Earlier this week, Universal dropped the first full-length trailer for Jurassic World, which was, generally speaking, met with nostalgic glee. By bringing together shots that evoke Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original with some radically new ideas, early impressions of the franchise’s fourth installment have been overly positive. But according to director Colin Trevorrow, things could have been much, much different.
In accordance with previous reports, it turns out that the storyline for Jurassic World does indeed revolve around a single, genetically-modified dinosaur, which the park’s geneticists have spliced together in order to draw in a bigger crowd. However, an early draft script for the reboot included a scenario where the God-playing scientists cooked up human-dinosaur hybrids — hyper intelligent creations that had the ability to fire automatic weapons. As ludicrous as this sounds, it turns out that the novel, balls-to-the-wall concept made it further in production than first imagined.
So, those who have criticized Trevorrow’s film for its purportedly wonky science — we were never under the impression that the franchise aimed for 100% scientific accuracy, but no matter — should count themselves lucky that a genetically-modified dinosaur is the most obscure concoction to make the final cut.
Jurassic World will swing its gargantuan doors open for business on June 12, 2015. Until then, be sure to check out Trevorrow’s justification down below. It’s a lengthy but worthwhile read for fans who want to scrape beneath the surface of the sequel’s genetically-altered plotline.
Yes, there will be one new dinosaur created by the park’s geneticists. The gaps in her sequence were filled with DNA from other species, much like the genome in the first film was completed with frog DNA. This creation exists to fulfill a corporate mandate—they want something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get. I know the idea of a modified dinosaur put a lot of fans on red alert, and I understand it. But we aren’t doing anything here that Crichton didn’t suggest in his novels. This animal is not a mutant freak. It doesn’t have a snake’s head or octopus tentacles. It’s a dinosaur, created in the same way the others were, but now the genetics have gone to the next level.
For me, it’s a natural evolution of the technology introduced in the first film. Maybe it sounds crazy, but most of my favorite movies sound crazy when you describe them in a single sentence. … We’re trying to tell a bold new story that doesn’t rely on a proven formula, because the movies we watch over and over again are the ones that surprised us, that worked when they shouldn’t have. I understand the risks of leaving the safe zone. We’ve all been disappointed by new installments of the stories we love.
But with all this talk of filmmakers “ruining our childhood”, we forget that right now is someone else’s childhood. This is their time. And I have to build something that can take them to the same place those earlier films took us. It may not happen in the same way everyone expects it to, but it’s the way I believe it needs to happen.
