I was watching Jurassic Park a few weeks ago and marveling at how well it’s constructed. The direction, script, performances and special effects all combine to create a movie where every single scene has something memorable happening. Sadly, the same cannot be said for its sequels, which range from mediocre to straight-up bad. Despite this, they’ve been sauropod-sized hits at the global box office, with Jurassic World 3 scheduled for a 2021 release.
In a surreal twist, the big draw for the next outing isn’t ferocious cloned dinosaurs, but the original movie’s dream team of palaeontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Each of these characters have returned for various sequels, but they’ve never all been reunited on screen together.
Recently, director Colin Trevorrow spoke about the thought processes behind bringing them back, explaining that:
“Emily Carmichael and I call it ‘Jurassic Park VI’, because it is. … The next film allows the legacy characters to be a part of the story in an organic way. You start asking the most basic questions: who are these people now? What do they make of the new world they’re living in, and how do they feel about being part of its history? Ultimately it will be in collaboration with the actors. They know and love these characters. We’ll do it together.”
I very much doubt that these actors ‘love’ their characters, but hey, nostalgic millennials do and that’s what counts. What’s more interesting is the comment on “the new world” they’ll be living in. As we saw at the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the recent short Battle at Big Rock, dinosaurs now exist in the wild and frequently come into contact with humans. This makes Earth a true Jurassic World.
You might call that development ridiculous, and you might say that a couple of guys with guns would make short work of gigantic hard-to-miss dinosaurs. And… you’d be right. But let’s face it, we’re on the sixth Jurassic Park movie and they can’t do another dinosaur-theme-park-goes-wrong story. My advice is just to go with the silliness and it’ll go down all the sweeter with Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm grumpily snipping at each other while Ellie Sattler rolls her eyes in the background.
