Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jurassic World
2015 · Colin Trevorrow · Jurassic World on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the monorail, the gift shops, and the branded signs. (setting)
The park is designed as a working resort: a Main Street of retail, a marine stadium, a petting zoo, gyroscopic ride vehicles, sponsors on everything. The film tours it before anything goes wrong.
Payoff: Leisure is built directly on top of barely contained animals. The design makes the film's case before the plot does. In the reading: the encompasser (synsign). The working park is the reading's encompasser: a whole situation surrounding every character and pressing until somebody has to act.
Watch the faces looking up, not the animals they see. (camera)
Schwartzman borrows Spielberg's wonder shot: a slack jaw lit by something off-screen. A boy in a gyrosphere, tourists at the lagoon, the crowd in the stadium. The creature is often barely in frame.
Payoff: Awe on a face is the attraction being sold. The film shows you people buying it while selling it to you.
Listen for the Williams main theme and note when it arrives. (sound)
Michael Giacchino wrote new music but drops the 1993 melody at chosen beats. The mix also leans on deep low-frequency roars and footfalls, the register the series has used since the first T. rex.
Payoff: The old melody works as a trigger. It arrives to tell you how to feel about what you are seeing.
Listen to the executives ask for bigger, louder, more teeth. (sound)
Attendance is flagging because ordinary dinosaurs no longer impress anybody, so the park builds a hybrid to order. Characters state the escalation logic out loud in meetings.
Payoff: The park's problem is the sequel's problem, said on screen. You are the jaded audience being described. In the reading: consciousness of clichés. The reading calls this consciousness of clichés: a film that knows its images have worn out and builds a bigger one anyway.
Look for glass and vehicles used as frames around people. (camera)
Schwartzman quotes Dean Cundey's 1993 grammar: reflective surfaces, lens flares, characters seen through windshields and spheres. He shot on a mix of film and digital to keep the grain and warmth.
Payoff: The look is inherited on purpose. Recognition is part of the product you bought with the ticket.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the original T. rex is blocked when it arrives. (staging)
Trevorrow blocks the late arrival for applause, framing the animal head-on and cueing the music. The same withholding governs the Indominus, shown in pieces long before it is shown whole.
Payoff: These moments stop the story to present you a thing. That is the park's business model, run on you. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls these attraction-images: spectacle set down for the audience rather than woven into cause and effect.
Watch Claire's shoes, hair, and white outfit over the film. (performance)
Howard starts in pressed white, managing the park by schedule and spreadsheet. The costume gets torn, soaked, and filthy as she moves from running the park to running through it.
Payoff: The film tracks her change in wardrobe rather than in dialogue. Her body ends up matched to the place she manages.
Look at the dying Apatosaurus that Claire touches. (setting)
Legacy Effects built that animal as a large practical puppet, so the actors laid hands on a real body. Almost every other creature in the film is ILM's digital work.
Payoff: The one scene with weight in it is the one with something physically present to touch.
Carry this in: Count the reaction shots. This park sells awe, and the film keeps showing you the customers' faces as they buy it.