How a thrilling eight-minute short might save the Jurassic franchise
I bring you good news and bad news. The good news is that the new Jurassic World film Battle at Big Rock is by far the best in the series, managing to be wholly original (unlike Jurassic World) without being aggressively, bonk-headedly stupid (unlike Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom). It’s tight, it’s tense, it’s a perfect fat-free distillation of everything that’s good about the Jurassic World franchise. However – and now for the bad news – it’s only eight minutes long.
Filmed in secret and released this weekend, Battle at Big Rock is an odd duck indeed. In Colin Trevorrow it has an authentically Jurassic World-appropriate director. In Andre Holland and Natalie Martinez it has a pair of convincingly big stars. It is staged, shot, lit and scored like a big budget feature. And yet – since it’s too short to be a film and too long to be a DVD extra – it is assuredly a short in its own right. It’s like a more confident, muscular, expensive version of the little One-Shot features that Marvel put out for a couple of years at the beginning of the decade.
And it’s pretty great. Following the end of the last film, dinosaurs live in the wild now. Holland and Martinez play a couple of campers out in a national park with their kids, and their visit is interrupted when a large herbivore trundles past. And then even more when an Allosaurus barges in and starts a fight. The campers watch, awestruck, from their window. And then the Allosaurus comes for them.
That’s it. That’s the whole film. It’s essentially a Jurassic World set-piece that’s been sliced up and presented alone. But three things make it stand out. First, unlike any of the dummies who ever blundered into Isla Nublar, the campers have no idea that the dinosaurs are coming, so their shock is at least genuine. Second, in its inventive use of a high chair and its distinctive framing of a roar it achieves a onetwo punch of indelible series-best moments.
And third, the mid-credit scenes are absolutely bonkers. Once the campers have been attacked (and saved by a very Jurassic Park precocious child), the action cuts away to some iPhone footage of a little girl on a ranch screaming in terror as she’s trailed by a pack of tiny procompsognathuses. Then there’s some dashcam footage of a car speeding out of a tunnel, swerving to avoid a stegosaurus and tumbling off a cliff. Some fisherman happen upon a parasaurolophus. A great white shark leaps out of the sea to catch a seal, which is in turn chased by a mosasaurus. A pair of newlyweds launch a dove into the air, and it’s quickly gobbled up by a pterodactyl.
The credit clips are all tremendous fun to watch, suggesting that this universe is also home to some sort of hilarious dinosaur-based home video clip show series. And, given that Trevorrow has hinted that he wanted Battle at Big Rock to gesture towards the larger themes of Jurassic World 3, why not speculate even harder? Why not just out-and-out guess that the next film is going to be completely made up of clips like this?
Now that humans and dinosaurs are forced to share the world, wouldn’t you watch a found footage Jurassic World film? The series isn’t shy about adopting new genres, as Fallen Kingdom’s bizarre horror hybrid proved only too well. So why not go full Cloverfield? A film compiled from multiple sources, shot by a public terrified of their giant invaders might be incredible. It would certainly cut down on all the soggy, laborious character work that bogged down the last two instalments. If nothing else, there’d be much less farting about with Chris Pratt and his pet raptors, so that’s something.
As a genre, the found footage film has been running out of steam for years. But that’s only because none of them had a bunch of tyrannosaurus rexes charging about the place gobbling people off toilets. If I’m right, and Battle at Big Rock really is a backdoor pilot for a found footage film, it might be time to get excited about Jurassic World again.