I Saw Jurassic World: Dominion So That You Don’t Have To

Warning: total spoilers.

Jurassic World: Dominion is not a good movie. Let’s get that out of the way up top. Given how terrible the first two Jurassic World movies were, I wasn’t expecting it to be, and yet I felt the need to see it anyway, just to make sure. Possibly this coloured my perception of it from the outset, but generally speaking, I’m not a person who purposefully sets out to hatewatch things, as I’d much rather be pleasantly surprised by an okayish film than proven right by a dud. I will, however, spitefinish an aggravating film in order to justify writing about it afterwards, and having sat through all 146 minutes of Dominion – unlike my mother, who walked out of our session and went home after the first five minutes because it was so goddamn loud – I feel the need to save others the time and money of doing likewise.

At every level of execution, Dominion is sloppily made. It has the feel of a group project where only one person was really trying, leading everyone else to coast along on their coattails without stopping to consider whether their work itself, for all the effort put into it, was actually any good. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the dinosaurs themselves, which ought to be the best thing about a goddamn dinosaur movie, but which in Dominion are woefully underwhelming. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mixing practical effects and CGI – in fact, done well, the results can be spectacular, as per the original Jurassic Park film – but here, the inconsistency is maddening. The practical effects look rubbery and cheap, but even that wouldn’t matter if they had any soul; instead, they have less personality than the titular 90s sitcom Dinosaurs and are considerably less memorable.

The dinosaur CGI, meanwhile, is really only good for two things: dramatic, distant landscape shots of dinosaurs in the modern world, and very slow closeups. Put them in motion, however, and the animals end up with a weird, furze-edged blur to them, as if they’ve been clumsily greenscreened in circa 2003. Every scene with fast-running raptors – and there are a number of these – looks like a video game cutscene where your custom-built player-character is moving through a pre-rendered environment: there’s that constant sense of something fake being imposed on an a setting rather than being part of it, and for a film with this sort of budget, that’s inexcusable. Nor have any lessons been learned from the first two films regarding a consistent sense of scale: the dinosaur sizes wax and wane depending on the camera angle, changing from moment to moment in such an egregious fashion that even my nine year old noticed. And to top things off, the climactic dinosaur-on-dinosaur fight scene – tacked on and plot-pointless though it is – looks like it was shot in a gymsock only sporadically lit by a pen-light: you can barely see anything, and when you do, it’s shaky to the point of incoherence.

With veteran names like Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Sam Neill returned to the cast, you might hope the acting was good, but it’s not. With the exception of a few bit players, the performances are uniformly flat, a failing I’m inclined to lay directly at the feet of director and EP Colin Trevorrow. In addition to directing the first Jurassic World and executive producing Fallen Kingdom, Trevorrow has writing credits for all three films, and frankly that goes a long way towards explaining why they never get any better. Trevorrow’s dialogue is flat, his pacing abysmal and his plotting worse; that he also manages to get consistently stilted performances out of some otherwise talented actors makes him the quadruple threat no-one asked for. As with the dinosaurs, he also doesn’t know how to shoot people in anything other than closeup or running at a distance, presumably because letting the characters inhabit the space for more than two seconds at a time would require him to use functional, character-developing dialogue and a basic understanding of how to block non-action sequences. Given Hollywood’s propensity to let mediocre white men fail upwards, however, this doubtless means Disney will snap him up for the MCU or Star Wars, so it’s hard to feel too bad for him.

Another constant issue was the sound, which – look. Possibly the obscene volume of the action scenes at our session, which chased my mother out of the cinema and had the rest of us watching with our hands over our ears, was the fault of our local cinema. I’ve been there many times before – recently, even, to see Top Gun: Maverick, which to my great annoyance is a superbly constructed film – and never felt like my eardrums were being blown out, but perhaps today was an exception. Whatever the case, the dialogue was normal, but the music and sound effects came through at a volume that could shatter glass, and while the cinema might bear some blame, the clear disparity between the two felt very much like a sound balancing failure, such that if I’d been watching it at home, I suspect I’d have been constantly turning the volume up for the dialogue, then ratcheting it down again for the action scenes. 0/10, do not recommend.

And then there’s the actual plot.

After a completely pointless, never-to-be-revisited opening scene in which a giant prehistoric sea-crocodile eats a fishing boat in Alaska, Dominion kicks off with what can only be described as a shitty YouTube video recap of the previous two films. As a background montage of what’s meant to be phone-camera footage of regular people encountering dinosaurs plays, a journalistic voiceover explains why dinosaurs have been walking among us for the past four years while also mentioning “by the way, we think there’s a human clone of a lady called Charlotte Lockwood walking around somewhere, only she’s missing,” without ever explaining why this relates to dinosaurs or how anyone knows about her, because in-universe continuity is for the weak. As dinosaurs are now apparently a global problem, with underground genetic engineering and illegal breeding farms cropping up everywhere, we also learn that a company called Biosyn has emerged to do Good Dinosaur Science and is relocating rescued animals to a scenic sanctuary in the Italian mountains, where they can live safely while also being studied for Beneficial Medical Research Purposes. Biosyn is run by a man named Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), which is a callback to the original Jurassic Park, where “Dodgson” was the guy who paid Dennis Nedry to smuggle dinosaur DNA samples out in a shaving cream can. Presumably, this is meant to be the same guy many years later, but as that’s never confirmed and has no real bearing on the plot, it doesn’t actually matter. We get a glimpse of the journalist giving the voiceover walking through some trees as she explains all this, and then she, like so much else in this film, is never seen again.

Cut to Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) engaged in a midnight heist to rescue a random baby dinosaur from an illegal breeding facility. Some action happens as she and her buddy flee, and we see that she’s still in touch with Franklin (Justice Smith) from Fallen Kingdom, who now apparently works for the CIA’s dinosaur division (yes, really). Cut again to Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) as he lassos a random parasaurolophus from horseback, because that’s absolutely a thing you could do without dying. Dinosaur acquired, he proceeds to… I don’t know, hand it over to the dinosaur rescue people? It’s not really clear, and the rest of the herd just goes running off, so there’s not really any point to it except once again Making Chris Pratt Look Cool And Manly. Not to kinkshame anyone, but between this, Owen Grady Looking Like Rough Trade From A Vintage Coke Ad By A Motorcycle in the first film and Owen Grady Building A House By Hand (While Sweating) in the second film, it feels a little like Trevorrow has a particular masc fantasy he’s a little bit obsessed with, and which he perhaps might want to consider working through in a venue other than film. I dunno, man, I’m just spitballing.

Next up, we’re reintroduced to Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), aka Clone Daughter, now aged fourteen, who’s apparently been living in a rustic cabin in the woods with Claire and Owen as her parents for the last four years, because I guess that makes sense. The creepiness of the fact that they took her illegally and have kept her out of school and away from other people, let alone anyone her own age, is completely glossed over as fine, because they’re keeping her safe, you guys! Nor are we invited to wonder how this weird little family unit works; the fact that Claire and Owen weren’t even a couple four years ago goes unacknowledged, while Claire herself has morphed from a highly-strung, child-free CEO in heels into a homesteading mother and partner in flannel who rescues dinosaurs on the side with zero difficulty because the plot requires it of her. Maisie chafes at her confinement, but that’s ascribed to her being fourteen and moody instead of, you know, a kid in a fucked-up situation. Also, Blue the velociraptor is here, and she’s had a baby Blue, even though that should be impossible! But oh noes! A nefarious Dinosaur Bad Guy has followed Owen back from one of his dinosaur hunts and spotted both Maisie and Baby Blue, and is planning to kidnap them!

And then, because this film doesn’t have enough balls in the air, we cut randomly to Texas, where Dr Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) has been called in to investigate after a plague of giant locusts attacks an independent farmstead and eats all their crops. The neighbouring farm, however, remains untouched – because their crop comes from Biosyn seeds. Keen observers might wonder why Satler, who was a paleobotonist in the original film, is now being called in for locust attacks; the answer, as best I can tell, is Because Reasons, with base notes of Studying Extinct Plants Is Basically The Same As Studying Alive Insects, It’s All Science, Just Roll With It. Naturally, then, the only way for Ellie to prove that the giant, provably prehistorically-engineered locusts come from Biosyn – that is, the only company known to be dicking around with dinosaur DNA and whose crops are the only ones the locusts don’t eat, where the fuck else would anyone think the locusts came from – is to join up with her paleontologist ex, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and use her in with chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who now has a gig with Biosyn, so she and Alan can break into their labs and steal a matching DNA sample to prove where the locusts came from. Because this is clearly a job for them, and not, say, any of their journalist or government agency contacts. Obviously.

Back in Rustic Cabinlandia, Maisie and Baby Blue have now been kidnapped, because Maisie disobeyed and went outside on her own! Her protective kidnapper-parents were right after all! So Claire calls up Franklin at the dinosaur CIA, who tells them that the kidnapper is named Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze), and that there’s a sting operation afoot to catch him doing illegal dinosaur stuff, which they should stay out of; he also explains that they have an inside man at Biosyn named Ramsay (Mamoudou Athie). Naturally, Claire and Owen ignore Franklin – or possibly he helps them during this bit; my attention was phasing in and out due to the terrible sound balancing – but either way, they head off to Malta, meet up with Owen’s old dinosaur-taming buddy Barry (Omar Sy), who we met briefly in Jurassic World, and then infiltrate a black market dinosaur bazaar, which, as we’re in Malta, looks exactly as stereotypical as you’d imagine. We’re also introduced to Kayla (DeWanda Wise), a pilot who takes Baby Blue to Biosyn and, in the process, catches sight of Maisie at the airstrip, so that when she then encounters Claire at the dino bazaar and realises she’s looking for her daughter, she feels obligated to help.

With Maisie nowhere in sight, Barry and Owen spot Rainn with a random evil henchlady, Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman), who was responsible for transporting Maisie and Baby Blue for Dodgson, but who is now trying to offload some genetically modified raptors which h ave been trained-slashed-engineered to attack anyone she indicates with her special laser pointer. Do the raptors come from Biosyn? Who knows! It doesn’t matter! Santos is only there so that when Barry and the sting operation interrupt the deal, she can flash her little laser on everyone to instigate a big dinosaur chase scene, while other for-sale dinosaurs end up on the loose. (Rainn is summarily eaten by said dinosaurs, but not before Owen gets him to admit that Maisie is at Biosyn. You’ll forgive me if I’ve got the order of events slightly backwards, but this section in particular was both very loud and structurally incomprehensible.) Thus armed with the knowledge of Maisie’s wherebaouts, Owen runs away from raptors on a motorbike while Kayla and Claire do the same in a truck en route to the airstrip. (We get a glimpse of Barry arresting Santos, and then neither of them are ever seen again; as for what befalls the random civilians left to fend for themselves in the face of sudden dinosaur carnage, who knows? The movie certainly doesn’t!) This culminates in Owen riding his motorbike onto the moving plane just before it takes off, complete with an angry dinosaur falling into the ocean, and then we’re off to Italy!

Meanwhile, Ellie and Alan have met up with Ian Malcolm at Biosyn to try and do an espionage. Ian gives them the special key-bracelet that’ll let them into the labs where the locusts are held, while elsewhere in the same facility, perpetually shady geneticist Henry Wu (BD Wong) is explaining to the captive Maisie that actually, she’s not quite a clone after all. Instead, Charlotte Lockwood, who was apparently a brilliant scientist, contrived to give birth to Maisie as part of her research and also because she wanted a kid, and then, on learning that she (Charlotte) had an incurable genetic disease, altered all of Maisie’s DNA so that she wouldn’t have it. This is why Henry wants to study both Maisie and Baby Blue, who is now named Beta: if he can master their genetic power, he’ll understand how to use genetics to wipe out the evil locusts, which are now mutating and breeding at an alarming rate. None of this makes the least bit of sense, nor is it clear why Henry, who has been cheerfully on the side of evil corporate science for several movies now, has suddenly grown a conscience, but he is wearing a very large brown cardigan with oversized lapels, which surely counts for something.

Unmoved by any of this, Maisie releases Beta and escapes into the facility, where she runs into Ellie and Alan, who have just had a traumatic encounter with some giant locusts. As they plan their escape, we cut back to Kayla, Owen and Claire, now on approach to Biosyn. As Dodgson is made aware that Kayla is carrying extra passengers, he disables the ADS – Air Defense System – which is some sort of electronic Thing that keeps the pterodactyls from flying above a certain height. Right on cue, their plane is attacked by an angry quetzalcoatlus, which prompts Owen to strap Claire into the only parachute and send her off into the sky, where she is immediately menaced by angry flying dinosaurs before falling into a carnivore-infested forest. Owen and Kayla crash the plane on a frozen lake and have to contend with a feathered raptor of some sort in order to escape and look for Claire, who is also having some dinosaur-related issues; at the same time, Ramsay has helped Ellie, Alan and Maisie onto an underground train-thing, but Dodgson has it stopped when he realises Ian has abetted their locust-bothering. This forces them to get out and make their way through the old amber mines, which – of course – also contain dinosaurs.

Dodgson takes this moment to fire Ian, who gives a big exit speech about how evil Dodgson is without actually mentioning the secret locust project. Double agent Ramsay then equips Ian to go save the others, which culminates in Ian fumbling about trying to input a gate code while Maisie, Ellie and Alan are menaced by dinosaurs; unbeknownst to any of them, Ramsay does the actual code-changing back at base after seeing their peril on CCTV, which I guess makes sense. Shortly afterwards, Owen and Kayla find Claire in time to rescue her from an angry dilophosaurus – this is Foreshadowing – and are then fortuitously united with the other escapees when their jeep rolls down a hill. Back at Biosyn and unaware that the good guys are all together, Dodgson decides to get rid of his locusts by having the whole lot set on fire. However, it turns out – and I cannot believe I’m about to type this – that the locusts can survive while on fire, so that when the burning lab’s contents are vented into the sky, a massive swarm of burning locust fireballs is released into the forest. This causes everything else to be on fire, which means that Dodgson has no choice but to use the special neural implants in all his dinosaurs (because this, too, is apparently a Thing) to make them come to safety at the facility.

As our heroes try to get back to base so that Owen can save Beta – having promised Blue solemnly that he’d rescue her baby, because sexist chivalry apparently now extends to dinosaurs, too – they encounter an angry giganotosaurus blocking their path. As a burning locust flaps weakly by, the gigano eats it; this ought to be unremarkable, except that, minutes later, Ian spears another burning bug on a stick, waves it to distract the gigano a la the original movie, and then throws the whole thing into its mouth, which – and again, I cannot believe I’m about to type this – causes the fucking dinosaur to breathe fire. Like, significantly more fire than the locust was ever on, and yet nobody comments on this! It just happens, because this is a Colin Trevorrow movie and why the fuck not, apparently. More peril ensues, and then they get into the tunnels leading back to the main facility, where Dodgson, having realised that his evil schemes are unraveling, tries to run off with Ramsay and is shocked – shocked! – when Ramsay reveals himself to be a good guy after all. Strangely, this confrontation does not result in Dodgson trying to attack Ramsay, or even so much as restrain him. He’s just… allowed to walk out, and then Dodgson escapes himself to the underground train-thing, heading for the airfield.

Now back in the facility, the good guys encounter both a remorseful Henry, who explains his plans for stopping the locusts and is therefore allowed to come with, and a significantly more useful Ramsay, who knows how the park systems work. Then they split up: Kayla to get a plane, Owen, Alan and Maisie to get Beta, Claire and Ellie to turn off the power so that the ADS has sufficient power to turn back on (because something something emergency power routing something) and Ian and Ramsay to hold down the fort and look pretty. Kayla gets the plane, Owen gets Beta (while teaching Maisie and Alan how to do his patented Hold Up Your Hands To The Dinosaur So It Obeys You trick) and Ellie and Claire wade through a server room inexplicably full of dead and dying locusts to turn off the power, which causes Dodgson’s train-thing to shut down. This prompts him to run into the tunnel until dinosaur noises make him retreat, at which point he is unceremoniously killed by a trio of dilophosaurus while a shaving-cream-shaped canister rolls away from his hand – see! He met his end just like Nedry in the original Jurassic Park! What a callback moment!

With the ADS reactivated, Kayla comes to pick everyone up. There’s just one problem – all the dinosaurs were neurally commanded to return to the facility because of the raging forest fire, so our heroes have to dodge them to escape! This culminates in the obligatory fight between a t-rex and a giganotosaurus, which you could simulate by putting a couple of plastic dinosaur toys in a hamster ball and rolling it down a hill in the dark, during which Henry sustains a mild arm injury, and after which Ellie and Alan make out a little, because Ellie and the husband with which she apparently had two now college-aged kids have split up, and so why not. And then it’s done: everyone gets away, the t-rex wins and roars triumphantly (because of course it does), and we’re treated to a random voiceover from nowhere – I don’t even think it’s the same voiceover from the shitty YouTube journalism bit at the beginning – telling us that Ellie and Alan went on to testify against Biosyn, Henry did his Locust Science and released an infected bug to kill all the other bad ones, the UN designated the Italian valley a world sanctuary, and now humanity has to learn to coexist with dinosaurs. There’s a few very pretty distance shots of dinosaurs in various environments – parasaurolophus running with wild horses, rhamphorynchus nesting on a high rise building, a stegosaurus on the savannah – and that’s it. There’s no closure about what Maisie is, whether anyone’s sill after her or where she gets to go now (other than, presumably, with Claire and Owen), nobody wonders what happened to Dodgson (whose motives were never more than gestured at as Basic Rich Guy Hubris), and there’s no mention of dinosaur containment elsewhere: just roll credits.

What a fucking waste.

But, to be fair, there are two things I liked about Dominion: the feathery raptor dinosaur that Owen and Kayla encountered, which actually looked pretty decent, and the fact that, as stupid as the plot was, it still wasn’t as sexist as the original Jurassic World or as willfully idiotic as Fallen Kingdom. Okay, two and a half things: there’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it inference that Kayla is queer and has a history with Denise, the random Biosyn worker who tells Dodgson that her plane has unauthorised passengers on it, but otherwise, it’s just two and a half hours of dreary, worse-than-formulaic pablum. Even my nine year old, who enjoyed the other two movies, came out of this one complaining that it was too loud, too long, the dinosaurs were all the wrong size and that what happened to Dodgson was stupid, and if you cannot successfully entertain a nine year old who loves dinosaurs with your big budget dinosaur movie, then who the fuck is it even for, Colin?

Point being, if you want to see a shiny action film this summer, I would recommend literally anything else. Everything Everywhere All At Once is absolutely flawless, but if you’re really desperate to revisit a decades-old franchise for the nostalgia value, try Top Gun: Maverick – yes, it’s a spectacular work of US military propaganda starring a known Scientologist, but at least it has the decency to include real planes doing real aerial stunts, a tight yet emotionally complete script and a banging soundtrack, and I’ll take that over shitty dinosaurs who can’t decide what size they are and Chris Pratt’s smugly punchable face any day of the week. You’re welcome.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Is A Terrible, Awful Film

Warning: total spoilers.

Today, a friend and I made the questionable decision to see Jurassic World: The Next One – sorry, Fallen Kingdom – a film whose relentlessly trite and overdone orchestral scoring made my fingers twitch throughout with the urge to mute the music. The only other film to ever provoke a similar tic was Eragon, which frankly does not make for a great comparison. Granted, I aggressively dislike both Jurassic World and the smugly punchable personage of Chris Pratt With Abs, but I loved the original Jurassic Park films (the first two, anyway) and am generally fond of trashy action spectacle. Had Fallen Kingdom been remotely good, these biases would have neatly cancelled each other out; instead, I was forced to sit through a film so bad, it made two hours feel like four.

Fallen Kingdom is, in every respect, an aggressively terrible movie. The music is bad, the direction is bad, the script and acting are terrible, and the plot is recognisable only inasmuch as it constitutes an immeasurably shitty, unfeeling knock-off of Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. The dinosaurs themselves, which ought to be the sole redeeming feature, are a constant and heinous visual offence: not only are the designs all slightly weird, but their proportions in relation to their environment are constantly, maddeningly inconsistent. A brachiosaurus that looks two stories tall in one shot looks half as big in the next; the carnivores are in constant flux, not only with regard to height, but also in terms of bulk and proportions. The fact that there’s zero sensawunda to their portrayal despite the fact that we’re meant to care about them is one nail of many in the film’s flamboyant coffin: it’s very hard to understand why any of the characters, having spent the whole narrative on the brink of being eaten, trampled or mauled, wants to save the dinosaurs even at the finale.

The film opens with a team of unknown dudes rescuing a bit of indominus rex bone from the bottom of Isla Nubar’s harbour. A massive crocodile-dino-thing eats three of them and escapes in the process, while the bone is taken away to have Evil Science done to it. This serves as a prologue of sorts, as the title card comes up after it.

As the movie proper starts, the premise – and I’m using that word generously – is established thusly: it’s three years after the events of Jurassic World, and now the dinosaurs left on Isla Nubar are in danger of re-extinction because IMMINENT VOLCANO. The logic of this volcano is not overly probed, presumably because this would mean explaining why the original theme park was built on a site that was in potential danger of blowing the fuck up; nor is it explained why the question of whether to rescue the dinosaurs or let them be obliterated was left to the last minute. The possibility that some might, in fact, survive the volcano, on account of how volcanoes aren’t an automatic death-sentence for whole ecosystems, isn’t mentioned either; so now the US government is debating whether to let them live or die. They are aided in this decision by Cameo Jeff Goldblumm, who talks a bit about chaos and genetic power and life correcting itself, thereby convincing the relevant senators to let nature take its course.

Opposed to this belief for reasons that would appear to belie her entire character arc in the first Jurassic World, inasmuch as she had one, is former park director Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Working with her two Tired Millennial Sidekicks, Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) – both of whom deserved a better movie – Claire is now a lobbyist to save the dinos; so when she’s contacted by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), an ageing scientist who apparently worked on the original Jurassic Park with John Hammond, she thinks her prayers are answered. Acting as the executor of Lockwood’s estate is the obsequious Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who promises that the dinosaurs will be rescued and taken to a new island habitat. However, in order to pull off the operation – and specifically to save Blue, the caring velociraptor – they need both Claire and animal behaviourist Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to go to the park in person: Claire because her biometrics are needed to activate trackers in the dinosaurs (and this can only be done on site, for some reason), Owen because he’s the only one who can get close enough to Blue to bring her in.

Also, Lockwood has a young mysterious granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), whose mother is dead and who lives with him. This will be relevant later, so hang onto that.

So: Claire goes out to where Owen is hand-building a Manly Wilderness Cabin to try and convince him to sign on for the mission, largely by appealing to his feeling for Blue. From this point on, we are treated to a camera-gaze which is – and there’s really no other way to put it – Super Hella Thirsty for Chris Pratt’s Owen, who we are meant to see as the Manliest Toughest Hot Manly Man On Earth. The camera does not just capture Chris Pratt; it models him like a spandex jumpsuit. Barely a minute passes without an intense, brooding close-up of Pratt smirking while staring into the distance, as though he’s still Andy Dwyer of Parks and Rec pretending to be Burt Macklin but without the self-deprecating playfulness. Franklin is the only character not impressed with Owen, and is therefore alone in being remotely tethered to reality: for saying sensible, reasonable things like “Why are we doing this?”, “Do we really have to?” and “No,” he is summarily ignored as the comic relief.

Once everyone is on the dinosaur island, whose soon-to-explode volcano apparently isn’t being tracked or monitored by anyone because honestly, why bother, we’re introduced to Eli’s right-hand man, a game-hunter dude who is butch and sneering and fucks up Blue’s capture by ignoring Owen’s directives, which leads to Blue being shot. There’s a lot of yelling, and Zia is conscripted to try and save Blue because she’s apparently a dinosaur doctor despite never having seen one before. It’s also revealed that the game-hunter and Eli have – shock horror! – lied to Claire about their intentions, and are in fact Bad Guys Who Do Not Value The Sanctity of Dinosaur Life, Not Even A Little Bit. This means they tranq Owen and leave him to the mercy of the oncoming lava while trapping Claire and Franklin in a radio tower, and now everything’s in a rush because the volcano starts exploding.

Listen: I like ridiculous action sequences as much as the next person, but having your characters run from both flaming lavaballs and dinosaurs at the same time is kind of gilding the lily. A bunch of Action happens, Claire makes a lot of breathy vocalisations, Franklin screams because he’s a normal person and Owen saves the day by being cool and manly and also having a knife. There’s a weird transition where Claire, Owen and Franklin go from being bedraggled on a shore to perched on a clifftop overlooking a different beach without any explanation for how they got there while the volcano is still exploding, we’re shown game-hunter guy stealing a dino tooth for a souvenir – this, too, is Important Later – and then, somehow, nobody on Team Evil notices when our heroes steal a truck and jump it onto the back of their fleeing boat, just in time for everyone to watch a brachiosaurus die tragically at the water’s edge.

Stuff happens on the boat, including Claire disguising herself by cunningly wearing a hat. Zia needs blood from the captive T-rex to do a transfusion to save Blue’s life, which Claire and Owen get for her. Zia gives Blue the blood and removes the bullet from her torso, all without stitching or sterilising anything, and then pronounces Blue saved, because that’s obviously how medicine works. Meanwhile, back at the mansion, little Maisie overhears Eli’s plans to sell the dinosaurs to the highest bidder and runs to tell grandpa Lockwood, who claims not to believe her and then sends her to bed. Maisie responds by sneaking down to Eli’s Sekrit Underground Lab, where she sees videos of Owen raising Blue, learns more about Eli’s plans, and encounters an engineered dinosaur called an indoraptor, which is apparently just, like… living there? And nobody upstairs noticed?

Eli finds Maisie and locks her in her room for Knowing Too Much, and is then summoned to see Lockwood, who apparently does believe Maisie, after all. For some reason, Lockwood’s genius plan as an ailing, bedridden man profoundly betrayed by his heir is to order Eli into his room, alone, and tell him to turn himself in to the police. Instead, in a totally unpredictable turn of events, Eli opts to murder Lockwood instead.

At this point, the plot holes in Fallen Kingdom are already gaping wide, while the script is an abominable patchwork of bad dialogue, glitchy logic and poorly-executed transitions. Yet somehow, writers Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly manage to launch their B-grade opus into decidedly C-grade territory with Eli’s decision to have the captive dinosaurs brought to his actual fucking house and stored in his basement lab, oh my actual god. HE LITERALLY HAS ENOUGH ROOM DOWN THERE FOR A FUCKING BRACHIOSAURUS AND SOMEHOW NOBODY NOTICED??? EVERYONE GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL IN CONTEMPT OF COMMON SENSE. 

ANYWAY.

So like. OBVIOUSLY Eli has to auction off all the dinosaurs IMMEDIATELY to a throng of rich criminal buyers who gather IN PERSON, IN HIS BASEMENT LAB, TOGETHER, to see each dinosaur paraded before them in a cage-on-wheels like the world’s weirdest fashion catwalk. (Apparently every American intelligence agency is, I don’t know, out to lunch or something, because nobody seems worried about surveillance.) Naturally, Owen and Claire, who’ve arrived on the scene, are captured here by Eli, who naturally elects to lock them up rather than kill them. Equally naturally, they escape by getting the neighbouring baby pachycephalosaurus to bash open their cell wall and then the door, whereupon they encounter a fugitive, traumatised Maisie, who has just now learned  that Lockwood is dead and that – DUHN-DUHHHHN – she’s not his granddaughter after all, but a SECRET CLONE OF HIS DEAD DAUGHTER, a reveal that was in no way hella fucking obvious to anyone remotely trope-literate.

Loose in the mansion, Claire, Owen and Maisie get to watch the dino auction happen in real time. LO THE BIG REVEAL OF THE INDORAPTOR, whose existence is why it was so important to capture Blue: it’s a prototype with raptor DNA and something something BD Wong something GENETIC MOTHERHOOD something. The indoraptor has been trained to attack people on command if someone puts a laser-target on them and then hits a sonic trigger, and like? My brain was beginning to liquefy at this point and it makes literally zero sense, but okay: sure, Jan. Naturally, Owen and Claire decide that the indoraptor Must Never Be Released and resolve to act.

They do this by instead releasing the baby pachycephalosaurus into the crowd of important criminal guests, because Eli is apparently super bad at security for his bootlegged dino trafficking empire. This causes all the buyers to flee and a few to get trampled, which means the indoraptor is left alone in its cage. RE-ENTER GAMEHUNTER GUY, who chooses this moment of all moments to come in yelling for his bonus. Spying the indoraptor alone, he decides he’s gotta get him one of them Big Teef for his trophy necklace – LITERALLY FOR HIS FUCKING NECKLACE, EVEN THOUGH THE TOOTH ITSELF IS WORTH WAY MORE AS A SOURCE OF DINO DNA – and shoots it with a tranq gun. The indoraptor plays stunned, game-hunter GOES INTO THE CAGE WITH THE UNRESTRAINED SUPER-INTELLIGENT SUPER-DINOSAUR, BECAUSE THAT’S OBVIOUSLY THE SMART THING TO DO, and gets eaten while trying to take one of its teeth. With its cage door open, the indoraptor promptly escapes and sets about trying to destroy everything.

As the end is nigh, Eli and his cronies try to salvage as much stuff from their lab as possible, which… somehow involves Zia and Franklin ending up in a room with Blue? I’m certain there was some sort of handwavey justification given for their presence, but that terrible knowledge has been purged from my memory in the hours since, like toxins leaving the body. There’s a bit where DB Wong starts yelling at Zia about how he needs Blue’s blood because PURE DNA something something, which Zia ruins by telling him about the blood transfusion she did on the boat, which… ruins Blue’s usefulness, somehow? I don’t know much about DNA or genetics, but I’m pretty sure this is some Science Bullshit that we’re meant to take on faith despite the fact that it doesn’t ultimately matter. But, sure: GASP!

Shit promptly goes down and Zia sets Blue lose in a way that fucks up the Bad Guys while saving her and Franklin. However, some gas cylinders get damaged in the process and this means the underground lab is now filling with poison that will, once again, kill the dinosaurs trapped down there unless they’re set free, as the exhaust system is also conveniently broken Because Reasons. (The fact that the baby pachy was able to break down a supporting wall to escape even though none of the much bigger animals can do likewise is the kind of detail I ought not to care about by this point. And yet.)

This prompts Zia and Franklin try and find the others, who are now being hunted by the indoraptor, also Because Reasons. At one point during this expertly written chase scene, Owen DELIBERATELY TURNS ALL THE LIGHTS OFF.

And I just.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? YOU LITERALLY JUST HEARD ALL ABOUT HOW THE FUCKING INDORAPTOR HAS AMAZINGLY KEEN SENSES BUT YOUR DUMB ASS WANTS TO RUN FROM IT IN THE DARK, AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH IT CAN SEE BETTER THAN YOU???

GOD.

OK, so: protracted dinosaur chase scene through the mansion. Maisie tries to hide in her bed because terrified child whose caregiver has just been murdered by a man she thought of as family: fair enough. This leads to a scene that audibly scared the shit out of every child in the packed session I attended, wherein the indoraptor stalks Maisie, uniquely and specifically, as she cowers under the covers, reaching out to her with a ghoulish clawed hand before Owen barges in to shoot it. The shooting doesn’t work, Maisie leads Owen out the window, and there’s a big showdown on the glass roof of the mansion’s museum where Claire and Blue come to the rescue and the indoraptor gets dropped down and impaled on the spikes of a triceratops skeleton.

Only then do Zia and Franklin catch up to the main party and inform them that it’s now their Solemn Duty to choose what happens to the remaining dinosaurs: press the big red button (literally) to free them into the countryside, or let them all die? Teary-eyed as she watches the bellowing dinos on the security feeds that apparently didn’t fucking exist when she and Owen were escaping earlier, Claire professes that they ought to live, but doesn’t press the button. She steps back to be sad in peace, only for Maisie to zoom in and press it herself – because the dinosaurs are cloned, like her, and if she’s gets to live, then so should they.

Which… given that we already know Maisie loves dinosaurs, we really didn’t need the whole weird sideplot of her being a clone to explain her desire to free them! She’s a traumatised kid whose sole relative was just murdered! She could’ve just been sick of watching things she loves die, and it would’ve made sense! But more to the point, the whole burden of choice about saving the species as represented by the big red button is moot, because THE FILM ALREADY OPENED WITH A GIANT DINOSAUR-CROCODILE ESCAPING INTO THE OCEAN. And some of the dinosaurs sold at auction were already taken for transport! There’s probably still some on the island, including the pterosaurs who were able to fly away from the volcano! All Maisie has done is let these dinosaurs lose on the populated mainland, where they’ll very likely cause more deaths! But NOBODY POINTS THIS OUT IN TIME TO STOP HER, nor do they mention this afterwards, because this movie is terrible! And then there’s a random cut to Jeff Goldblum explaining why something like this was basically inevitable, because CAMEO!

Just to hammer home the point that Maisie’s choice was meaningless, the film immediately shows us all these already-free dinosaurs along with the ones she released herself. The fact that Eli immediately gets eaten by the T-Rex is kinda vindicating, I’ll admit, but it really doesn’t compensate for how wildly detached from reality the reactions of the characters are to everything that’s happened. The film ends with Claire and Owen – who are somehow a couple again, with just as little chemistry as before – driving away with Maisie. We don’t find out what happened to the nanny who raised her – Eli sent her away after killing Lockwood, so I guess she left the house – and Maisie never asks about her again, because, uh…. trauma, I guess? And her legal guardians are both dead anyway, so Claire and Owen get a free kid, kind of? GOD, THIS FILM WAS SO TERRIBLE, I’M OFFENDED BY THE CONSTRUCTION OF IT ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL.

Also: this might seem like a comparatively minor nitpick in the scheme of things, but the fact that not a single character tries to call for help at any point in the movie – the total absence of smartphones of any kind – is really, really conspicuous, and has major implications for the shittiness of the plotting. Take, for instance, the early sequence where Eli’s original plan to dispose of Claire and Franklin involves remotely locking them in the radio tower, there to be consumed by lava and dinosaurs. Aside from the fact that they should’ve easily been able to phone a friend about his organisation’s treachery, forewarning people on the mainland to look out for his incoming dinosaurs, his decision to leave them to die there in the first place makes no goddamn sense in a context where he’d reasonably expect them to have phones – which both he and they fucking should, because they’re professionals in twenty fucking eighteen.

Given that huge chunks of plot in the original Jurassic sequel, The Lost World – which was written and filmed in the pre-smartphone era, and on which Fallen Kingdom is shamelessly riffing – revolve around satellite phones and the ability to radio off the island, there’s literally no excuse for the writers to forget that phones exist. Either Trevorrow and Connelly are being lazy as hell, or they’re so dismissive of the intelligence of viewers that they figured it wouldn’t matter. Either way, it’s a problem that crops up again and again. During the period where Claire and Owen were safe on the boat with the rescued dinosaurs and surrounded by enemies, they could’ve called for backup ahead of time, but they didn’t.

The fact that Maisie, a child of the smartphone era who’s clearly familiar with technology and accustomed to wealth, seemingly doesn’t have her own phone handy is weird enough; compare her to tech-savvy Lex from the original Jurassic Park, and the anachronism is even more startling. Armed with a smartphone, Maisie could easily have filmed Eli’s treachery to show her grandfather, or made her own call for help. Possibly there was meant to be some deliberate plot reason why Maisie had no phone, like being raised by an old, somehow tech-averse scientist – it stood out to me that the phone Lockwood tries to foist on Eli for his police-call looked like a goddamn portable landline from the early noughties – but if so, it was never explained. Even when the dinosaurs are set free at the very end, there’s no sign that Owen and Claire have bothered to call and warn the authorities to look out for them, even though a not inconsiderable portion of the early plot hinged on the dinosaurs having individual radio trackers – meaning that there’s a clear-cut way to recover all the escapees instead of letting them vanish into the wilderness.

But none of this happens, because Fallen Kingdom is clearly setting the stage for – god help us – a third shitty film, one where humans have had to adjust to dinosaurs roaming the North American continent. Never mind that this means disregarding everything we just watched in order to make it comprehensible as a premise – look, here’s that cool shot of a T-Rex roaring at a lion from the trailer! Here’s that shot of the dino-crocodile lurking in a wave, also from the trailer! Haha! Isn’t it cool how we implied the film was going to be one thing, and then only introduced those elements in the final minute of screentime? What a gotcha!

Films like Fallen Kingdom are a testament to Hollywood’s obsession with letting mediocre white dudes ruin everything. It’s hysterically bad in every way – even the couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it anti-Trump barbs fell flat – and yet I don’t feel like laughing, because Trevorrow and Connolly will invariably still get trusted with big-ticket gigs after this, while vastly more talented writers who are queer or female or POC or some combination thereof will be asked to prove themselves over and over and over again. Even if you’re only after a quick trashy action fix, don’t waste your money on Fallen Kingdom. Go buy some dinosaur Lego instead, or rewatch one of the earlier films. I promise, you’ll be better off.

And if, in the mean time, Hollywood wants to make a good dinosaur movie – or if HBO wants to make an awesome dinosaur TV show, which would be even better – then I’d humbly submit James Gurney’s Dinotopia as a much more fruitful starting point. I’ve seen enough of mindless dinosaurs knocking things down; let’s have a story where clever dinosaurs help to build things instead.

I See Your Preferences, Wendig

Earlier this week, Chuck Wendig posted a piece on his blog – I Smell Your Rookie Moves, New Writers – which, as the title suggests, is a takedown of particular errors he feels newbie authors make. It’s been doing the rounds on my tumblr, Facebook and Twitter feeds, because quite a lot of people I follow seem to share his sentiments; but as often as I’ve agreed with Wendig’s rants in this past, this isn’t one of those times. In fact, my abiding reaction to the early sections in particular has been one of teeth-grinding fury.

Before we get started, let me make two things clear up front: firstly, that I have an inherent dislike of writing advice that lays down specific mandates regardless of where it comes from; and secondly, that I have enormous respect for Wendig himself as a writer. His prose is punchy, sharp and bruisingly beautiful, quite like getting mugged by a street poet, and I have zero qualms about his ability to offer good advice otherwise. This isn’t me quibbling with Wendig’s technique, nor am I taking issue with the fact that he, specifically, is the one who’s spoken – it’s just that, on this occasion, he’s said a few things I think are fucking stupid, and I’d rather like to address them.

So.

Straight up, there’s a need to compare what Wendig says in his very first paragraph to what he says in the fourth (bolding mine):

I am occasionally in a place where I read work by new writers. Sometimes this is at cons or conferences. Sometimes it’s in the sample of work that’s free online or a fragment from a self-published work…

What I’m trying to say is, your rookie efforts are not automatically worth putting out into the world, especially if those efforts cost readers money to access them. The mere existence of a story is not justification for its publication. Don’t make people give you cash for your inferior efforts. Get it right before you ask money to reward you for getting it wrong.

Oh my fucking GOD, I will flip a table. Where do I even begin with this bullshit? If someone is publishing their work free online, THEY AREN’T ASKING FOR CASH – and what’s more, no one is fucking asking you to read it. There are myriad online communities that exist precisely so that new writers can ‘publish’ their work and share it with each other, up to and including specific fandom and fanwriter sites, and I reject utterly the implication that there’s no point to those venues or those communities – that such new stories aren’t “worth putting out into the world” – just because they’re not up to Wendig’s standards. I’d take less issue with the sentiment of an established writer selflessly offering help to rookies if that’s what Wendig was actually doing; instead, his piece reads like a successful author castigating first-timers for daring to aspire to his level before he thinks they’re ready.

Listen: I am all for writers improving themselves, and in the event that I fork over money for a book, I am all in favour of that book not sucking! But look at the wording, here: “don’t make people give you cash for your inferior efforts” – don’t MAKE them, as though the author is standing behind the consumer with a loaded gun, forcing them to buy their latest Kindle release. The entire point of the goddamn marketplace is that consumers take risks on products and then share their opinions about what they bought, thereby potentially attracting or deterring others from purchasing likewise. Wanting to engage in this process in good faith is not a fucking crime, okay? This whole section reads like a form of literary class policing: know your place, and know that it isn’t good enough. 

I also think it’s telling – and grossly hypocritical, given that Wendig himself started as a self-published writer – that he explicitly mentions writers who self-publish, who are unpublished or who write for free, but not rookie authors published via traditional means. (The only nod to traditional publishing is when he talks about “tested authors,” though even then, he could just as easily mean writers who’ve released multiple stories in other formats.) Because, let me tell you: I have read my share of traditionally published works that were fucking shit, and I guarantee I paid more for each of them than I ever have for any self-published release. Never mind that “inferior efforts” is a monumental and incredibly subjective value judgement in the first place: what traditionally published authors have that their unpaid or self-supporting brethren don’t – or not usually, at any rate – is the help of professional editors. Which doesn’t mean that their first drafts are somehow magically lacking the same mistakes Wendig is so angry about here; just that they’ve got an extra pair of eyes to catch them on the first pass. Does Wendig recommend his non-traditional rookies use editors or beta readers, which is an unequivocally useful piece of advice? No, he does not – which means, in essence, that he’s holding such writers to a higher standard than their traditionally published counterparts: be so good the first time that you don’t need an editor.

And look. Okay. Wendig never mentions fanwriters by name, but speaking as someone who’s pretty heavily invested in fan culture at this point, applied in that context, his advice here is the exact fucking OPPOSITE of useful. I mean, I have my own issues with the idea in some fanwriting circles that unsolicited criticism of any kind, even concrit, is verboten, because at the end of the day, if you’re putting something online where people not your friends can read it, you’ve got to be prepared for some degree of feedback. The internet is not your perfect, criticism-free bubble, and there’s no rule saying you get to enjoy the advantages of having an audience minus that audience having its own opinions just because you’d rather not deal with them. But when people share their writing for pleasure ahead of profit – when the content you’re reading is produced for free – that rightly changes the nature of how any feedback should be offered, assuming you care about not being an asshole. A person writing for free is not necessarily interested in improvement, or in anything other than having fun as part of an online community – in which case, telling them to stop posting until they suck less is rather like running up to a bunch of kids playing ball at the park and yelling that they need to run more drills before they do that shit in public, otherwise they’re never going to get scouted. I know it’s hard for published writers to remember this, but some people do write for pleasure alone, and the internet makes that easier than ever.

More to the point, though: writing shouldn’t begin as a woodshed exercise for every single person who wants to try it for money, and part of what makes new authors better – especially if they’re the type of rookie who can’t afford an editor and has no access to reliable betas – is getting feedback on their work. I mean, let’s be real: Wendig is acting like charging money for crap books is a crime, instead of just part of the literary-commercial ecosystem. Crap books – and we won’t always agree on what they are, because it’s a judgement call – are always going to be published, and some people are always going to regret buying them, but that doesn’t mean they should never have been written or published in the first place.

Except 50 Shades of Gray, maybe. That is some abusive, rape-apologist bullshit right there.

But I digress.    

Here’s my point: so long as you continue to write, your writing style will change. Maybe you’ll get better, maybe you’ll get worse, and maybe you’ll just get different – write for long enough, and you’ll probably do all three. But if you really want to succeed as a writer, hesitating to publish through fear of your own inadequacies is going to get you vastly fewer places than publishing in confidence, but learning to accept criticism. That being so, I’m not angry that Wendig wants new writers to improve; that’s fair enough. I’m angry because a statement like “don’t make people give you cash for your inferior efforts” isn’t going stop an uncritical egotist who already thinks they’re the next John Green, but it’s sure as hell going to stop the kind of self-doubting beginner whose problem isn’t accepting criticism, but finding the necessary confidence to parse it intelligently.

Which brings me to the topic of Wendig’s actual advice, and the reason I’m always sceptical whenever I see anyone lay down hard rules about what to do, or not do, in the course of writing: it’s because, 90% of the time, that sort of advice doesn’t account for differences in individual style any more than it accounts for differences in individual taste, and therefore has the effect of teaching someone, not how to write well, where well is a universal, but how to write like the person giving the advice.

It is compelling, I know, to figure out every single thing that is happening all the time always in your story. Characters smile and laugh. Okay. They fidget. Fine. They drink a cup of tea with their pinky out. Sure, why not? But if you’re writing out every hiccup, burp, fart, wince, flinch, sip, and gobble, you got problems. A character turns on a lamp? Super, you don’t need to describe how they turn it on. I don’t need to see John Q. Dicknoggin unzipping his fly before he pisses, and frankly, I may not need to see that he pisses unless it’s telling us something about his character.     

On the surface, this is a reasonable thing to say. The problem is that it’s only contextually reasonable, in that some people will be helped by taking this advice, and others hindered. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, for instance -widely regarded as a genre classic – could never have been written if Peake wrote to Wendig’s specifications, and regardless of whether his work is your cup of tea, you can’t deny that many people are extremely fond of it, even though – or especially because, depending on your perspective – it contains passages like this:

The speed of the door as it swung on its hinges was extraordinary, but what was just as dramatic was the silence – a silence so complete that Bellgrove, with his head turned towards his staff and his hand still groping in the air for the bell-pull, could not grasp the reason for the peculiar behaviour of his colleagues. When a man is about to make a speech, however modest, he is glad to have the attention of his audience. To see on every face that stared in his direction an expression of intense interest, but an interest that obviously had nothing to do with him, was more than disturbing. What had happened to them? Why were all those eyes so out of focus – or if they were in focus why should they skim his own as though there were something absorbing about the woodwork of the high green door behind him? And why was Throd standing on tiptoe in order to look through him?

Bellgrove was about to turn – not because he thought there could be anything to see but because he was experiencing that sensation that causes men to turn their heads on deserted roads in order to make sure they are alone. But before he could turn of his own free will he received two sharp yet deferential knuckle-taps on his left shoulder-blade – and leaping about as though at the touch of a ghost he found himself face to face with the tall Christmas-cracker of a butler.

Intense, tight, detailed description of settings, people and actions is a valid stylistic choice. That doesn’t mean it can’t be executed badly – just that doing so is not synonymous with executing it at all.

Enter Wendig’s second objection:

We tell stories because they are interesting. We offer narrative because narrative is a bone-breaker: it snaps the femur of the status quo. It is in fact the sharp, gunshot-loud fracture-break of the expected story is what perks our attention. Guy goes to work, works, comes home, has dinner, goes to bed? Not interesting. Guy goes to work, has the same troubles with his boss, endures the standard problems of the day (“where are my goddamn staples?”), goes home, eats an unsatisfying dinner, goes to bed and sleeps restlessly until the next day of the same thing? Still not interesting. Guy goes to work and gets fired? Okay, maybe, depending on if he does something unexpected with it. Guy goes to work and gets fired out of a cannon into a warehouse full of ninjas? I’M LISTENING.

Well, of course you are, Chuck: you write SFF, and are therefore highly likely to prefer ninjas to the minutiae of daily office life. But this doesn’t change the fact that there’s an entire literary tradition based around slice-of-life realism: stories where the big emotional tension really does hinge on the fact that someone was fired after struggling with their boss, and what this means for their family. Hell, you basically just described the first third of American Beauty. What you’re really railing at here is the idea that domesticity is fundamentally uninteresting – which, don’t even get me started on the gendered implications of that logic when applied in wider contexts, aka The Reason Why So Many Goddamn Fantasy Stories Focus On Big Dudes With Swords Because What Women Do In The Castle Is Girly And Unimportant – in conjunction with a dislike of stories that privilege a character’s emotions and internality above external conflict. Which is to say: this paragraph tells us a great deal about what Chuck Wendig looks for in a novel, but conflates this preference with what good novels look like, period.

Description is the same way. You don’t need to tell me what everything looks like because I already know –

Not if I’m describing something that’s purely fictional, you don’t. Which is to say: the fact that I don’t need to tell you what everything looks like doesn’t mean I shouldn’t tell you what anything looks like.

– and most things aren’t that interesting. Leaves on a tree are leaves on a tree. For the impact of story, how many points each leaf has or how they move in the wind is not compelling.

AUGH. Look: I get that this is meant to be a random example illustrating why we shouldn’t include information that’s totally irrelevant to the plot, but it’s a really shitty example, because even ignoring the fact that sometimes, it’s just nice to set the scene, I can think of a dozen reasons off the top of my head why detailing leaves specifically might be relevant. A ranger describes a particular plant which, in addition to its historical significance, can be used as life-saving medicine. The king’s poisoner tends their herb garden, teaching their protégé the various uses of each. A paleobotanist suddenly encounters plants she thought extinct, and promptly goes into raptures. But Foz! I hear you cry, Aren’t you being unfairly specific? When would that ever happen, really?

Reader, I just described to you actual canonically important scenes from The Lord of the Rings, Robin Hobb’s Assassin series and Jurassic Park. The devil is in the motherfucking details, dudes. Sometimes you can do without them, but sometimes you really can’t.

Trim, tighten, slice, dice. Pare it all down. Render. Render!…

Whatever it is you’re writing, it’s too long. Cut it by a third or more. Do it now. I don’t care if you think you should do it, just do it. Try it. You can go back to it if you don’t like it. Consider it an intellectual challenge — can you utterly obliterate 33% of your story? Can you do it mercilessly and yet still tell the story you want to tell? I bet you jolly well fucking can.

Merciful fucking Christ, if I never see another piece of writing advice that involves the phrase “pare it all down” it’ll be too soon. I mean, look: I love a stylistically wham, bam, thank-you ma’am novel as much as the next person, but sometimes I want to indulge myself. Really settle in with the slow-burn detail, rolling around in lush descriptions of bright new worlds. Sometimes you want a bit of junk in the literary trunk, you know? Every single novel does not have to whip its metaphorical dick out on the first page and then spend the next thirty chapters furiously jacking itself to climax like a pornstar trying to hit his mark for a neatly-timed cumshot. Your novel won’t implicitly suck if you slow down and take your time teasing the reader.

Plus and also? I know we have a cultural stereotype that says rookie writers consistently produce pages and pages of unnecessary drivel, but a lot of newbies underwrite, too – in which case, telling them to pare back an already barren story isn’t going to help. There’s a reason why so many early creative writing exercises teach students how to describe, how to build: you need to get to the point of creating excess before you can learn how to cut it back, such that assuming the presence of excess as a default is a bad way to go.

The story begins on page one.

Repeat: the story begins on page one.

It doesn’t begin on page ten. It doesn’t start in chapter five.

It starts on page one.

Get to the point. Get to the story. Intro characters and their problem and the stakes to those problems as immediately as you are able. You think you’re doing some clever shit by denying this? You think you need to invest us in your luscious prose and the rich loamy soil of the worldbuilding and the deep nature of these characters — ha ha ha, no. We’re here for a reason. We’re here for a story. If by the end of the first page there isn’t the sign of a story starting up? Then we’re pulling the ripcord and ejecting. We’ll parachute out of your airless atmosphere and land on the ground where things are actually happening.

This is one way to tell a story, certainly. But it’s not the only way, and it’s not always a good one. I have had my absolute fill of – to pick a single example – first-person YA fantasy novels that start with the character in the middle of a battle for precisely this reason, but which never slow down sufficiently to explain why the fight unfolded that way in the first place, because the author never bothered to figure it out. Listen: I’m aware that there’s a debate about the utility of prologues in SFF, and some people hate them for exactly the reasons Wendig has outlined above. The story should start when it starts; if you can’t communicate that earlier information in the first chapter, then it doesn’t deserve a prologue. And in some cases, that’s correct.

But prologues also constitute an important stylistic break. In a story that’s otherwise written entirely in the first person, for instance, having a prologue in the third, containing information the viewpoint character couldn’t possibly know, but which is materially relevant to interpreting their actions, can be an extremely clever move. Think about every film you’ve ever seen that starts in one place before the opening credits roll, then cuts to the protagonist once they’ve finished. That, right there? That’s setting the scene, and even though it’s not always obvious how that first scene relates to the subsequent ones, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t ever have been there in the first place.

Despite his presumptuous use of the royal ‘we’, Chuck Wendig is not speaking for everyone when he says that readers aren’t interested in stories that take longer than a fucking page to establish worldbuilding or character. Good novels can be slow. Not to bring up Tolkien again, because I get hives when people hold him up as the be-all, end-all of the genre, but Christ: do you even remember how The Fellowship of the Ring starts? It’s with a prologue entitled Concerning Hobbits that goes on for pages before Frodo Baggins is ever even mentioned by name, and that doesn’t stop people loving it. Writing books is not a goddamn race, is my point, and I’m sick and tired of seeing brevity held up as an unequivocal literary virtue when it’s just as liable to produce dross as gold when used inexpertly.

Dialogue, for instance, is one of those things that has rules. And for some reason, it’s one of the most common things I see get utterly fucked.

On this point, I agree with Wendig. But then, he’s not discussing style here so much as the basic rules of grammar – and even then, if you’re doing it intelligently, with purpose, as opposed to because you’re unaware of the conventions, even these can be fluid. Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet eschews all quotation marks, and it’s a gorgeous novel: yes, it’s an exception to the norm, but I mention it because Wendig’s decision to situate adherence to actual grammatical/formatting rules as identical to meeting his personal narrative preferences makes me bristle. Generally speaking, electing to fuck with the standard protocols is not something you’d do with a first novel, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t ever been done successfully. Returning to an earlier point, it’s the kind of problem that, for a traditionally published author, would (one hopes) be caught in editing – so if you’re not too sharp on the basic conventions and you care about getting them right, you can either look them up, ask a knowledgeable friend to beta your work, or hire an editor. This is line-edit drama, not a problem with poorly-executed style, and there’s a goddamn difference, please and thank you.

You need to let your characters talk.

Dialogue is grease that slicks the wheels of your story.

And eventually it gets tiresome. You love the characters and you think they should be allowed to go on and on all day long because you think they’re just aces. They’re not. Shut them up. Keep the dialogue trim and vital. Concise and powerful. Let them have their say in the way they need to say it — in the way that best exemplifies who those characters are and what they want — and then close their mouths. Move onto the next thing. Let’s hear from someone else or something else.

Generally speaking, I agree with this, too. Unless your character is giving a speech, monologuing to a captive audience or engaging in a soliloquy, they’re probably not going to speak uninterrupted for any length of time. The conversation will go back and forth, and eventually, it’s going to end, and you don’t always need to show every single exchange in order to get the point across. I will, however, take issue with the idea that dialogue must always be “trim and vital, concise and powerful” – because many people aren’t. Naturalistic dialogue can be a powerful tool in a writer’s arsenal, letting you establish voice, dialect, setting and any manner of other things. That doesn’t mean letting the characters talk about anything under the sun with no reference to plotting; it means that not every single exchange has to be geared towards the narrative end-game in order to make a positive contribution to the story.

Each character needs to be a shining beam — each distinct from the next. Bright and demonstrative of its own color. Not archetypes, not stereotypes, but complex and easily distinguished people. And I want a reason to care about them.

This, I agree with: absolutely, 1000%.

Right out of the gate, I want this. I need to know what they want, why they want it, and what they’re willing to do to get it. I need, in very short terms, their quest. Whether desired or a burden, I gotta know why they’re here on the page in front of me. That’s not true only of the protagonist, but of all the characters.

Who are they?

If you can’t tell me quickly, they become noise instead of operating as signal.

Aaaand we’re back to disagreeing again. Because, look, Chuck – I don’t know what your fucking deal with speed is, here, but I’m going to say it again: storytelling isn’t a race. There are times when I want to know quickly what a character’s motivation is, and times where I can stand to wait a little. Sometimes, the best characters slowly emerge from the background, insinuating themselves into the story in ways you didn’t expect at the outset. A great recent example of this was Csevet in Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. A courier who initially brings the protagonist, Maia, the news of his ascension to the throne, Csevet seems at first to be a background character, someone who’ll disappear once he’s fulfilled his immediate purpose. This isn’t because Addison fails to make him a distinct individual, but is rather a consequence of the story being told with a tight focus on Maia’s perspective: Csevet’s needs aren’t as important in the first chapters as Maia’s are, and as Csevet initially appears to deliver a specific piece of news, we’re not expecting Maia to keep him around. But he does, and so the character expands, steadily revealing more and more of himself as the narrative progresses.

You don’t need to give a physical description of every single character the second they first appear in the story, because that information might not be immediately relevant. A character can move in the background as a seeming bit player before ever coming to the fore, and even once you can see them, their motives won’t always be transparent. I don’t just mean this in the facetiously obvious sense, that some characters have hidden agendas: I mean that if you’ve got six characters in a scene, the fact that the primary focus is on two of them doesn’t mean the other four won’t come into their own later. This is even more important to remember if you’re writing in first person, where describing a character or making an observation is synonymous with the character doing those things – and while the author might want to give certain details, the character might not even pick up on them for another three chapters.

What I’m saying is this: Wendig is completely correct in saying that your characters, even the minor ones, should be real, distinct individuals. But that doesn’t mean you have to give their quest away up front, or make it immediately obvious that a seemingly minor character is going to come into greater prominence later. I dislike working from the assumption that your audience is impatient, easily bored and allergic to surprises – especially as I’m not that sort of reader myself.

It’s very hard to manage a lot of characters.

I do it in some books and the way that I do it is by introducing them piecemeal — not in one big dump like I’m emptying a bag of apples onto the counter (where they promptly all roll away from me), but one or two at a time.

Which is kind of what I’m getting at, but from the opposite perspective: it’s okay to empty your bag of apples, provided you subsequently gather them all back up again. Otherwise, you’re permanently restricting yourself to writing early scenes where only one or two characters are present, which… personally? I find that boring; or at least, I wouldn’t want it as a staple. I like stories that challenge me by throwing me in the deep end, asking that I figure out a bunch of characters and navigate their relationships on the fly by way of teaching me the setting. Elizabeth Bear does this wonderfully, as do Kate Elliott and Alaya Dawn Johnson, which is a big part of why I love their books. Particularly in SFF, the social roles the characters inhabit can tell you as much about them – and the world – as their personalities and motives, and the fact that there might be a tension between how a character behaves in an official capacity and who they are otherwise can lead to some extremely satisfying characterisation. Thus: you might first show me the faceless Executioner in Chapter 1, letting them appear as a background authority in Chapter 2, so that when I finally learn their name and their hatred of the Emperor they purport to serve in Chapter 3, I feel the contradiction far more strongly than if you’d simply said as much to begin with.

…if each character sounds like a replicant of the next, you’ve got a problem. It’s not just about vocal patterns. It’s about what they’re saying in addition to how they’re saying it. It’s about their ideas and vision and desires. Look at it this way: it’s not just your prose that makes you your author. It’s not just your style. It’s whatyou write. It’s the themes you express. Characters operate the same way. They have different viewpoints and needs. They have their own ways of expressing those viewpoints and needs, too. Get on that. Otherwise, they’re all just clones with different names and faces. 

Exactly.

Stop doing stunt moves. You can do that later. Right now, assume that you have a single goal: clarity. Clarity is key. It is king. If I do not know what is going on, then I’m out… Do yourself a favor and aim to just tell the story. Get out of the way. Be clear. Be forthright. Be confident and assertive and show us what’s happening without compromise and without burying it under a lot of mud.

You don’t get points for being deliberately ambiguous.

On the surface, this is good advice: it’s just that, given the emphasis on speed in the rest of this piece, I’m inclined to think that Wendig thinks of clarity as a synonym for simplicity, as per the injunction against “trick moves”. Which, yes: if you’re a very new writer, you need to make sure you’re being understood before you can play with expression. But natively, not everyone is going to have the same style or be interested in writing the same sort of book. It’s not a “trick move” to want to have a big cast, or to tell a slow-burn story, or to be interested in description. In fact, I’d argue that writing in a sparse, clean style takes just as much skill as writing more lavishly: there’s an art to economy, and I’ve never liked the idea that it’s somehow a better, easier choice for beginners just because it uses fewer words. Ask any artist: understanding negative space and its impact on the picture takes skill and practice, just like drawing does.

I guess what I’m saying is this: Chuck Wendig has written a piece that’s enormously helpful if you want to learn to write like Chuck Wendig and/or have a natural inclination towards his style, but which is vastly less helpful if you want to learn to write like anyone else; like you, for instance. There’s some good advice there, to be sure, but the parts that aren’t – which conflate his personal preferences with universal truths; which tell new writers they’re not good enough to be worth the cost of admission, no matter how cheap – those parts can fuck right off. Not everybody needs to write books the exact same way, just as everyone doesn’t need to read and love the exact same things, and I’m sick of writing advice that’s really just one person’s taste masquerading as objective truth.

Jurassic World: A Summary

Jurassic World is a film that attempts to highlight the dangers of crassly commercialising dinosaurs by… well, crassly commercialising dinosaurs.

The irony of this was apparently lost on the writers.

Look: I get it. You wanted an excuse to make a dinosaur that was bigger than a t-rex, but you couldn’t be bothered looking up giganotosaurus or spinosaurus and anyway, that whole Meddling Mad Science angle is so appealing, why not go there instead? So you wrote an excuse for it into the script about how Kids These Days with their internets and their rap music are just so jaded that only bigger, better, newer dinosaurs can hold their attention, and then you spent the whole film explaining why building bigger, better, newer dinosaurs with Meddling Mad Science is, in fact, a terrible idea. But before all the carnage and death, when you were showing us the excited younger brother dragging his disaffected sibling through the park – and I’m sorry, but even with the 3D glasses on, it still looks like a plastic model in the panning shots – you made the mistake of assuming your actual audience is just as jaded as your fictional one. As such, you didn’t bother with a slow reveal, or a sense of wonder, or any sort of visual tease with the dinosaurs at all, which is more than a little disappointing for those of us who’ve been waiting for this film since 1997 (The Lost World was okay, but Jurassic Park III never happened, shhh). Everything was presented as ordinary, mundane, boring, right up until it all went to shit; and even then, your CGI indominus rex wasn’t a patch on Jurassic Park’s t-rex, not least because you couldn’t be bothered to keep the size and scale of it consistent, so that it gets noticeably bigger or smaller depending on the scene –

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the sexism.

Let’s talk about Karen’s chirpy, passive-aggressive exchanges with her sons and husband. Let’s talk about how, when Zach’s girlfriend asks him to send her photos from his week away so she won’t forget what he looks like, then tells him she loves him, and Zach replies by basically shouting YEAH BYE and noping out to the car, she still stares adoringly after him, as though this is a thing an actual, emotionally invested girlfriend would do. Let’s talk about how Zach then spends the first half of the film staring creepily at every teenage girl he encounters. Let’s talk about Karen’s assumption that of course her single sister is going to want kids – not if she has them, but when – and the way she breaks down in guilt-inducing tears on the phone because Zach is just so mean to his little brother sometimes and why isn’t Claire there to make him play nice?  Let’s talk about Claire being criticised in the narrative for being trepidatious around a pair of kids she’s too busy to mind and hasn’t seen in seven years, as though she’s not doing her sister a bigass favour by taking them in the first place. Let’s talk about how Claire is apparently so clueless despite her high-powered job that not only can’t she remember how old her nephews are or how long it’s been since she’s seen them – as though this information never came up when the trip was organised – but when she’s out hunting them down, she unironically asks if Owen can track their scent, as though this is a skill that actual humans possess.

Let’s talk about how, after that one meeting with the executives we never see again, Claire is criticised by literally every man she encounters regardless of age and rank – Larry, her underling; Masrani, her boss; Zach and Gray, her nephews; Owen, her (ugh) love interest; Hoskins, the obligatory InGen douchebag who isn’t eaten by raptors anywhere near soon enough – and how not a single fucking person treats her as competent. Let’s talk about how the narrative never even tries to portray her as good at her job, given the whole ‘let’s send people into the indominus rex paddock before activating the tracking beacon that would’ve told me it was there the whole time’ fiasco that literally causes dozens of deaths and the ruin of the entire theme park. Let’s talk about how, when she finally does do something awesome by rescuing Owen from a pterodactyl, her nephews respond by asking who Owen is and, even though Claire just did something totally badass while Owen lay on the ground, he’s the one they want to stick with for protection. Let’s talk about how, when Claire has the similarly good idea of leading the t-rex out to fight the indominus, she somehow ends up lying behind it on the ground in an actual swimwear model pose, having spent the entire film steadily shedding clothing. Let’s talk about the needlessly protracted, gratuitous death of Zara. Let’s talk about Zach telling Gray not to cry about their parents getting divorced, even though he only found out about it himself that fucking second, because guys aren’t meant to do that, damn it! Let’s talk about how, in accordance with this dictum, the only other people who cry on screen are women.

Let’s talk about what the fuck the scriptwriters were even on when they wrote this mess, sweet Christ on a goddamn bicycle. Because even without all the shit mentioned above – and it is, as Dr Ian Malcolm so famously said, one big pile of shit – the script is more full of dropped threads than an amateur’s sewing basket.

The whole thing about Zach and Gray’s parents getting divorced? Never mentioned again. Zach’s girlfriend? Never mentioned again. The reason for Zach’s apparent lack of commitment to said girlfriend? Never even discussed. The opening gambit about Claire not wanting kids, which is – one charitably assumes – meant to evoke the same claim originally made by Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park? Irrelevant, given that, unlike Alan, Claire doesn’t then spend the whole film bonding with Zach and Gray; in fact, they barely communicate, and the boys end the film liking Owen more than her. (And don’t even get me started on the very salient contextual difference between one half of a lovingly married couple playfully bringing up the subject of kids with their male spouse, who eventually changes his mind, and a single professional woman being pressured to want children by a sibling who, to make the whole thing even more ironic, is going through a divorce.) The reason for Dr Wu’s apparent defection to InGen? Never explained. Owen’s status as a navy guy who somehow got tapped to work as a fucking dinosaur behaviouralist despite the fact that, as far as the script is concerned, he’s never even worked with animals before? Not explained. The thing where Gray is apparently smart enough to know everything there is to know about the park – and can apparently repair and jumpstart a decades-old Jeep he instantly identifies by make and model, Jesus Christ – but still somehow believes that his brother once killed a ghost to save him? I literally cannot even.

And okay, look. I get that a not inconsiderable portion of the internet has become rather swoony on the subject of Chris Pratt’s Captain Tight Pants transformation, but the scene where he’s introduced fixing a classic motorbike outside his charming bungalow while sipping Coke from a glass fucking bottle like he’s recreating Dylan O’Brien’s Teen Vogue photoshoot, and then proceeds to get all up in Claire’s business by making at least one horrible innuendo, mocking how terrible she was on their date and grinning because she’s a corporate suit who doesn’t understand the animals or like getting her hands dirty, while she stands there in what is effectively a jungle wearing a pristine white business suit? Yes, hello: nineteen eighty-four called, it wants its Romancing the Stone tropes back.

I mean, come ON.

 

Actually, scrap that: Romancing the Stone was a better film than Jurassic World, not least because it had a sense of its own ridiculousness, as well as – case in point – a scary gang boss who loved romance novels. And, you know, actual chemistry between the two lead characters, instead of the cardboard bickering that’s meant to pass for that between Pratt and Howard. Which, in fairness, is less their fault than it is a consequence of the utterly abysmal script, which riffs shamelessly on the original film with zero understanding of what made it work. (Hint: it wasn’t a Jimmy Fallon cameo.)

In Jurassic Park terms, then, here’s how bad the characterisation in Jurassic World is: Claire is a female version of Donald Gennaro, the bloodsucking lawyer famously eaten while taking a shit, who spends the whole film being alternately condescended to and hit on by a hybrid of Dr Ian Malcolm and Robert Muldoon, aka Owen. Their chemistry is dismal, their one kiss is worse, and both of them get less emotional development and catharsis than Blue the velociraptor, who’s probably just grateful – given that her siblings are called Charlie, Delta and Echo – that she wasn’t named Foxtrot.

Cool gyroscopes, though.