What in the Jurassic World ... ??

My wife and I decided to make a date Sunday afternoon, so we went to the cinema and watched Jurassic World, Steven Spielberg's fourth, and latest, installment of the Jurassic Park franchise.

This film may have shattered records as the highest grossing opening weekend blockbuster in history, but I personally feel that Jurassic World is a little bit overrated as movies go.

In my humble opinion, the movie is just a little bit better than the second and third installments of the series; but a far cry from equaling the original film.

My most significant complaint with World is that same as Lost World and JPIII: the rather casual violence and gratuitous death that the first film did not have.

While the "terrible lizards" killed and/or ate people in the first Jurassic Park, the deaths were strategic and integral parts of the story. In other words, when people died in the first film, it was part of telling the story. They weren't gratuitous.

But in Jurassic World, as in the previous two Jurassic movies, death came swiftly and often to people who otherwise weren't part of the story, or held insignificant bit parts that had little to no baring on the story's development.

Like the poor park employee who looked pathetically at Pratt, whimpering in sad silence a moment before Indominus Rex stuffed him in its mouth. Why not let the poor fellow live? His death had no significance to the story.

Either did the death of the hapless Brit girl tasked with keeping tabs on the female lead's nephews. She literally got carried away by flying dinosaurs before being dropped into a large pool of water, where she survived long enough to get picked up again by the airborne reptiles. She continued to fight but it was all for not as the giant aquatic dinosaur leaped from the water to snag the Pterodactyl that held the poor girl in its grasp. So, not only did the flying lizard get eaten, but so did the girl.

Why couldn't the girl have been dropped a second before the monster came out of the water to eat the dinosaur trying to kill her?

Then there were the velociraptors, who turned on the commando unit and shredded them to pieces. Screams of horror, pain, and terror resonated as the pack lizards had, their way with the troopers.

Sprays of blood, the sound effects of bones crunching, and shrieks of pain, pretty much told the story of the Indominus Rex and the velociraptors.

Don't get me wrong here: I understand the movie's undertones. The dinosaurs are supposed to be scary. We are supposed to be afraid of them, and the power they once possessed over the planet 65 million years ago. We are supposed to think critically about the wisdom of cloning and bringing back to life animals that could realistically wipe us off the map completely.

But is all of the gratuitous death really necessary? No, it's not. And I'm sure even Steven Spielberg would agree with that. However, movie makers and producers are continuously pushing the envelope of what is conventional. Boundaries are constantly being pressed toward the edge. Sometimes they go over it, too. They are on the look-out for ways to add "shock" value to their films. That is really the bottom line. Shock sells; be it sex, language, or blood.

Spielberg wants to see his movie to as many people curious enough to check it out. The edgier he makes it, the more shock it contains, the more money he makes. Period.

It is a sad reality that popular culture places a high value on shock, and the viewing public tends to soak up popular culture values like a sponge. Because movie-goers have been conditioned to enjoy, even love, shock in films, the more shock there is in a movie the more people seem to like it.

Hence why Jurassic World contains so much gratuitous death and casual violence. It isn't necessary; it's essential to selling movies anymore.

Very sick.