New universe built with beloved DNA
Jurassic World director brings fresh perspective to latest dino offering
A brilliant chaos theorist once observed that “life ... uh ... finds a way.”
In Hollywood, so do multibillion-dollar properties. Hence the action fivequel Jurassic
World: Fallen Kingdom, which roars into theatres Friday poised to devour the box office 25 years after the first film thrilled audiences around the globe. Audiences appear to be as dino-crazy as ever over the franchise spawned from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic Jurassic
Park, adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel about geneticists playing God with dinosaur DNA. The 2015 franchisereviving Jurassic World scored record-breaking numbers before tallying $1.6 billion worldwide. With a third Jurassic
World film already in the works, to complete a planned second trilogy, the stewards of Universal Pictures’ valuable Jurassic universe have a tricky negotiation ahead: How do you keep the series’ core DNA intact while pushing a commercially vital franchise forward?
“I kind of see it like inheriting a garden,” said Colin Trevorrow, the director of Jurassic
World and co-writer of each film in the new trilogy. “It is a verdant garden, and your job is to occasionally plant new seeds. But really you’re tending to something that was planted by someone else, and hopefully you can grow something new.” New perspectives One way to “grow something new” is to bring in a fresh perspective. In the case of Fallen Kingdom, that’s Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona, whose critically acclaimed work encompasses eerie horror ( The Orphanage), survival drama ( The Impossible) and emotionally charged fantasy ( A Monster Calls). Elements of all, naturally, find their way into his Jurassic. As a budding director about to enter film school, Bayona was among the legions of fans enthralled by Spielberg’s original film, which expanded everything he believed was possible in cinema.
“As a director you try to create iconic shots that somehow resemble the original trilogy,” he said, “but we are (always) trying to switch the world that we are seeing in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom upside down, telling you that the whole thing is getting more complicated, more complex.”
As the series progresses, the fundamental core of science run amok takes on increasingly greater stakes. For Fallen Kingdom, Bayona, Trevorrow and company sought balance between the Spielbergian emotions and thrills of the original film and deeper, more contemporary thematic concerns: How do we reckon with the consequences of past mistakes? How can we take responsibility for what’s happening around us?
These inward interrogations are embodied through former theme park manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and dinosaur trainer Owen (Chris Pratt), who, in Fallen Kingdom,” are each examining the parts they played to help usher in a deadly new era of dinos walking the Earth.
“(Mankind has) made these mistakes and (they are) dealing with the consequences of (their) choices,” Bayona added. Alot of opinions The makers of Fallen Kingdom realize that audiences in the social media era are arguably more critical than ever, even when it comes to seemingly small details in supersized blockbuster franchises. Trevorrow partly arrived at the creative imperative the hard way when he opened Jurassic World three summers ago only to be haunted by two words: high heels.
Yes, he heard the internet’s complaints about Howard’s action movie-unfriendly Jurassic World footwear. So he baked a direct acknowledgement of the gaffe into the sequel, in which she makes much more practical choices. “I wanted to understand what about this really did upset people so much,” he added. “And it had to do with the messaging.
“As opposed to just thinking, ‘OK, this time she’s not going to run in heels,’ I wanted to make sure that I was thinking that way about the whole movie — and about everything that we were doing.”
A few weeks after opening Jurassic World, he buckled up for a cross-country drive back to his home in Vermont with longtime collaborator Connolly to spend extended hours hashing out the sequel’s story. Occasionally they would stop in a town and observe how average moviegoers reacted to their movie as it played in theatres across the country. Training dinosaurs One of Jurassic World most crowd-pleasing relationships — the bond between Owen and his trained charge Blue the velociraptor — blossoms in Fallen Kingdom. It’s an idea that originated, according to Trevorrow, from conversations with Spielberg.
“He has a fascination with the idea of these creatures being used in all of the ways that we use animals for militarization,” he said.
“If he has an instinct, you’re going to listen — I felt like we could (show) the origin of how something like that could be possible.” Genetic links Furthering the genetic links between Jurassic World and the Jurassic Park trilogy, original cast member Jeff Goldblum reprises his franchise role of mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm in a Fallen Kingdom cameo. He relished the chance to revisit the character and to see how his views also have evolved since audiences last saw him onscreen in 1997’s The Lost World.
“My character was changed by those experiences, I imagine, and he’s now perhaps more present, grateful, and trying to make himself into a more effective contributor,” Goldblum considered.
“Those are some of the things that I, myself, aspire to.”
He discussed Malcolm’s perspective on the happenings in the Jurassic world at length with both Bayona and Trevorrow before filming a scene in which Malcolm testifies before Congress about the dangers of science reviving creatures that nature made extinct.