"This is my wheat field. Have every acre."

So I like the Jurassic Park movies. I was a dinosaur kid, and I’m not a dinosaur adult, but I’ve still got the warm nostalgias for raptors and whatever.

So I dealt with the movie. I dealt with the gross assumption that kids are a “when” for every woman, the way that Claire and Owen’s first onscreen moments start with creepy workplace sexual harassment, the annoying kids who just would not die, and the truly terrible dialogue. I dealt with it.

But I couldn’t deal with this.

Claire’s assistant.

What the fuck, Jurassic World? Why did you do that to her?

And by that, I mean horrifyingly kill her.

Zara Young (apparently that’s her name, who knew?) has the longest onscreen death in the movie. She’s also– congratulations!– the first notable female to die onscreen in the franchise. While there was a woman in the park’s first responder team that was presumably horrifically eaten, we don’t see that. 

In fact, we don’t see much explicit death at all.

Sure, we see people being eaten in a single chomp a couple times, but we frequently cut away. That first responder team has a convenient bank of heart rate monitors (what an exceptionally dumb way to keep track of things) that allows the camera to cut to their flatlining readouts once they bite it. 

Even the asshole, the arguable main human villain, gets a cutaway.We see his arm get bit, but then immediately after the raptor lunges we pan to a spray of blood on the glass. 

But Zara, poor not fucking paid enough for this Zara, gets picked up, tossed around midair several times, dropped into the water, dunked at least three times and crushed between a beak, only to be lifted up again and then devoured by the shark dino.

All while making a terrified face and screaming hysterically, as you might, if you were going through such a gross death scene. 

So what the hell did Zara do to deserve this? She’s not the villain, she’s not even that memorable. She’s not a heroic sacrifice, or a funny yet squeamish gag death. She’s not cathartic at all. She didn’t deserve it. 

Unless.

Unless the movie kind of thinks she does. 

Because Zara looks an awful lot like Claire.

From the white suit, to the constant phone use, to the corporate structure buy in, Claire is just Zara with a better job. They even refuse to let their menfolk have fun– Claire makes date itineraries (which sounds awesome to me) and Zara is apparently refusing to allow her fiance to have a bachelor party (a conversation point she has on the phone while those shitty kids make a break for it). 

See, you’re not meant to like Claire at the beginning. The fact that I did is an outlier– she is the unsympathetic, frigid woman opposed to the ideals of the rugged individualist man who lives in a trailer and fixes motorcycles. Claire redeems herself by becoming “badass” like her “boyfriend” and only then do we think she’s competent. God forbid running a multi-million dollar corporation’s day to day management while your idiot boss crashes helicopters be seen as badass. 

But Zara, poor underpaid assistant, doesn’t get a chance to take a level in badass. Instead, the movie gets to punish her like it wanted to punish Claire, except they couldn’t now that she is worthy of being the love interest. 

And it was gross. And I hated it.

What the fuck, dinosaurs?