barnes and Noble in Philly looking for a book for my dad. I saw a table display of new fiction, and there was one big one with a shimmering alligator, a familiar font, a familiar name, and a title that started with “A.”
Turns out my man Jeff Vandermeer had written a prequel to Annihilation. I picked it up. I considered it. I looked around to make sure no one was watching and would tell my loved ones what I was up to, that I was relapsing. To quote another movie, I was practically tearing up telling the book that “Just don’t know how to quit you.”
So I bought it. I had to see things through, right? More importantly, I had to give him one more chance. I’m not sure how many times we’re at the “fool me” order of operations or who the shame now rests upon. Probably me, cause the book fucking sucks for all of the reasons it ever did.
And you know what? I called it. With about 50 pages left I realized that this was not going to get any better. This wasn’t going to be fun. This wasn’t going to end in a satisfying way. And when I logged this DNF on Goodreads I warned others that “I am going to throw this book into the river” in the hopes that they don’t find it like Jumanji or something and naively check it out.
That’s a good movie that they dug up, too.
They just keep fucking doing it, man.
They’re making another Jurassic Park – or Jurassic World, I guess. I had read they were doing it but tried to push it from my mind. I started taking meditation seriously after that surgery where they ripped my guts out on account of the cancer, and I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with it.
Eventually, though, the trailer crossed my YouTube suggestions and I was once again powerless in the face of something I knew wasn’t going to be good for me. And, naively, because I am perhaps a sucker, I said, “You know, maybe they got it right this time?”
The trailer did not immediately piss me off. I even thought, “OK, I’ll check it out,” but maybe with parameters that I won’t follow like “I won’t see it in theaters” or “I won’t wear my Jurassic Park shirt” or “I won’t tell people I’m on my way to see it so they won’t say, ‘Oof, sorry,’ knowing how bad it is before most people even saw it because word travels fast nowadays.”
I will see it because I have learned nothing. But, I have at least learned enough to know that if they’re going to dig up the corpse of my beloved friend, I should at least get to say what I think they should do with it. And, since we all know they’re won’t hear me out when I say, “Put it back in the ground and let it live in our memories,” I have some suggestions. Rules, I’d even call them:
1. No one signs on for a franchise.
The first Jurassic Park worked, first as a book and then as a movie, because it was a standalone. You watched it (or read it) believing with every second that Drs. Grant, Sattler or Malcolm could die, even though they were played by very good looking and famous people. In Jurassic World, we knew full well that they would not kill off the humorless and muscular husk of Chris Pratt, nor would they defile Bryce Dallas Howard’s white outfits with too much gore. With the likes of very attractive and lucrative stars like Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, I fear they will once again not heed my warning, and all dramatic tension will be gone. Because that’s what works so well with the first JP. I have seen that movie a gazillion times, and each time I watch my heartrate still goes up at certain points. It’s not terror – it’s dread.
The Jurassic World cast was on for a trilogy, so the stakes were nonexistent. The only characters we knew would get their comeuppance were either throwaways introduced with barely a name mentioned or the clear villains. Which brings me to my next point.
2. No mustache-twirling villains.
In Jurassic Park you could argue that the villains are Newman (real character name Dennis Nedry) and John Hammond. I am here to argue, though, that they are not villains, merely normal men who fall victim to one of the most common things normal men fall victim to: greed. Wow. Newman works for Jurassic Park as a computer man, presumably an underpaid and underappreciated computer man, and starts dealing with a competitor to steal and sell dino DNA. He dies in the process, in a scene that is horrifying in the movie and somehow even more fucked up in the book. Gives me the shivvies thinking about it.
Hammond is the stand-in for man’s hubris, playing god to, wouldn’t you know it, dig up the corpse of something that should’ve been allowed to rest and thinking that he’s built different so it won’t blow up in his face. But neither of them are long monologue-delivering caricatures. They’re believable men. How many of those guys exist right at this moment that you can think of? Tech dorks who want more power and influence and generational wealth-wielding demigods believing themselves immune to consequences? It’s real. And guess what, they don’t always get their due. They often get away with it.
Especially in the World franchise, the baddies are just different Monsters of the Week for each movie, and they each get their big cinematic death. It’s never undignified. It’s never out of the spotlight. It’s never scary or dreadful. It’s not believable. Which brings me to my next point.
3. Animals do not understand dramatic tension
If you have a pet, think about feeding time. You open the can or bag or whatever, and they immediately go to town, almost knocking you down in the process. This is because they are hungry, and it is their animal instinct to eat as soon as possible to get rid of that hunger. Or think about if you have a cat and they get a mouse in your house. There’s no drawn out scene where the cat backs the mouse into a corner and sneers as it gets closer, giving time for a deus to machina its way in real quick at the last second.
One of the ways I was fooled into believing that the third Jurassic World would end on a high note, or at least a note that seems to show that they understand the source material, was director Colin Trevorrow talking about the plot months before it came out:
Trevorrow did not want to depict dinosaurs terrorizing cities, which he considered unrealistic. He wanted to honor Michael Crichton's novels Jurassic Park (1990) and The Lost World (1995), believing that humans and dinosaurs "battling it out in the city streets is a different kind of film than what he would've done". Trevorrow described a world where "a dinosaur might run out in front of your car on a foggy backroad, or invade your campground looking for food. A world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks. We hunt animals, we traffic them, we herd them, we breed them, we invade their territory and pay the price, but we don't go to war with them."
Fuckin’ A. That’s right! But then he didn’t do that at all and instead had velociraptors practically delivering soliloquies as they stalked their helpless, good-looking and lucrative prey.
The movie is about Chaos Theory, of the chaos of animals – animals thrust into an environment that is not their own – and the chaos that ensues, despite man’s best efforts to tame and pimp out chaos for monetary gain. Do not even get me started on them tearing out that extremely load-bearing wall by letting Chris Pratt control them by fucking putting his palm up in front of them like it’s “Swiper, no swiping.” I could’ve levitated in the theater from pure anger.
Also a note about dinosaurs:
4. Stop making the T-rex the superhero
Much like they create stupid human villains, the producers of Jurassic World also had to give each movie a dinosaur villain that we understood was MEAN and BAD and EVIL. Usually, the T-Rex, the dreaded T-Rex from the first movie that killed Gennaro on the toilet and tossed Timmy into the trees and did countless other shit because she was scared and confused, had to step in and clean up the mess. She has enough on her plate. Stop making her step in to defend the humans from whatever lazy dinosaur they cook up for the movie. Which brings me to my final point:
5. No more god damn hybrids, be them human or reptilian
I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I do. Dinosaurs are the coolest thing in the world. The very fact that they ever existed is a miracle to me. One time one of my friends in college told me she was brought up to believe dinosaurs weren’t real and I almost broke down in tears not because I was mad that her parents were apparently backwards science-deniers, or that this person went to the same college that I was proud to go to, but because she denied herself the existence of fuckin’ dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! DINOSAURS.
You don’t need to make up new dinosaurs to sell us on this. It’s like how the media would keep trying to stretch the truth when Donald Trump would do something stupid. You don’t need to lie to make him look like he did something stupid. He’s doing that already. You don’t need to invent new dinosaurs to impress us, because dinosaurs are already impressive enough.
I’m just so sick of it is all.
If I wanted to write another 3,000 words in an already tedious article, I’d get into how the modern filmmaking world is not conducive to the likes of Jurassic Park, so a good Jurassic World redux is impossible — much like how the world of the 1990s was inhospitable for the dinosaurs of more than 5,000 years ago. (That’s a joke.) But others have done that and will do it better than me, so you already know about that. I just want to vent about what I feel like they could be doing, rather than what they think they should be doing.
On that note, I wish I could say that I was strong enough to not buy tickets to see Jurassic World Rebirth when it hits theaters on July 2. I’ll be there. I’ll probably even wear the shirt. But I’ll know full well that I’m going in with the chance of being once again horrified with what they did with the corpse of my beloved friend that means so much to me. I have been bitten and fooled so many times that it doesn’t even make a difference anymore.
But, if they try to CGI Jimmy Buffett in there for a posthumous cameo, I just might finally lose it.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is PUP.
Post credits scene:
I actually had a whole plan of looping in the Twilight movies, which I just watched for the first time last weekend. The first three, at least. Same deal, thought “Well that was bad but it can only go up from here, right?” But neglected not to for space, and also, I think at a certain point I became so desensitized to it I didn’t even see it as bad anymore. Not great movies, though. But I do have to see how the whole situation ends for them…