Franchise films have a way of raking in box office hits, just because there’s a formula that every viewer can understand and follow. A very popular franchise format is the trilogy – but what happens when they’ve run past their 3-movie mark? Most tend to ‘reinvent’ themselves as a beefed-up CGI version of their predecessors.
This is very much the case of Jurassic World – a series that follows the Jurassic Park trilogy. In the first Jurassic World, the entire premise is about the awe and wonder of a new invention, where everyone is amazed at a new world… until it tries to kill them, just like in 1993’s Jurassic Park. In Fallen Kingdom (which is Jurassic World 2, or Jurassic Park 5 depending on how you look at it), the dinosaurs are extracted from the island and shipped to the US, where terror ensues – which is pretty much a mirror story to 1997’s Jurassic Park II: The Lost World.
So, what else did we learn from the latest installment of Spielberg’s well-crafted dinosaur universe (with source material from author Michael Crichton)?
1. We love herbivores
At our core, we humans have a soft spot for the helpless and vulnerable. In one scene of the movie, some members of the audience were moved to tears when a brontosaurus was stranded and eventually killed by the volcanic explosion. If the movie swapped that herbivore for a T-Rex or Allosaurus, the audience might not have been so sympathetic.
Basically, we’re empathetic to creatures who don’t want to eat us.
2. There are always children involved
In case you haven’t noticed, every movie in the Jurassic Park franchise feature children – you can thank Spielberg for that. There are two siblings in the first Jurassic Park who were related to the founder of the park; in Jurassic World, there’s a pair of siblings related to Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the manager of the park. In Fallen Kingdom, there’s just one girl – exactly like in The Lost World.
No matter how precarious their situation, the rule of thumb in cinema is: children can never be victims. Which explains how Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) in Fallen Kingdom can lie in bed and still be alive even when the dinosaur is hovering that close to her face.
3. Humans are the real monsters
When it comes to predators, none can be more dangerous than humans. Sure, the T-Rex, Velociraptor, and all those newly-created hybrids in the movie are all scary, but at their core, they’re still animals with a single instinct: to feed.
It’s the humans who are using – actually, creating – these predators for their own gain: in Jurassic World, the hybrid Indominus Rex is used to attract more visitors to the park, while in Fallen Kingdom, the new creature – called Indoraptor – is simply a walking weapon with teeth. Even ‘Blue’, the velociraptor that saves the day in Fallen Kingdom, was trained to follow human commands.
As you can expect, all hell breaks loose because nature doesn’t like to be tamed or controlled. To quote Dr. Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum) pronouncement from the original Jurassic Park: “Life cannot be contained.”
4. “New” creatures in Jurassic World are based on real ones
With each installment of the franchise comes a headlining predator dinosaur; in the Jurassic Park series, they were the T-Rex, Velociraptor, and the Pteranodon. While the latter two aren’t on your everyday dinosaur list, they did exist – although an actual Velociraptor was only 1.5m tall and the giant Pteranodon in reality weighed only 20kg and did not have teeth.
In Jurassic World, the new predators are engineered by humans. The Indominus Rex is supposedly a beefed-up version of the T-Rex with DNA of other animals, but it’s actually based off a little-known dino called Therizinosaurus which had large, grasping arms – but unlike its screen counterpart, it’s actually vegetarian.
Fallen Kingdom‘s Indoraptor – with a velociraptor origin – is based on the Masiakiasurus, a Madagascan dinosaur complete with strange teeth and hair-like feathers on its head. The real one was only 2m tall.
Pity the Mosasaurus – the crocodile-like giant sea creature – doesn’t get much screen time even though it was probably the most menacing.
5. Where are the scientists?
The first Jurassic Park trilogy featured scientists as heroes, but in the Jurassic World series, they’ve been relegated to the labs. Science has taken a back seat since Sam Neil’s Alan Grant, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, and Julianne Moore’s Dr. Sarah Harding, all of whom played the roles of palaeontologists.
The heroes of Fallen Kingdom consists of born-again conservationist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and ex-Marine muscle Owen Grady (Chris Pratt). Without a lead scientist in the picture, you get situations like Claire running in heels in front of a T-Rex simply because a kid says “we need more teeth”. In Fallen Kingdom, we see her in a similarly precarious situation: being atop a sleeping T-Rex inside a cage (will she never learn?).
In this mess that humans have created, and where science provides clear solutions to how we can in future act to avoid catastrophe, we tend to routinely ignore expert advice.
Will life, as Dr. Malcolm says, “find a way”?
