Voices: 'Jurassic World' has a mother of a problem

Kelly Lawler | USA TODAY

Like so, so many of you, I bought a ticket to see Jurassic World this past week. I went for the dinosaur fights. I went to see America's new favorite movie star, Chris Pratt, in action. I went to recapture that feeling I had when I saw the original as a child.

Unfortunately, I walked out of the theater not with the sense of wonder and amazement Jurassic Park gave my 10-year-old self, but instead with a familiar mix of anger and depression that Hollywood had churned out yet another aggressively sexist blockbuster.

I was angry and saddened, and maybe a little bit disgusted, but I wasn't surprised. I had been worried about the movie ever since a certain clip that debuted a few months ago featured some troublesome dialogue, so troublesome it caused rival blockbuster director Joss Whedon, a self-proclaimed feminist, to call it "70s era sexist" on Twitter. My concerns had only been magnified by early reviews of the movie that lobbed similar charges against it. But I was not quite prepared to sit through two hours and 10 minutes designed to instruct women -- and the multitudes of young girls who will be toted to see it with their parents -- that the choice not to be a mother is wrong. Not just wrong, but that to exist as a woman without also being a mother actively makes you a bad person.

Jurassic World has three main villains: The Indominus Rex dinosaur that is causing havoc and killing adorable brontosauruses for sport, Vincent D'Onofrio's military contractor who wants to use the mayhem as an excuse to turn dinosaurs into weapons, and Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire, the cold, childless career woman who runs the park.

The basic plot of Jurassic World centers around Claire, who, along with the park's owner, has allowed the mad scientists to create a bigger, badder dinosaur to attract new visitors. But creating this monster is not why the movie treats her as one of its villains; her great crime is having the audacity to do things like not know her nephews' ages, ask her employee (Chris Pratt's Owen) to do a task, and take care of the business of the massive theme park she has been entrusted to run.

Claire is constantly demonized in the film for not being close or taking care of her two nephews who come to visit her and the park. She is too busy working to spend time with them, and she shuffles them off onto her assistant (a character the movie finds so heinous she actually dies one of the most graphic and brutal deaths). When the Indominus Rex gets loose of course those two little scamps are right in the middle of the mayhem, and Claire enlists the help of Owen to save the boys. After some sweet-talking from him as the two traipse through the jungle (while she is, inexplicably, still wearing a white skirt suit and stilettos, making her damsel-in-distress look complete), Claire straightens out her priorities. By the end of the film she has abandoned her career (and whatever responsibilities she had to the park and the thousands of people who died there) in favor of dreams of motherhood and romantic overtures from Owen, and has thus been redeemed in the eyes of the film.

As Marlowe Stern wrote for The Daily Beast, Jurassic World is inherently a movie "about a woman's 'evolution' from an icy-cold, selfish corporate shill into a considerate wife and mother."

While there's nothing wrong with being or wanting to be a wife and mother, there's also absolutely nothing wrong with making the opposite choice. The Claire at the beginning of the movie is so cold she can't reasonably answer questions about whether or not the dinosaurs of the park are happy -- she responds by saying she can't scientifically measure their emotions. When she cannot tell Owen the ages of her nephews, he gawks at her like she can't name the President. These are not the qualities of a morally bad person. But the movie would like you to think so. And that's a problem.

Jurassic World is not the first huge blockbuster to suggest that for women, goodness is inherently linked to motherhood -- it's not even the first one of 2015. In a hugely controversial scene in this summer's second-biggest movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Scarlett Johansson's character reveals that she was sterilized in the training program that turned her into a KGB assassin, in order to make it easier for her to kill people. After sharing this secret with her love interest, Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner/The Hulk, she turns to him and says "Still think you're the only monster on the team?" implying that her monstrosity is tied to her inability to bear children. The fact that she has saved the world multiple times as a childless woman couldn't matter less.

The unsettling implications about motherhood are not the only times Jurassic is sexist. In an early exchange between Claire and Owen, an exchange between an employer and an employee, he responds to her request that he help with the Indominus's enclosure by suggesting she have sex with him, a conversation that ought to have gotten him fired for sexual harassment. Later Claire will share a dramatic kiss with Owen during the film's climax that will, I kid you not, feature swelling background music. Too bad he has no respect for her as a person or a boss. The film also feels the need to punctuate Claire's every triumph -- whether she's killing a pterodactyl or saving the day entirely -- by marveling at her ability to do anything at all. When Claire does something good, the movie might as well be flashing a sign that says, "Wow, can you believe a girl just did that? Woo wee!"

Jurassic World presents itself as a step forward for the 22-year-old franchise, but the treatment of Claire is a massive step back from the way, for example, Laura Dern's Ellie was portrayed in the original in 1993. Ellie was a strong, confident woman (in boots, not heels) who was on equal footing with her partner, Alan (Sam Neill). If you followed her through to the disappointing sequels, she did eventually choose to become a stay-at-home mom, which is totally fine, because the movie respects her right to make that choice.

I hope they respect my choice to sit out on Jurassic World 2.