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Warning: spoilers for the Jurassic Park movies below, including Fallen Kingdom.
Let me just start by stating that Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time. I have, without a doubt, watched the original movie more than any other movie ever. It’s because of this that I’ve loved all of the Jurassic Park sequels. Each one brings me a certain kind of guilty joy that no other movies can quite supply. This being said, I’m under no illusion that these are great movies. In fact, I wouldn’t even say that Jurassic Park 3 is a good movie. That doesn’t deny the fact that I will always enjoy myself while watching it, and will forever look forward to seeing more Jurassic movies play big and loud on the silver screen. Now, I would like to dive a little deeper and explain just why I think the Jurassic World movies that have come out recently are effectively ruining the magical terror that Spielberg created in his original masterpiece.
Jurassic Park opens with one of the most terrifying scenes in the entire series: Robert Muldoon prepares to unload a giant metal crate into an unknown facility, just before the animal inside the crate attacks and kills one of the workers. After this, we take a break from the dinosaurs and get to spend some time with the characters. In fact, it takes some 45 minutes before any dino-action starts up again. The scene with the T-rex escaping its paddock will forever go down as one of the greatest moments in blockbuster history. This is all before Jurassic Park introduces us to the true star of the series: the velociraptor. These animals are said to be some of the deadliest and most terrifying creatures to ever hunt the Earth, and boy do they deliver. The kitchen scene where the two raptors slowly track down Lex and Tim is the stuff of nightmares! These monsters are lethal, ruthless, and hungry, and the movie smartly saves its third act for these creatures alone.
Let’s compare now Jurassic Park’s use of the velociraptor to their debut in Jurassic World. To briefly catch up, at this point in time it has been 22 years since the original Jurassic Park came out, and roughly 14 years since the most recent sequel, Jurassic Park III. Last we had seen, the velociraptors were still the fiercest of our heroes opponents. If audiences were to remember one thing about the previous Jurassic movies, it would likely be that the velociraptors were terrifying animals. This is where Jurassic World immediately fails for me. Within the first thirty minutes of the film, we are given a representation of where the raptors’ role in the film will be: glorified pets. These once menacing and tenaciously evil creatures that were originally introduced in a dark emergency bunker are now being introduced in broad daylight following commands for a treat, their rubbery CGI skin glistening in the sunlight. Jurassic World chose to take the series’ greatest horror asset and turn them into a house pet. And this isn’t even the worst they’ve done.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom takes the CGI attack dogs from its predecessor and decides to turn them into superheroes. The velociraptor has devolved from being a seriously horrific killing machine to jumping away from exploding gas tanks and fighting other dinosaurs in slow-motion. I’m not denying that the fight at the end of Fallen Kingdom wasn’t badass, but I think that somewhere along the way the series lost track of what it stood for. What was once representative of mankind wrongfully playing God is now replaced with essentially animal rights propaganda.
Okay, that could be a bit of a stretch, but there’s no denying the serious thematic shift that has happened. It never used to be a question of whether or not these creatures had the right to live, but rather if people should have the right to create in the first place. Even Ian Malcolm, the series’ voice of reason on this subject, states in Fallen Kingdom that the world should let these animals return to their extinction. The writers have a character who has been shown to be trustworthy and respected throughout the series state that he believes one thing, only to have the newest protagonists do the exact opposite. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters go against what our voice of reason is saying, and the movie as a whole suffers for it. By reconnecting Ian Malcolm to this new trilogy, the filmmakers effectively remind us of all of the terrible things that happened to Malcolm and his party in The Lost World, and we’re supposed to just pretend that the raptors are now our friends? Allies, even? It simply doesn’t add up.
The Jurassic series built its suspense around the setup that these creatures are from a time that we simply aren’t compatible with, and they will do and eat what they need to in order to survive. By doing a complete 180 and now telling the audience that the animals are our friends and they will help us fight our other abominations (i.e., the Indoraptor), the series loses a lot of the built-up terror magic, and in a way that hurts the first film as well as all that have come after. It can be tough to be frightened by a velociraptor backing someone into a corner while still having the sight of Chris Pratt riding a motorcycle alongside 4 raptors fresh in your mind.
In closing, I would like to again state that I really don’t dislike the Jurassic Park franchise. While I do seriously believe that the first film is a near-perfect example of how to make a blockbuster, I also think that the successors have all added something fresh and new to the table. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom left the franchise toward a path that I am genuinely excited for, and I think it could offer some really cool moments that have never been explored in a Jurassic movie prior. I simply wish that Colin Trevorrow and company had approached the situation a bit differently, and perhaps saved the raptors for a more appropriate time where their natural scaring talents could be better utilized.
Written by Zackary Townsend (@themoviebuzzz)