I don't feel like editing this or doing any polishing whatsoever. Every time I try, I lose momentum and kind of fall into myself. I overthink about how to word everything and lose track of where I'm heading. For some reason how I've processed this movie has coalesced into a kind of missile and every time I try to properly prime it for firing, it gets lodged in the chamber. So I'm just going to pop it in and hit the fucking trigger.
Spoilers
The Platts are sent back in time just as we are sent back in time. The '80s are, just like this [and every] era of dinosaurs, a time that we don't belong in. Nostalgia is unhealthy. Just look at Trump's whole fucking slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' or any other fucking 'Retvrn' ideology. Don't move forward; regress, repeat, repeal. The past is the threat here.
Considering all the geysers, volcanoes, humidity from jungle fauna, and the change in the sun's brightness...they're immediately met with literal climate change. So, follow me from there...
What's even more interesting is that the 'progress' that's brought back in time causes serious destruction. It's not a coincidence that this is based in 1982 Detroit, the 'Motor City' at the tail end of the auto industry essentially fucking over Michigan. Hell, that's why the Dad is laid off and working his pizza delivery gig (surely he's one of thousands). So it's not nothing that the fire that ravages the land and displaces dinosaurs is caused by a car being bust open. Seeing them flee from the flames means Mitchell is being a bit on the nose [complimentary] evoking dinosaur extinction with fossil fuels. It's fucking delicious, actually. Their extinction, our extinction, living in the past, no regard for the future. Fuck
There's a sense of hopelessness running under every scene. This isn't the Amblin homage I think people are expecting, but a critique of that very thing. Really funny that J.J. Abrams' name is on this. It'd be like if Chris Hansen was executive producer of PRIMETIME. Euphoria gif of Maddy asking "Is this fucking play about us?"
My favorite scene is when Audrey goes to the car to listen to Steve Winwood's Valerie and sob. She doesn't wail or scream, she just simply sobs. This teenager is confronting the fact that her future is no longer ahead of her. Earlier she'd asked her parents over and over if this was the end of the world, if they're stuck here forever, but she was never given a straight or satisfying answer. So the way she steers the wheel with quiet desperation and playfulness for a precious few seconds before letting her hands fall actually took a breath away from me.
She's never going to learn to drive, she's never going to college, she's never going to meet her 'Valerie'. Aside from every other reason I've given about this not being a nostalgic pastiche: there's the wonderful lack of overt references or sweaty banter. Anything referential is regional esoterica (like the cans of Faygo or the baseball team in the newspaper). Mitchell is interested in capturing a specific place in time, not the time itself necessarily. It's a personal snapshot so no 'member berries or Easter eggs. Well, aside from the giant pile of shit (thankfully, no one says it). And later when we see other piles of shit, there are bits of clothes and shoes in them. That's why I love the Audrey car scene so much: this is serious to her. Neither she nor her brother make snarky jokes on behalf of Mitchell hating the premise of his own movie. He makes his characters face it head-on without ironic detachment and that earnestness is very M. Night [complimentary].
This movie's ending is so interesting considering how Mitchell builds up to it.
He accumulates so many shots of portraits, mostly juxtaposed with people dead or in peril. He also shows us so many images of people framed in windows. There's even a great shot from inside a house tracking the allosaurus chasing the family as we see them through windows but in the foreground is a wall littered with portraits passing by in the same frame.
Then he echoes this at the end as we get portraits showing how everyone has changed during the two year time-jump: Brian has a girlfriend, Audrey is dating Jeanette and in College, Denise is a published author...but the last photo is of Greg 1.
It's the Polaroid that Denise took of him in front of the mating dinosaurs. Then Mitchell pans up from this Polaroid to the family in the backyard having a get-together. So we see Greg 2 along with Jeanettes 1 and 2. It's such a crazy fucking contrast to give us this sequence of growth and change for these characters but we're meant to confront the disconnect between the two Gregs depicted. Why even keep this photo? It's a memory of someone who doesn't exist anymore and a reminder that this new person... is someone else. Not to mention Denise essentially had to steal him away from an alternate timeline version of her and her kids, leaving them to die. Again, we've traveled through time, and this time all we have to go on for characterization are snapshots. The frame is limited, the time is past, and these people have changed. Except for Greg, he's forever stuck in that Polaroid.
This wrinkle is what makes the movie for me. Of course I love the tension and suspense of all the dino action but the melancholic cynicism saves it from just being a Jurassic Park riff*. This ending is actually a bookend considering how similar the opening is: it's also a BBQ get-together or moreso a block party, actually. There's a sense of community but gradually it's revealed that everyone is hiding, lying, and withholding from one another. A neighbor even shakes Greg's hand and tells him he's a lucky man, he has such a nice family. But once the shit hits fan, that sense of community is fucking evaporated. There is no uniting to work together, just mitigating all the lies and misplaced emotions that have been bottled up.
The scene with the brother returning to kick Brian's ass was such a shock for me that when it resolved itself with the younger kid in the cast begging his brother to stop so they can go find their Mom...I was so clenched up that it took me a bit to process it. It was such an unexpected but satisfying note to leave that on considering they're just two parts of this mosaic of catastrophe. The older brother reserved that anger for Brian and it's just been building because of his new circumstances. So to see it explode and Brian isn't able to fight back or get any kind of resolution beyond taking the beating...it felt ...real. You can even sympathize with this guy because who knows what he and his brother have gone through and now he sees someone who picked on his little brother just roaming around. Of course he's going to pounce and unload that anger regardless of its futility. Just another glimpse into how this community isn't connected in any meaningful way.
And I'm thankful that Mitchell didn't do the typical coming-of-age trope of having Brian become empowered by this situation and use that as a thrust to confront his bully. Because 1) the only reason he's the target of this bully is because he bullied someone and 2) this situation shows just how vulnerable he is. Even his own Mother does the same thing later as she unloads unprocessed anger at him after coming down from the shock of seeing her husband die.
The ending makes it clear that the Platts are still living a lie. It's Carpenter cynicism filtered through a Spielbergian lens. I'm also kicking myself because I jumped the gun comparing Bone Temple to Disclosure Day when this would have made more sense. Fuck
* I'm not stupid, of course I get the Jurassic Park and Back To The Future comparisons. And even Twilight Zone, yes, obviously.
But what I kept thinking of was Star Man.
Carpenter responded to the negative reviews and box office of The Thing being unfairly matched with E.T. with his version of a Spielberg story. And it's about a woman who loses her husband but she's 'reunited' with an alien disguised as him. Gradually she's given a chance to say goodbye to him over the course of the movie. But that's inverted here. She doesn't have to say goodbye, she just replaces him regardless of what it means for their future.
And to think, just earlier, that this timeline's Denise was complaining that her Greg wasn't spending time with them because he was off making pizza deliveries. This time, he never came back... because of Denise 2 ordering a pizza.
I've seen pushback on the use of split-diopters based...solely on the fact that there are split-diopters. I guess they're outright dismissed as purely an exercise in style rather than seen as just a deliberate stylistic choice. I welcome them because they actually give the conversations weight, the dialog feels more intimate and shared, rather than some standard medium shot/reverse shot (it also uses the entire frame which means this wasn't shot for TikTok engagement with everything centered in the frame).
The biggest complaint I've seen is that
"There was no sense of wonder"
Well, clearly Mitchell wasn't going for that.
To fault a movie for not doing something that it was never going to do...isn't conducive. That's why boxing something in to what you expect and not allowing any room for surprise is just a needlessly limiting way to engage with art. You don't go to the stage play of Glengarry Glenn Ross and complain that they never sang anything from Shrek: The Musical, do you?
Expectations are a trap, plain and simple. If you dismiss something for what it isn't, you're not engaging with what it is. Which is incredibly uncurious behavior that can lead to anti-art dismissiveness and that shit will erode your spirit.
There's no sense of 'wonder' because he wanted this to be scary and he achieved just that. Any romanticism of the past would negate the rest of the movie.
