The Jurassic Park franchise is one of the most successful and recognizable in the modern age of blockbuster filmmaking. With the sixth entry in the series, Jurassic World: Dominion, releasing this past summer, the franchise has officially grossed more than $6 billion dollars worldwide. The original Jurassic Park is often considered to be one of the greatest blockbuster films to ever grace the big screen. Its direct sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III were, however, generally considered disappointments by fans and critics alike. After the lackluster performance of the third film, work on Jurassic Park 4 stalled. The film went through various stages of development as interest in the franchise had gradually decreased with each new film. There were doubts whether there would be any interest in another film in the series at all, especially immediately following the release of the third in 2001.
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This doubt led to the longest period of time between Jurassic Park films, as there were 14 years between Jurassic Park III and the fourth entry in the franchise, the soft reboot that was Jurassic World. While Jurassic World would revive the franchise and spawn two sequels of…debatable quality, there’s no debating that the fourth film in the Jurassic series was a high point in terms of box office numbers for the series. While the first three films had a steep decline in box office from film to film, with Jurassic Park III bottoming out at $368 million worldwide, Jurassic World broke the series’ record by bringing in a total of $1.67 billion, a height that has not been reached by the franchise again since.
Beyond its success at the box office, the first Jurassic World film was also a pretty well received hit by both critics and audiences alike at the time of its release. In the seven and a half years since its release, however, the flaws of the film have become more and more apparent. With as much fun as it was to revisit the world of Jurassic Park, Jurassic World and its sequels present little more than the average of pretty much every major modern blockbuster film that gets released these days. These issues have become more and more obvious with age, which doesn’t bode well for the long-term regard for Jurassic World. Here’s how the blueprint for modern blockbuster filmmaking has been heavily relied on in the Jurassic World films.
Reduced Emphasis on Character
Universal Pictures
The character work in the original Jurassic Park was a crucial contributor to what made that film so compelling to begin with. Over the course of The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, that attention to character development was almost entirely thrown out the window, as most of the people in the films were just cliché action heroes and scared civilians that brought little to no dramatic weight to their stories. There was hope that Jurassic World could turn things around, but that proved not to be the case. Despite the charismatic and likable cast that includes the likes of Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and more, the characters in Jurassic World are mere shadows of the franchise’s past.
Pratt’s role as Owen Grady, in combination with his introduction as Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy the year prior, established him as the major action star that he continues to be today. However, the character of Grady is about as generic an action hero as you can get. He’s a gruff guy that makes funny quips, rides a motorcycle, and exudes a strong “cool guy” energy. He’s basically invincible, as he somehow manages to make his way out of countless absurdly dangerous situations, and he’s really only there to guide audiences through whatever insane situation is cooked up in the writers’ room. Howard was very well cast as Claire Dearing, the park’s operations manager who spends the film tracking down her nephews who are missing in the park somewhere. Unlike Grady, Claire actually has a bit of an arc to her character in Jurassic World, as she grows to realize the error of her ways and then becomes an advocate against the profiting on the dinos in the later films. With as likable as Dallas Howard is in the role, unfortunately, her character growth is consistently just entirely set aside to have her be the damsel in distress in any given scene.
Grady and Claire, despite being the leads of all three new films, never really clicked as compelling new faces for the franchise. The reason why being that there are almost no discerning factors between them and the leads of almost any other major franchise. They could be plucked out of this film and placed anywhere else with almost no difference. Grady in particular would make an excellent fit for the Fast and Furious films, going up against the likes of Vin Diesel, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and their myriad of super-cars. The development of these characters in Jurassic World is consistently sacrificed for the sake of “exciting” action sequences that can be thrown in trailers to sell the movie. Despite solid casting and performances, the characters are just cardboard cutouts that are there to just look cool and spew one-liners and exposition. The action sequences of the series are prioritized over the characters, which results in movies that may look cool and be exciting, but are ultimately hollow upon further inspection.
Over-the-Top Action
People love dinosaurs. That has always been true, and it likely always will be true. That’s understandable; there’s likely not a person or child on the planet that could look you dead in the eye and say “I think dinosaurs are overrated.” Building an entire movie around that assumption doesn’t create the best atmosphere for a great film, though. Despite the fact that it was the compelling story and character work of the original Jurassic Park that made that film so spectacular, the dinosaurs are what bring people into the theater. As such, Jurassic World and its sequels are targeted almost exclusively at fulfilling that promise of crazy dinosaur action. In that sense, the films certainly have achieved the goal they were aiming for.
The action in Jurassic World often makes for some of the most over-the-top sequences in any modern blockbuster. Whether it be the lab-created Indominus Rex turning invisible and sneaking up on people despite its massive size, Grady training raptors and then riding alongside them on his motorcycle or the dramatic showdown between the raptors, T-Rex and Indominus Rex at the end, every new action scene in Jurassic World is consistently trying to one-up the previous sequences in terms of utter ridiculousness. Looking at it purely through that perspective, the film works. It’s not meant to be taken seriously; it’s meant to be blindly entertaining. It’s a silly and cheesy popcorn movie that provides the kind of ludicrous dinosaur action that you’re not going to find anywhere else.
It’s precisely because of that approach that the Jurassic World films were so successful. Colin Trevorrow doesn’t even think the first Jurassic Park should’ve had any sequels to begin with, but he saw an opportunity for success and pursued it. He and the rest of the creative team on the series recognized the global uptick in demand for that kind of absurdity in action films like superhero and comic-book movies, and they simply applied it to the Jurassic Park franchise. From a business perspective, it’s a really smart move. Universal had been looking for a way to revive the long-dormant series, and by applying the aesthetics of a superhero movie to it, they were able to not only bring the series back but make it genuinely competitive in today’s MCU-dominated movie market.
Reliance on Nostalgia
It’s no secret that nostalgia is the name of the game in major Hollywood movies these days. Developing legacy sequels for recognizable properties has become an almost surefire path to success at the box office. Classics like Ghostbusters, Halloween, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Predator, Mad Max, Terminator, Star Wars, and pretty much any major hit of the ‘70s and ‘80s have been revived through new sequels that bring back original cast members and replicate as much of the original story as they can. All of those franchises listed above have already had new entries, and there are many more already in development. Jurassic World was one of the first to really hop on this new trend in the mid-2010s. The amount that the Jurassic World trilogy has relied on the nostalgia for its brand, though, has wavered throughout the trilogy.
The first Jurassic World really dove into the nostalgia. Whether it be with the frequent use of the classic Jurassic Park music, the inclusion of recognizable settings and characters from the first film (including even bringing back the same T-Rex) or the mirroring of the entire plot of the original story, most aspects of Jurassic World are structured and built in a way that is purposefully reminiscent of the first Jurassic Park film. It was one of a series of films released in the mid-2010s that utilized this approach, with the most notable of which being Star Wars: The Force Awakens later that same year.
The second film in the new trilogy, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was notably less reliant on what had been done before in its series. That film chose to go in more of a more haunted house direction with the brand, which made for an entry that is unique to say the very least. However, the newest film, Jurassic World: Dominion reversed course and doubled down on this utilization of nostalgia. It brought back the original cast from Jurassic Park, chiefly Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, introduced their characters to the new cast and interweaved them into what was billed as the “final chapter” of the Jurassic series. Will it actually be? Probably not, it’s a multi-billion-dollar franchise. There’s always a way to keep those alive these days.
Now, all of this isn’t to say that the Jurassic World film or its sequels are the worst films of the modern blockbuster age. Not at all. They are certainly entertaining films, and they thoroughly succeeded at what they set out to do. They just happened to achieve that by absorbing nearly every modern blockbuster cliché and concept and baking them directly into the core DNA of the films. That method of filmmaking isn’t necessarily the most indicative of a truly original or compelling film like the first Jurassic Park, but it did work for making three vaguely connected rollercoaster rides meant to be enjoyed with shovels of popcorn and gallons of soda.
