One of my core memories was going to the theater at 9-years-old with my mom to see Jurassic Park back in 1993. I can remember being both horrified and thrilled by it to the point where I couldn't stop talking about it. My poor mother had to endure me talking endlessly about how they did some of the special effects, including the cow scene.
Back then, I was wowed by the brachiosaurus scene like everyone else was, and it was so impactful that I think it rewired my neurons forever. I would go on to watch it over and over again over the course of my lifetime, and as I aged, the film sort of grew up with me. While the dinosaur scenes are still fantastic, the philosophical backdrop of the film catches my attention more so. I can remember when I was young, Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm used to give me the creeps, but now he's my favorite part of the movie.
Loyal readers of mine will know I love the movie as well. I think I've referenced it twice in the last couple of weeks in articles, and for good reason. A lot of the philosophical and moral themes in the film can apply to almost anything and everything. Just the other day, I used Malcolm to discuss how nature was always going to win out against modern socio-political attempts to redefine gender. Before that, I used it to discuss how us moving toward an Artificial General Intelligence at lightning speed is us being "the kid that's found his dad's gun."
Read: Forget Skynet, Here's the Thing About AI That Should Terrify You, and It's Coming Soon
Jurassic Park is such an integral part of our society that it's referenced today in all sorts of conversations across so many different subjects.
And it absolutely breaks my heart that people in Hollywood are taking something so precious and milking it for every dollar they can. Now, as Jurassic World: Rebirth hits theaters, I want to rant on just how much Hollywood has missed the point, not just about the legacy of the film, but what it was trying to relay.
My own YouTube review isn't up yet, but you may feel free to watch this one if you'd like a rundown. I'm not going to go into detail in this article; suffice to say that it suffers from the same issues all the Jurassic World films do in that they missed the point in favor of spectacle.
Spectacle has become one of the core issues of modern filmmaking. The more CGI on screen, the grander you can make your scene, but as you lean harder on wowing the audience with visuals, you forget to give them depth. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a really solid example of this, as the film had so much CGI on the screen that it actually got tedious to look at.
The Jurassic World movies do the same thing. It's awesome to watch a Mosasaurus swim around in the water and be terrifying, and it's fun to watch the T-Rex chase something down after appearing like a ghost out of the dark, but the World movies do this to such an extent that it almost feels like a mockery of the original film, especially its message.
The original Jurassic Park wasn't a horror movie... it had parts that had horror in them. It also wasn't a film that was overblown with spectacle, it just had parts where spectacular scenes happened, and even then, it did so to give weight to what the film was at its core, which was a cautionary tale about man's penchant to play God with things it doesn't fully understand. That singular foundation is what holds that movie up, especially as its audience ages with it.
When we watched the Dr. Alan Grant attempt to save the children from the T-Rex in that unforgettable scene, flair in hand, rain pouring down, the Rex staring at him with murderous intent, we felt the tension. It was that moment that the warnings of the film were trying to give. The power we had tried to control was now out of our control, and now we're dealing with the consequences.
We had been warned about it throughout the movie from characters who felt like they had stakes. Grant the leading paleontologist, Malcolm the chaotician, Dr. Ellie Sattler the paleobotanist, Robert Muldoon the game warden and security expert, all of which seemed to understand the weight of what they were looking at while the very people who built it, John Hammond, his attorney Donald Gennaro, and the traitor Dennis Nedry, had no respect for it beyond the money they could make off it.
These two sides of the coin represented two very real philosophies that were so well acted out that you felt the weight of that place yourself.
And the point of the film was that the place was not good. It was wrong, as the animals were something we thought we could just create and have without fully understanding what we were dealing with. You see that as even before the action starts, you're already seeing the issues in the system with dinosaurs falling ill with no real explanation. It's explained in the book, but even that explanation shows that man is out of his depth.
Even when it came to the electronics, Chief Engineer Ray Arnold says the park systems were "full of bugs" and "spaghetti code," which shows even the things man did understand were shaky at best.
After everything goes wrong, the line that sums it all up is delivered by Sattler during her conversation with Hammond, who didn't seem to be learning the lesson.
"You never had control. That's the illusion."
Fast-forward to the Jurassic World movies, an attempt at recapturing the magic but with more visual grandeur and heart-pounding action, and no one is feeling that same old magic.
Why?
From The Lost World, all the way to Jurassic World: Rebirth, Hollywood seems to believe that the message of the original was that greed is bad, and it continues to pump out movies where the villain isn't man's hubris and ignorance, but some idiot seduced by corporate greed. In other words, they keep centering on Nedry tropes.
Yeah, Nedry and his greed were the catalyst for a lot of the events that happened in Jurassic Park, but he wasn't the focus. He was only part of the point about man's inability to control everything it sees. Nedry represented the fact that humanity can't even control itself.
The formula is always the same. Corporation wants the dinosaurs for one reason or another, they go in half-cocked and full of disrespect, something unforeseen happens that throws everything into chaos, the dinosaurs go on a rampage, respect is learned, we leave nature alone... until the next corporate villain comes along.
The characters in these movies have no philosophical or thematic weight. Many serve no narrative function beyond dying to a dinosaur's jaws. I can remember feeling at least a little sympathy for Gennaro when he was eaten by the T-Rex, because he was a man so focused on doing his job (making the board money) that he failed to grasp the power they were working with until it grasped him in its jaws.
All of Jurassic Park's deaths had some sort of meaning. Nedry tried to control his destiny by betraying everyone and fleeing with dino DNA, but lost control during a storm, winding up in the jaws of a dilophasaurus. Arnold, responsible for controlling the systems across the park, lost control when the hurricane hit and died to raptors while he was trying to restore it. Muldoon, the man responsible for controlling the animals, died by them even though he knew them better than everyone else.
"You never had control. That's the illusion."
These deaths give weight to Sattler's line. Now? When a person dies to a dino... I don't care. They serve no purpose other than being a shallow reinforcement of a lesson we learned back in 1993. Today, we're still being told the same thing, but in a way that's shallow, tedious, and misses the mark entirely.
Jurassic Park was a movie with depth and philosophical importance, delivered with master-class acting and a focused narrative that included stunning visuals and thrilling moments.
Every subsequent one was a monster movie.
Hollywood should take its cues from the original. They should just leave the dinosaurs alone.
The culture war is ultimately THE war, and RedState is here to help fight it.
Help us to continue that fight by joining up with the RedState VIP program and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.