The Needlessly Limited Imagination of the Jurassic World Franchise

Jurassic Park/World movies seem to be written around a single theme: hubris, capitalism and fascination with dinosaurs lead us to create circumstances where large dangerous monsters wreak havoc and endanger us.

But the movies also keep inserting really fascinating elements that could be pursued to expand and draw out the narrative in fascinating directions, but which they don’t even bother pretending to pursue. I am going to discuss four:

1) Jeff Goldblum: man of science/doomsday cultist

Goldblum’s character’s main throughline is using the veneer of science (chaos theory) to predict that things will go wrong. He usually turns out to be right. He is inordinately famous, in this universe, for a theoretical mathematician, especially one who could be replaced by a flowchart that says “don’t do dinosaur things” and a copy of the legend of Icarus. So, what is going on with his fans? Are they just enchanted with Goldblum because of how dreamy he is like we are here in the real world? Or have his accurate prognostications produced a zeal and fervor among a core contingent of followers who herald him as a prophet of the end times. So, make a movie where he is reluctantly heading up a doomsday cult. His fans want to know how they can accelerate the dino-geddon, and he tries in vain to explain that he’s a fatalist not actively promoting the death of humans.

2) Better Dino hybrids.

Since the very first movie, we knew that they had the technology to splice in frog genes into the Dinos. With unforeseen consequences. Subsequently they’ve been very excited to take one dinosaur, and another dinosaur, and cross breed them. Just stop. Stop mixing two different dinosaurs together. That’s the most boring gene splicing you could do. In high school, I spliced pglo into some bacteria so that the bacteria glew in the dark and that was way more exciting than “now this dinosaur has the claws of a different dinosaur”. Imagine if Greek mythological creatures were like “it has the head of a lion, the body of a tiger and the legs of a leopard”. No one would care. They aren’t even doing like, winged raptors or anything. So, here’s my proposal: DINO HUMAN HYBRIDS, OBVIOUSLY.

Splice that shit into humans. Some evil company took samples from the spitters, the raptors, the pterandons, and the ankylosaurus to create a black ops team of Dino-men.

How are there five movies and no Dino men?

3) civilization actually collapses

So, the Dinos get loose, commit to it. They breed, they wreck shit. It gets all mad max (mad rex? Rad rex?) and we are in some legend of the lost type setting. Rise of the planet of the dinosaurs. Society is crumbling, humans are trying to stick together. You can’t just keep making islands with dinos on them, if the whole theme is a Pandora’s box that you can’t keep shut. Maybe North America gets reclaimed by OG dinos but South America gets taken over by tactical dinos controlled by the former leader of a paramilitary organization. The protagonists are trying to figure out how to jumpstart civilization in a post Dino regime while General evil is trying to conquer the world atop a terrible thunder lizard.

4) fast forward to future

I know what you’re saying: we want to keep our famous cast in the films. But hear me out: you could have a movie with like 15 Bryce Dallas Howards in it, because the whole franchise is about cloning, so set it 2,000 years in the future and clone Chris Pratt and clone BDH are trying to escape from Human Island, the last refuge of humans. They were cloned by a future scientist because of the records of their success handling the especially vicious dinosaurs from JW:FK, and the hope that they would be able to save humanity. But of course, nature vs. nurture: clone Pratt doesn’t have the same personality, and clone Howard doesn’t have the same knowledge and skills. In fact, clone Howard winds up the badass tracker/trainer, and clone Pratt is the bleeding heart, and I don’t have the whole movie scripted but the point is it is way better than the screen writer finding out about saurophaganax and deciding that someone wants to crossbreed saurophaganax with a T. rex and make an amusement park where people pay to see it eat things but then it breaks free and eats people.