Jurassic Park is a nearly perfect film, and it really didn’t need a sequel - but as the saying goes, “Life, uh, finds a way.” Here we are 25 years and five sequels later. Jurassic World Dominion isn’t the WORST way to cap off a sequel trilogy in recent memory, but it’s certainly more of a whimper than a roar. However, there’s another Universal Studios franchise that Jurassic Park could take cues from. I’ll give you a hit: it’s the one with all the cars.
The original Jurassic Park had a lot going for it - the source material of Michael Crichton’s excellent novel made for an airtight story, it had an incredible cast without feeling too Hollywood, and behind the camera, Steven Spielberg was in top form. And, of course, it wouldn’t have become such a cultural touchstone without the groundbreaking special effects that brought the dinosaurs to life. They were breathtaking in 1993, and they still hold up great nearly 30 years later.
A word often thrown around about Jurassic Park is “WONDER” - the movie is filled with moments where characters are dumbstruck with awe, whether it’s watching a baby raptor hatch, or hearing a triceratops’ heartbeat, or looking up and seeing a real, live dinosaur for the first time. In these moments, we’re right there with them. They can’t believe John Hammond actually brought dinosaurs to life, and we feel the same about Spielberg and company.
At least that’s how it was for a lot of us seeing it the first time, and it’s understandable to want to chase that high. But that’s genuine movie magic, and trying to replicate it is about as realistic as cloning actual dinosaurs. A John Williams needle drop at the right moment might tug some heartstrings, and a cleverly executed callback might dredge up some fond memories of your first time seeing a classic, but that’s nostalgia. Ironically, a film franchise about resurrecting 200-million-year-old animals deserves better than just capitalizing on the past.
See, here’s the thing: Jurassic Park has so much more going for it than just that sense of wonder. It’s got action scenes, horror elements, and a surprisingly good sense of humor. At its core, Jurassic Park is a monster movie. It combines tropes like Frankenstein’s “reckless pursuit of knowledge” with King Kong’s “nature’s fury” and reimagines them as a gigantic, hydraulically-powered T-Rex puppet that instantly became as iconic as any movie monster before it. And really, if you want to get pedantic, this is a sentiment shared within the movies. In Jurassic Park III, Alan Grant dismisses the idea that Hammond’s clones even count as dinosaurs, calling them “genetically engineered theme park monsters, nothing more, nothing less.” In monster movies, the monsters are the real stars. Not only is it okay if the characters and story take second billing to the featured creatures, it should be encouraged.
Jumping the Shark
Jurassic Park isn’t Universal’s first rodeo when it comes to franchising a hit summer film about big animals eating people that was directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a bestselling novel. That already happened with Jaws. Spielberg’s Jaws was arguably the first summer blockbuster, and it disrupted the entire motion picture industry, changing how movies are made to this very day. Despite the first film’s success, Spielberg was NOT open to the idea of making another. In 1975 he told the San Francisco Chronicle he’d been offered Jaws 2, but didn’t dignify it with a response, going on to describe sequels as “venal” and something that was done for the sake of exhibitors, not audiences. In any case, Jaws sequels happened without Spielberg, and the series went on for another two movies before the fourth entry jumped the shark so high it sank the franchise entirely.
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Obviously, Spielberg soon warmed up to sequels, and wasted no time following up Jurassic Park with The Lost World, which didn’t even try to adapt Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, instead cherry-picking fun elements and incorporating ideas from the first book that hadn’t been put on film yet. The Lost World cleaned up at the box office, but the general consensus to this day is that it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie. In fact, it’s flat-out dumb as hell at times. You might recall the scene where a middle-schooler uses gymnastics to kick a raptor out a window. However, The Lost World did one thing extremely right: it raised the stakes, with a grand finale that turned a T-Rex loose on the mainland to wreak havoc in true monster movie fashion.
It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a sequel without some form of escalation. It’s a fine line to walk: not enough escalation and you have a disappointing rehash of the first installment; too much and you have a story that collapses under the weight of its own ambitions or goes so over the top it’s hard to take seriously. Luckily, there’s another Universal movie property that’s gotten this down to a science: The Fast and Furious franchise. It began as a movie about an undercover cop delving into the world of street racing to bust a ring of DVD player thieves. Nine movies later, Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson are driving a Pontiac Fiero into space. Has this series gotten a little stupid? Absolutely! But it’s all in the name of making a fun and entertaining movie.
Entertainment is subjective, but there’s some evidence to support this claim: by and large, the more bombastic Fast & Furious sequels have gotten, the better they’ve been received critically, and the more they’ve made at the box office.
Go Big or Go Home
Jurassic Park BEGAN as a movie about a dinosaur theme park where the dinosaurs break out and terrorize everyone, which is already an almost comically outlandish premise. How do you escalate that concept? Well, aside from the T-Rex’s brief San Diego vacation, it took four sequels to actually get the dinosaurs off an island. Even after rebranding the series Jurassic World, it took a movie and a half to go beyond the theme park setting. And from there, for whatever reason, Fallen Kingdom turned dinosaurs loose in a mansion, a setting that’s even SMALLER than an island! Dominion FINALLY gave us a glimpse of a literal Jurassic World, where dinosaurs are an invasive species. But it ultimately reigned things in and relegated most of the dinos to a remote valley, which, for all intents and purposes is… just another island.
Of course, this was between backburnering the big lizards to focus on genetically engineered locusts and human clones. That could make for compelling plots in another film franchise that doesn’t have a whole sandbox full of dinosaurs to play with, but that’s not what most people bought tickets to see.
There’s an argument to be made that the human characters are why the first Jurassic Park is so good, and there’s no denying that they’re great. There’s a certain charm to being reunited with Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler and the unforgettable Ian Malcolm - but again, nostalgia is cheap, that original wonder can’t be recaptured, and fixating on these characters misses the whole point of why we’re familiar with them in the first place. They went to an island to see some dinosaurs, because who wouldn’t want to see a dinosaur?
That’s not to say you ONLY need dinosaurs. In fact, it's quite the opposite. A human element is necessary to resonate with human audiences. Are the Fast films just about cars? Of course not, they’re also about family - but they’ve never lost sight of the fact that the promise of fast-moving vehicles is what got people in the door in the first place. The human relationships are the connective tissue between car chases and wrench fights and batshit insane setpieces that defy the laws of physics whenever it makes for a cooler scene.
Any six-year-old can tell you that a car is different from a dinosaur, but they do have a few key things in common: virtually everybody knows what cars and dinosaurs are, and if they EVER thought they were cool, they probably still do. It’s quite fitting that Universal has film franchises about cars and dinosaurs, because the appeal of those things is exactly that - universal.
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride
The Jurassic World films have some really fun moments, but too often, they trip over themselves focusing on something other than fun - whether that’s trying to expand the Jurassic Park mythos by delving into the finer plot points of shifty biotech companies and corporate espionage, or bending over backwards to set up a callback to something from the first film. Or both, like bringing back Lewis Dodgson. In the words of Dennis Nedry, “See? Nobody cares.”
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The original Jurassic Park is genuinely smart science fiction. Among other things, it plays with real-world concepts like DNA, chaos theory, virtual reality, cybercrime and the UNIX operating system. But we are far past the point of no return for smart Jurassic Park sequels. That ship has sailed… and there was a T-Rex on board. It wrecked San Diego. They made a whole movie about it.
So, where do you take the series next? The writing’s on the wall... or rather, written on a banner falling from the ceiling at the end of the first film. Show us what it’s like when dinosaurs rule the earth, again. Give us an actual Jurassic World where the dinosaurs have established dominion over mankind. Zombie fiction has shown us time and time again you can tell interesting human stories against a backdrop of people getting eaten. If that sounds too bleak, build a Jurassic Park on the moon, or if we’re really short on ideas, hire Dominic Torreto and company to hijack a train full of pissed-off velociraptors. Get it? Because they’re ALSO fast and furious. The series needs to evolve beyond just giving the dinosaurs more feathers.
Universal will not make a better, smarter dinosaur adventure film than the original Jurassic Park, so why try? Make like a brachiosaurus and be big and stupid. We give a lot of dumb blockbuster movies a pass by saying “they’re a ton of fun if you turn your brain off,” and equating them to theme park rides, but in this case, it all started with a theme park – maybe these movies SHOULD have more rollercoaster DNA.
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July 03, 2022 at 09:18PM
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