You're Not Stupid for Loving Jurassic World

       I had an experience in the comment section of a YouTube video essay back in 2018. This was around the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and the essay traced out how the original Jurassic Park developed its character arcs. I thought it was a thoughtful analysis, and many of the comments seemed to agree. But I didn’t have to search long before I inevitably came across one comment lamenting how far the "Jurassic" franchise had fallen and how the new "Jurassic World" films just didn't care about things like character arcs anymore.

I did a foolish thing and replied to this comment with my honest opinion, that being that the JW films actually took a very similar approach to their character arcs and that arguments to the contrary weren’t giving the new films proper credit. One person replied directly to my comment, countering my point with “HAAHAHAHAAHA.” And, well, I just couldn’t argue with that … 

    The Jurassic World movies are especially vulnerable to a certain kind of criticism that pops up in popular discussion. They’re the kind of movies for which a well-worded takedown can score someone major credibility. In addition to being loud summer movies, the Jurassic World films are also follow-ups to one of the greatest achievements in film of all time, a once in a lifetime event. Recreating the marvel of such a cinematic nonpareil, or even trying to, can feel like an affront to the classic that inspired it. Hence, the need for loud pushback.

That first Jurassic World movie is the only one of the trilogy to have a fresh score on Rottentomatoes, and even there the reviews mostly groan about how “It’s fine, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing, but as for me and my house, we prefer the unbridled majesty of Jurassic Park.” And from there, the franchise's reputation has only declined, culminating in sites like World of Reel deeming Jurassic World: Dominion, "... unbearable, unwatchable, and too incoherent to suffer through."

These movies share a space in the discourse with movies like the equally contentious live-action Disney remakes. Both groups are expensive outgrowths of a well-loved pop culture tentpole, and the unstoppable performance of both groups only seems to validate the widespread critical derision they experience.

    But where the Disney remakes have landed all over the map, quality-wise, I’ve found the Jurassic World movies fairly consistent in quality. I’ve actually found them consistently good. Dare I say, I love the Jurassic World movies. Yes, I love them differently than I love a film like Taste of Cherry or Nights of Cabiria, sure, but I love them nonetheless. This is why I find their overwhelming critical malign hard to swallow. In no meaningful universe should any of the Jurassic World movies have an IMDb score lower than Terminator: Genysis.

I took another foray into the Jurassic hate the week that “Dominion” came out just to see whether I really was missing anything. One video essay published that same week featured a line like, “In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are framed for their majesty and grandeur. In Jurassic World, it’s all about controlling the dinosaurs.” I thought this was a slanted observation given that a major character of the film literally says “It’s not about control,” and this becomes the basis for the film's theme. I’ll clarify, this video didn’t even attempt to rebut said line—it didn’t try to argue that Jurassic World just didn’t make this point very well—it was “Jurassic World is all about the thrill of controlling dinosaurs, and that’s why it’s bad,” plain and simple.

   And this strawman rhetoric has been consistent across the entire body of anti-Jurassic World literature I have had to wade through. The points I see brought up against the films tend to be reductive or slanted, or else they assign certain motivations to the films that make them easier to hate. There might be a thoughtful takedown of the Jurassic World films out there somewhere, but I sure haven't found it.

    On paper, the Jurassic World films should be bad, and deeply so. There is certainly a precedent for masterful films being sullied by lackluster sequels helmed by directors who don't understand why the original film worked in the first place. But criticism has never been about how a film reads on paper. When you do afford the films honest analysis, it becomes clear that the reasons for the backlash have less to do with the movies themselves than the internet wants to think.

         To clarify, I’m not saying a person can’t have legitimate critiques of the franchise. (In my own review of “Dominion,” I noted that the giant locusts took up just a little too much real estate.) Healthy film discourse depends on questioning what’s popular, but questioning implies curiosity which implies getting to know something on its own terms, a feature that the majority of the pushback has lacked. And as the Jurassic World franchise prepares to graduate to the pop culture archives, I feel like there needs to be some kind of corrective action.

Because with this essay, I’m not just here to argue that the Jurassic World movies “aren’t bad.” No. I’m here to argue that the Jurassic World movies are in fact good. Really good, actually. I’m here to say that the Jurassic World films actually enrich Spielberg’s 1993 film, far more than the noise that critics use as an excuse to dump on the franchise.

There's a lot of ground I want to cover in this piece. As much as I want to discuss the "Jurassic World" films, I also want to survey the state of popular film discourse and why films like Jurassic World are so maligned on the internet, because the truth is it has much less to do with the merits of the films themselves than we'd like to think. We’ll start by looking at where this trilogy is coming from, and then I want to look into why movies like Jurassic World tend to be on the receiving end of a lot of unnecessary snideness from critics. Then we’ll dive into the meat of the movies themselves, including the character arcs and the emotional center of the films.

 

Where do these movies come from?

When Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park in 1990, the demand was high for film adaptation. Among those eager to get their hands on the novel was blockbuster master James Cameron. Cameron would later concede that the film Spielberg made was infinitely better than the film he would have done.

"When I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film. He was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been Aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn't have been fair.

"Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs, and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film.”

         To say that Jurassic Park was a success would be a grade A understatement. The movie overtook E.T. as the highest grossing film of all time, and Hollywood has spent the thirty years since putting out CGI action pics hoping to inspire wonder and thrills of equal measure. Jurassic Park saw two direct sequels, one released in 1997 and another in 2001. This essay isn’t really about them, so I won’t go into much detail about these sequels, but let it stand to say that these follow-ups never hit the same storytelling stride as the 1993 masterpiece.

    The possibility of a “Jurassic Park 4” was floated basically since that third movie back in 2001. Spielberg oversaw the development for some time but never seemed interested in stepping into the director’s chair himself. This mysterious “Jurassic Park 4” saw a number of potential storylines. One of the most prominent of these featured human-dinosaur hybrids as a major plotpoint. Potential concept art surfaced online exploring what this might have looked like. Universal later revealed that this art was not developed for this project, but I also feel like this is about as good as we could expect from this concept.

         When Colin Trevorrow’s name came up, the director only had one film to his name: 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed, an indie flick following a journalist chasing a story about a man who claims to have traveled through time. With that one film, Spielberg recognized in Trevorrow a “shared set of priorities” and “a love for the audience.” Against the wishes of Universal, Spielberg wrote to Trevorrow personally, inviting him to discuss directing a fourth Jurassic Park film.

         When Universal handed the reins over to Trevorrow, they basically gave him three conditions for the story: 1. A fully operational dinosaur park 2. A mutant dinosaur who breaks out and causes chaos, and 3. A dude who trains velociraptors. Universal gave him the conditions for a single film, but Trevorrow took that and plotted out not only Jurassic Park 4 but a full-length trilogy that built on the universe and ideas embodied in Spielberg’s film. When Jurassic World became the first film to gross half a billion worldwide on its first weekend, Universal naturally greenlit Trevorrow’s planned trilogy. Trevorrow would pass directing responsibilities to J.A. Bayona for “Fallen Kingdom” (for which he would continue to serve as producer), but returned to direct “Dominion.” For all intents and purposes, this trilogy was buoyed by a filmmaker’s love for the Jurassic Park mythology.

         This brings me to the first point that I take issue with regarding the Jurassic World backlash, the idea that these movies are just cynical cash grabs made solely out of capitalist appetites. Colin Trevorrow reads like a genuine fan of Jurassic Park, not just as a profitable intellectual property but as a reflection on human values. He’s interested in the franchise for all the right reasons. Read even some of the director statements made by Trevorrow and you’ll find a narrative far more compelling and coherent than any of the criticism levied against his trilogy.

“We think of ‘Jurassic Park’ as this dinosaur franchise where people get chomped and that’s why we love to go to see people get chomped, but it’s also a warning. Science has given us extraordinary power to alter the natural world, and we are seeing the consequences of it. We are all living with that. And so to be able to tell a story about the humility needed in the face of the natural world in order to survive is something that felt meaningful to me.”

        See, if the Jurassic World films had been given the same PR team as the Disney remakes, we absolutely would have sat through all sorts of lines about how Jurassic Park was "in many ways a fantastic film for its time, but we were troubled at just how problematic it feels from today's viewpoint, and don't we owe it to the kids to give something better? What are you talking about? Of course, I've actually seen Jurassic Park!"

Trevorrow’s respect of the property is perhaps most evident in the choice to withhold bringing back Jurassic Park’s legacy characters until the most recent installment. Trevorrow saw it as important that he not drag the golden trio back into the battlefield unless the narrative justified their involvement. As far back as the first Jurassic World film, Trevorrow was saying,

“I respect those actors too much to shoehorn them into this story for my own sentimental reasons. Jurassic Park isn’t about the bad luck of three people who keep getting thrown into the same situation. The only reason they’d go back to that island is if the screenwriters contrived a reason for them to go.”

         It’s a really risky move to attempt to float a franchise while deliberately divorcing from the property’s headliners. We’ve seen a lot of franchises try to pull this off, with little success. To make it work, you need to be secure in two things: first, a new cast of characters with charisma and complexity to match their predecessors (more on this in a later section); second, a solid understanding of what the franchise is about on a subatomic level.

Yes, the "Jurassic" movies all follow people being eaten by dinosaurs, and if we’re being honest that’s why most of us show up to the theater, but that’s not what the movies are about. Jurassic Park is the story of how humanity seeks to possess the power of creation while at the same time ignoring the beauty that manifests itself freely in nature, to its own peril. Any follow-up has to commit to these same circles of thought.

         Compare the Jurassic World movies to something like the Fantastic Beasts series. Both are spin-offs of a highly popular franchise despite not following the original set of characters. But in the case of Fantastic Beasts, it’s not just the lack of familiar faces that sinks the franchise. It's not even really about the shoddy storytelling of the films themselves: Fantastic Beasts doesn’t grow or reward your understanding of or love for Harry’s journey. Tally some of the main ideas of the Harry Potter books and movies—love being the most powerful magic of all, making peace with death, destiny vs choice—and notice how none of them feature in the Fantastic Beasts series. Maybe you’re watching them out of a sense of misplaced love for the Harry Potter series, but nothing about these films feels like a natural outgrowth of that universe.

         Meanwhile, Jurassic World makes good on Hammond’s dream project of a fully operational dinosaur theme park, and it falls apart for the exact same reasons that Malcom, Grant, and Sattler foresaw. Even after the park falls, the conflicts of the final two films follow this natural trajectory—can humans survive in an ecosystem molded by their own abuse of science? As Grant says in that first film, “Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?”

I often see critical voices attempt to draw parallels between Jurassic World and action flicks made by the likes of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich, but Trevorrow’s been judicious about what kind of fireworks he puts into these films. A volcanic apocalypse forcing the dinos off the island and into our world? That tracks. An extinction level event like that is a fitting metaphor for the destruction of Hammond’s original dream of a dinosaur playground, and volcanoes have been a part of dinosaur mythology for a long time. (And yes, in real life the ash cloud would have vaporized Chris Pratt. I promise your 8th grade science teacher is proud of you. Now go watch the movie.) Dinosaur-human hybrids, on the other hand? Trevorrow knew that was a stupid idea. When asked about the possibility of seeing soldiers riding on dinosaurs in a Jurassic World sequel, Trevorrow said,

“It’s important that we keep it at least grounded in a space where the dinosaurs are a parable for animals in the world today. I think that, ultimately, when people are able to watch this film and where this franchise is going, it really is about the ethical treatment of animals in the world and our responsibility to the living creatures that we share the planet with, alongside our responsibility to the planet itself. I think the riding of a T. rex by a soldier is a level of fantasy that is ... I love it and I would love to see it, I don’t know if it’s specifically for this franchise, but it’s super cool.”

    Even some of the more bizarre directions that the trilogy takes actually maintain that thematic connection to Jurassic Park, and these aren't just surface level connections. Dropping the center of the action in "Fallen Kingdom" to this eerie gothic mansion complete with an underground mad science lab that feels like it wandered in from a 1930s horror movie? Well, that kinda works. It not only expands the Jurassic franchise beyond just "scientists running around screaming on a jungle island," it also endows the mutated dinosaurs with the same gravitas as those early Hollywood nightmare monsters.

   The filmmaking even invokes films like Nosferatu (1922) in many of its shots with homage that doesn't feel incidental. It's not so far a leap given that Jurassic Park is a direct descendant of the Frankenstein story. And even if Trevorrow and company overestimated how interesting dinosaur-mosquitos would be, at least in this franchise, that plot point in "Dominion" is a natural extension of the threat of biotechnology--that abuse of science, and not the dinosaurs themselves, has always been the evil that the "Jurassic" films have warned against. I'm not saying it was masterfully executed, but neither was it unmotivated.

         This isn’t a Clash of the Titans remake situation. It’s not even a Toy Story 4 situation. Trevorrow knows what his movies are about. There’s a clear method to his madness, and it’s not as crude as reducing a property to its most palatable features—Trevorrow’s not just here to make dinosaurs go boom. 

   One might argue that it doesn't matter how much fun a director is having if the film they are making is bad. I agree with that in principle, but it feels necessary to scout this argument because while the backlash will sometimes grab onto facets of the filmmaking [no, BDH did not deserve that Razzie Nomination, you guys were just being mean], it is the intentions, or rather the supposed intentions, of the films that gets most of the attention in the backlash.

    

    Are these movies the best execution of filmmaking in the history of moving pictures ever ever? Maybe not, but at some point the backlash stops feeling like honest criticism and more like projection. The movies follow a basic 3-act structure, the stakes are clear, the character beats are well-signaled, and the themes are consistent and cohesive. It's a facet somewhat unique to the Jurassic World backlash where critics deliberately pan over the actual meat of film analysis while at the same time putting way too much thought into set pieces that don't really matter. (Something about how Jurassic World's dinosaurs don't act like real dinosaurs, an argument that makes less sense the more people try to explain it.)

        For all the hoopla about how the new films "justdontgetit," the Jurassic World films always keep the guiding ideas of Spielberg's film at the center. Trevorrow’s films put into shape and form the fear of what happens when human boredom converges with human arrogance enabled by the tools of biotechnology. This is itself expressed by tapping into our insecurity that we were never at the top of the food chain. We’ve only bent the game to suit our purposes. In a world where the rules reset, where dinosaurs were free to creep into your bedroom at night, we would be helpless.

In all these ways, his films are very in line with the aims of Jurassic Park, including the choice to present this scenario in the form of an action-filled blockbuster. So why aren’t people willing to extend the same enthusiasm for these new films? 

 

The Blockbuster Stigma 

         Critics seasoned and novice tend to frown on your summer action spectacle because they represent a certain encroachment on sophisticated and intellectual film—films that require a more discerning mind and don’t abase themselves with something as crude as spectacle. The "Jurassic World" movies are very much action-blockbusters designed to keep the theater business relevant during those hot summer months, and this makes them ripe targets for internet takedowns. From what I’ve observed, this attitude comes from a deep-rooted frustration at the difficulty that indie and small-budget films face in trying to catch the public's attention. A movie like Thor: Love and Thunder can “underperform” by making “only” 45 M its second weekend where non-franchise films, at least those that can secure a theatrical release at all, could never dream of making that across their whole run.

    And so I feel like the brunt of the backlash doled out toward movies like Jurassic World comes less from a desire to honestly assess the quality of the movies than from a misguided desire to balance the scale. This is not the worst of human impulses, but in a perfect world, this would mean elevating disadvantaged movies with extra coverage, and that's just not the state of the internet. The easiest way for someone to appear discerning is not by broadcasting one's exotic interests, but in taking down something easily accessible and visible, by showing that you are "smarter" than the state of popular film, which one can easily demonstrate with naught but the most milquetoast of observations.

    I have long found this broad dismissal of all things popular to be a rather fruitless means of combatting the problem, not just because it completely neutralizes the time and effort of all involved, but also because I haven’t yet seen this elitist rhetoric actually convince anyone to explore the realm of niche cinema, and I don't think it ever will. Sometimes I question whether the average moviegoer ever appreciates being told their tastes are basic and uncultured ...

         Jurassic Park is the rare blockbuster that escapes this critical trap in the modern discourse. This is in large part because Spielberg’s film is by most measures the film that kicked off the summer event film as we know it. Jurassic Park recalls an age when the CG-painted action flick was a true novelty and even a financial gamble, not an emissary of Hollywood cash-grabbery like it is today. 

         Jurassic World takes full advantage of the VFX wonderland that “Park” opened the doors to, but this only seems to count against it in the eyes of critics. The prevailing narrative seems to be that the Jurassic World follow-ups lean into the CGI smorgasbord, but they lack a certain empathic synergy that made Jurassic Park so magnificent in the first place.

         This review from Roger Ebert sums up the argument pretty clearly,

“The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.”

Many critics and fans have made similar remarks about the Jurassic World films. The dinosaurs look great, sure, but the movie is just missing that human element, that angel’s kiss that transubstantiates a mere action flick into something transformative.

But here’s the catch: that review wasn’t written for Jurassic World—it was written for Jurassic Park. Really.

In his review, Ebert went on to call the characters “half-realized” with “sketched-in personalities,” and he compared the film’s plot to that of a “Three Stooges” picture. Even in 1993, we were already hearing that refrain of "they just don't make them like they used to." He further laments, "In the 16 years since [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] was made, however, big-budget Hollywood seems to have lost its confidence that audiences can share big dreams. Jurassic Park throws a lot of dinosaurs at us, and because they look terrific (and indeed they do), we're supposed to be grateful." I believe Ebert is giving his honest reaction, even if I disagree with his verdict, but at the same time, imagine someone today unironically declaring that Jurassic Park is lacking in wonderment.

    At the time, critical reaction to Jurassic Park definitely leaned positive, but it was not pure adoration as nostalgia might suppose. As we discussed in my series on Pixar and film reviews, critics are very stingy when it comes to announcing that Hollywood has hit a homerun, "a surefire classic for the ages," and Jurassic Park was no exception. Even the enthusiastic reviews, like that of Empire Online's Caroline Westbrook, contextualized their love with caveats like, "the script and the performances aren't exactly Oscar material, but it scarcely matters given that the real stars here are the ILM-created dinosaurs, a miracle of modern moviemaking."

    Westbrook's claim, that we shouldn't be too bothered by any storytelling deficiencies because the effects are just that good, is especially interesting here because that line would never fly in this critical landscape. If the critic's guild didn't laugh her out of the inner sanctum, it would be because they'd be too busy tarring and feathering her. And so it's not just the composition of the films that have changed, but also the attitudes of the critics receiving them.

It also reveals another contradiction within the Jurassic World hate: most of the supposed “flaws” of the Jurassic World movies are actually present in Jurassic Park, but they’re never discussed as “flaws” in that context. We roast Jurassic World for being didactic or employing stock characters when the series has always been very straightforward in its storytelling. Is the alpha male ex-soldier who hates corporation in Jurassic World a little too on the nose? Maybe, but how about the greedy, underachieving computer nerd, or the “bloodsucking lawyer”? It's tragic, then, that so much of the dialogue around the Jurassic World movies is dedicated to punishing the new trilogy in the name of Spielberg's masterpiece when Jurassic Park itself became a classic despite facing many of the same criticisms.

    Jurassic Park is also a loaded property to be capitalizing on given just how anti-capitalist the subject material is. The entire film is heavy with themes on the ills of the commodification of the natural world. The same thing that makes, say, a theme park ride of Jurassic Park at Universal such an enticing prospect is also what make it such an awkward endeavor: the film exists as this document on the futility and even dangers of converting natural majesty into cheap thrills that are easily consumed, yet it is one of the most widely consumed pieces of media in history. If you give more than a passing thought to just how many t-shirts have been sold blazing the logo of the in-universe theme park--the embodiment of hubris and complacency--the whole Jurassic Park enterprise becomes a wee dissonant.

    And so a part of me feels that the pushback against the Jurassic World trilogy is a deliberate effort, even a coping mechanism, to offset the unease some people feel about the consumable nature of Spielberg's film. By marking the rebooted thing as being inherently bad and inferior, that makes the original thing--the pure thing--somehow more okay to consume. Negotiating the moral contradictions of a nostalgia-laden, consumerist society is a complex issue that should be mindfully addressed with deliberation and nuance (plug for my "Detective Pikachu"/"Roger Rabbit" essay), but careful critique has long been a tool of the discerning viewer. Jurassic Park offers this, and so does Jurassic World.

    The Owen-raptor relationship is one plot element that tends to get written off as blockbuster pandering. I won’t deny that Chris Pratt leading a pack of raptors through the jungle on his motorcycle fills a certain need, but it’s also a potent metaphor for our relationship to nature. The raptors are majestic and powerful, but they’re also dangerous. They aren’t vindictive killing machines, but they aren’t exactly housebroken. Controlling them doesn't work. Caging them doesn't work. The only thing that does work is respect.

Again referring to that very hollow criticism from that one video about “controlling” dinosaurs, Owen doesn’t earn their loyalty by overpowering them. He regards them as sentient beings with autonomy and, above all, deadly capability, and the raptors return that loyalty by working with him. The films present a model of man and nature coexisting not through domination or coercion but through "mutual respect." The films build a lot of their dialogue on this foundation, so we'll return to it through the essay.

 

        Spectacle itself can also impart meaning relevant to the demands of the story. Consider the climax of the first Jurassic World film when the Tyrannosaurus finally makes her debut. When Rexie bursts onto the battlefield, she does so by crashing through the plaza’s skeleton replica. Visually, the moment suggests that the T-rex is hatching, being reborn from the fossils.

This is significant because Claire bringing out the T-rex represents her rekindled deference to the old school dinosaurs that previously had bored her. (Nobody’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore, my high heels …­) Meanwhile, the raptors work with Owen because they recognize that he is their ally. Unlike the military forces that try to extort them, Owen genuinely has their best interest at heart, which he proves when he rectifies his mistake and takes off their leash. The conflict in Jurassic World culminates with what is essentially a Pokemon battle with Claire and Owen sending out their own dinosaur avatar to do battle with the Indominus, testing whether the old guard can right a wrong that was made when manufactured thrills replaced genuine rapture. “Spectacle” and “meaning” aren’t mutually exclusive.

Detractors will parrot how it’s not enough to have cool explosions, you need strong storytelling, without really exploring the function or development of the narrative threads in the movies.

Character Arcs in Jurassic World

I really want to spend some time talking about the main character arcs in the Jurassic World series because, again, detractors like to put up that barrier with these movies. And to give ourselves a framework, we're going to start by looking at the two main character arcs in Jurassic Park.

   On the one end, you have park owner, John Hammond, who at the start does not respect the laws of nature that divide humans and dinosaurs. He fully believes that his dinosaur park is some boon to humanity only to eventually realize that the park is a death trap. You also have Dr. Alan Grant, who begins the film as a grouchy old man without a nurturing bone in his body, but when the dinosaurs break loose and Grant suddenly has to keep these two kids safe, he rises to the occasion and finds fatherhood to be a much more natural fit than he’d have ever guessed. Both characters are on opposite ends of the argument regarding Jurassic Park, yet they both need the same thing—a renewed sense of childlike wonder.

Something else worth remarking upon, I guess, is that these are both very tight character arcs ... that are absolutely obliterated by the Jurassic Park follow-ups, the ones that came before Trevorrow ever left his mark on the series. JP 2 has Hammond relapsing back into the dinosaur cloning business, having learned nothing from his first enterprise, and JP 3 shows that Grant never really opened himself up to a relationship with Sattler. Those films canonized that neither of those guys really learned their respective lessons, though at least with Dominion they were able to rectify Sam Neil's assassination and let him eventually get together with Laura Dern. That is what real damage to a brand looks like, and it makes the complaints I see lobbed toward Trevorrow's films seem like small potatoes. Anyways ...

The Jurassic World trilogy follow two main characters who have very similar arcs to those outlined in Jurassic Park: Claire Dearing and Owen Grady, with Claire emerging as the Hammond insert and Owen functioning as a stand-in for Grant.

        In the first film, Claire has the more pronounced arc because her growth ties in directly to the themes of the film. She gets to embody the transformation the film hopes to enact within the audience, that of learning to see these dinosaurs not as “assets” but living beings with souls. At the start of the franchise, she is lacking that reverence for the world of dinosaurs despite running a park full of them.

   Yet it's not fair to describe Claire as just your basic girlboss villain. She's presented as having a character flaw, and the films give her a chance to grow past it. Moreover, even when she’s morally in the wrong for the first half of Jurassic World, the movie still humanizes Claire. Note the phone exchange with her sister where we see her having a healthy interaction with a loved one, a scene which also confesses Claire’s insecurity about her ability to maintain interpersonal relationships. She’s bought into “the system,” but she herself isn’t “the system.”

         The cracks start to appear when the Indominus Rex escapes and Claire realizes she made a grave mistake in authorizing the creation of a monster, and the threat becomes personal when she realizes that her nephews are in danger because she neglected their relationship. This is another throughline through the Jurassic films--the way a person's failure to the earth echoes them failing the rising generation.

       This comes to a head in the scene with the dying apatosaurus, the scene that makes the biggest swing in her character arc. Here we see Claire visibly reacting to the loss of life, recognizing that a dinosaur can experience emotions and that she can feel for them in turn. If you're already married to the idea that these movies don't do subtext or character development, this scene will pass under the radar, but in the context of the films, it is a powerful one.

    Unlike many other blinded figures in Jurassic films, Claire is not only allowed to recognize and correct her actions, but also find a second life as a champion of the dinosaurs and the planet she initially disregarded. Many of the skill sets Claire previously used to manufacture dinosaurs come in handy in later films. In “Fallen Kingdom,” we see her organizational, leadership, and personable skills used to mobilize action on behalf of the dinosaurs left on Isla Nublar. Her determination, cleverness, and strong moral compass are put to better use outside of a cold and indifferent system.

        Owen, meanwhile, is the voice enabling Claire’s arc in that first film. He is a master in the thing Claire lacks at the start of the franchise: he sees dinosaurs in all their complexity. Note the way he advocates for Blue and her pack, “I don’t ‘control’ the raptors. It’s a relationship based on mutual respect.” Owen gives equal credit to the Indominus Rex. He gets that this tornado of jaws is capable of complex thought, deliberately planning its escape from its pen. He’s the only one who really acknowledges how dangerous this thing is, and so he functions like the warning bell in this story.

But even Owen experiences growth in his own way. Owen respects the autonomy of the raptors and their capacity for violence, but despite essentially parenting them since they hatched, he doesn't doubt that these animals will make lunch out of him if he lets his guard down. He "respects" the raptors, but there's still a certain impersonality to their relationship. In that way, Owen also needs a bit of that childlike reverence himself.

         There’s a spell where Owen temporarily betrays his principles when he is pressured to weaponize the raptors in order to hunt down the Indominus Rex. As a consequence, he temporarily loses his good standing with them, and his raptors become loyal to the Indominus. In this chapter where the raptors have effectively been mechanized, they have lost the intrapersonal piece, the loyalty that they previously had for Owen.

    This is restored when, knowing full well that the raptors have turned against him, Owen removes the headset from Blue. This moment is made even stronger because, again, Owen did not imagine himself “friends” with the raptors. This is very much a leap of faith for him. 

         “Fallen Kingdom” has Claire and Owen effectively switch places. At the start of this second film, Owen is more or less ready to cut his losses and just let Blue be taken out by the volcano until Claire presses him to live by his principles. This time around, Owen is the one who needs to be shaken from his state of indifference, and it's Claire who compels him to honor his relationship with Blue. Their mutual growth sets the stage for them to both emerge as parent figures to Maisie, the storyline carrying the last half of "Fallen Kingdom" and on.

Owen and Claire have noticeably smaller arcs in “Dominion." Their story is confined almost exclusively to rescuing Maisie and Beta from BioSyn, and they don't really have to grow or mature to accomplish this, they just have to prove that they're up to the task. Some have written that off as a failing on part of the writers, and I give this particular criticism points for at least being specific and being rooted in actual filmmaking principles. Just the same, I don’t see it as a bad thing. Characters need a purpose in a story, and a story with no arc is really hard to pull off, but there are ways to test a character having them undergo a traditional “arc.”

Owen and Claire took a risk when they adopted Maisie at the end of “Fallen Kingdom,” and “Dominion” confronts them with the implications of that choice. “Did we make the right decision taking her in? Can we actually protect this girl? Is a happy family even sustainable in a world that is tearing itself apart?” You can get rich tension from these kinds of questions, and I don’t think it exposes some embarrassing flaw in the writers' abilities for Owen and Claire to have basically the same arc in “Dominion” as Joyce does in the first two seasons of Stranger Things. I think the film works without their specific development for reasons I’ll get into in the next section.

    Another thing that tends to get buried in discussion about this series is that Claire and Owen are a very symbiotic match. They start the series very much at odds, yes, but they're allowed to grow past their immaturity. Not only do they take turns rescuing each other (or just as often, teaming up to rescue someone else), they help each other become the best versions of themselves. Come the final film in the trilogy, they’re both finally putting their skill sets to better use, they’ve finally moved past the bickering lovers phase of their courtship, and most significantly they’ve become parents to someone who needs them.

And it’s that last part especially that really diffuses the popular narrative of Jurassic World not “getting” what the franchise is about.

 

The “Heart” of the Jurassic Movies 

      Probably the most common complaint against the Jurassic World franchise is “something, something, cynical blockbuster, something, something, just doesn’t have the H E A R T of the original.”

    The thing about this kind of reasoning is that it’s basically impossible to argue against. Not because its intellectual reasoning is sound, but because it doesn’t actually say anything. It sounds smart, but this confines almost all of the analysis to the most subjective part of film criticism. How does one objectively identify which films were made with love and which were corporate shells? You really can’t. That’s not to say that heart isn’t a real thing or that some films don’t have it, but it's a critique that tries to get a lot of mileage out of very little analysis.

It's one thing to just not be feeling what these movies are doing, but to say that the Jurassic World films don't care for that human element, you have to be deliberately ignoring a lot of key points in the series. The moment after Zach and Gray escape from their first encounter with the Indominus, and Gray realizes that even as his parents’ marriage is disintegrating his older brother actually does have his back? BLOCKED. Blue’s makeshift surgery where Owen is fighting to save this creature he’s nurtured all her life, intercut with scenes from him training her as a hatchling? BLOCKED. Owen and Claire stumbling on Maisie after she’s found her murdered grandfather and asking this frightened girl if she’ll be their friend? BLOCKED. Maisie learning about the truth surrounding her birth, that her mother chose to clone herself, that her creation wasn’t just a perversion of science but an act of hope for the future? BLOCKED.

         However you want to define “heart,” I’d argue that the Jurassic World films are abounding in it. To identify it we need only look at the same place we find it with Jurassic Park. Referring back to Mr. Cameron’s observation about what makes Spielberg’s film work, Jurassic Park places children–in all their hopes, fears, and excitements–at its center.

Children connote a sort of unblemished altruism, a reverence for the natural world that is lost on most of the adult characters in the franchise. A kid doesn’t see a triceratops and wonder how high a price they can fetch for it or wonder if it can be trained to take out foreign nations. They just want to give it a hug. And much like the earth in this series reverts back to a prehistoric landscape, the films advocate for a more internal reset within the audience, a return to that genuineness that is so easy for children.

    This is one reason why the child character is a mainstay of the films. There’s always a character (or characters) who embody that viewpoint. In the ’90 book and the ’93 film, that was Lex and Tim. In Jurassic World, it was Zach and Gray. And from “Fallen Kingdom” on, that was Maisie. Netflix even has a fairly enjoyable animated series following the events of Jurassic World, and its immediate aftermath, from the perspective of a band of kids attending the park for a summer camp.  Childlike wonder has always been part of the "Jurassic" franchise, including the recent films.

         There’s a passage from Crichton’s novel that describes this really well. “Grant liked kids—it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs. Grant used to watch kids in museums as they stared openmouthed at the big skeletons rising above them. He wondered what their fascination really represented. He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Fascinating and frightening, like parents. And kids loved them, as they loved their parents.”

         This also touches on the other half of the equation, the other reason why the series has always centered on children: it’s not just a child’s innocence that’s at the center of these films. It’s the relationship between parents and children that carries this series. 

         The impulse to care for and protect a younger, more helpless version of yourself demands the full presence of emotional faculties. That a dinosaur could possess such capability, as we see with Blue in “Dominion,” speaks to their emotional complexity, a complexity that the Jurassic World films have always afforded their dinosaur cast. Blue nurtures her child, grieves for it when she loses it. Owen is able to connect with Blue on a deep level in no small part because he himself has also stepped into the role of parent. This is emotional ground that they have both walked. Owen seeing himself in Blue in this way fleshes out a person's capacity for connecting with an animal.

       What’s interesting is that this throughline is somewhat unique to Spielberg’s film. The setup is there in Crichton’s novel, yes, Grant leads the kids through the park after the dinosaurs run amok, but you’ll notice in that passage from the book, Grant actually gets along with Lex and Tim almost right off. His internal journey of opening his heart to the possibility of fatherhood? That’s mostly Spielberg. And so the Jurassic World movies internalizing this particular theme reveals a connection to the Spielberg film that is never given credit.

Bringing it back to Maisie, “Dominion” is where the child character gets to take ownership of the narrative. Maisie is the one with questions about her identity and what part she plays in this world, and she gets to come to her own answers. In the end, Maisie’s the one who makes the decision to trust Wu to manufacture the gene that will eliminate the locust problem. The adults would never do that. Even at their most altruistic, they are still worn down by a weariness that naturally sets them against someone who has messed up so drastically. They need someone like Maisie to facilitate that kind of trust and hope. It's poetic that a series about learning to see oneself in children concludes with a child taking charge. Again, Owen and Claire having relatively static arcs in “Dominion” kind of works because that story doesn’t really belong to them: it belongs to Maisie.

        This is also why bringing back the legacy characters for “Dominion” reads like more than simple fan service. It’s meaningful to have that final team spanning across multiple generations of heroes. It imagines a world where the generations stop fighting with one another and combine their efforts in order to heal the world. That kind of undaunting trust comes naturally to children, and if adults can relearn it, then real social harmony has a chance.

             Arguing today whether the Jurassic World movies can ever be as good as Jurassic Park is kind of a slanted battle because the conditions in which the ’93 film entered classic-hood simply no longer exist. No movie could ever push the cinematic form forward so forcefully while remaining tethered to the universe of the ’93 film, especially given that the conversation around CGI mastery has taken such a dramatic turn in recent years.

    So I guess the question shouldn't be, "is Jurassic World as good as Jurassic Park" so much as, "is there still something to be learned from returning to the Jurassic Park mythology? Are there still stories to be told within this framework?" And in a world where greed abounds and empathy is on its last limb, I think the answer is very clear.

    That's why the child character, whatever shape it inhabits, rings even more deeply today. The promise of a rising generation at all explicitly speaks to a hope for a future that feels increasingly out of reach amidst this chaos. But it’s a hope we hold onto anyways.

Life Finds a Way

         The quote that I featured at the start of this essay comes from a book by film critic Raymond Durgnat. It came from the same book that features the quote you see on the header for this site. The book in question is, of course, “Films and Feelings.” If you’re wondering if there’s a connection, the answer is yes. Absolutely yes. I came across it relatively early in my film studies, and needless to say it left an impression on me and inspired me to really think about my responsibility as a voice in the film conversation.

         There are reasons why most of my essays tend to be celebratory rather than critical. Yes, I indulge in the occasional rant because that’s also a part of healthy film criticism, but I don’t like to drink from that well too often. A part of this is that I simply prefer to add more excitement into the world, but a part of that is also just the nature of writing hate-pieces. No one ever talks about this, but criticism is actually really hard to write, or rather hard to write well, for the same reason it is so easy to consume: cynicism doesn’t have to work as hard.

    Pointing out a flaw in something puts you above the thing you are critiquing. It assumes you know more, and that’s a really appealing place to be. We don’t question hate or skepticism the way we question enthusiasm. As a result, fallacies go unchallenged, cynicism becomes the default, and cheap rhetoric runs rampant.

As it pertains to the Jurassic World movies, I see it as a real lost opportunity because, despite what the YouTube comments say, a lot of love and thought went into this series, and it understands the emotional thread of Jurassic Park better than popular discourse will ever give credit for. It has the potential to not only compel the viewer to consciously consider their relationship to the natural world, it can also serve as a cultural touchstone for people who just love a well told story.

    So I guess you could say that much in the same way that society in the Jurassic World films has lost touch with a childlike wonder that gives them reverence for dinosaurs, our society is losing touch with the thing that makes movies so engaging.

         I’ll clarify one final time; I’m not trying to assign any moral imperative to a person’s opinion of the Jurassic World movies. Maybe a person just isn’t feeling what Trevorrow did for the franchise, and that’s no sin, but working backwards from a foregone conclusion that these movies are just dino-branded money pits because it might get you more clicks, that doesn't help anyone. In hindsight, the fact that this trilogy never really internalized this pushback actually reads like a point in its favor. This could have easily been a Star Wars sequel trilogy situation where there was no singular vision guiding the trilogy and each new installment was just a counterpoint to the previous, but Trevorrow and his team knew what story they were telling, and they told that story. The week leading up to “Dominion,” Trevorrow shared,

“I hope with this one that people feel like I've treated it with respect, that I've made bold new decisions that have made this richer and deeper. And ultimately recognize that dinosaurs are a reminder of how very briefly we've been on this planet, and that we shouldn't treat this place as if we own it, because we coexist with a lot of living things.”

         On its first release, It’s a Wonderful Life was written off as being unfocused and overly simplistic. It took a few generations (and cable reruns) for people to “get” what the film was about and why it was so special. I don’t know if a similar fate awaits the Jurassic World trilogy. I’d be happy if people eventually came around to seeing the trilogy as a worthy supplement to Spielberg’s film, but I’m also not going to imagine that every movie that deserves a reevaluation receives one, and the internet seems pretty comfortable letting Jurassic World be this emblem of blockbuster evil.

I don’t know what the legacy of Jurassic World is going to be thirty years down the road. But while we’re waiting, I think we can take a page from Dr. Grant and learn to evolve.

--The Professor