I recently watched through the Jurassic Park film series, currently numbering six movies: an original trilogy released in 1993–2001, and a follow-up trilogy released in 2015–2022.
As you've likely noticed, readers, the 2010s and 2020s have seen a spate of sequels and reboots of successful film franchises from the 1970s–early 2000s. The Matrix: Resurrections. The disastrous Star Wars trilogy (episodes 7–9). Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The hobbit trilogy (yes, that's in lowercase on purpose). An unending cascade of new Mission Impossible movies. You get the picture.
Most of these haven't been worth the two hours+ they took to watch, but because we will keep going to them, the producers will keep making them.
As you will see, I was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of the Jurassic World trilogy as sequels. Except, as I continued to ponder the films, I noticed one glaring issue: the makers of the latter movies seemed to have missed the same lesson as the characters. But more on that below.
Jurassic Park Series: Review
Note: In this review of sorts I will mostly not attempt to be spoiler free. In fact, I'm going to tell you exactly what happens in every movie. At the time of writing, the movies were released 32 years, 28 years, 24 years, 10 years, 7 years, and 3 years ago, respectively. So if you haven't seen all of them by now, that's on you. (And if you've only seen one... well, as we will see that's really the same thing as seeing all of them anyway).
Plotlines
The first movie (Jurassic Park) opens with a team of scientists using fossilized mosquitoes to extract dinosaur DNA, which they are able to successfully synthesize into living dinosaurs. (Most with surprisingly normal dinosaur behavior and no genetic defects. Movie magic.)
Someone has the brilliant idea to create a whole dinosaur community on an isolated South American island, from the tiny but vicious Compsognathus, to the always-there-for-the-wow-its-a-dinosaur-shot Brachiosaurus, to the terrifying Dilophosaurus that spits poison, to the classic, carnivorous, and charismatic Tyrannosaurus Rex.
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| Wow, it's a dinosaur! |
With this menagerie in place (carefully corralled behind electric fences, in the case of the carnivores at any rate), the most logical next step is to add a few food trucks and souvenir shops, and invite the public to tour the island. What could go wrong?
Everything, actually.
You remember the electric fences? Yeah, that won't be nearly enough to keep the dinos in line. The security is never sufficient, the dinosaurs are always smarter than anticipated, and the humans keep making the same mistakes, again and again.
And that's even before reckoning with a double-crossing character, of which every Jurassic movie has one. Whether he's in it for the money, the power, or the military potential of the Velociraptors, there's always one character who isn't leveling with everyone else.
But never fear: if the disasters in Jurassic Park are predictable, so, too, are the key plot points of the ending. First of all, the bad guy(s) gets eaten. This signals to the audience that the human threat has been removed, and the dinosaur threat is only just behind.
Just as one dinosaur is about to devour the good guys, another (bigger) dinosaur shows up in the nick of time to start a duel, and the dinosaurs decide to fight it out first and eat the good guys later. Meanwhile, the good guys escape on a boat/plane/helicopter/truck.
Everyone lives happily ever after. Except the bad guys, who are dead. And the T-Rex, who missed out on his dessert. And the good guys, who will inevitable appear in another movie and live through the same dinosaur trauma again. And again. (What's that quote about the definition of insanity?)
One continuous story
It may sound like I'm criticizing or belittling this plot structure, but please don't misunderstand me. On the one hand, watching a Jurassic Park movie like watching a horror movie, where you can only watch helplessly as the characters persist in going down to the basement that they've been warned nineteen times not to enter and the consequences for their actions naturally, painfully, and predictably unfold.
On the other hand, there is something kind of comforting in how no Jurassic Park movie tries seriously to deviate from this basic outline. With Jurassic Park, you know what you're getting. The good guys will inevitably end up trapped with the T-Rex, but the bad guys will definitely get eaten. It's like ordering your regular meal at a mediocre restaurant. There are no surprising flavors, but that's not always a bad thing.
This was particularly evident in comparing the three most recent installments to other films in the sequels/prequels/reboots genre. By coming up with new characters and details but sticking to the same basic premise, the new trilogy builds upon the old trilogy better than any other reboot film I could think of. Most sequels either try too hard to repeat the originals (e.g., The hobbit: An unexpected journey), or they completely disregard the original story and the real effects of its conclusion (ahem, The Matrix: Resurrections), or somehow do both at the same time (*cough cough The Force Awakens cough cough*).
Unlike these other examples, the newest Jurassic Park movies feel like they belong on one continuous timeline with the originals. Yes, the new characters use Millennial slang and humor, but that doesn't ruin the effect since the movie timeline is supposed to roughly follow the "real" timeline, with the original park being created in the early 1990s and the events of the rest of the series taking place over the next twenty to thirty years.
In fact, I will pass over summarizing movies 2–4 because they're really just movie 1 with new clothing.
Questionable messages
The most irritating part of watching any Jurassic Park movie after the first one is that one can't help feeling, every five minutes or so, that the characters are complete dunderheads for not having learned their lesson yet. Didn't they see the last movie? Shouldn't they realize by now that mixing small children and multi-ton carnivores is a bad idea?
Yet as I pondered the last two films, I started wondering if the movie creators themselves somehow missed the message too.
The opening premise of Jurassic Park #5 (Fallen Kingdom) is that a volcano on the abandoned Isla Nublar is about to erupt and kill all remaining dinosaurs on the island. Rational people might say, "Thank goodness, that solves that problem!" But with the exception of the mathematician Ian Malcolm, whom one can always count on to say what everyone else ought to be saying about the insanity of propagating and domesticating dinosaurs, there are no rational people in Jurassic Park. Therefore, some people start advocacy groups to lobby various world governments to... move the man-eating creatures off the island.
I mean, what could go wrong?
One could say this is just the latest installment in a series following People Who Do Not Learn Their Lessons and that we're meant to shake our heads at this newest exhibit of idiocy, except that the corporate-executive-turned-Julia-Butterfly-Hill—who is one of the two the main characters of the second trilogy—is on their side. At least to some extent, consigning multiple human lives to certain death in order to rescue highly dangerous animals who should never have been cloned in the first place is portrayed as a noble endeavor.
SPOILER ALERT! This is really quite a serious spoiler, and thus I'm giving one of the only spoiler warnings in this post. So if you haven't seen Fallen Kingdom, scroll past the velociraptor.
The movie writers try to counter the argument that a volcanic eruption is just fixing what should never have happened in the first place by introducing a disturbing new kind of clone: a human girl. At the end of the movie, after the adults decide to let a group of dinosaurs die of poisonous gas because the alternative is setting them free into civilization, the girl opens the cage doors because "They already exist, just like me."
END SPOILER
This is a powerful argument, but it does have one flaw: animals are not just like humans. In Genesis 9:3 God tells mankind that he gives them "everything that lives and moves about" (i.e., animals, including dinosaurs) as food. Two verses later, God contrasts killing animals with killing people:
"And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an account from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being." (Genesis 9:5, emphasis added)
So not only is killing animals licit while killing other humans is not, even the T-Rex will be held to account for killing people made in God's image.
I don't mean to say that this gives license to wantonly kill or cause harm to members of the animal kingdom, even dangerous ones, but it does mean that putting human lives at risk (let's face it, there's a certainty of death for at least some of the people in every Jurassic adventure, particularly interns, assistants, and passersby) in order to possibly save some dinosaurs from re-extinction is not a morally admirable choice, but I think we're supposed to think it is, or at least to see it as a real dilemma.
The sixth movie seems so show even more clearly that the writers of the series (or the most recent films at least) didn't grasp the lessons from the films: that just because we can doesn't mean we should, and when people continue to meddle in things that should be God's alone, problems always get worse, not better.
Jurassic World: Dominion opens with a new level of disaster: dinosaurs now roam at large upon every continent in the world (as well as in the ocean, we should add—snorkeling in Hawaii is no longer a safe proposition). Even worse, a new dinosaur-locust species (picture a grasshopper the size of a toy poodle with impenetrable armor and fangs) is decimating crops across the world.
Of course, *spoiler but not really* we learn that the locust-zilla are no normal species but were designed in a lab (in order to provide profits to a biotech company, to no one's surprise).
The solution they provide, however, is not to cut one's losses, pray for God's mercy, and regret that such a thing had been designed. Instead, a scientist proposes designing a virus that will spread to all the locust and kill them.
Hm, what could go wrong with creating and spreading a worldwide virus?
*Also a spoiler, scroll past the mosasaurus if you prefer to avoid it* Having opened Pandora's box and spread dinosaurs across the world, the movie creators were apparently unable to come up with a way to put them back on an island somewhere. Instead, they end the film with the sentimental, idealistic picture of a parasaurolophus herd mixed in with horses and a group of triceratops slowly plodding along next to elephants, all to suggest that peaceful coexistence is not only desirable but possible... somehow forgetting the bloody carnage of the past six movies.
Not to mention the terrifying mosasaurus that is now posing an ineradicable risk to surfers, cruise ships, and sharks.
A Conclusion with a Bow on Top... almost
Remember the formula for a JP film? Scientists engineer a new terrifying species. People once again think it will be just fine. And one character is particularly out of touch with reality: the bad guy, i.e., the person who is most clueless about the real danger of large wild animals and most arrogant about his (it's always a his) own superiority to and/or capabilities in dealing with the prehistoric species.
But the second part of the formula is that — after a lot interns and small children nearly or actually lose their lives — 1) the bad guy will always get eaten by a dinosaur, and 2) right when a dinosaur is about to eat the good guys (moving noticeably slower than when there's a villain on set), another dinosaur will always show up in the nick of time to start a fight so the good guys don't end up as someone's dinner.
Until this guy.
Dr. Wu, who makes his first appearance in the original
Jurassic Park way back in 1993 and then returns for the last three films, is among those who is living in an alternate reality. The kind of person who never asks the question of "
Should we do this" but rather considers the fact that they
are doing these things as self-justifying, as though to do original or creative work is itself an inherent moral good, regardless of the thing being created or what boundaries are crossed in the process.
In short, he is a clear candidate for becoming the petit déjeuner of a pterodactyl.
At the very climax of the last film, when the main villain has just been dispatched and we know the rescue of the good guys can't be far off, Dr. Wu shows up. He is regretful. But not about the whole enterprise, just about one particular experiment that — shockingly — went sideways. And he is already scheming about more experiments, not having learned his lesson in humility sufficiently to recognize that he ought to promptly hand in his resignation and accept that perhaps he can be a lab assistant somewhere in five or six years if he continues on a path of contrition.
Not only this, but the other characters decide to give him a chance. Instead of leaving him alone in a facility quickly being overrun by dinosaurs, they decide to take him with them and promise him the chance of conducting his (potentially human-rights violating) experiments.
Now, I'm glad the writers decided that the characters should extend forgiveness, grace, and mercy and not leave him to meet a sticky end.
However, in this story justice is executed by dinosaurs. The characters showed mercy, as they should have. But the writers should have carried out justice by having Wu carried off by a pteranodon or trampled by a triceratops as soon as he exited the building. By breaking one of the fundamental rules of the Jurassic Park universe — the antagonists always get eaten — it feels like they were excusing, not condemning and forgiving, his offenses.
Despite the movie writers seeming to miss the point of their own movies (and having unrealistic expectations about the possibility of dinosaur-human cohabitation), the series finale really does end things nicely. To my surprise and delight, the original three main characters came back for the last movie: the archeologist guy, the scientist with whom he is just friends, and the mathemagician (in addition to one of the original villains). And because the new trilogy builds upon the original one, their presence in the movie feels natural rather than engineered, like coming full circle in one coherent story.
Outside of these few objections, the series wrapped up quite well with no loose ends holding out the chance of future movies. One would hope they wouldn't spoil a good thing by attempting to make more, but then... Life finds a way.
