JURASSIC WORLD

A fourth Jurassic Park movie was all but promised almost immediately after the release of the third film in July of 2001. The third movie itself suggested as much with the final shot of the pterodons flying off into the horizon toward civilization.

            “'It would be so easy for those birds at the end of Part 3 to just follow the helicopter with the surviving humans. They could follow them back to the mainland,” teased director Joe Johnston, later adding, “I know it looks like they're going off to nest in Vancouver or something, but Steven Spielberg actually has an idea for number four that doesn't involve the pterodons. It takes the 'Jurassic Park' thing in a whole new direction.”

 Little did anyone know then just how shocking this new direction would be eve after Spielberg himself initiated the long wait with the tantalizing news of a secret script already in mind Later, Sam Neil added to the suspense with his announcement, “Yeah, Steven Spielberg and his people are quite busy prepping another one. There is a chance you'll see me in it. I'm as surprised as anyone, because I didn't think there was any way they could get Alan Grant involved again. But they came up with a clever idea. Steven just blew me away with the story....something frightening is happening concerning those dinosaurs that doesn't necessarily bode well for us humans. Scientists never seem to learn. You know that feeling when you first saw the original film, and you were so in awe, and felt so swept away and mesmerized by the sheer majesty of it all? I believe this premise has the potential to elicit that same kind of response. Out of all the concepts that've been created for these movies, this is possibly my favorite.”

For a while there was little talk of the film, interest was revoked in the spring of 2003 with an announcement from the publication Dark Horizons stating, “Twelve years after the first movie, John Hammond's dinosaurs have apparently become urban legend. Most of the public has become skeptical they ever existed. Part of the plot involves the discovery of previously unidentified lizard-like animals showing up on mainland Costa Rica and conflicting with the locals (killing them?). To find out what the heck is going on, a team of experts chart an expedition to one of the off-shore islands. They find out the dinosaurs are thriving and breeding at an uncontrollable rate, so much so that it poses a threat to the nearby continent. They must find a way to curb the spread of the dinos or face an ecological disaster.

I want to make clear that is not the WHOLE story. There is apparently some top-secret aspect of the plot that they refused to even hint to me. They only said that Spielberg was "delighted" with it. In Michael Crichton's novel The Lost World it was discovered that the dinosaurs have been accidentally infected by a disease code-named DX by InGen. Expect this concept to be carried over to JPIV. They don't end up sending in the military to bomb the place, because in time, DX will prevent the dino's continued existence. This leads me to believe JPIV will probably be the last one.”

However, what this was really was the start of a long development hell that lasted for over a decade. By the time the film finally came into fruition the only part of the original plan still in place was Spielberg’s step back as director, staying once again only as co-producer. Neither Neil nor anyone from the original principle cast would return and Joe Johnston would not be back to direct. The first writer hired was William Monahan (then a new comer currently worker for a Ridley Scott script) but the evolution of the screenplay and the many hands it passed through is a story as interesting as the script itself.

Little is known about Monahan’s finished screenplay and conceptually seems to have vanished without a trace as all known stages of what would become the finished script are far removed from how Kathleen Kennedy described Monahan’s script in July of 2003.

“Let's just say it takes place someplace else,” she said. “It will not be green. We will not go back to the jungle.”

Be that as it may, Monahan backed off the already delayed project within less than two years to work on Kingdom of Heaven, taking most of his ideas with him. Though no director was still named, the new screenwriting was now handed down to John Sayles.

            Whatever Monahan’s script consisted of, at least one thing died with it, moving the action off the island. All known incarnations of the screenplay returned, at least to some degree, to Isla Nublar, including the piece that became the most notorious proposition in Jurassic Park lore. At some point in the mid-2000s  Sayles’s screenplay finally leaked and caused an (all things considered) contained uproar. The premise was a departure from the relatively grounded scientific foundation of the series and had made a big stride toward sci-fi fantasy. It couldn’t have sounded more absurd if it tried. Nick, an ex-Navy SEAL, is recruited by a villainous Swiss scientist operating in a secret facility in the Alps where his team is creating living monsters composed of dinosaur, human, and dog DNA. The goal is to make the ultimate warrior to reduce human casualties in combat.

            If that idiotic concoction was not enough to stir the fans’ rage, some photos alleged to be concept art (though Industrial Light & Magic didn’t recognize them from anything they had in production at the time), depicting bipedal reptilian beings with human features and coats of armors like something out of Transformers, did the trick. As a result most of that script was blessedly scrapped, and Joe Johnston (director of the third film) and Jack Horner took over, though aspects of the Sayles’s concept survived.

            This resulted in further postponing production, and in the spring of 2005 special effects technician Stan Winston released an update to keep impatient fans in the loop saying, “Things have somewhat slowed on the development of the film, as Steven wasn't very enthused with the first couple of screenplay drafts. I think he felt neither of them balanced the science and adventure elements effectively. It's a tough compromise to reach, as too much science will make the movie too talky, but too much adventure will make it seem hollow. So we're sort of on hold at the moment, just waiting for the written word to be in place, and then it's full steam ahead, baby!”

            But while talk kept hope for the film alive, Jurassic Park IV was largely put on hold for the next few years while Spielberg gave priority to his own directorial efforts including Munich and Lincoln. With the death of Michael Crichton in 2008, the future of the film seemed bleak with Kathleen Kennedy even suggesting the project may be dead. However, by summer 2011 things had changed and fans breathed a sigh of relief when Spielberg announced that a fourth film was in the works. By then much had changed, including the departure of Johnston and Horner as screenwriters and any hope of Johnston directing this film. With Spielberg out of the question, a director was still needed, but in 2013 the final team of screenwriters was found. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who had given the Planet of the Apes series such a remarkable facelift with Rise of the Planet of the Apes were entrusted with finally making Jurassic Park IV possible.

 Fortunately, much of the material retained from Sayles’s script was from the less twisted aspects. An ex-Navy man is still the hero, now named Owen Grady and is another ruggedly relaxed role for Chris Pratt. There is still a government plan to use dinosaurs, specifically raptors, as military weapons but none of that nonsense involving human DNA.

            Unfortunately, remnants the original script’s more ludicrous ideas also survived, albeit in spirit. The raptors, though still dangerous, have become practically trained attack dogs under Grady’s control, responding to his signals, and even communication via signs and gestures. Hoskins (Vincent D’Onorfio), his boss and head security at InGen, has a different intention for the reptiles, seeing them as efficient war machines.

            All that is alarmingly close to the original though nowhere near its level of lunacy. While it is unflattering to see the raptors demoted from apex predators to essentially dangerous pets, it isn’t something we can’t work with. This taming of the dinos does, however, became a little too ridiculous to ignore when, in a twist on the first film’s finale, the surviving raptor and the T-rex become a tag team in a battle against the Indominus rex, a new monstrous genetically modified dinosaur. Grady’s understanding with the raptors is sloppy, but giving prehistoric beasts human-like emotions is downright moronic. There are many nods to Spielberg’s oeuvre in Jurassic World, but this is the wrong spot for E.T. 

            The good news is, that is about the worst that can be said of Jurassic World, which is one of the more satisfying of the heavily anticipated summer 2015 blockbusters and the best in the series since the original film. There are, to be sure, considerable departures from what has been done with the franchise so far, both visually and spiritually, though every tribute to Spielberg’s first collaboration with Michael Crichton is a high point.

            Further developments, like the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, pushed Kathleen Kennedy away as producer, Spielberg hung on to his role as executive producer and the hunt for director continued. Finally, in the spring of 2013, a surprise decision was made. Colin Trevorrow, an almost unknown name outside of indie circles, was named director for the fourth film.

            Trevorrow, then only 36, was himself stunned at the decision, recalling the moment when producer Frank Marshall, after having seen Trevorrow’s directorial debut, called him to discuss his taking over of the fourth movie, “Steven saw the film and Frank gave me a call. And asked me to come out. We talked for about two hours and then they flew me to L.A. a couple days later and Steven and I talked for a couple of hours and then he gave me Jurassic Park because it was a very strange week. You know, I don’t know exactly why he made that choice. Part of me feels like he wanted a child in the way that, like, Willy Wonka did–Who, like–you know, wouldn’t screw up the chocolate factory. But, you know–and as far as,I didn’t pitch anything because I didn’t know what the movie was about and I was hired before I’d even seen the script. They were still working on a draft and then I saw it and it was a very tough moment in my life because I realize I didn’t understand how to direct that screenplay and tell that story. And so, I had to go back to them and say, look, I’ll go home to Vermont but, it’s either that or Derek and I build a new movie called Jurassic Park IV and that’s what it was called at the time. And so, we just started doing it, essentially. We just got in a hotel and we started writing and I was designing the sequences by day at work while writing the thing based on, you know, this new outline that had come to us very quickly. I was saying to you guys before,I think all of us could write a Jurassic Park movie if called upon to do so. And so, it was suggested, I was activated and it all came very easily to me. I wrote–like, the outline for the movie, I wrote essentially, the Tuesday morning, I woke up at 4 a.m. and knowing I was going to go into work and tell Frank what I had tell him. Wrote a whole outline but there were two ideas from the earlier drafts that were very interesting. I was telling you earlier that the park existed and the idea that there was, even though the nature of it was different, that there was a dinosaur that had to be stopped that was killing everything in its path. And it kind of–essentially the idea that there was a human who had a relationship with the raptors that echoes relationships we have with animals today.

But, I felt like it really needed to be pulled way, way, way back. But, I read a lot of your websites and I know that it’s a draft doesn’t work or isn’t ultimately used, it’s suggested that those people did a bad job or–and it’s really not that. It’s that, developing a Jurassic Park movie took 14 years and it’s really hard. And the benefit of drafts like what John Sayles did and what Rick and Amanda did, they put the orange cones around all the potholes. And so, you get to look straight down the road. And there’s an advantage. And hopefully, people will respect the drafts that I’ve written that have been thrown out for the future. It happens to all of us.”

            With only 2012’s indie Safety Not Guaranteed to his credit, Trevorrow seemed an unlikely choice to helm not only a summer blockbuster, but a long-awaited franchise piece. But Marshall was confident in his choice.

            “Colin understood the movies,” he said. “That’s what Steven and I felt was the most important thing, he’s a storyteller.”

            The novice director, undoubtedly excited at such an unexpected forward leap in his career also understood the responsibility he took on.

            “There are a lot of people in my generation who dreamed of being filmmakers who would love to have this job, and I feel a responsibility to all of them to make this everything that we all wish it could be,” he said. “If I can pull that off, that’s my gift back to Steven.”

            One of the director’s first steps was joining forces with Jaffa and Silver on the screenwriting, and was responsible for scrapping most of Sayles’s previous script.

            “It was as difficult to decline as you'd think,” he said. “But I knew I couldn't make that film. So I said, 'I'm honored, but if we're going to do this we really need to build a different movie that can also be called Jurassic Park 4’”

            This was one of the contributing factor that pushed the movie’s release one last time from the summer of 2014 to the following year.

            “Getting the script right was the tough part,” the director explained. “There are a hundred different ways to tell any story, finding the right one takes persistence. Jurassic Park movies don’t fit into a specific genre. They’re sci-fi adventures that also have to be funny, emotional and scary as hell. That takes a lot of construction, but it can’t feel designed. The characters have to be authentic, the situations real. Derek [Connolly, co-writer on the film] and I started with a blank page and worked all the way through the summer. The process got easier when we decided not to rush to meet that 2014 release date. There just wasn’t enough time. Steven had the foresight to make that call, the studio was supportive, and I couldn’t be more grateful.”

            “You know, and I have to say that the original script that I came on the movie with was certainly was different, a different approach to the story,” recalls Frank Marsahll. “And what Colin and Derek did was they brought basic Steven ideas and then turned them into the story they wanted to tell which was much more an Amblin kind of story.”

            Trevorrow then tied this film directly to the first without wiping the second and third off the narrative slate, though the defenders of the second and even more the third are growing smaller by the day.

            “There’s a lot of bold new ideas in the movie and I’m pushing it as far forward as I can. I know Steven didn’t want me to make a carbon copy of the earlier films. So we’re going for it,” he explained, adding later, “I’m not on a mission to separate this film from the ones that came before. That will happen naturally – I have different instincts. But, like a lot of people my age, I grew up on Amblin movies. They’re a part of who I am as a filmmaker, and arguably as a person. This film will have a lot of new ideas in it, but I think the spirit will be familiar. It will have an old soul.”

            Marshall, for one, was pleased with Trevorrow’s approach. “To make a movie that hearkens back to everything that everybody loved about the first movie. And I think because we had Colin who so appreciated and was so immersed in that first movie, that gave me obviously the confidence that he would deliver something that everybody would respond to and not look at cynically,” he said.

For one thing, Trevorrow returns the action to Isla Nublar in the very park created by John Hammond, now gone and nothing more than a commemorative statue in the revamped visitor’s center.  It’s been rechristened “Jurassic World”, mostly because the new InGen staff wants to put the memory of the disastrous first park behind them (vintage souvenir shirts are taboo as a serio-comic exchange makes clear).

            The first requirement of changing the title to Jurassic World was breaking the news to Spielberg who had nursed the franchise to the blockbuster bonanza it became. Half-jokingly, Trevorrow says, “I emailed Steven–one of the most carefully worded emails I've ever written–and explained every single reason why we should change the title from Jurassic Park 4 to Jurassic World. It's like changing the recipe of someone's favorite cereal, but I wanted people to know that this is going to be a bold movie. It's going to be different.”

            But, as Trevorrow said, “We have seen that we will repeat our mistakes if there’s money on the table. It’s not about the danger of playing God. These animals are real, and they’re on our planet.”

            In the twenty-two years since the first failed attempt, InGen has been passed on to younger more capable hands. Hammond’s successor, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), has revitalized the place into a state of the art prehistoric zoological theme park, protecting visitors with the latest technology separating them from the jaws of dinosaurs.

            If anything, the public has grown too accustomed to the giant reptiles and park attendance has dropped. The solution is to bring back Dr. Wu (B.D. Wong, the only returning original cast member) and his lab team and create something new. As Wu rightly argues, mixing DNA was what the Jurassic Park scientists were doing from the start. This time, however, they’ve created a monstrosity, a fifty-foot killing machine bigger than a T-Rex and smarter than any dinosaur. This is the movie’s new star, stealing the spotlight from all the dinosaurs we’ve grown so familiar with over the years.

            “There are dinosaurs and there’s the other—there’s this thing that is not one of them, that is not of them,” the director said. He would later add, “The Indominus was meant to embody our worst tendencies. We're surrounded by wonder and yet we want more. And we want it bigger, faster, louder, better. And in the world of the movie the animal is designed based on a series of corporate focus groups. It's a hybrid of specific dinosaurs with great movie names like the Giganotosaurus and Majungasaurus, as well as other animals that exist in the world today, with certain attributes that Dr. Wu felt would create the ultimate piece of entertainment.”

            But, as unnatural as they may be (and their departure from what real dinosaurs looked like may be accounted for this way), the iconic dinosaurs are the ones that are here to stay, something Trevorrow felt had to happened.

            “You know, Frankenstein and Darth Vader and even Captain Hook, there are parts to them that aren't entirely organic. Indominus sort of makes the dinosaurs feel like real animals. It's an abomination that must be exterminated,” he said.

            Above all, though, Trevorrow set off to make great entertainment of the sort that hasn’t been captured by the series since the first film.

            While maintaining that, “There’s something in the film about our greed and our desire for profit. The Indominus Rex, to me, is very much that desire that need to be satisfied. The customers want something bigger and badder and louder,” he also added, “I don’t think it’s a message movie and I’m certainly not here to preach.”

            One of the more curious indictments in the movie, however, is against corporate America’s control over science and technology. And yet, ostensibly to chastise them, the movie features more product placement than any recent movie to date. The park is home to a Samsung center, a Ben & Jerry’s stand, and a Margaritaville bar. It’s as double win, the movie makes its point about the unwelcome influence of corporations and yet benefits from the presence of those very corporations.

            Trevorrow is aware hypocrisy and how common it is in the film industry.

            “We’re so surrounded by so much of this marketing and just being told on a regular basis that you have to like this, you will go here, you want this. I found that to me that fit perfectly into what a theme park of dinosaur would be about,” he said. “It’s a surprisingly simple idea. I found that a lot of bigger films tend to get very complicated in their storytelling these days, and we have ideas in here that, yes, they may be sophisticated if you decide to think about them and talk about them a lot, but I think the experience of seeing the film is one that even young kids will be able to process and get behind.”

            Audiences don’t flock to Jurassic Park movies for human drama, but the human element works on a subconscious level, giving audiences a relatable base for which to care. For all the awe real looking dinosaurs inspire the popularity of the Jurassic Park franchise would have soon died were the only other thing fearing a T-Rex another dinosaur. When humans like us become prey our emotional stakes are raised (we too can be eaten) and we respond accordingly. 

            Still, the human factor is understandably treated as an afterthought in films like this. Despite that, however, the writers do an unusually smart job with the non-extinct cast. As is common in the series, the focus is on children, specifically two brothers Gray and Zach (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson) there visiting their aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard, who has come a long way from her M. Night Shyamalan days), the park’s young and ambitious manager, too busy to keep a tight watch on them while their parents file for divorce back home. As the first film proves, nothing awakens our concern more than children in harm’s way. Their backstory is so unimaginative it’s hard to believe it wasn’t allotted the least amount of time by the writers. Any audience can see them getting separated and into danger practically from the start.

            Largely because of this, their encounter with the Indominus rex, clearly patterned as a tribute to Tim & Lexi’s face to face encounter with the T-rex in the first film, feels less exciting this time around, though it retains the element of entrapment in what was supposed to be a shield (in the first film a car, now a motion gyrosphere; a reminder of how much has changed in little more than twenty years). Maybe it’s just a little too familiar and the fear factor is now recognized not impregnable.

            When it comes, however, their big moment is surprising and ultimately more rewarding. After the park shuts down, they wander off into the ruins of the old Jurassic Park, now a restricted area of decaying reminders of the dream that died there more than two decades ago. For older audience members there is a certain poignancy in recognizing iconic items (the night vision goggles, the old Jeeps, etc.) that were seen as state of the art in the first film as dusty relics of a bygone age left abandoned to be discovered by a new generation. It the same sort of somberness experienced by Boomers during that moment in Skyfall in which James Bond, now facing a midlife crisis, unearths an emblem of his glory years, the old Aston Martin DB5.

            Trevorrow’s greatest contribution to the cast in Jurassic World, however, is giving his female leads a bigger piece of the action. Laura Dern spent most of the first film in the tech lab while Julianne Moore got lost in the hunting party of Lost World. Tea Leoni, a solid actress who deserved better, was given very little to do the third time around. Here Claire goes into the jungle in search of her nephews and ultimately saves the day. Of course, the film lampshades its own breakdown of convention by referencing an earlier one-liner. When they first teamed up, Grady mocked her use of high-heels in the forest floor, but it’s with those very heels (the camera zooming in on them to make the point) that Claire outruns the T-rex as she lures it toward the rampaging Indominus rex, manipulating the beasts into a deadly battle.

            “She goes out to the jungle and her white clothes are ripped up, she gets bruised and she’s sweaty but she doesn’t take off her heels,” Howard added said of her character. “By the end of the film, the fact she’s courageously sprinting in those shoes to me represents her strength, her power, and the side of her that is a true warrior.

 A career woman can also be an action girl, the film says and while some could argue that her acceptance of Grady’s advances in the end are a resignation into conformity (inexplicably, Trevorrow saw nothing wrong with it, saying “They don’t like each other at all, and by the end that’s changed”), the film balances this out with a neighboring scene in which the squirrely computer technician at the control center (Jake Johnson) finally makes a move on the colleague he’s long had a crush on only to be shot down instantly. Even Claire’s assistant Zara (Katie McGrath), put in charge of the kids, is more than an embodiment of the fussy British nanny, and elevated, albeit subtly, almost to the status of comic sidekick in a way that was for a while relegated only to male character actors. Her inadequacy for survival in a theme park full of wild beasts run amuck, expressed through her inseparable relationship with cellphones, her distraction when watching the boys (again tied to her cellphone addiction), her unfamiliarity with technology at the park (an automatic door almost sandwiches her in the middle as it closes) and her preoccupation with gossip while terror unfolds around her is played for laughs. A case could be made that her misfortune at the hand of two species of dinosaurs is as darkly comic as was Dennis Nedry’s demise after encountering a dilophosaurus. If Nedry’s gruesome death was a revenge on the worst stereotypes of Generation X (the novel’s version of Nedry was a clearer representation of this than Wayne Knight’s characterization), Zara’s is a playful jab at the pest of this generation, the self-absorbed incessant cellphone user.

            Chris Pratt, of course, takes the lion’s share of the action and while he likely won’t define the action films of the generation (he’s a little too much of too many things for that; the cool Steve McQueen and the rugged Midwestern adventurer that always comes its inherent boy’s-own charm) he is fast becoming one of those stars that years later evoke a specific time in pop culture. With his khaki shorts and dirty vest he’s a young Daktari here, gearing up as the heir to Indiana Jones. He can stare down raptors like only Crocodile Dundee can and is not above covering himself with gasoline to ward off a dinosaur.

            “He’s a classic hero in a very modern context,” Trevorrow said of his lead. “He’s the guy who will get you through the jungle alive – but like Malcolm, Grant and Sattler, he’s an expert in a scientific field that’s connected to our story. The character allows us to explore some new ideas about our relationship with these animals, without losing the humor and sense of adventure. He’s a great contrast for Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, who starts off very corporate, very controlled. Until the running and screaming starts. Then they need each other.”

            The secondary cast is an interesting bunch, especially Masrani who inherits many of Hammond’s vices, notably a lack of foresight, but also has something his predecessor lacked, a realization of the consequences of his actions. As such, Masrani is a midpoint between Khan’s own unscrupulous medical profiteer in The Amazing Spider-Man and what the Jurassic Park series always cautioned against. He is what a reformed Hammond would have looked like and is thus offered a chance at redemption, going down a hero. Hoskins’s villainous intentions for the raptors, meanwhile, are less complex, but when the animals become a threat to the tourists, his argument in favor of utilizing them as weapons is not without merit.

            Perhaps as a consequence of this extra care in character development, the dinosaurs are less of a showstopper this time, even the new ones. The Mosasaurus steals the show and proves that “monster” is a subjective term. Long one of the most feared creatures on Earth, the great white shark is used in the park as mere fodder for the prehistoric sea monster. The point is made clearer since the lifeless carcass of the great white that dangles over the giant tank is a clear homage to the scene in Jaws where the bounty hunters, unaware that the shark they’ve killed was not the one responsible for the deaths at the beach, proudly hang their kill on the dock for the press to see. The terror of that film is just bait for a Mosasaurus. 

            The dinosaurs put the best use are the pterosaurs that break free from their enclosure and wreak havoc on the park carrying off terrified visitors and pecking fallen victims to death in a fun tribute to The Birds, the flying monkeys of The Wizard of Oz, and classic sci-fi.

            The T-rex doesn’t do much until the finale and then is used rather humiliatingly as the attack dog. On the other hand, the new dinosaur may not be that exciting in and of itself, but it does create some of the film’s best moments of fear, like the sort we haven’t seen since the first film. Its introduction is in itself a triumph of expert film craftsmanship. Its reputation precedes it; it’s unusually fierce (having killed its sibling) and cunning (it tried to break out of its cage). Here the best lesson of Jaws, we fear most what we don’t see, is remembered to superb results.  When we first see the beast it is only in pieces, a scale here or there emerging behind the trees, tantalizing us with evidence of the thing’s size. The best shot is a close-up of Howard’s face with the monster’s fangs reflected on the glass separating them, a chilling foreshadow of how close predator and prey will soon be.

            The creature’s first full appearance is also a masterstroke of craftsmanship. A clever reptile, the Indominus rex claws off the tracking device on its body and goes off radar while Grady and two park employees explore its enclosure, believing it to be empty. It’s always scarier to know when danger lurks nearby before the characters and while the still oblivious team continues to survey the enclosure, the control center detects that the dinosaur is still in there, hiding and watching her prey. Then, Grady and the team’s realization that they’re not alone evolves into a chase that’s both scary and darkly funny in the classic Jurassic Park way as desperate victims try every pathetic attempt possible to run and hide.

            The escaped dino’s attack on the ACU team is horrifying in an unexpected way that once again uses Jaws, though in a more subliminal way.  In that film, a band of gruff seamen go off to hunt the marauding shark only to be warned by Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) that none of them would come back alive. At first they ignore his warning but eventually turn back and return safely to shore. Here, Grady, in some ways a spiritual descendent of Hooper for his connection with the animals he ends up hunting, warns the park managers to call the team back after they were sent off into the jungle in search of the escaped dinosaur. But they realize their disadvantage too late and this time, in a shocking variation of the familiar situation, are devoured by the animal.

            If there is one thing truly missed in Jurassic World it’s the soaring score of John Williams. It’s heard in brief reminiscing flashes, as composer Michael Giacchino wanted to pay tribute from the start.

            “The great thing about John’s music is that you could stick it anywhere and it sounds amazing ‘cause he’s just the greatest there is,” he said. “For us, as fans of the film, neither Colin nor I wanted to make a Jurassic Park movie without hearing that theme. It was about saying, “Okay, where can we put it? Where does it make the most sense?” Colin had this idea that the beginning of the film is delivering on a promise that was made 20-some years ago, when we said we were going to make an actual functioning Jurassic Park. So, what we thought was, when we show that, that’s where we should deliver John’s theme. It was a really targeted approach, as to where to do it and where would make the most sense and where would we most appreciate it, as fans ourselves. And then, there were a couple more places, here and there, in the rest of the film, where we thought we could use a little bit, but it was a very targeted thing. We really thought it out. When you heard it, we wanted it to mean something. I’m lucky, I work with guys who allow and really love music and they love melody and they love those sorts of scores. But, so many movies these days are made where you could have just thrown anything into the movie and it wouldn’t matter. So, it’s really wonderful to work with people that respect that old school way of doing it. I feel very lucky.”

 However, the bulk of the soundtrack is Giacchino’s own mind and, though a talented composer, he seems somewhat out of sync with the nature of the series, resulting in an almost limp soundtrack. In fairness to Giacchino he clearly honored his task and took the work seriously, as made evident by his chronicling of the process, “Basically, I wrote an 18-minute suite. I went and watched the movie with him [Trevorrow], and then I walked away and said, “Let me think about it for a couple of days.” And then, I wrote an 18-minute suite, which basically encompassed how I felt about the movie when I watched it. It’s something I like to do on each film. I like to sit down and write how I felt, watching the film. Once I did that, he came over and I played that for him. We just sat there for 18 minutes, listening to the whole thing. It’s torturous because you’re sitting there hoping and wondering, “Is he going to like this?” And he was very happy with it. Over that 18 minutes, I tried to hit upon all the main story beats or characters or situations or ideas, so that he could feel like we were covering all the bases with these themes. At that point, I said, “Okay, just give me the movie,” and I just started writing. We didn’t have a traditional spotting session, like you would normally do, where you sit with the director and analyze every single scene and say, “Oh, we should do this. The music starts here and stops here.” We didn’t do any of that, and mainly because I had just been going so quickly from the last two movies and was already in that mode. I was like, “All right, just give me the movie. I’m ready to go.” So, I just sat down and did it. And then, he would come over and watch it. We were able to watch the whole movie with the music that I wrote, and we could talk about it. If there was anything he wanted to add, I could change it right there, on the spot, with him in the room. By the time we went through that whole process, I was just ready to go record it.”

Jurassic Park may simply not be the best fit for Giacchino, which says nothing about his talent as a composer or the franchise. Movies and music are alive with different personalities and not all of them will be a match.

            A final Easter egg worth mentioning comes in the opening scene where Gray, the younger brother, is seen playing with a Viewmaster before leaving for Costa Rica. He’s watching an old reel with antiquated renditions of dinosaurs battling against a primeval background. For a while this was the most advanced way for children to become awed by the extinct creatures. And then, two of those children, Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton, combined their childhood fascination and made movie history.