Welcome…to Jurassic Slop

When I look at all the Super Bowl ads, I’m always curious as to which one will be the obvious worst. When you consider how much the ad time costs and the size of the audience, it’s stunning when an ad absolutely whiffs. A good example would be the Nationwide ad from the 2015 Super Bowl that encouraged you to buy their insurance lest your child die. While we have yet to see all the ads from this year’s Super Bowl, there’s now a clear frontrunner for the worst ad.

Xfinity dropped this monstrosity online, which digitally de-ages actors Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum for a vision of how Jurassic Park would have worked fine if only they had Xfinity internet.

To be clear, I don’t hold the actors responsible here. They’re collecting a paycheck, and if I could still dine out on a 33-year-old movie, I certainly would. It’s not their job to protect the sanctity of Jurassic Park. 

But the de-aging here is atrocious, and that’s a problem when your goal is to sell the greatness of your tech. If you can’t even recognize a tech issue in your own advertisement, I doubt you’re going to help me when my Wi-Fi is on the fritz (we used to have Xfinity Internet, and outages were a regular occurrence). I’m kind of stunned that this had to pass through so many stages of approvals, and the people at both the ad agency and Xfinity shrugged and said, “Eh, good enough.”

Then there’s the joke of the ad, which is to imagine a working Jurassic Park. Not to spoil anything for Comcast/Xfinity, which owns Universal, which made the entire Jurassic Park franchise, but that’s the premise of the fourth movie, Jurassic World. Also, everything still goes wrong because it’s a theme park for dinosaurs, and the whole point is that man’s love of technology combined with his hubris leads to disaster. It’s not subtle.

And that’s where this whole ad becomes truly cursed, as a bunch of empty suits and poor creatives combined their power to cash in on Jurassic Park nostalgia while missing what everyone understands about this classic movie. Even the film sets you up to understand that, even when the park is in working order, it sucks. Yes, there are majestic dinosaurs in the fields, but nothing works as it should. The scientists are observed as if they’re animatronics and can apparently leave their stations with live-hatching dinosaurs when their shift is over. When you go on the car ride through the paddocks, the dinosaurs don’t show up. The dinosaurs also get sick because no one at the park took the care to provide the right paleobotany. Jurassic Park was bad before Nedry shut down the system.

I suppose asking for basic media literacy from the folks at Xfinity is too much to ask, but it’s not even a clever ad. It’s not funny, nor does it give you warm and fuzzy feelings about how much you love the original Jurassic Park. It strips all of that away for some lazy product pitch while misunderstanding every aspect of the property it’s using. It’s a failure of ideation and execution, which is really something. Anyway, it costs $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, and that’s before the cost of producing the ad. Money well spent.