Steven Spielberg’sJurassic Parkis the ultimate crowd-pleasing blockbuster. It has suspense-filled set pieces, compelling characters, and a large-scale story with intimate stakes. At one point, it was the highest-grossing movie ever made, and its revolutionary visual effects made it one of the most groundbreaking and influential movies of all time. Naturally, a studio with$1 billion more in their pocketsturned this masterpiece into a franchise.
Spielberg returned to helm the first sequel,The Lost World, which was followed byJurassic Park III,Jurassic World, andJurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, withJurassic World: Dominionon the way for a summer 2022 release. That one promises to conclude the series, but Universal executives will probably be lining up around this dead horse with baseball bats at the ready in a couple of years. Every sequel toJurassic Parkhas failed to justify its existence, becauseJurassic Parkis a movie that didn’t need any sequels. While movies likeStar Warsintentionally open themselves up to endless sequels exploring their vast fictional universe,Jurassic Parktold its story in its entirety and explored the themes perfectly in the first movie.
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Thematically,Jurassic Parkis aFrankensteinstory. It’s a science thriller about the dangers of hubris and playing God. Much like Victor Frankenstein, John Hammond is a deranged genius who feeds his ego by creating a monster. Ian Malcolm’s famous quote, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” could just as easily be applied toDr. Frankenstein’s work in reanimation. The sequels have ignored these overtones and presented a more general “humanity bad” message.
After the first movie closed the door on its own premise with Hammond realizing the error of his ways and pledging to shut down the park, most of the sequels have meandered aroundthe island full of dinosaur clones, throwing random story ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. The closest that any of theJurassicsequels has come to matching the greatness of the original is 2015’sJurassic World, which finally offered a fresh twist on the premise. It explores a functioning dinosaur park filled with tourists, which raises the tension when the dinosaurs escape because a lot more lives are at stake. But that movie is let down by weak, one-dimensional characters and a lot of stretches in logic (would people really get bored of seeing live dinosaurs after just a couple of years?).
Plus,Jurassic Worldpaved the way for the worst of the bunch,Fallen Kingdom. After starting out with the familiarJurassicsequel setup of military guys tricking scientists into taking them to the island to brutalize the dinosaurs (which they should see coming by now),Fallen Kingdomstumbles from one inane plot point to the next. It reveals that the island has been an active volcano this whole time (making John Hammond retroactively moronic for building a theme park there), then follows “the floor is made of lava” rules in depicting the eruption, then becomes a tepid haunted house movie in its second half as the surviving dinosaurs are taken to a giant country manor to be auctioned off for $4 million a pop. This movie is stitched together like the filmmakers had two half-baked story ideas they couldn’t quite flesh out into full movies and just crammed them both into the same script.
Spielberg made the originalJurassic Parkfilm as a monster movie, as he’d previously done withJaws. The T. rex is framed in the same way Godzilla or King Kong are framed, and it’s arguably become just as iconic within the movie monster canon. In the first sequel,The Lost World,Spielberg leaned way too heavily into this anglewith a random trip to San Diego for someGodzillareferences. After that, theJurassicsequels have all avoided being straightforward monster movies and instead aspire toAvengers-level blockbuster-dom, which betrays the spirit of the original story.
The originalJurassic Parkmovie is the perfect blockbuster. Its set pieces, from the T. rex’s initial escape to the raptors’ attack in the kitchen, have much more suspense and excitement and emotional engagement than anything inthe average modern-day superhero movie. In a world with more and more uninspired movies that don’t demand to be seen on the big screen,Jurassic Parkstill plays to huge crowds in its rereleases three decades later, because it’s truly a spectacle to behold.
In the original movie’s final showdown, the survivors are being chased by the raptors and get saved by the T. rex, whotakes on the raptors in a vicious fightas the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner falls through the frame. This finale posits that nature is bigger than humanity and when humanity arrogantly tries to tweak nature, nature will take care of things. This is proving to be untrue in the age of climate change, but the sentiment closes the book onJurassic Park’s themes and messages.
One of the downsides ofJurassicstories is that they require a lot of exposition to set up the action, which can really drag a movie down if it’s not done well. In the first movie, Spielberg uses exposition masterfully. For starters, he gets through most of it with a goofy cartoon starring Mr. DNA – all the later movies have long, drawn-out, on-the-nose information dumps. InJurassic Park, the exposition works because itenhances the actioninstead of hindering it. The design of the velociraptors is terrifying on its own, but their screen presence wouldn’t be nearly as effective if Grant hadn’t explained in gruesome detail how raptors eat people alive in an early scene.
The final scene inJurassic Parkprovides enough emotional closure to conclude the story for good. Having warmed to the kids and genuinely changed over the course of the movie, Dr. Grant looks out the window of the helicopter and watches birds (technically dinosaurs) flying in a flock. This was the perfect ending for the story. It’s simple, but it wraps everything up in a neat bow. The tightly structuredJurassic Parkscript, credited to David Koepp andoriginal author Michael Crichton, ties up all the loose ends, so there’s no room for a sequel. But Universal wasn’t going to let anything – not even three-quarters of the original cast refusing to return – stop them from making a sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Jurassic World: Dominion, originally set to release in 2021 but delayed to 2022 by the COVID-19 pandemic, promises to beanEndgame/Rise of Skywalker-style finaleto the entireJurassicsaga, but it’ll be difficult to conclude a series that never should’ve been a series in the first place. Bringing back the original trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum (in more than a glorified cameo appearance this time) is a nice touch, but the movie will struggle to prove to audiences that it needs to exist, because it simply doesn’t.
