You Probably Don’t Hate the Jurassic World Movies As Much As You Think You Do
Before you page away from this article, just hear me out.
I think it goes without saying that the original Jurassic Park Movies were ahead of their time, with Steven Spielberg turning what was a dark and (arguably) horribly written book into an Academy Award winning movie boasting phenomenal practical effects, suspenseful frights, and a few laughs (and lesbian dinosaurs of course). It was a no-brainer that this one blockbuster would turn over a whole franchise of movies about dinosaur zoos and people stupid enough to mess with them. But as The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3 rolled around, the general consensus seemed to be that they were good, but not at all to the level of the original.
Or did people just like seeing dinosaurs?
The decades following the release of the original Jurassic Park trilogy saw a massive influx of prehistoric/dinosaur content to the media, also as scientists uncovered more discoveries surrounding our prehistoric ancestors. That is to say, if you lived in the 2000s or 2010s, there was no shortage of dinosaur representation: the Jurassic Park games, dinosaur toys, Walking With the Dinosaurs, documentaries, the Godzilla Franchise resurgence in 2014, you name it. You would think that when Jurassic World came out in 2015 with the announcement of its own trilogy, people would be more on board with the concept…
It turns out, quite the opposite!
While the film was generally well received, Jurassic World is the scapegoat of many many negative comments surrounding the new trilogy as a whole, with many criticizing its decision to bring the franchise in a direction so saturated with DNA splicing, genetic modification, and hybrids. After Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom released in 2018, almost decades after the release of the original Jurassic Park, people were already tired of the whole concept of hybrids. When Jurassic World: Dominion came out in 2022, no one really seemed to care– I mean, did you even remember this movie existed? Could you name the big villain dinosaur in this movie? Why is that?
Well, whenever this question appears, I like to quote a line from Jurassic World, when a reporter explicitly asks Claire, the park operations manager, why they’re making a genetic hybrid so dangerous.
She says: no one is impressed by a dinosaur anymore.
Ring a bell?
Let’s just recap the main villains of all the Jurassic movies really quick: T-rex(carnivore), 2 T-rex’s, Spinosaurus(bigger carnivore), Indominus Rex (hybrid carnivore), Indo-Raptor(smart hybrid), Giganotosaurus (history’s largest carnivore). Let me ask you this:
Where logically, did you expect the creators to go after Jurassic Park 3? Introducing the Spinosaurus as a formidable challenger to the T-Rex (with long arms!) in the third movie of the franchise left them with no other choice, if you really think about it. Giganotosaurus was still freshly discovered by the time of Jurassic Park 3, and as dinosaur media became more and more saturated, people weren’t going to settle for just an ordinary dinosaur. After all, it was Jurassic World… People wanted something quite literally out-of-this-world. Of course they went in the direction of hybrids.
When Jurassic Park came out, dinosaurs were new and fascinating. When Jurassic World came out, the media was more than saturated with dinosaurs. In the 2010s as CRISPr/Cas9 research and development was at its peak, it only made sense that the creators turned to this new, gene-editing approach.
Now that we’ve established that the dinosaurs are not the problem with the Jurassic World movies, we can analyze it more from an objective perspective. Comparing the two trilogies as a whole, they seem to follow a parallel structure. The first movie involves a disaster that takes place in the main, innovative park. The second movie involves an attempt to move dinosaurs from the island to the mainland. The third movie involves the main characters’ return to a dinosaur infested area to save a loved one. If this three-movie structure worked so well in the original trilogy, why wouldn’t it work in the sequel trilogy? When narrowing the scope and focusing solely on Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, these movies remain largely the same, with similar plot points even down to the final battle: a dinosaur that has been terrorizing them the entire movie requires the intervention of a larger dinosaur (T-Rex) in order for the main characters to escape. This trend is mirrored as you compared the subsequent movies, so why are the Jurassic World movies considered bad? I don’t think it’s fair to the franchise to discredit the sequel trilogy just for the reason of being too similar to the originals.
On top of that, with the use of CGI on top of practical effects, dinosaurs look better than ever, and the movies feel more alive, like a dinosaur movie should. And with a more diverse casting, more audiences can feel immersed in the prehistoric experience.
So next time you watch the Jurassic World movies, try to actually watch it, instead of clowning on the “direction” of the movies. You don’t hate the movies, you just don’t love dinosaurs anymore.