Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona, 2018) is an experiment in nostalgia. Like many of the other franchises cluttering theaters these days, the latest Jurassic Park installment reawakens our admiration for its original. It elicits memories of prior experiences watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). I myself will never forget the first time I saw it, when at the age of four or five, I ran screaming from the theater because the T-Rex broke loose and ripped the lawyer off a toilet—“when you gotta go, ya gotta go.”
Like me, many Jurassic Park fans can similarly identify lines of dialogue with their moments in the film. Perhaps the dialogue was so well-written, so representative of their moments, and delivered so well—by fully fleshed-out characters with plausible motivations and complete backstories—that enthusiastic audiences can easily recall it. Several of the more intuitive lines, like those above, are spoken by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who specializes in chaos theory and predicts the fall of the park. It’s no wonder, then, that the character returns in Fallen Kingdom, whose taglines read: “life finds a way” and “the park is gone.” The former is the oft-cited Malcolm line, the other something he insistently prophesizes.
Fans readily recognize the allusions, and makers of Fallen Kingdom are likely banking on that: a fan’s nostalgia for an enduring classic. Spielberg’s film was indeed clever, frightening, and at times darkly comical. It broke records and redefined expectations of the creature feature. For all these reasons, Jurassic Park is memorable and inventive; Fallen Kingdom is not—although it desperately wants to be.
Mostly, the new installment excavates the original film. Fallen Kingdom pilfers, for example, from the moment in Jurassic Park when the principal characters—Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, John Hammond, and Ian Malcolm—gaze up at the brachiosaurus for the first time. The scene was jaw-dropping for characters and audiences alike. But in Fallen Kingdom, it’s become a shadow of its predecessor. A character we hardly know or care about stands looking up amazed, asking, “Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur? First time you see them, it’s like… a miracle.”
Yes, we remember, and although both scenes are replete with CGI dinosaurs, Jurassic Park’s Brachiosaurus stands the test of time. It carried weight: it occupied the scene, it bent tree branches, and it stomped around and shook the earth. It felt real. Fallen Kingdom’s dinos are shades—no depth, no mass. They glide in and tear people to pieces but leave no trace and inflict no emotional impact, not on the audience at least; several characters hope to rescue the dinosaurs from extinction. Audiences are left to ponder why. Maybe the latest innovations in special effects have rendered the dinosaurs too glossy, too perfect, and therefore uninteresting. They aren’t scary, not really—largely because they fail to take up space in the scene. They have no substance, literally or metaphorically.
These dinosaurs are not claymation or cartoons, but they might as well be. They feel like lingering ghosts haunting the screen, rejected by better prototypes. What made Jurassic Park and Lost World (1997) great was their meager use of CGI, relying instead mainly on animatronics. Remember the children in the original being nearly crushed in the car under the weight of the t-rex, with only a piece of glass separating them? We saw their fingers pressed against the glass pushing the dinosaur back, and we imagined their terror. Fallen World makes many an allusion to Spielberg’s masterpiece: the goat tied to a stick, a girl straining to hide herself in a food cart—here, in Fallen Kingdom, a dumbwaiter—a sick dinosaur needing medical attention, and a T-Rex swooping in to save the day…by gobbling down a different, more dangerous foe, the capitalist once again gone mad. The movie does all this but cannot recapture Spielberg’s miracle.
And this is where the Fallen Kingdom’s attempts at participating in nostalgia horror flop. Recently, a multitude of nostalgia horror films and series have emerged. Their secondary purpose after terrifying audiences, of course, is to gesture to past scares. Stranger Things is an apt example. With its blended references to 80’s films like E.T., The Goonies, and many more, it reimagines a recent past living in the present. But Fallen Kingdom does not recapture past glories with a twist. It mostly just tries to clone them.
On the other hand, the film endeavors to make the velociraptor, Blue, a character from the first Jurassic World (2015), loveable. This offers a new angle, admittedly, making an old favorite seem alive and new again. But it’s too jarringly different. Nostalgia is all about craving a return to fond memories, and, as the Greek root suggests, a return to home—what is most comforting and familiar. Fans that grew up with Jurassic Park are fairly comfortable with the raptors being killers. So why make them the good guy, especially if that good guy still eats people? Fallen Kingdom proposes the indoraptor, a special hybrid breed, as the new dinosaur to fear. Yet this species is still raptor, just bigger and trained to kill on command. And like a raptor, and Blue, it is unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Basically, Fallen Kingdom flunks at promoting nostalgia but might succeed at the uncanny, the feeling we get when confronting something that was once familiar but that has turned strange. Sigmund Freud called this “unheimlich,” or unhomely. The dinosaurs are not the dinosaurs we had come to expect. And although the movie pulls from the original in theme—man must not tamper with creation—the entire film as a whole unwittingly symbolizes John Hammond’s mistakes. The movie is an allegory about Spielberg losing control over his own creation. The director’s artistic genus has been appropriated by others wanting to franchise the original: “I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real,” Hammond says to Ellie after the park erupts into chaos in Jurassic Park. “Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it’ll be flawless.”
In reality, the first film was flawless. The third installment and onward have been abysmal. They lack substance and innovation. Responding to the outcries to keep the dinosaurs around in Fallen Kingdom, Malcolm asks: “How many times must the point be made?” It’s a mistake to repeat this particular experiment in nostalgia over and over expecting new results.
Michelle Mastro is a third year PhD student at Indiana University, Bloomington’s English department. There, she studies the development of the novel with an emphasis on the Victorian Gothic. She recently taught a course of her own design: The Final Girl: Cultural Analysis and Representations of Gender in the Slasher Film. Michelle Mastro has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Tucker and Dale vs Evil, Stranger Things, the 90s horror film, Fear, the phenomenon of the creepy clown, and It Follows.
Check out our article on why Jurassic World (and the other Jurassic films) are indeed horror films!
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