“Jurassic World: Dominion” doesn’t understand “Jurassic Park”
Let’s deconstruct parts of a movie that really doesn’t deserve it!
Let’s discuss a movie that really doesn’t deserve it!
If one were to start a class on deconstructing theme in literature, it’d be hard to go much farther afield than the 1989 novel Jurassic Park and its corollary 1993 film. In it, a group of scientists and investors, buoyed by hubris and driven by greed, construct a technological marvel of a theme park. Throughout the book and film, it’s made clear that the violent and hostile chimeras they have wrought through ignorance, laziness and the desire for a strong ROI are a destructive and uncontrollable force that will doom many of the protagonists and fundamentally scar the others.
There are also dinosaurs in it. (cheap gag)
The reason Crichton’s novel (and 1993 film, which he wrote the screenplay for) is so successful is that the dinosaurs serve perfectly as a physical agent representing the wondrous and terrible force of science that has been welded to the side of a corporate monster. It’s unsubtle. Mankind created a monster he couldn’t control, and chaos inevitably reigns.
The Jurassic Park sequels were, as a rule, nothing special. This goes as much for the films as it does for the novel “The Lost World” (Crichton’s one and only sequel in his literary oeuvre). He seems to have written it to correct himself about how much learned behavior velociraptors would have had, and defends this with a trite message about “science marches on”. The themes of the second and third movies seemed to be “Poaching is bad, actually,” and “Kids sure are annoying,” respectively, with Jurassic Park 3 being beige enough that it killed the franchise for more than 10 years.
In 2015, Jurassic World shambled on to the scene with enough product placement to shame Michael Bay, remnants of an abandoned plotline about human/dinosaur hybrids, and a firm sense of pastiche. This was Jurassic Park done again, this time replete with in-jokes, memes, shout-outs, and devoid of the core warning of the first film. Though I could go on about the reversal of the 90s feminism present in the first movie and the male saviour syndrome and the unparalleled idiocy of making dinosaurs as a weapon of war, I won’t. It was okay. There was a park, people got eaten, Indomitus could camouflage, and running from a T-rex in heels is faster than it appears. It was fine.
In the second movie (fifth movie? Fallen Kingdom) we meet Maisie, and the Indoraptor, and the sinking feeling that aaalll this is going to go horribly wrong. The money-grubbing billionaires of the world are practically twirling their mustaches as they bid on the ability to imbue dinosaurs with the intensely militaristic technological wonder that is chasing a laser pointer. More ominously, the plot seems to be making some sort of point about Maisie’s potential lack of rights because, surprise, she’s a clone. This, apparently, and climactically, means that she must release the dinosaurs from certain death because… uh… they’re just like her?
It’s here that we see a zombie of the scrapped human/dinosaur hybrid script. The question of Maisie’s humanity would have been far more coercive as a storytelling device if they’d shown a sliding scale of “obviously not human” on one side, and “obviously human” on the other. But they couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t have been Jurassic Park -er — World. You need proper dinosaurs in your proper dinosaur movie(™).
It’s into this environment, that of a tightly wound and thematically driven techno-thriller and it’s raft of middling sequels, that I stepped in to watch Jurassic World: Dominion a few weeks ago, with the unambitious hope of being able to at least giggle when the comic book villain gets his nose chewed off because he’s just that much of a dick.
As it turns out, I walked out of the cinema absolutely fuming.
The Plot
The actual storyline of this film is a level of unadulterated mess that I’d be embarrassed to have someone read it as a draft, let alone as a completed movie that was a) given the green light, b) filmed, and c) released worldwide. The critical reviews are bearing me out on this, and I don’t want to harp on about the many, many logical inconsistencies in the plot, as it will be covered in detail elsewhere. I will, however, touch on a few of the things which I want people to be aware of for the purposes of this analysis(oh, spoilers, by the way).
The film opens with a series of news article/documentary type shorts about the death rate and catastrophic results of dinosaurs and humanity having to share a now very crowded earth.
Maisie et al are hiding in the woods, because she’s being hunted by people who want her for nefarious purposes.
Dr Ellie Satler (do you remember her? She was in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Jurassic Park), discovers that gigantic bioengineered locusts are consuming crops, but not crops spawned of Biosyn (Dodgson!) seed.
Maisie is kidnapped, and there is a series of chase scenes across many exotic locations trying to find her. Eventually Chris Pratt and his plucky crew crash land a plane in the gigantic reserve/secret bunker/research facility that Biosyn (We’ve got Dodgson here!) has in the mountains.
Ellie and Dr Grant (Do you remember him? He was in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Jurassic Park) are also at Biosyn (See? Nobody cares) trying to get to the bottom of the thing about the locust plague. By stealing some. Also, Dr Ian Malcolm is there. He’s Goldbluming all over the place as a peon to a corporation, a horrific selling out of the character from the first film who was one of the most principled of the protagonists.
Dr Henry Wu (do you remember oh fuck it, writing this out is boring) has done *something* and now the locusts, which were always meant to be a nefarious scheme, have become worse than that for reasons of inane technobabble. Apparently the things they designed to eat food are now eating too much food. Gasp. or was it Yawn?
Turns out Maisie isn’t really a clone but just a clone like thing and this is important because they can use her DNA to solve the Locusts.
The crew escapes the facility.
Dr Henry Wu solves the locust problem offscreen by using Maisie DNA and bioengineering.
Plot point #1 is never addressed. At all. The end scene informs us by way of audiolog from dead Maisie’s mum that we have to learn to live with dinosaurs. THE END, ROLL CREDITS.
I’ve skipped a lot (this movie is a mess), and you can check a lot of places that have done a really great job of describing why it is that this film has a series of glaring failures of intent. For the purposes of my discussion, keep in mind these three things:
The intent and actions of all the characters had the exact outcome desired, and all the fallout in the plot is known, expected, and dealt with in short order.
The major plot of the film, that of the bioengineered locusts, was solved by the very same processes that created them.
And finally,
This Film did not need to have dinosaurs in it at all.
In an attempt to explain why this movie so enraged me, I’m going to start with the last one.
The Dinosaur-less Dinosaur movie
Jurassic World: Dominion is a spy thriller. The major moments of tension come from human villains pointing guns at the protagonists, and the very, very few instances where it’s a dinosaur causing the dramatic tension, there is absolutely no reason that the creatures can’t be removed and replaced by, say, a rockslide, or flunkies on motorbikes, or a person with a gun. It’s essentially a story where the writer seemed to roll the dice on what would stand in our hero’s way at whatever point. The Giganotosaurus, ostensibly this movie’s Big Bad Dinosaur(™) has absolutely no bearing on what happens to the cast. The other dinosaur attacks are similar in that while they cause drama, the fact that they’re dinosaurs is a purely aesthetic touch. This, broadly, has been a problem in all the films since the first Jurassic Park, but it was painfully obvious in this film that it wanted to be James Bond. In the first film, and the book, the threat comes from the fact that the dinosaur is a vast, ancient and unknowable power. The book in particular spends a great deal of time explaining just how ignorant the world is about dinosaurs, but the movie concisely sums it up with the following quote by Dr Grant:
“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?”
It is this inherent unpredictability that makes it so frightening. It is that lack of control that makes the actions of the T-rex so alien. It is that lack of understanding that leaves the lawyers, scientists and investors wide open for untold horrors when a sole disgruntled employee uncages the existential threat to their survival. The facts about the dinosaurs’ biology and history made them the antagonists of the film and book. In the book, particularly, this is illustrated when Ed Regis is killed by a young tyrannosaur. In the book’s canon, it’s revealed that the expectation that they can only see movement is false. What knowledge we had was wrong, and a man died.
There is none of this in Dominion. Atrociraptors (who incidentally, show up to highlight the unresolved plot of the second World film and disappear into a box, never to be seen again) are stand ins for motorcycle mercenaries. Quetzalcoatlus (a pterosaur which is, objectively, really fucking cool) is, as far as the plot is concerned, as much motor malfunction as navigation failure on a plane. Giganotosaurus is simply an excuse for Rexy to once again roar iconically, walk through a circle (like the logo!) and kick butt. Not plot relevant butt, just a violent background event. Like watching a news story about a natural disaster. Interesting, and terrible, but distant.
Dinosaurs, especially cloned dinosaurs, have an enormous amount of thematic opportunity as a plot device, and that was simply not explored here. It looked like it would be, early on. A rescue from a factory farm showed a parallel to the real world treatment of meat and milking animals. The opening montage highlighted the problems with humanity adjusting to this new world, possibly even as a deliberate allegory to the destruction we’ve released in terms of the climate change, but it’s abandoned as well. Dinosaurs, after these early thrusts at interesting storytelling, are thus left as set dressing, and plot themes are abandoned in favour of:
What bugs me
Henry Wu has been a bad man. He made bugs which were designed to eat the crops of wheat farmers who didn’t buy BioSyn(™) wheat seed, or whatever. It’s a very hamfisted plot point, and it’s dumped into this (need I mention it again) dinosaur movie with such unabashed biblical visual style that I was wondering whether they’d do the blood of the firstborn before or after the rain of frogs.
Something vague has gone wrong with the locusts. They’re too hungry, or something. I don’t care, it’s stupid. Henry Wu tries to fix it but can’t. Until at the end he can because he learned from Maisie how to delete genes because that’s what her mum did when she made Maisie (that’s… yeah. Welcome to the end of the almost-slightly-interesting clone storyline, by the way).
This plot is stupid, but it gives us some very cool imagery of a hive of giant locusts being set on fire and shot out into the atmosphere. My issue with it aside from its stupidity is how it’s resolved.
Henry Wu, in the attempt to create these little bastards (locusts, the famously controllable and well-liked swarm insect), did something that he didn’t intend while he was twiddling with their DNA. This caused them to be a bigger risk than they should have been, and this is solved at the end of the movie by…. Doing something by twiddling with their DNA.
Once again let’s contrast with the first film, and the book. The dinosaurs got out. They wreak hundreds of millions in damages, and cost many people their lives (a cost which is conspicuous in its absence in the new film. I’m actually hard pressed to think of a dinosaur related death from the top of my head) and result in the total closure and shut down of the Park. In the book it’s even more Tabula Rasa than this; they firebomb the island, and all the technical genius that was poured into the enterprise is expunged. The fact was that due to their own lack of understanding of, and respect for, their creation, they had no technological fallback. The only thing they could do was destroy. This was one of the hard lessons of the story that the characters had to learn, but the worse one was that it didn’t work (more on that soon). The lack of respect and lack of desire to understand what they’d done made it inevitable. In this and some other instances, this is what makes the novel of Jurassic Park the pinnacle of the franchise for me: they didn’t have to simply run: they had to set an entire ecological habitat on fire in a vain attempt to control the outcome of their own lack of foresight.
Not so in Dominion! The world’s most dangerous war criminals have trained and specially bred attack dinosaurs! Doesn’t matter, it makes for a cool car chase and then we can forget about them completely! Nothing to see here! The Dinosaurs are killing people in populated areas? Guess we’re just going to learn to live with it! Thank you, ending montage! Our own lack of understanding has led to an uncontrollable locust plague? No problems, we’ll just release one (1) dainty enplagued insect and the rest will fall neatly into place. Nothing to see here but dazzling spectacle.
The repeated use of spectacle and the hiding or handwaving of consequences is the beginning of the root of my anger with the film. Intrinsically tied to Dinosaurs as a concept is the duality of grandeur and danger. They both have to exist for the piece to have meaning. Yes, you have created a simple grandeur, but the hidden dangers beneath the surface are bigger than we understand.
The Corporate Myth of Control
Jurassic Park (Novel) takes its time to get going. The principles at play are fairly high-concept, and there’s a lot of chatter about the awe inspiring technology of the late 80’s (stories of powerful supercomputers with 200mHz of processing power are great, aren’t they?) that allowed for the Park to be realised. But more than that, Crichton takes his time to highlight, from the very first pages, that something on the shores of Costa Rica is going wrong. Babies are being killed. Children are being accosted by unusually aggressive lizards. Lab tests are showing strange, ancient venoms that haven’t been recorded before. While we find out later that the park has a laundry list of careful security measures, but it ultimately doesn’t matter: the park has already failed. Velociraptors and Procompsognathuses are getting off the island, the dinosaurs are breeding, and they’re finding foods that contain the enzymes they’ve been denied.
This, I feel, more than anything, is what lends Jurassic park its weight. It’s not that this horror is an isolated incident in a single facility, it’s that even prior to the story beginning, a systemic failure has already occurred. It’s highlighted in the film. Malcolm’s “life, uh, finds a way,” is an oft-quoted line. However a more poignant exchange happens between Dr Sattler and John Hammond:
“John Hammond : When we have control again…
Dr. Ellie Sattler : You never had control, that’s the illusion! I was overwhelmed by the power of this place. But I made a mistake, too, I didn’t have enough respect for that power and it’s out now.”
Here it is then. Jurassic Park, the actual park that the book was named for, was a failure from the start. Ian Malcolm knew nothing but the mathematics of its inevitable demise. Nedry knew nothing but the manner in which he would make money. Hammond wanted to get his idea signed off. Grant thought he knew, from nothing more than bones, how these creatures would behave. Arnold, the game hunter, based his knowledge off savannah mammals. Every person’s area of expertise formed a venn diagram that only vaguely overlapped with the gigantic web of knowledge that would be required to effectively run the park they were designing. There was never a world in which this park was, or could be, effectively controlled and run by informed experts. Any prevarications otherwise were based on misplaced confidence and hubris in the flawed creations of humanity, and the film and book revel in this. They practically scream “We must think about whether or not we have the ability or the right to play god and pursue progress for its own sake, or worse, for the sake of money”. It’s a simple message, conveyed with devastating effectiveness as we watch the manifestations of misplaced pride run riot through our attempts at structure.
In Dominion we do not get this. Chris Pratt’s Owen can control not only Blue but seemingly any other dinosaur. Biosyn have bounced back from being shady perpetrators of corporate espionage to having a facility that has homing beacons that allow them to control the dinosaurs. The Atrociraptors are controlled by light and sound. Every step of the way, there are examples of humanity not only understanding what they wrought, but being their own saviors in the case of their mistakes. And this would be fine, except that the catastrophic and ever-present wonder and danger of the dinosaurs demands that we face the consequences of our actions. And Dominion steadfastly refuses to do it. The outcome is predetermined. Nothing is truly at stake, we can simply leave the dinosaurs to themselves and they, and by extension we, will be fine. The narration says so. The words are dressing to hang the spectacle from, and there is no attempt to engage with anything that could be identified as a theme. Plenty of theme is identified, but they are cast aside, forgotten for the splendour of more meaninglessness.
The Separation of Spectacle from Drama
I realise that my gripe with Dominion is entirely based on its comparison with the original, and unarguably better, movie, but that’s kind of the point. By making this an explicit in-universe sequel (and the inclusion of merchandise from the previous iteration of the Park in previous World movies would do that, even if the inclusion of Rexy didn’t), you are implicitly creating a timeline where the lessons from that film have been learned and enacted. The unlearning of these lessons in the World films have hung off the franchise since day one, but the previous two films didn’t appear to be taking themselves too seriously. This one, however, opens with several frames through which it demands that it has a point to make, after which it completely forgets itself in favour of bloated corporatism and side-eyed continuity winks at the camera. Any moral weight it could have carried is shed along with the lifeblood of what came before. It bears something like the aesthetic form of the historical ideal, but it’s been unscrupulously mixed with the corruptive essences of corporate interests and fanservice, while being stripped of its context. Into our modern world, then, we have been given a bloated monster, created by people who didn’t understand what it was that made the original great or didn’t care, and didn’t care to worry about the damage they’d do to its legacy by throwing empty spectacle at us.
Man, someone should write a book about that.
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