JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM
Something has survived. for now… as the dinosaurs from jurassic world are faced with extinction, richard edwards meets the key players behind Sequel Fallen Kingdom
An adventure 65 million years in the making. Oh, alright, three. The Jurassic World sequelosaurus roars into life.
If you’re planning on building a theme park in a science fiction movie – especially one that has anything to do with the late Michael Crichton – it’s probably wise to take out the best insurance money can buy. after all, it’s as certain as death and taxes that sooner or later something will go wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
So much so, in fact, that the decision to open the glossy new dinosaur theme park in Jurassic
World existed somewhere in that fuzzy hinterland between wild optimism, carelessness and naivety – after that surely nobody would be crazy enough to give it another go. Would they?
er, that would be no. Fallen Kingdom, the follow-up to 2015’s massive Jurassic World – still the fourth biggest film of all time, unless Thanos has had his way by the time you read this – is definitely not another excuse to have punters being eaten in a theme park. This attraction is permanently closed…
“We knew that we were going to tear the park apart,” laughs Colin Trevorrow, the
Jurassic World director who’s returned to co-script this sequel – and will be back at the helm for part three. “i love abandoned theme parks. They’re the creepiest haunted house that there is. We shot Jurassic World in new orleans in the parking lot of an abandoned theme park that had flooded during Katrina, and they never went back. So we would walk through this theme park that had vines up on the rollercoasters – there was a snake problem and an alligator problem – and right there, i felt like, ‘oh, god, i’m going to want to see Jurassic
World looking like this.’ That’s pretty much where we started off.”
While the threat of dinosaur attack is minimal, the irony isn’t lost on SFX that we’re in sight of an actual theme park. it’s a beautiful March day on the universal lot in los angeles, and a giant Minion is staring at us from the iconic universal Studios Hollywood – home to the famous Jurassic Park ride. The new movie is in the last stages of post-production when the cast and crew have been dragged away to tease what’s in store in a film that, unlike previous standalone Jurassic follow-ups, was always conceived as part of a trilogy.
“The models for a second film that i think are the most effective are movies where by the time you get to the end, everything has changed,” explains Trevorrow. “you can definitely say that about The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath Of Khan, The Dark Knight, and when you look at the amount of change that exists in those films, it earns a third movie and it compels people to want to see what’s going to happen. The challenge here was making a movie that can make a case to the audience that there should still be Jurassic Park movies, and to take it to a place where people are going to really want to know what’s going to happen to these people. i feel like the second film needs to end in a place that you couldn’t have imagined possible when it began, in a world that will never be the same again.” Four years have passed since Jurassic World had a very bad day in the customer care department, and the genetically engineered residents of isla nublar are facing an extinction event to rival the meteorite that (probably) wiped out their dinosaur ancestors 65 million
our characters have to decide whether to save these creatures or let them die
years ago. a volcano is about to blow, with the potential to erase them all from existence.
“it’s a ticking clock on the dinosaurs,” says Ja bayona, the Spanish director of The Orphanage, The Impossible and A Monster Calls who was handpicked to marshal Fallen Kingdom. “it’s the second time that the dinosaurs are going to be extinct, so we find our characters in the moral position of deciding what they’re going to do. are they going to save them, or are they going to let them die? This has been one of the main themes in the saga from the very beginning – the role of man towards nature, and towards the creatures that you bring back from the old times. in the first movie, it was more about if we were able to create new dinosaurs. now it’s our responsibility towards them.”
“it’s a point of view in the movie that we changed the course of natural history, and this is a correction,” adds Trevorrow. “it’s reverting back to the way it should be. it’s like, these animals shouldn’t be here and we need to let them die. That core question is where the movie begins and really ends. do we have a responsibility to let these creatures live because we created them? or should we let them die, because we created them?”
SEQUEL RIGHTS
Where the dna shared between previous movies in the saga has generally been more reptile than human – ian Malcolm, alan grant, John Hammond and his grandchildren and Henry Wu were the only significant characters to appear in more than one movie – Fallen Kingdom is built around its homo sapien leads. That means the focus is very much on Claire dearing (bryce dallas Howard), the businessminded former manager of the Jurassic World park, and owen grady (Chris pratt), the ex-forces guy who successfully trained an elite unit of Velociraptors – including their surviving leader, blue.
“owen’s just trying to get away from the whole thing, and it’s Claire who takes us to him,” explains bayona. “She’s trying to get us back to the island, she wants to save the dinosaurs and she’s asked for owen’s expertise to do it.”
“When people do watch all the movies together, you can go back and see that moment with the apatosaurus in Jurassic World as being the moment that she changes,” says Trevorrow, discussing Claire’s evolution from corporate suit to activist. “in that movie it goes from her completely trusting computers and technology, to a point where she trusts her instincts in animals at the end. To me, going from there to her feeling horribly guilty and wanting to set things right doesn’t feel like a massive leap. i think that kind of thing happens all the time when people feel a tremendous amount of responsibility for their actions.”
There are also a couple of other key figures returning to the mix. Jeff goldblum reprises his role as chaos theory-loving maths guy dr ian Malcolm for the first time since 1997’s
when i say weaponising dinosaurs, i don’t mean cannons on their heads!
The Lost World – “He’s the al gore of this movie,” says Trevorrow. “He’s the guy who’s like, ‘i told you this was going to happen. and sure enough it is.’ He takes no joy in that”. Meanwhile geneticist Henry Wu (bd Wong), effectively the father of the resurrected dinosaurs, is becoming an increasingly important player in the franchise.
“He doesn’t do it for the money like most of the guys in this movie,” says bayona. “He does it because he considers himself an artist. He’s trying to get that perfect dinosaur. He has a big ego, and that’s probably his biggest problem. That’s what gets him into trouble all the time.”
“His character in the novel felt that he was underappreciated, and he’s constantly suffering from that throughout these films,” continues Trevorrow. “His character is really going to have to – especially in the third movie – come to terms with what he’s done. He’s got a lot to answer for.”
CORPORATE GREED
but it seems that wowing the masses with the ultimate zoo is just the tip of the iceberg. let’s face it, in the real world technology like the ability to bring dinosaurs back from the dead wouldn’t just reside in the entertainment industry, and Fallen Kingdom will explore some of its more morally questionable implications. For starters, it looks like we’ll also see more of the corporate skulduggery that’s mostly been glossed over in the movies, but was a big part of Michael Crichton’s two Jurassic Park novels, as Jurassic park parent company ingen and rivals biosyn vied for biotech supremacy.
“When you have a corporate structure, there’s all kind of room for people down that ladder to be up to some pretty nasty stuff, and for the guy on top to not really realise it,” says Trevorrow. “you’ll see in Fallen Kingdom that there’s a connection between what dr Wu and Hoskins were up to in Jurassic World that threads throughout all of them. i don’t think there’s any such thing as an evil corporation, but the corporation is an umbrella that can cover up a lot of bad behaviour.”
That means that the weaponisation of dinosaurs, hinted at when owen tried using his raptor troupe to hunt down the rogue indominus-rex in Jurassic World, is set to come to the fore.
“When i say weaponising dinosaurs, to be clear, i don’t mean cannons on their heads!” laughs Trevorrow. “but it’s a storyline that Steven [Spielberg]’s really interested in, so i’ve worked with him to make sure that we do it in a way that doesn’t send us outside of the parameters of what people want out of these kind of movies. What we’ve done on this trilogy is added another vein that really comes from the threat of what biosyn might have done in Crichton’s novel. There were ideas in that novel that were pretty nefarious about the potential of genetic power. So we wanted to show the seemingly evil decisions that are made in favour of making money. animals have been used in war for thousands of years.”
we wanted to make a sequel that was darker, more dangerous and suspenseful
These dinosaurs are also an expensive commodity, so it was probably always likely a market would grow up around them.
“it’s also a dinosaur trafficking movie,” the writer reveals. “i think what would happen in reality is people would try to sell them. That’s what animal poachers do today – they move these animals, and they either sell them for parts, or sell them wholesale. The threat of this technology going open-sourced, the ability to clone dinosaurs being in the hands of many instead of being in the hands of one, is where we wanted to get to. and that takes them into a very different environment, but it’s one that’s very conducive to Ja bayona’s style. We haven’t seen a dinosaur in a child’s bedroom before, and you do in this one...”
ah yes, that scene in the trailers where young Maisie lockwood – granddaughter of benjamin lockwood, John Hammond’s previously unseen partner on the original Jurassic Park – is tormented by a prehistoric predator in the unlikely setting of a house.
unWanTed guesTs
“Having a monster sneak into my bedroom through the window was one of my biggest fears as a kid,” admits bayona. “and i had the chance of shooting that for this movie.
“i think Colin already thought about having a darker, more dangerous and suspenseful sequel,” he continues. “i was interested the first time Colin told me the story: ‘The first half, you will find all the elements and situations that you would expect from one of these movies. it’s focused on adventure and danger. but then there is a second half that you don’t expect, which plays with this kind of gothic element in a mansion, in a claustrophobic context.’
“i really enjoyed being able to play with dinosaurs while doing the kinds of things that i love, playing with the design of shots, playing with the shadows and with big corridors. it’s very Hitchcock.”
The dinosaur pursuing the child is a newcomer to the franchise – the indoraptor. a step up from the genetically engineered terror of the indominus-rex in Jurassic World, it’s a
chimera of numerous dangerous elements that may just be the most dangerous creature ever to walk the earth – dr Wu, you really are a naughty boy…
“i thought that it would take the whole franchise into a slightly different space, and also allow us to focus on the pure evil, the dinosaur you should be really scared of,” says Trevorrow. “it’s this sort of Frankenstein-like creation that has gone too far.”
but rest assured, we will see some old friends too...
“The T-rex is kind of a hero to us now,” smiles Trevorrow. “it’s one of the great heroes of cinema, as far as i’m concerned and it’s really difficult to cycle it all the way back to that point that she was in Jurassic Park, where she was this murderer that was just trying to eat everything in its path. our relationship with her has evolved.”
“She represents the result of our sins towards science,” adds bayona. “She’s the monster to remind us that we’re doing the wrong thing with dinosaurs. every time we cross a red line, we have the impact of the T-rex there to remind us that we’re not doing the right thing!”