Films and Fiction

Jurassic Park is one of the worst casualties in the recent attack on legacy franchises. In 1993, Steven Spielberg made not just one of his best movies, but one of the best movies of all time, with Jurassic Park, a slick thriller with a perfect script. In the years since, the franchise has gone rapidly downhill, especially in the last ten years, following its reboot and rebranding as Jurassic World.

Jurassic Park is a film that defies its premise. It’s easy to look at it as just a dumb dinosaur thrill ride, all spectacle and no substance, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Spielberg takes the best parts of Michael Crichton’s novel and adapts them superbly, understanding the basic premise at its heart.

Outside of all the destruction, the running, screaming, and tearing of limbs, it’s actually a smart story about the dangers of science, human arrogance and ignorance, the folly of trying to control nature and playing God with things we barely understand.

There’s a reason why Ian Malcolm has become such a popular character, because he’s smart, well-written, and provides sensible commentary on the events of the film. He’s the one who clearly sees the faults right from the start, in contrast with the lawyer Gennaro who only sees the potential for profit; John Hammond, who idealistically believes in his own vision; and the two experts, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, who are initially overwhelmed at seeing the creatures they’ve studied as bones for years brought back into existence.

Over the course of the film, things slowly crumble, as we see how unprepared the park is for a catastrophe, and how all of their technology can’t measure up to the power of nature.

It’s an incredibly smart film that leaves you with a lot to think about when it’s over; one of those stories that can be pointed to as an example, a cautionary tale that goes beyond the dinosaur effects.

The Lost World isn’t anywhere near as good, but it at least attempts to show the opposite side of things, as now the dinosaurs have reclaimed their territory and the humans who venture there are completely out of their element.

With the Jurassic World movies beginning in 2015, the series began to take a turn for the worse. It began to lose touch with everything that made it so unique and special to begin with. There’s a complete inability in these films to capture any of what made Jurassic Park so good, in anything other than a superficial way.

Gone are the lean scripts and pertinent commentary, and in its place we get the strange mash-up of action and effects, where Owen Grady leads a team of raptor SEALS who obey his commands, and are used to hunt down another dinosaur, all while an evil military guy leers at them, thinking of how these could somehow be used in combat.

There’s a line in the movie where one of the characters says they need “more teeth” to take out a big dinosaur, and it’s actually funny, because this is what the franchise has become. It’s unable to create anything that’s exciting or thrilling in a subtle way. It can never again get the same emotion as that first brachiosaurus reveal, nor come close to the tension of the raptors hunting in the kitchens. All it can do is make crass “wow!” moments, that hit the audience over the head with sound and visuals, where dinosaurs crash into each other, and we’re meant to believe that there are now “good” and “bad” dinosaurs, rather them being the unstoppable forces of instinct and nature that they used to be.

It’s become a parody of itself, filled with raptor-motorbike chases, more and more extreme hybrids and mutants, and an inability to see how it has itself become a hybrid or mutant of what it once was.

For all that the science of Jurassic Park might still be beyond us, and quite probably impossible, it’s still credible, and at least offers a reasonable explanation of how these creatures were brought back from extinction. Now, it’s just used as a plot device, so we can have creatures that change colour to hide and somehow know they had a GPS tracker inserted at birth, to say nothing of the strange plot of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, that features either human cloning or a virgin birth, I’m still not sure which.

What was once smart commentary on scientific hubris has turned into a basic and stupid “capitalism is bad” argument, where corporate suits lack only the twirling moustaches to make them into pure cartoon villains. They want to exploit these creatures for some dumb reason, usually weaponization, however that would work. It’s actually funny, and not a bit ironic, how this is a central feature of a franchise that’s being bled dry and made a shallow copy of its former self by greedy corporate executives who could never imagine themselves as the bad guys they laugh at.

Such is the case with the latest mutant abomination Jurassic World: Rebirth. Much like the overhyped D-Rex that was used in marketing, this film is a bloated, destructive, ugly thing that should never have been allowed to live, and should have been put out of its misery to save its suffering and indignation, and save the audience from its menace. But that can’t happen, because there’s still money to be made.

It’s so sad to see where these movies have ended up, as pale imitations of themselves, lost for ideas, rerunning plots, and scrabbling for the last few crumbs from the books. If I told you this entire movie happens because of one idiot with a Snickers wrapper, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration. “Ah, well, that Chaos Theory” you might think, but that’s not the case.

Like its predecessors, this movie doesn’t understand anything about the first movie or why it’s so beloved, it just copies what it sees. It’s like someone who learns a language phonetically, they know the sounds, but they have no idea what they are saying, no idea where to include emphasis or emotional, it’s just a repetition of the sounds. So here we have all the franchise tropes, reduced to their smallest element: there’s the evil businessman obsessed with money, a screen where characters stare in awe at a giant sauropod, a tense scene with raptors in a small space, several boring self-righteous speeches about humanity and nature, but with none of Malcolm’s insight or pertinence, that could have been taken from one of those cringey Facebook posts, and of course, the obligatory callbacks and references to the first movie with ripped-off shots.

This movie, like most of its three predecessors, has no ideas of its own and is incapable of creating anything new. It’s impossible to imagine any of Ian Malcolm’s scenes, or the birth of the baby raptors, or any of the classic scenes, being made now with such emotion and sincerity, or even intelligence.

The focus of these films is simply the carnage. They don’t mean anything, don’t have anything to say, won’t be remembered for anything worthwhile. Everything is in service to the action, where boring characters make stupid decisions just so that we can get to the next scene of someone being eaten, or see a plane being attacked by a dinosaur, or watch two of the creatures fight. It doesn’t offer anything to make you think, just some cool scenes that are soon forgotten and have no lasting impact or legacy.

I hate how far this franchise has fallen, and wish it would come to an end so we can maybe save whatever dignity it has left, but that won’t happen. Rebirth is a hit, so there will be a sequel, and a sequel, and a sequel, until one flops, then after a few years’ wait we’ll get another reboot.

At the beginning of Rebirth there’s a large sauropod lying in the middle of the road, slowly dying and blocking traffic, as commuters blow their horns angrily. That’s symbolic of this franchise, a once powerful and majestic creature, now sad, old, and boring, lying across the box office and blocking more worthy films from getting past.

Even thirty years and seven movies, Jurassic Park has stripped itself down to nothing. It’s about nothing, just self-reference and crass moments that lead to nothing, kept alive by ruthless corporatism. It deserves to go extinct, but it won’t not as long as there’s something to be extracted from its fossilized remains.

You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourself, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it!

Ian Malcolm