The ‘Jurassic’ Sequels Are Terrible and It’s All Our Fault
There’s a scene in Jurassic World (2015) that I just can’t get over: the one in which the park’s owner, Simon Masrani, confronts his chief geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu. Masrani accuses Wu of creating a literal monster, the rampaging, genetically-modified Indominus rex. Wu retorts, “You’re acting like we’re engaged in some kind of mad science. But we are doing what we have done from the beginning. Nothing in Jurassic World is real… but you didn’t ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.”
This pithy directive — “more teeth” — is fascinating. First, it invites the viewer to consider Jurassic World on a meta level, as a film that must one-up its predecessors in the Jurassic Park franchise. But it also hints that filmmaker Colin Trevorrow (who directed Jurassic World and co-wrote the film, along with its 2018 sequel, Fallen Kingdom) may understand how deep the meta factor runs.
Let’s back up. In the early 1980s, best-selling author Michael Crichton sat down to work on a screenplay (though the project quickly became a novel instead) about a grad student who uses genetic technology to recreate dinosaurs. But Crichton almost immediately realized how cost-prohibitive that kind of fictional endeavor would be. As Crichton explains in the 1995 making-of Jurassic Park documentary: “The question arises: who will pay for it? The only thing I could think of is that it would come from a desire for entertainment.” Thus, Crichton hit upon the idea of a dinosaur theme park and its billionaire park-builder, John Hammond. So, the tension between authentic creativity and economic reality was already baked into the story when Crichton, screenwriter David Koepp, and director Steven Spielberg set out to adapt Jurassic Park into a film in the early 1990s.
That tension was simmering in the movie industry, too. By 1993, Spielberg had already been the “truck and shark” director for nearly two decades. From the start, his career — along with that of many of his “new Hollywood” filmmaker brethren — was built on spectacle, on his ability to deliver increasingly eye-popping creatures and stunts. With the advent of CGI [first used in films like Tron (1982), The Abyss (1989), and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)], Spielberg saw a chance to make once-extinct dinosaurs come to life, backed by Universal execs, who were seeing dollar signs.
The problem was: Jurassic Park, the novel, reads as a sober cautionary tale about the dangers of using technology for profit — ironic, considering Spielberg was searching for a box-office smash with the help of cutting-edge animation technology. So Jurassic Park, the film, softens the book’s warnings. Sure, the “blood-sucking lawyer” is famously gobbled off a toilet by a T-rex, and the corporate spy is blinded by his greed after a dinosaur spits poison into his eyes. On the other hand, the heroic archeologist, Alan Grant, who begins the story with a strictly negative view of technology, finds himself dazzled by the living dinosaurs even as they try to kill him.
It’s also particularly telling that corporate tycoon Hammond, who doesn’t make it through the book, survives the movie. The film is kind to Hammond throughout, portraying him as idealistic and benevolent. Though he would almost certainly make a fortune on Jurassic Park, that doesn’t seem to be his primary motivation. Still, the camera lingers on Jurassic Park lunch boxes and T-shirts — the exact kind of swag Universal actually made and sold to bolster the movie’s already swollen profits. (Jurassic Park was the highest-grossing film of 1993, and is today the 9th highest-grossing film of all time domestically when adjusted for inflation.)
In other words, Jurassic Park figured out how to get past the irony by splitting its characters into two essential groups: the heroes, those who want dinosaurs to exist because they are wonderful and powerful, and the villains, those who want to profit off of them.
Which brings us back to Jurassic World. Colin Trevorrow has flatly said that the Indominus rex was “meant to embody [humanity’s] worst tendencies. We’re surrounded by wonder and yet we want more, and we want it bigger, faster, louder, better. And in the world of the movie, the animal is designed based on a series of corporate focus groups.” Trevorrow has also said, “There’s something in the film about our greed and our desire for profit. The Indominus rex, to me, is very much that desire, that need to be satisfied.”
Thus, Jurassic World, regardless of whether Trevorrow meant to invoke the film industry, begs to be read on a meta level. A meta disdain for the film’s consumers can arguably be spotted in multiple scenes. Sure, there’s the park’s admission-paying guests getting ripped apart by dinosaurs, a possible stand-in for the film’s admission-paying audience. But then there’s a control-room underling who proudly wears a vintage Jurassic Park shirt despite its being “in poor taste,” or the hordes of people being attacked as they attempt to hide in park gift shops or Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville (just like the one right outside the gates of Universal Studios). But the really nifty sleight of hand is that the film manages to blame all of its problems only on the Indominus rex.
And here we are, back at that scene with Dr. Wu. Trevorrow has said explicitly that he thinks of the Indominus as an “abomination,” a “monster,” or a “thing” — the kind of epithets slung at the Indominus throughout the movie by just about everyone. Meanwhile, the velociraptors and the T-rex, the villains of the previous films, actually become the heroes. In an especially on the nose moment, former corporate suit, Claire, says, “We need more teeth!” before she runs off to free the T-rex so it can fight the Indominus. “More teeth,” a phrase which begins as a damning directive, becomes a mantra of salvation by the film’s end. So when Masrani is confronting Wu in the lab, he’s really only angry about the existence of the Indominus. The problem isn’t all the CGI dinosaurs, you understand, it’s just that one.
So who do we blame for the fact that Jurassic World just isn’t very good? Like all of the Jurassic Park sequels, the movie received a tepid critical response (a 72% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it dominated at the box office and is now the highest-grossing Universal movie of all time. One gets the sense that not only the fictional dinosaurs, but the movies themselves, are inevitable — and we’re the ones to blame. Twice in the movie, raptor trainer Owen is told, “This is happening, with or without you,” and even Dr. Wu tells Masrani, “If I don’t innovate, someone else will.” The tone of Jurassic World seems resentful, as though it knows it’s a tired, nostalgia-laden reboot of a franchise, but that there is nothing that can be done. If the audience must have its dinosaurs, then this is what they will get.
And this is a position on which Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doubles down: its own soulless inevitably. The aptly-named Fallen Kingdom has a 48% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but still made over a billion dollars and is the 27th highest-grossing film of all time domestically when adjusted for inflation. The villain in that movie, a forgettable character named Eli Mills, is yet another one-dimensional profiteer who decides to auction off the Jurassic dinosaurs to Russian arms dealers. Yet, he tellingly maintains that none of his actions are his own fault. When Claire and Owen are captured, Mills reminds them that they’re actually in the same business he is: “Claire, I admire your idealism, but we both exploited these animals… And you, the man who proved raptors can follow orders. You never thought about the applications of your research, Owen? What it might be worth? You two, you’re the parents of the new world.” And after he leaves, both Claire and Owen acknowledge that he’s right.
Later, Mills derides their attempts to defy him as futile: “What, are you gonna go back in time before Hammond decided to play god? You can’t put it back in the box!” The box, in this case, perhaps indicates a pre-Jurassic world, reminding the audience that ever since the first movie raked in a fortune for Universal, there was never a chance it wouldn’t become a money-grab of a franchise, and that we would be naive to think otherwise. Once again, Hammond’s legacy is alive and well. And cue more sequels.
So whose fault is it? As any serious look at the franchise reveals, it is ours. Slick, soulless Jurassic Park sequels are only inevitable as long as they’re profitable. The moment we swap our money for an experience, no matter how insipid, we open ourselves to that risk, just like the park goers in the films. We can vote with our money to demand quality. After all, if this Jurassic World is one that we made, we get to select what does and does not go extinct.
