Nothing will ever be Jurassic Park. In an interview for Fallen Kingdom, executive producer Steven Spielberg recalls his experience directing the franchise-opener explaining, “the moment that brought this home for me as a filmmaker was when the T. Rex started to attack two modern Ford Explorers, and you saw the modern world and you saw the prehistoric world meeting up 65 million years later. To me, that’s when I really felt we had captured lightning in a bottle.” That sensation, what Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) evokes when she asks Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), “Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur…it’s like, a miracle. You read about them in books. You see the bones in museums. But you don’t really believe it,” cannot be replicated.
Fortunately, that is not what Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) is attempting to do. Rather, the film evokes the memory of those emotions, via visual callbacks and recurring characters, both human and non, to drive J. A. Bayona’s purpose—empathy. The director insists, “It’s not about people rescuing people anymore; it’s about people rescuing dinosaurs. The whole movie’s about empathy. An empathy toward the dinosaurs.” This objective is simple, and Fallen Kingdom excels at simplicity—in jump scares, with Blue, demonstrating the dangers of commodifying life. However, the questions the film raises are inherently complex, and, though fun, Fallen Kingdom sometimes finds itself lost in its own complexity.
Check out the trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom here:
Although the T. Rex has been the staple dinosaur of the franchise since the beginning[1] Velociraptor Blue occupies most of Fallen Kingdom’s screen time and sympathetic energy. This is intentional; in HBO’s First Look J. A. Bayona reports, “I told Steven [Spielberg] the heart of the story is about Blue.” Bayona’s point is made early in Fallen Kingdom when Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) explains his plan to remove select dinosaurs from Isla Nublar. His initial reaction to Claire’s identification of Blue as “the one animal, in particular, that poses a real challenge” is a confused, “I didn’t know she had a name,” before continuing, “But Blue, is potentially the second most intelligent piece of life on this planet.”
While, as Jack Halberstam states, “naming confers, rather than reflects, meaning,” and can thus be read as an imperial act, in this context (where all de-extinct animals are already subject to inequitable power structures), naming, as Sune Borkfelt explains, “is instrumental to people recognizing the animal as an individual and regarding him or her with special fondness.” Blue, the sole named survivor from Owen’s therapod training group in Jurassic World (2015), is identified as particularly extraordinary—and sympathetic—through the strategic placement of Owen’s recorded training sessions. She is visualized as not only the ultimate compassionate figure, a baby, but Owen’s voiceover describes, “levels of interest, concern, hyperintelligence, cognitive bonding.” Her intellect and emotional connection are epitomized as the camera cuts between images of baby Blue and the present Blue on the operating table as the audience hears Owen’s final research observation, “she’s curious. She’s showing empathy.” We feel for Blue because Blue has the potential to feel for us.[2]
Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire Dearing
And herein lies the problem with Fallen Kingdom. It is not so much about empathy but, rather, the dangers of misplaced empathy. When Maisie, upon liberating the dinosaurs, says “They’re alive, like me,” she doesn’t mean all sentient beings inherently deserve the right to live; she means specifically creatures like her, that is, clones. Set as a moment of triumphant revelation it is instead the reinforcement of the dominant ideology—the more “human” a species is, whether that is defined by similarities in intelligence or emotional register—the more right its kind has to human compassion and, accordingly, protection. Even if their preservation comes at the expense of local ecosystems, both natural and human. Maisie is not moving on to free animals at testing facilities any more than Claire is concerned with endangered species beyond the “de-extinct” creatures of the movie’s opening, which, by the midpoint of the film, have already crossed the extinction threshold.
Isabella Sermon as Maisie Lockwood
Maisie’s ultimate decision to release the dinosaurs into the “wilds” of northern California points to Fallen Kingdom’s second flaw. The rebooted Jurassic franchise’s credibility as scientific possibility rides almost entirely on Dr. Wu’s declaration, “nothing in Jurassic World is natural…if their genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different” in defending his creation of the Indominous Rex. Fallen Kingdom, however, muddles this message by positioning as “natural” reanimated species whose existence depends on filling “gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals” against the hybrid “designer dinos” developed with specific, nefarious objectives in mind. The question of whether any living creature has the right to life is over-simplified to apply only to those animals we know, name, or recall nostalgically.[3]
Re-creating “the first time you saw a dinosaur” is impossible, but remembering that feeling is achievable and, when effectively executed, powerful. Throughout the film it is clear that “the first time [Bayona] thought about Fallen Kingdom [he] thought about [his] reaction watching the very first Jurassic Park.” On a case-by-case basis, Bayona is acutely successful, but the potential for so much more exists. Now fully entrenched in the Anthropocene, Jurassic World takes the audience from Ford Explorers to the realization of global capitalism, which leads Fallen Kingdom beyond animal creation and development for touristic purposes to their endless other potentialities (pharmaceutical, weaponization, etc.). This commodification is remarkably accurate.[4] However, it extends well beyond dinosaurs and house pets.
In the text that began this now quarter-century-long phenomena, Michael Crichton notes the “characteristic look to an animal attack” that applies across species, citing Rottweilers, Bengal Tigers, and Velociraptors as examples. Ian Malcolm testifies at Fallen Kingdom’s conclusion, “We’re causing our own extinction. …And our home has, in fundamental ways, been polluted by avarice, and political megalomania.” The Jurassic franchise has the opportunity to concretely demonstrate the extent to which humans have interfered with the food chain, from factory farming to habitat destruction, and our responsibility to correct these imbalances—beyond those creatures we get to know personally. I look forward to the conclusion of the Jurassic World trilogy, which co-author Colin Trevorrow will return to direct. I can only hope the series will culminate with other species in mind. Based on his Twitter account, empathy for all seems like a real possibility.
Amber P. Hodge is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. A frequenter of DoesTheDogDie.com, her dissertation focuses on the problem of the human in the gothic. You can follow her on Academia and Instagram or Twitter @acafamber on the rare occasions she isn’t watching or writing about horror. She has written previously for Horror Homeroom on politics in American Horror Story: Roanoke.
You can read a different take on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom–one that argues that it fails in its nostalgic project, here.
And here is why Jurassic World should be considered horror.
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Notes
[1] Ahead of Jurassic World (2015), co-writer and director, Colin Trevorrow, confirmed the T. Rex would be the same animal featured in Jurassic Park.
[2] The effectiveness of Bayona’s techniques can be observed in the audience entries for Blue (and the brachiosaurus) on DoestheDogDie.com, an appropriate venue in light of Owen’s use of a dog clicker to train her.
[3] In what I would call the film’s most beautiful shot, and what others have already labeled its “most powerful,” a brachiosaurus is engulfed in lava as the last ship leaves Isla Nublar. Sarah Moran eloquently explains the cinematic impact of this scene. Its success may lie, in part, to its familiarity. Bayona has confirmed that the brachiosaurus whose death is played out at length is not only the same dinosaur Alan Grant saw in the first film, but the animation used in the death scene is also “the exact same animation from the 1993 [filmic] original.”
[4] 18 days before Fallen Kingdom premiered in the United States the skeleton of a carnivorous dinosaur was sold at a private auction in the Eiffel Tower for 2 million Euros. An advisor to the auction house, which sold an herbivore skeleton for almost half the price in 2016, explained, “Herbivores do not quite excite businessmen who buy dinosaurs the same way as carnivores do.”
