There’s a specific story about Jurassic Park that gets re-upped every few years when Universal sees the dormant intellectual property’s crop is ready for harvest, fires up the threshing machine to reap, and the content mill gleaners of the fields emerge from their Watership Down-like hovels to steal what bits of leftover grain fall to the wayside. It goes something like this: Steven Spielberg outbid a host of suitors for the rights to Michael Crichton’s novel – Tim Burton, Joe Dante, Richard Donner — but, specifically, it was James Cameron who he beat by the space of a few hours. Cue “what-could-have-been” lamentations wept by the teenaged Beard-bashers, especially when Cameron opened up to a reporter that his vision would have been “[…] Aliens with dinosaurs[…],” as “[he’d] have gone further, nastier, much nastier” than Spielberg ultimately did.
I love and admire Cameron’s work as well as his other competitors, but his other point is the oft-forgotten and more salient one: Spielberg, ultimately, was the only person who could have made Critchton’s howdy-free Westworld retread work in the way that it did because it privileged the experiments of the children in the audience. I think there’s another layer to it as well, but as an introductory thesis, this will suffice. The reason Jurassic Park sequels fail, much like Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth fails, is because they’re what a Jim Cameron or Tim Burton or Joe Dante Jurassic Park would have looked like, only without the sturdiness of Crichton’s tried-and-true narrative structure.
On one level, it’s nice to see the Dino-Industrial Complex strive to make more thrilling spectacle. Unlike Colin Trevorrow or J.A. Bayona, Edwards is a rare and accomplished visual stylist, having built a career transforming the recognizably fabulous imagery of blockbuster sci-fi cinema into true novelties. His visions of a marine force HALO-jumping past the gargantuan form of his thicc boi Godzilla or the hazy Death Star towering beyond the clouds as seen from the surface of the planet Scarif are examples of his ability to use perspective to transform a well-digested Wookiepedia article into its surreal and sublime ideal form. This isn’t wholly incompatible with the profit-making ends of franchise film production, but it certainly requires effort that a number of filmmakers aren’t willing to put in, and involves a level of risk that makes an IP steward like Kathleen Kennedy dial up Tony Gilroy for reshoots when it tests poorly. When he’s let off the chain, he makes features like The Creator, a vivid and gorgeous epic that still has some manner of soul, plastic or rubber or silicon it may be. When he’s tethered to an anchor of corporate interests and a David Koepp script, well, you have a Jurassic World feature.
Koepp — who had a fantastic year turning out excellent scripts for Steven Soderbergh with Presence and Black Bag — understandably sees this as a way to course-correct following the mistakes of the first World trilogy. There are few Glorp Shitto cameos (that will come in the sequels) and it’s blessedly free of continuity bullshit that has dragged this entire franchise down, but what replaces it isn’t necessarily better. If you didn’t know going in that Koepp came up with the idea for Jurassic Park III, well, be prepared to whisper to your significant other or friend “Isn’t this just Jurassic Park III again?” Certain specifics are different, but the outline remains: A group of well-equipped professional mercenaries, headed by Zora (Scarlett Johansson), and a family lost at sea are shipwrecked on one of the islands that evil omnicorp InGen used as a black-ops research facility. It was abandoned following an accident with a Snickers wrapper (I’m not kidding), and is one of the last places where dinosaurs roam the Earth unconstrained by a warming planet and disease (more on this in a second).
Zora and her pal Duncan (Mahershala Ali) have been hired by a smarmy Pharma asshole (Rupert Friend) to get fresh blood samples from a few of the larger dinosaurs, as their DNA is the key to beating heart disease and, more importantly, the way said asshole will make a whole lot of fucking money. Oh, there’s an expert paleontologist on hand, played by Jonathan Bailey, but he’s not really as important as he seems. He’s just there to have a mild flirtation with ScarJo, have mild Malcolm-like asides about humanity’s doom, and occasionally crunch on some Altoids. The bits involving the family are, for the most part, fine, though they never connect in the way that you want (even though there’s a previous baby dinosaur involved).
I have always disliked ragging on David Koepp, because he’s written some legitimately incredible films amid his myriad misfires, and he did, after all, write the two Jurassics Stevie worked on. I also think the primary failure of this film as a work of franchise cinema — the inability to seize upon a generous wellspring of future film ideas gifted to them by the events of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion — is a studio dictate to prevent the world of the film getting too estranged from the one we currently inhabit. However, the contrivances that Koepp creates to advance this particular story are ruinous. Poor Ed Skrein is the cause of our first-act climax, when his mercenary character, out of nowhere, starts lighting up dinos off the coast with neurotoxin-laced bullets. It comes out of nowhere. Skrein has been on screen for maybe two minutes at that point, and there’s no reason for him to act this way, established or otherwise. He’s initially just ScarJo’s pal, and then he lets loose and Ruins Everything. Minor variations on this flaw reappear throughout, and things get dumber from there as Edwards tries to make family entertainment when he only has spectacularly apocalyptic paints on his palette.
Yet this is the endemic issue with all of the Jurassic World films: They’re devoid of the wonder that Edwards was no doubt hired to bring back to the franchise, and what you’re left with are the kind of dipshit nitpicks that could sate a day’s uploads for the dozens of AI-voiced YouTube channels dedicated to making viewers feel smarter than a non-sentient entertainment.
To tie a nice bow on things, I imagine Jurassic World: Rebirth would be the sort of middling sequel we would have seen at this point regardless if Joe Dante or Tim Burton or Jim Cameron directed the first one. It’d still be bad, but it’d feel less like a betrayal of Jurassic Park’s ethos as rendered by Spielberg. These are weirdly brutish movies (the kills here aren’t earned, for the most part – the dinosaurs just kill whoever is low enough on the call sheet that day) that are running out of novelty. Hence the D-Rex, the latest and dumbest manifestation of the weird hard-on the franchise has toward creating something badder than the T-Rex, which is like trying to make “fetch” happen, just with more millions of dollars behind it. Yet Cameron was right about one thing — he wasn’t the right person for Jurassic Park — but not for the reason he thought. He thought it was because Spielberg made it child-friendly, which is a Jim Cameron damning-with-faint-praise classic. No, Jurassic Park works so well because it’s heavily self-critical.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but The Beard isn’t just Alan Grant, he’s John Hammond, having chased a dream all the way to the end of the line without realizing the consequences of that ambition and the second-order effects on the world around him. In essence, it’s him grappling with the fact that his spectacle essentially did away with the world he knew — the old and new Hollywoods — bringing about a crisp, corporatized wonder that’s merely a mutant echo of the astonishment he felt when escaping into the world of cinematic imagination as a child.
This element of semi-autobiographical tragedy is what makes Jurassic Park resonant, and, without it, you get The Lost World. Otherwise, it’s just scaly Westworld, and Rebirth doesn’t even have the luxury of that hook — too many creatures, too few comforts.