As a young kid who grew up at the perfect time for the release of the original Jurassic Park in 1993, the film has always had a special place for me. My obsession with it has continued throughout my adult life and to this day I still hang a framed picture of the original movie poster in my office. To add more fuel to the fire, my parents at the time got to work with Sam Neil, helping restore his art collection. This meant I got to meet him in person, at his house, have lunch together and swim in his pool, all during my peak Jurassic Park fandom.
For an action blockbuster, the film is a well crafted piece of cinema that holds up to this day. We all know how ground breaking it was visually at the time, but the real core strength of the film, is its well crafted characters and their stories.
what boy hood dreams are made of
Since then, you’d be holding your breath to think any sequel would have held up to the first film—and although none of them really do— some have their moments. Technical execution of movie production across the last 20 years has evolved spectacularly. You can do whatever you want, however you want, but that doesn’t mean you should. And it seems that the art of screen writing has devolved immensely when it comes to this genre of block buster. Don’t get me wrong there are many well written films out there, so i’m only focusing on the degradation of the JP franchise here.
My expectations were low to start with when I went into Jurassic World Dominion knowing it was going to be bad, or at best, just a fun action ride. That young fan in me wanted to see how they wrapped this whole story up especially since they made a huge point of brining back the original cast (which the cynic in me knew was just nostalgia bait).
My god, it was worse than I could have ever expected. The worst part is they missed a great opportunity to evolve the characters and actually tell a great story with the ingredients they had.
Now I can understand that I may not be the target market for this new type of storytelling, and that the film is more geared towards kids. In that case, the filmmakers must think kids are dumb and or stupid, as there are plenty of kids films out there with a far higher caliber of storytelling than this Jurassic World pile of lazy writing. Films such as Coco, How to Train your Dragon, Soul; I could list many more kids films here that have more emotional engagement than the last 3 JW films combined.
Coming out of the cinema I was shocked to the core at how bad the script was. Don’t get me wrong: the actors, the CG, the execution of the film, it’s all fine, but it’s all just wrapped around a rotting core of pathetic lazy script and story. This got me thinking, how do you fix this story? Can you fix it? How would I make it better? Could I make a better story?
Leaning into my hubris, yes, I think I could to be honest.
JW Dominion introduces Dr Alan Grant, and yep you guessed it, he’s at a dig site… again… Wow, so you’re telling me that over the last 20 years this guy who is obsessed with dinosaurs and studying their fossils to piece together what they might have been like alive, now has a chance to study the real deal and decides that he’ll just stick to digging up their fossils? Here is the film’s first mistake and opportunity to show change and evolution in his character arc. He has the skills to compare fossil data to real life data [which, caveat, have been genetically modified with other genomes to fill in the blanks so it’s not a perfect 1-to-1 comparison] and fuse the two academic domains into one.
The new Trilogy actually has some great ideas and commentary on what would happen if dinosaurs were introduced into our ecosystem, it’s just poorly executed. Here are some ideas of what could have made a more compelling story (in my opinion of course).
- Skip here to read how it should have gone down -
Imagine that Dr Alan Grant, having had first hand experience with the T-rex and raptors in JP1 and JP3, evolves from being a paleontologist to being an expert on living dinosaurs, studying them in the wild over the course of the next 20 years (hell maybe INGEN even hired/convinced him to help with their research until they lost control of the islands). Dr Grant grows from being a paleontologist studying fossils to studying the real thing in real life and becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on raptors.
Perhaps with the help of Ellie Sattler, they both pioneer new research into dinosaur behavior biology and osteology, discovering that over this period of time, since the dinosaurs ventured off the islands, Earth’s food chain has become affected with potential dire consequences for humanity. All while their unrequited love grows for one another(Not that you need it)… Here you cross the story over with Claire Dearing and Owen Grady who are tackling the illegal capture and black market trade of Dinosaurs.
There is no need for BIOSYN or INGEN anymore, their story has already been told. The creatures they engineered are loose and the world is left to clean up their mess much like an oil spill, they didn’t mean to cause an ecological disaster but the damage has been done. We can move on from this trope of an evil corporation that has nefarious motives… also why do these multi billion dollar corps seem to always have the worst security systems on the planet… oh right to move the story forward...
Then the the core of the film is introduced. As Dr Grant and Dr Sattler study the Dinosaurs in the wild, they discover that the dinosaurs are affecting the Earth’s food chains. Raptors, T-rex and other dinosauria super-predators are taking out normal food sources of natural habitats affecting other apex predators like wolves and lions meaning that those animals are dying out along with the food chain below them. With natural food sources running out for the carnivore dinos, they start attacking cattle ranches and chicken farms etc. This begins to affect human food production, hell you can even leave in the dumb locust thing destroying crops, but rather than them being engineered and the main focus of the plot, they are just a side product of increased dinosaur population(after all it is a dinosaur centric film). Moving things along perhaps the dinosaur black market trade has introduced them into habitats where the dinos may not have naturally got to, throwing the natural order of things out even more so.
Brachiosaurs and Triceratops and other such sauropods are eating out the food sources of modern day herbivores like elephants and deer, and affecting wider mammalian territories. Perhaps even some of the genetically engineered flora that INGEN produced has made its way across the planet and that too is affecting the eco-sphere of habitats across the planet (Could have been a nice commentary on climate change). Lo and behold Drs Grant and Sattler discover that all these elements are starting to affect the human food chain and something has to be done about it.
Humans being the ultimate super predator right?
Then to bring Owen Grady into into the picture, lets say maybe a black market deal went down that went horribly bad and a whole bunch of raptors have gotten loose into an area they shouldn’t be(why not throw in a few t-rex while we are at it). These super predators have started breeding rapidly over a period of time (pre film) and it’s no longer safe for humans to venture out into these areas. Kind of like the back mountains of LA, where there are mountain cougars, just now, you have raptors in your back yard to worry about. let’s say that the raptors newfound ability to breed asexually (thanks to INGEN) has made their population explode, and with not enough natural food sources in the wild for them to survive the next logical prey is unsuspecting humans.
Now, you can’t just send in the army to wipe out all the dinos as this causes huge animal rights protests and the conflict deepens on how to manage the situation and or situations around the world. You cant have people dying from dinosaur attacks, but you cant just go around and commit a species geocide either, enter Ian Malcom’s philosophical quips here as a background commentary on the global situation.
Perhaps Owen Grady needs Grant’s expertise in the field, or vice versa. Let’s say they don't agree with each others’ philosophies which creates character conflict between them. Dr Grant sees Raptors as super predators that shouldn't be trained, or tamed; but Grady knows otherwise and thinks they can be controlled and herded, having had his own experience at INGEN training them.
Then the movie can bring these two character arcs together whereby Dr Grant and Owen have to merge their expertise and solve the film’s issue managing a dangerous super predator situation and how to balance the food chain (at least in their generalized area of the world).
The film would act as a sort of passing of the generational torch, where Dr Grant thought he knew everything about raptors/super-predators but learns through Grady there is more to them. He always knew they were smart, but this takes their understanding to the next level. Their philosophies combine and the resolution of the film is that we learn how to live in this new “Jurassic World” in some kind of new modern day harmony... or it goes planet of the apes style and we really are fucked…
As a filmmaker my self, this poor script writing frustrates me and it's such a shame to see so much effort, technical artistry and talent go into making such a poorly written story.
I know that many people will enjoy this film for what it is “Dino-action nostalgia bait” , however objectively that still doesn’t make it a good story.
I start to wonder as I have gotten older, am I out of touch? Is the first JP just as dumb as this new one, but because I was a kid at the time it came out it just seemed so much better? I can confidently say no (even though yes, the first film has some silly things in it, but it still balances those elements out as a well told story). Having studied the art of storytelling, filmmaking, character arcs and the hero’s journey, this new film lacks in every single one of those categories, it retains no magic what so ever. If you like watching animals fight each other to the death for no apparent reason then it might be for you, as it only serves to distract from the weak script writing…
I think if you enjoyed this film that’s cool, It’s ok to enjoy it for what it is. To me though storytelling is the most important part in the art of cinema. Iconic characters that learn and evolve over time is what engages us. ‘The hero’s journey’ is what makes films memorable, and there are no hero’s in this story.