Thus Spoke Zara; a Discussion of Jurassic World's Worst Moment 

is finally out and I think the reviews you’ve probably seen all across the net have already summed it up quite nicely; it has its strengths, it has its faults, and dinosaurs will always be awesome. But there’s one particular question that I have, and that I’ve seen echoed across comment sections and message boards all over. What in the ever loving hell did Katie McGrath’s Zara, the British assistant, do to deserve this:

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Being completely honest, this is pretty much the single thing I disliked most about this movie, the oddly specific, extra horrifying, and rather mean spirited death of one random, underdeveloped character, and I’m coming across a similar reaction over and over. What is it that makes this death stand out, and to many, feel like a negative mark on an otherwise entertaining movie? Well, I’ve got some theories.

By which I mean we literally had seen this bit before. The woman carried off by pterodactyl only for both to be devoured by a dinosharkodile was literally in the trailer, and while we might not have been able to pinpoint Zara specifically as the woman in question, anyone who was the slightest bit aware of that sequence would have been able to know where it was going as soon as the pterodactyls got loose. If it was the particularly intense death of a nameless, faceless bystander, it would have been one thing, but when the trailer shows off exactly what happens to a named character, that removes any and all suspense from the sequence.

Movies that operate off of any combination of action, horror, or disaster tend to feature plenty of bystander death, and it’s no new thing for particular deaths of particular characters to stand out in some way. However, if a story really wants to make a character suffer, there’s usually some ground work the story wants to lay down first. The first

is a prime example of this, in the form of Donald Gennaro, the sniveling, cowardly, unscrupulous lawyer. Now, at no point are we made to believe that these traits make it right or just for this person to die, but in a story that must feature death, there’s a certain sense of rightfulness that the ‘good’ people are spared and the ‘bad’ people are sacrificed for our amusement.

, however, made no effort to try and convince us that Zara was a ‘bad’ person who in any way deserved what happened to her. She isn’t cruel, she isn’t cowardly, she isn’t lazy, she isn’t unlikeable. At worst, she’s a solidly neutral character, and yet she dies in a manner that would normally be reserved for an animal abusing, child bullying, spoiled rich banker. We the audience in no way are looking forward to this woman getting any sort of comeuppance, so when the entire park conspires to grant someone a violent death, we just watch as a random passerby we had no reason to hate gets so much worse than they ever deserved, screaming in terror all the way, and it becomes a little jarring that the movie would suddenly choose to go so far against what feels ‘right’ in this sort of situation.

There’s a certain language that is spoken by horror and action movies; when a torment goes on long enough, relief is soon to follow. It’s this unspoken rule of suspense; that punishment is swift and brutal and you don’t see it coming, but when things look the most grim is when succor is offered at just the last possible moment, which we also don’t see coming. Bottom line, in whatever situation characters find themselves in, what the build up makes you believe you’re getting, is the opposite of what you get.

Zara’s extended death sequence unnecessarily drags out a death scene, and in doing so makes it feel like it should have ended some other way. If she was to die, the moment that a pterodactyl grabs her and flies off was precisely the moment that sequence should have ended. “Oh kids, I’m so glad I found you, now everything is going to be alri—” SWOOSH; pterodactyl death. End of scene. Instead, she’s picked up by a pterodactyl, to be carried off to what is surely a quick and painless off screen death when suddenly she’s dropped. Okay, maybe she gets a little banged up, but she’s otherwise fine, but then - oh no – another pterodactyl has her. Well, that was a quick little sidetrack in our— wait, she’s out of its claws... and into the death waters of the giant mosasaur. Surely this is the end— and out of the water? Okay maybe she’s going to make it after all— And chomp. End of scene, for real this time, right?

Point is, by the time she actually dies, you had me rooting for her. If I more or less felt nothing for her during the entire movie up until now, the out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire rising stakes of her death sequence made me emote about her for the first time, and that emotion was, ‘wow that sucks, after this she really ought to live’. For the scene to end in death after so much build up feels not just distasteful, but also anti-climactic.

Imagine that exact same sequence, only with a cartoon coyote. The coyote doesn’t seem particularly out of place, now does it? Here I am watching a suspenseful, thrilling dinosaur horror movie that made me mourn a slain flock of diplodocus and actually start to believe Chris Pratt could imprint himself as an alpha male on a pack of velociraptors, when suddenly you’re throwing a dinosaur themed Looney Tunes sequence at me? Was this supposed to be horrifying or was this supposed to be black humor? I honestly can’t tell, and in my confusion as to what I’m supposed to feel here, I’m really just feeling ick.

Okay, so there’s something to be said about how we as mass audiences feel about violence towards women in fiction, and no matter which way you look at it, it’s kind of weird. We don’t (anymore) tolerate protagonists who are violent against women, to the point that we don’t typically let female villains get into physical fights with our beefy male action heroes; at the same time, we don’t appear to be able to truly empathize with a male hero unless he’s had at least one beloved female companion get brutally murdered. We the audience feel so protective of female characters that we typically only let them die if it’s supposed to be a narrative shorthand for instant sympathy, so I guess add ‘jerky cannon fodder’ to the depressingly long list of male dominated fields; in a way, Zara’s death is something of a feminist victory, as we get to finally see equality in the ‘creative death of a supposedly unlikeable side character’ field. At the same time, however, it cannot be overlooked that women are the recipients of a disproportionate amount of hate and bile in this world, including (but not limited to) graphically violent rhetoric, and as a result, extreme moments of violence against women in fiction come across as unsavory under the best of circumstances.

Ultimately, the collective history of fiction enforcing to us that female characters are to be spared horrible, violent ends, and the awfulness of extreme, violent fantasies against women have created a modern climate where this scene stands out and feels distasteful, at odds with both our fictional indoctrinations and our real life revulsions.

This kind of goes back to my point about her character not being awful enough to feel like she deserved this, but it goes a step further. Where it’s easy to feel neutral about her character, I personally found quite a bit to like, or at least relate to, about her. In the brief amount of time she was with us, we managed to glean a few things; one, she was getting married soon, so congratulations are in order. Maybe he didn’t sound like that nice of a guy, what her not being sure she could trust him at a bachelor party, or maybe it was just his rowdy friends she wasn’t fully comfortable with. In either case, what we really learned about her is that she settled. A less than ideal relationship, but one that she was willing to commit to and make a life with, which is something I think we can all relate to, in some degree or another.

Second, we could tell she didn’t seem all that satisfied with her career. She seemed put upon, beleaguered even. You could tell that taking care of her boss’s unwanted, underage relatives was not how she wanted to spend her day, and yet that’s exactly what she was going to do, because that’s what her life had come to: do this job, whether you want to or not, and eventually you’ll get recognized for what you’re doing and hopefully get a promotion and hopefully end up in a position that will hopefully allow you to retire comfortably in your later years. You have to empathize with someone to whom being 10 feet from a baby triceratops petting zoo has become a daily grind; what kind of toil must she have gone through on a daily basis, and for how long, for the magic of such a place to be lost on her. We’ve all been there, at some point or another, where the things that used to give us the greatest of joys have become mere drudgery in the difficult to impossible seeming task of just living day to day. It’s a sad place to be, but with just one lucky break, we might be able to get past it. Just a few more years of this, and surely I’ll get some place.

Third, this was just clearly not her day. It was bad enough that she had these kids forced upon her when what she really needed was some time to plan her upcoming wedding, but then the kids had to ditch her like yesterday’s garbage? And of all days for things to start going majorly wrong, dangerous even, at Jurassic World, it just had to be the day she had someone else’s kids to look after, and it just had to be so soon after the kids had slipped away when her back was turned for one minute. We’ve all had days where problem just piled on top of problem; we’ve all had moments where we realized one minor screw up could very easily be the end of a career we’ve sunk a lot of time and money into, and that now, in retrospect, there’s nothing we can do to fix this situation. We’ve all had days like poor, poor Zara, who at this point was probably very afraid that she was in danger of losing her job, and just when she finds those pesky kids again, when things finally start looking the slightest bit up, that’s when it turns out she was in danger of losing her life.

In the end, we’ve all been Zara, we’ve all found ourselves caught between a mosasaur and a hard place, and

why it hurt so bad when she was ignominiously tossed around and eaten. The movie is over now, and while I’d like to be thinking back on how the movie delivered a better monster fight scene than the last

movie or just how many of my buttons Bryce Dallas Howard managed to press while sweaty in a tank top with a lit flare, but all I can really think of is how much I’m going to miss

That said, there’s always the future to look forward to. I think I’ll take a page from the fans who half expected a one armed, chain smoking Samuel L. Jackson to be found on the island and hope that when the inevitable sequel comes, and someone returns to Isla Nublar with a pocketful of ambition and Bad Ideas™, they will discover a badass British assistant with a pterodactyl wing cloak, a new appreciation for life, and one hell of a survival story.

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