Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a remote reserve full of genetically engineered dinosaurs descends into chaos when scientific hubris unleashes the creatures on visitors. You have, three times? Okay, then how about this; a ragtag group travels to an abandoned dinosaur reserve for an important mission only for everything to go catastrophically wrong. Three times as well? Then let’s go with a plot about scientists creating a hybrid dinosaur only for it to escape and wreak havoc. Twice?
It has been over thirty years since the first Jurassic Park became an instant classic. In that time, there have been six movies, with a seventh just around the corner. And each of those six movies has relied on at least one of the above plots. Often two. Even films that promised something new, like Fallen Kingdom or most egregiously Dominion, largely play out the same beats again. And all indications point to a similar result for this year’s Rebirth, which centerson a ragtag team travelling to an abandoned dinosaur reserve for an important mission only for everything to go catastrophically wrong, this time due to another hybrid dinosaur. Essentially we’re being sold the plot of The Lost World, Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Again.
It’s not news that Hollywood likes to play it safe when it comes to legacy sequels. The Force Awakens was mostly a beat for beat mirror of A New Hope, and after The Last Jedi’s mild subversions to the formula kickstarted a ceaseless culture war, The Rise of Skywalker was overhauled to just be Return of the Jedi, but stupider. Is it any surprise that after a mostly disliked last film Universal would go back to familiar territory?
You can’t entirely blame executives for being cautious. Long established franchises come with entrenched fanbases who often hate the formula being messed with. But the problem here is that a new Jurassic World movie can no longer be considered a ‘legacy sequel’. Rebirth will be the fourth new movie in a decade. The franchise has brought back all the old favorites. It has retraced the plots of the first two films several times over. It’s indulged in every tribute and callback imaginable. Surely it’s time, now, to try something else?
Fallen Kingdom doesn’t tend to be highly ranked among Jurassic films, but in 2018 there was a palpable sense of excitement at the final scenes, which promised the chaos and excitement and danger of a world overrun with dinosaurs. It felt like the long overdue fulfilment of Ian Malcolm’s warning in the first film: “Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?”
And after Fallen Kingdom, it really did seem like we might not have the slightest idea of what to expect. With dinosaurs out in the world, the next film could not be another park or secret mission. It had no choice but to do something new. There was a real sense of possibility.
You almost have to admire Dominion’s complete unwillingness to give audiences what they wanted. Trailers teased a world overrun with dinosaurs. But in the film itself, that’s not really the case. In fact, the dinosaurs aren’t nearly as much of a concern as the locusts who, bafflingly, take up much of the first half’s focus.
The second involves the characters converging on another dinosaur park only for everything to go wrong. Again.
Dominion was more than a disappointment; it was an act of audience contempt. You can almost feel the nervous hovering executives warning the creative team not to blow up the status quo too much, just in case this film is badly received and they have to pump out a more ‘traditional’ Jurassic movie in a couple of years. Which obviously is what happened, but it would seem to bespeak a gigantic misunderstanding of why Dominion was so derided; it didn’t do what it promised. And now, rather than offer a mea culpa film that does, Universal are again reverting to the same old formula and, according to the synopsis, they’ve functionally walked back the events of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion by explaining that dinosaurs mostly can’t survive in modern earth’s environment and so now only exist in small, remote, tropical locations. Like, say, secret islands.
If we’re being charitable then we have to acknowledge a couple of things. It does make sense that dinosaurs would be more suited to hotter environments; it’s the whole reason they were on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna in the first place. And during the press tour for Dominion, director Colin Trevorrow regularly warned that we wouldn’t be seeing a dinosaur takeover of the planet because it wasn’t really credible that could happen, with Trevorrow likening your chances of encountering a dinosaur as being roughly on par with your chances of encountering a bear or some other dangerous predator. And look, that would be fair enough – if we were talking about a franchise that cared much about credibility.
Once upon a time, yes it did. Among the many reasons Jurassic Park struck such a chord is because it didn’t feel a million miles removed from something that could actually happen. But with each new film that relative grounding has slipped away, whether it was the ‘raptor whistle’ in Jurassic Park III or Chris Pratt’s apparently superhuman ability to withstand temperature when he’s lying inches away from molten lava. As such it feels egregious to pick and choose when you want to abide by the rules of reality, especially when said abiding is your excuse for not making the all out chaos movie about dinosaur dominion (actually, this time) that the franchise has arguably been leading towards since the very start.
Is there anyone who would rather watch another movie about characters sneaking onto a dinosaur island over a film where pockets of surviving humans eke out an agrarian existence in a world where a T-rex could appear any second? There is nothing stopping these films from jumping forward several decades to get there, apart from the evident fears that doing so might cross a line this lucrative money machine cannot come back from.
It’s true that a Jurassic film blowing things up to such a degree would indeed be difficult to retcon if poorly received. Once the franchise has moved from dinosaur islands to a genuine dinosaur world, it can’t really go back unless the hard reboot button is pressed.
It’s only fair to note that without having seen Rebirth we don’t know what tricks it might have up its sleeve. And there is a precedent for that; Fallen Kingdom gave us half a film of the standard mission to dinosaur island before pivoting into gothic horror in the second half – still the closest the later films have come to something genuinely fresh. But so far we are not being sold anything close to a radical reinvention. Rebirth has a strong creative team and there’s every chance it will be well written, exciting and fun, but unless the marketing is hiding something massive, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the film getting away with its own familiarity. We’ve just seen this story too many times already.
Changing the Jurassic formula would be a risk. But after so much repetition, not doing so is an even bigger one.
