Dilo's Insanity

What I ended up seeing on July 7th was a return to classic formula for the JP/W franchise: humans travel to dino-island for xyx and chaos ensues. In the years following the release of non-avian dinosaurs around the world, it turns out that - somehow - the Earth's climate and diseases have caused a second die-off and the animals cannot survive anywhere save for the tropical equatorial regions. Now, it's not anthropocentric climate change that is implicated to have done them in but rather extreme cold, like winter snow. Humanity has become so apathetic to the plight of the dinosaurs that they've resorted to defunding natural history museums and basically erasing any mention of the de-extinct animals. The general vibe (to me) is like what happened with the COVID-19 Pandemic: yes, variants of the virus still infect and kill people today and the lessons from that time must always be remembered, but I'm sure many of us treat that period from 2019-2023 like a fever-dream that is better left forgotten.

From there, the main plot arises, and we follow the cast as they retrieve blood samples from the largest animals on a sizable Atlantic island that was a breeding-facility for Jurassic World hybrid experiments. All the while dealing with a shipwrecked family. But that's not what I'm here kvetching about.

Upon reading the production history following my theater-experience, I learned about David Koepp (co-writer of Jurassic Park) and how he essentially felt "put in a corner" with where to take this film. According to an article by AP News: "By some measure, the world of “Jurassic World” got too big. In the last entry, 2022’s not particularly well received “Jurassic World: Dominion,” the dinosaurs had spread across the planet. “I don’t know where else to go with that,” Koepp says."

As well, in an interview with Koepp by IndieWire: "Well, in some ways I think my job was easier by virtue of our premise of “they can’t survive.” You’ve done something that’s not going to work. What that premise does is it makes them special again. I think they told a very large and very ambitious story over three movies where dinosaurs spread throughout the world. Once that happened, you can go anywhere in the world and you can have as many crazy dinosaur situations as you want. I was more limited. I find limitations freeing ... So I think we actually had an easier time than the three “Jurassic World” movies because they got so big and that becomes hard to work with."

The subsequent production of Rebirth was also hemmed by a limited time-frame and by the desire of Steven Spielberg himself to relaunch the franchise in a unique direction away from what the previous trilogy has established.

Now I must be somewhat fair, and recognize that an individual writer probably works best with what they know and with projects that follow their natural workflow. I cannot speak for Koepp or Spielberg. But I also feel as though part of the writing process should involve some challenges and some risk taking. And in a film era of reboots, revivals, and nostalgia being constantly thrown at a general public who has expressed a desire for originality... was the answer really to go back to the drawing board and remake Jurassic Park but as a action/spy thriller?

I for one was severely disappointed, and the more I thought about this movie and chatted about it with my friends, the more frustrated I became. This was not only a lost opportunity but a perfect example of the on-going disaster that is modern Hollywood film-making. People cry over and crave originality but then flood the cinemas with attendance and allow these films to make billions of dollars so that more derivatives can go into production. I'm not saying someone is terrible for enjoying a movie, but it feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

And that's not to forget the proboscidean in the room: Jurassic Park/World has a near-monopoly on dinosaurs when it comes to film and other popular culture. It has been proposed that this series has such a wide influence that other attempts to launch projects about or featuring dinosaurs have almost always faced complications. Designs for dinosaurs in non-documentary media from movies to toys are often modified-clones of JP/W designs. And, frequently, these films are going to be the only way that non-specialists engage with prehistoric life. So it's no surprise that paleontologists for years have had to frequently comment on the franchises' loose dinosaur-science, and in the case of Rebirth the 'science' is so bad that it actually takes a large step backward from the very first film! I'd argue the original JP's perception of dinosaurs has never been surpassed in any of the subsequent six films.

Given what we know of paleoecology today, the idea that dinosaurs would not survive in cold, snowy environments is just preposterous. While the question of whether Mesozoic dinosaurs could survive under our modern atmosphere is tricky, given the franchises' lore, wouldn't the dinosaurs specifically made for the parks have had genetic modifications to allow them to survive in the 21st Century anyway? Otherwise, why make a Jurassic Park if all your stock were just going to die off over a few decades? And holy shit the film's paleontologist character Dr. Henry Loomis was a pretty bad scientist. I can't think of any good researcher today who would make such simple errors like thinking dinosaurs "were basically stupid" or lumping the other contemporaneous reptiles like pterosaurs and mosasaurs as Dinosauria. How many more people are going to walk out of this film and confidently regurgitate this nonsense?

Overall Rebirth had such a pessimistic air covering everything. A pessimism about people and a pessimism about dinosaurs. It was almost bleak, and it made it all the more insulting that the film had its "look how majestic dinosaurs are" scene with the herd of Titanosaurus but then never really addressed that feeling again.

Okay, I've been complaining long enough. I'm going to conclude this post with a few playful thoughts about what I think could make a good sequel to the JW trilogy that actually embraces the bombastic ending of Dominion:

The film should be set decades if not centuries into the future.

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are here to stay, and they've managed to find a new niche for themselves on the world's stage. Given the state of the natural world at the time of Dominion, the dinosaurs would have taken over much of the space that was formerly utilized by the giant mammals of yesteryear, as well as filling in the gaps lost by our modern megamammals that have had their wild populations severely depleted due to overhunting and habitat destruction. The most common large herbivores are not bison or elephants but ceratopsians and hadrosaurs. The apex predators are no longer lions or tigers but tyrannosaurs and allosaurs. Marine reptiles have repopulated areas where whale numbers have plummeted.

Just imagine how the ecology would look if this continued to play out over decades or even centuries? Already humans had taken to using dinosaurs as pets, guardians, weapons, food, and sources of pharmaceuticals (as played out most heavily in Dominion). Now picture them being fully integrated into human agriculture and land management! Think about considerations taken for dinosaurs by urban development and park planning. Think about the new breeds of dinosaurs that could be created that supply people with food or "designer dinosaurs" that function like dogs, cats, or horses. Think of the bonds that could form between societies and their neighboring dinosaurs: new philosophies, new beliefs, new ways of thinking about nature, or even returns to old ways of thinking, or both!

This would make the sequel an exercise in speculative history, about how human cultures would look if the world suddenly regained its collective of large and obvious animals but under a different guise. Societal change happens slowly or quickly depending on the circumstances, and I imagine human civilization would take on new and interesting routes if dinosaurs returned to the world and we chose to embrace Dr. Charlotte Lockwood's closing monologue.

The film should take place in a non-western/American setting.

It's frankly pretty obvious that the Jurassic Park/World series has been primarily centered around characters from the United States and the United Kingdom. This is not a criticism, but an observation that naturally leads into yet another way a JW sequel could be different and original.

Change the setting! Have it take place in future Ghana, or South Korea, or in Turkey. Hell, all these dinosaur islands have been near Costa Rica, so why not set the story there or elsewhere in Central America? Instead of following another ex-military operative or executive, why not check in on an average family with no major ties to any major government or organization? I think it could be fun to set a film around a birder or amateur naturalist who cares deeply about the dinosaurs, who perhaps gets involved in some conflict between the animals and a local community, or even two communities with conflicting interests.

Ideally, no matter where we are, the setting should not have anything to do with Jurassic World or a related genetics facility. Let's try to avoid retreading old ground and truly see what it means to live in a Jurassic World.

The film should embrace new dinosaur designs that match the science.

It's time to throw out Blue and Rexy and all the other classic dinosaurs that have remained with this franchise from the beginning. Enough has been said about the frustrations we had with the first Jurassic World and Colin Trevorrow's "no feathers" tweet: if we're serious about a "rebirth", let's just go all in. Give us Prehistoric Planet-quality dinosaurs that look as good as paleontology can provide. They can still be personalities but at least they would look like actual dinosaurs in the way that the first film embraced Renaissance-era animals. Modern CG is so good now and Hollywood budgets are so massive that there should be no excuses about rendering feathered dinosaurs. I've seen more than enough excellent CG recreations of modern animals (e.g. the giraffe from The Last of Us, or even those capuchins from Rebirth itself) to know that we could get spectacular designs.

Lastly, the film should not be afraid to have fun with its premise.

Given the ever-increasing insanity that was the Jurassic World trilogy - from rampaging hybrid dinosaurs to the US weaponizing dinosaurs to fight terrorists to a cloned Tyrannosaurus having a brief channel with its parent across 66 million years - there's nothing stopping a sequel from embracing a little more insanity. That's not to say that I think a good sequel should echo The Flintstones or Dinosaur Train, but I do think that a good test of originality is to throw anything at the wall and see what sticks with audiences. This franchise was already asking its viewers to accept Mesozoic dinosaurs coexisting with humans, why not take the next step?

It's not like this is a premise that hasn't been explored properly before. My immediate go-to for this sort of this is the iconic Dinotopia series by James Gurney. This is a wonderful and beautifully-illustrated series of books detailing a father-and-son team washing ashore on an undiscovered landmass with a long and multifaceted history of contact between humans and prehistoric animals, with the dinosaurs having their own society and language. In many ways this series has fully-fleshed out what a Jurassic World could look like at some point in the future. There's also a little-known series of young-adult novels called The World of Supersaurs by Jay Jay Burridge, which is set in an alternate late-19th Century where dinosaurs never went extinct and co-evolved alongside humans. Frequent plots involve colonialism and exploitation of the dinosaurs for profit, and there are several characters who form close bonds with particular dinosaurs (Spear & Fang style).

I do not necessarily think that a Jurassic World sequel should follow these exact routes, but what I'm arguing is that other writers with a passion for prehistory have taken the same premise left-open by Dominion (a world where humans and dinosaurs co-exist) and not only ran with it but managed to do so for successive installments.

There should not have been any excuse or issue with being "written into a corner", and there's no shortage of imagination that can be used to truly craft an excellent sequel. I don't know if I speak for everyone or anyone, but I think it's safe to say that a golden opportunity was lost with Rebirth and we may be doomed to a creatively-bankrupt trilogy that will probably make us look far less harshly on the Jurassic World trilogy than we do know.