Much Ado About Zara

Up until now, we had held our breath, attempting to make our own opinions about Jurassic World but knowing that they would be utterly insignificant until a review from a certain person was received. Today we have gotten that news! Rejoice! Dr. Alan Grant approves of the movie!

Uproxx conducted a short interview with Sam Neill, and of course they had to ask him about JW. His response reminds me a lot of Harrison Ford with The Force Awakens: he didn’t have a lot to do with the way the movie went or how the new trilogy will go, but he’s glad that us kids enjoyed it and he thought it was pretty neat himself. Here’s the best part of the interview:

When Jurassic World came out, was that something you felt that you had to see?

I was very curious to see it and I’m happy to see it, and I thought they did a really good job. And the actors were real good.

Not returning to the trilogy doesn’t seem to have upset Sam much, whether he was asked to return or not. (I have no idea if he was.) I’m picturing him sitting in the theater, smiling and saying, “What a bunch of nice kids,” while feeding popcorn to the tiny raptor that perpetually sits on his shoulder.

When you were watching it, are you just like, “My character has been through this twice. Why are they still hanging out with those creatures?”

I can’t run as fast as those guys anymore. Even with high heels. I’d be left for dead.

Any JP actor is bound to get the “If 3 park already, why still people make dinosaurz” question, and I have to say this is the best response I’ve seen to it. At least now we have a good reason why a much-awaited Alan cameo in the movie wouldn’t have been a good idea: he might have ended up as dino chow. I would like to see him try to run in heels, though.

They referenced the first movie a lot.

They certainly referenced it a lot.

They didn’t want to just forget it exists.

Yeah, I think it was respectful.

It sounds like he’s trying to get the JP questions over with, but if you read closely between the lines, you can see jealousy that it wasn’t his book that got a cameo.

There were t-shirts with “Jurassic Park” on it.

Right. Boy, what did the English girl do wrong? She got eaten by like three dinosaurs at once. Was she on the phone too much? She did something really wrong.

If the guy who watched a guy get munched by a Spinosaurus and another guy get ripped apart by a raptor and didn’t blink– and lived to indirectly make his assistant jump off a cliff afterward– thinks your death was brutal, it must have been really, really brutal. And just like a lot of others, he doesn’t think Zara’s death was justified just because she was doing her job rather than attending on the two children that had been unexpectedly foisted on her. Clearly he knows a lot about film tropes and which types of characters “deserve” their deaths…

Right. I have no idea. Why did she deserve that? I get why Wayne Knight met a bad fate in the first film…

And you could see poor old Sam Jackson was going to get it, because he’s a smoker. Smokers always die. And the lawyer.

I didn’t know that smokers always die.

Smokers always die, yeah.

But yeah, when I was watching “Jurassic World,” this poor women. Yeah, she’s on the phone a lot, but this seems like…

It wasn’t that big a crime.

I thought she was a perfectly fine human being…

Just ripped her to bits.

… and he doesn’t think Zara’s punishment fit the crime. Whatever Trevorrow was thinking with that scene, let’s hope that advice from the Dinosaur Man himself will dissuade him from thinking of it again.

Yeah, that’s the one scene I didn’t get. The high heels was a big controversy…

I’m fine with high heels. I like people being eaten. And if you’re going to be eaten, you may as well do it spectacularly.

Kudos to him for not taking the heel bait and realizing that everything that can possibly be said about the heel meme already has been. Also, he likes dinosaur carnage! I really want to watch JW with Sam Neill now. He could talk about the inaccuracies in the dinosaurs’ designs and we could scream “TEAR ‘EM APART! TEAR ‘EM APART!” together.

That’s a good point.

Yeah. Just pull her into the pool and she gets eaten underwater? No.

No, she gets three different dinosaurs coming at her.

Let’s shock the entire crowd. He’s a great leading man, by the way.

Chris Pratt?

Yeah. Terrific. He’s got the bike-riding skills.

He’s great at riding his bike, but he should leave the raptor-whispering to the experts. I saw that shade there, Sam. Niiiiice.

So in other words, Jurassic World has the all-important approval of Alan Grant, and it can continue on its flight in peace. The interview doesn’t ask whether Neill would accept an offer to return for the sequel, but I dearly hope he does– just like I said for the first movie in the new trilogy, I want a cameo by grumpy-old-man Grant and I want it now.

Speaking of women meeting grisly deaths by pterodactyl, Universal Studios Japan has released a new advertisement for their upcoming Flying Dinosaur ride, which forms a cruelly cheery mockery of Zara’s end. In it, an innocent zookeeper/ park attendant lady leads 2 other women through Jurassic World:

The girl in the pink is contemplating whether to add “Dinosaur Hat Wearer” to her acting resume.

But the pterodactyls break out again– someone should really put some kind of invisible fence or something around that aviary– and they begin to wreak havoc, and that better not be a Spinosaurus I see in the background! Not in my JW canon! Don’t make me come back there!

If that isn’t a T. rex, Baryonyx or Suchomimus, it better end up in the steakhouse.

Why, God, why?

After the animal that for all intents and purposes should’ve been in destroyed-skeleton form in this trailer leaves, we’re forced to endure the brutal whimsy of a woman soaring through the air to her inevitable demise.

The smile of the doomed crosses her innocent face. Why must we bear witness to such suffering? Need we be reminded of our mortality while in line for a Dumbo-style ride?

The creature brings her flailing body to its nest.

Soon, the flaplings will get a taste of human flesh; it will not, by far, be their first.

All is suffering now.

Alas, we will only be reborn in the afterlife, if there even is one. Before long, our heroine will find out. But she is not alone on the end of her mortal coil:

But humans are a sympathetic species. When we die, we die together, holding hands as we fly into the abyss. Universal Studios!

Grim commercial aside, this looks like a really interesting roller coaster. It seems to mimic the design of Manta, a coaster in Universal’s neighbor park SeaWorld where riders hang face-down from their  vehicle. Except in this case, you aren’t gliding along the ocean floor with one of the gentle giants of the deep– you’re being abducted by a murderous flying lizard. Fun! At least you get to have a good time in the meantime, though; the ride looks like it’s especially designed to make you feel like you’re soaring above Jurassic World, and those loops to the right look like they’d make you feel weightless. If there’s one hope I have for the ride, it’s that they keep the small forest below the coaster intact and make it look like it does in that concept art, because it’s much easier to feel like you’re flying with the pteranodons above Jurassic World when you’re looking down on concrete. Universal always pulls off its theming extraordinarily, though, so if you’re lucky enough to be able to ride the Flying Dinosaur when it opens, you probably have nothing but good things to look forward to.

Finally, I’m happy to relay the news that Chronicle Collectibles will be producing 1:6 scale Jurassic Park/ World human figures! The first two in their line-up will be Alan Grant and Owen Grady, the latter of which you can partially see in its 3D render form:

And later, because I informed the company that I would sell them for my actual soul for an Ian Malcolm figure and apparently nine other people would as well, we found out that a third figure is also on its way:

Welp, looks like I’m selling a kidney.

And to close on a completely perfect note, straight from the Mosasaur trainer Courtney James Clark herself, this is canon: