I flew home from America recently, and you know what that means! More movies on a plane!

This time around the quality of what I saw was pretty good, with one notable exception…

Some spoilers, though they are mild

Jurassic World: Rebirth

The Jurassic movies (be they Park or World) have always been about human stupidity as much as they have been about dinosaurs. As I watched this movie begin with an errant chocolate bar wrapper short-circuiting a presumably state-of-the-art security system, leading to dinosaur-fuelled mayhem and death, I knew that this film was no exception.

The Jurassic movies have also generally been about pretty boring people; characters who don’t generate any interest beyond the charisma of the actors who play them (ie Jeff Goldblum, Chris Pratt, etc). This time that pressure falls onto the shoulders of Scarlett Johannson, who gets to play the least engaging part I have ever seen her in. She’s a mercenary with a mildly traumatic backstory who is hired by a business guy with a noble goal but who obviously cares about money more than anything else (think Paul Reiser from Aliens) to help a geeky scientist collect some biological material from three giant prehistoric creatures (one beast each who dwell in the water, land and air).

Meanwhile, there is a family on a boat whose story briefly intersects with the mercenaries, before they split off again into their own survival story. These two plots run parallel to each other until they meet up at the climax, simply because neither one is substantial enough to fill up a while movie.

There are a few diverting thriller sequences courtesy of director Gareth Edwards, and generally I enjoyed the family’s survival plot line better than the “lead” story about the mercenaries, but overall everything feels like it’s paint-by-numbers storytelling, and adds up to one of the duller Jurassic movies, maybe akin to Jurassic Park III.

If I hadn’t listed it on my viewing goals for 2025, I probably would have skipped it, and would generally have been happier for it.

Parasite

Much more successful was Parasite, the comedy thriller from Bong Joon Ho which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2020. But of course, saying that Parasite was a better movie than Jurassic World Rebirth is kind of like saying that barista coffee is better than instant, or that Qatar Air is better than Jetstar, or that a bagel from a New York bakery is better than something you find at the supermarket. It’s obvious is what I mean.

If you haven’t seen Parasite, you probably just should, rather than letting me spoil it at all for you. But to just sell it lightly I’ll say that it is about class disparity in Korea, and pulls off the feat of taking a bunch of characters who are objectively terrible and making them interesting and funny, so you can enjoy watching them even as you hope they get their comeuppance. The movie also features a big twist which has just the right amount of that “this changes how you understand what you watched before”-vibe, something which can be effective but can also be annoying and weaken a movie if it relies on it too heavily. The twist is more of the “this sets the movie in a whole new direction” variety, which I’d say in general is better for making a story interesting.

Mickey 17

Also by Bong Joon Ho, although I didn’t realize that at first, was Mickey 17, a dark science fiction comedy about Mickey, a guy played by Robert Pattinson who has sold himself to be an “expendable” on a deep space colonisation mission. This means that he is given all the worst and most dangerous jobs, because when he is killed he just gets printed out again (cloned, basically), with his memories intact to whenever he last downloaded them to a computer system. The mission he is part of is particularly screwed up thanks to the fact that it is led by the charismatic but an egomaniacal failed politician / cult-leader, played by Mark Ruffalo.

Things go even further awry when the latest version of Mickey (the titular “Mickey 17”) is thought dead and thus replaced by Mickey 18, only to turn up alive. This is a big no-no in the world where this movie takes place, and could easily lead to the execution of all the Mickeys and permanent erasure of all of his genetic information forever. The fact that Mickey 18 is a bit more of a violent psychopath than most of the Mickeys also adds spice to the mix.

The movie is quite different from Parasite but you can see a lot of the same intelligent filmmaking at play. You once again have an engaging but unpredictable plot full of interesting characters telling a story with lots of thematic undertones, which sets this movie far apart and above general drivel like Jurassic World Rebirth. I’d say Parasite is probably the stronger work just because it’s more grounded, but Mickey 17 is good too and pulls of the feat of making a thoughtful science fiction film that is also highly entertaining (even if it’s also a bit gross at times).

That’s all the movies I watched on this trip. I also watched some TV, including another episode or two of Watson (see this earlier leg of this trip). I caught a couple of episodes of The Paper, a sequel series to The Office starring Domhall Gleason and featuring Oscar Nunez from the original series. It was amusing enough and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of it, but it wasn’t funny enough to make me want to binge it on this flight.

Catching my attention a bit more was…

Moonflower Murders

While in America I read a bunch of murder mystery novels, including two by Anthony Horowitz. One of them was Magpie Murders, which is about a book editor investigating the death of her most popular author. This involves both her own sleuthing around but also important clues that are baked into his last novel, a detective story about a Poirot-like character named Atticus Pünd. And so the gimmick is that you really get two mysteries that are wrapped up together–the one inside the novel-within-the-novel, and the “real life” mystery of the author’s death.

Somewhere along the way this book was dramatised in a British TV series, which was then followed up by a dramatisation of the sequel, Moonflower Murders. This is the one that I actually watched. My flight allowed me the opportunity to see all six episode–although the last half of the last one was on different leg than the others!

In this story, another Atticus Pünd book from years earlier is linked to a “real life” murder that helped to inspire it, and the mysterious disappearance of one of the people involved, long after the fact (ie, in the “present”). And so Susan Ryeland, the now former-editor who is the main character of the first book, once again investigates, while also rereading that old book–which of course also plays out before us as a little show-within-the show.

It’s good solid English detectiving from one of the modern day mainstays of the genre (Horowitz created and wrote Foyle’s War, for instance) and both mysteries end up being interesting and satisfying. That said, the series’ gimmick (with it’s two related cases) still feels like a gimmick, and the relationship between the two mysteries isn’t necessarily as strong or purposeful as it could have been. If there are future dramatisations in this series, I don’t think I will be strongly motivated to rush out and watch them.

And that, basically, was that! As I said, it was, overall, a pretty successfully viewing list in terms of quality, once we got past the dinosaurs.