What the Jurassic Park franchise keeps getting so wrong

OPINION: Every new Jurassic movie has been a pale imitation of the perfect original — and there’s one simple thing they keep getting so, so wrong.

JURASSIC Park is a perfect movie. This is accepted as fact.

Some people deny this, sure, but there are politicians who deny climate change and Bachelorette contestants who are flat Earthers. You can’t win everyone over to the truth, even when that truth is that Jurassic Park is a perfect movie.

The Jurassic Park sequels, on the other teeny tiny T-Rex hand, are bad. Every one of them. And that includes the half dozen more we’re gonna get, as Universal keeps cranking them out in an attempt to keep up with their competitors’ superhero universes. The notion of doing a Jurassic Park sequel was an incorrect one from the get-go, and that’s been proven out because every single Jurassic Park sequel has missed what made the original movie so special: the characters.

What do we talk about when we talk about Jurassic Park? A T-Rex eating a lawyer off a toilet, sure. A bunch of Velociraptors going all Kitchen Nightmares, that probably comes up. But what do we talk about most? The characters! The quotes! The relationships! The interpersonal drama!

Jurassic Park was big on dinosaurs — but bigger on human characters.

This is what makes Jurassic Park special. Look at what we chose to write about when Jurassic Park turned 25 earlier this month. We didn’t write about the Best Dino Kills or the Most Shocking Moments. Kayla Cobb wrote about what a hero Lex is for teen girls, Meghan O’Keefe celebrated Ellie’s character-defining khaki shorts, Jade Budowski got into how Ian Malcolm forever made Jeff Golblum Jeff Goldblum, and I revealed that Alan Grant was my first ever crush.

These characters — a tenacious palaeobotanist, a mumbling mathematician that exudes sex, a grumpy dino nerd that learns to love, an overzealous billionaire with Santa Claus’ smile, two precocious kids that miraculously never get annoying — make Jurassic Park the re-watchable triumph it is.

They add the weight to the film, by spending the first chunk of the movie arguing over the legit ethical concerns over bringing dinosaurs back to life. Even the minor characters are infinitely memorable. A chain-smoking Samuel L. Jackson gets the line of the movie (“Hold on to your butts”), a line that has nothing to do with dinos!

The latest instalments in the Jurassic franchise are all cloned super mega-dinosaurs. Picture: AP

Obviously I cannot discredit the astounding special effects work pulled off in this film, work that still stands above pretty much anything you see on TV 25 years later, and even a lot of today’s blockbusters. Perfect movie’s special effects are perfect, and there’s a reason why every documentary about Jurassic Park focuses on the effects and takes the acting for granted. But I want to point out that director Steven Spielberg knew he wasn’t making a monster movie. He wanted to treat the dinosaurs like animals and make sure that the characters felt like real people. That’s why he cast Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum in the leads, as they’re three actors that know how to make Jurassic jargon sound natural.

The problem with the Jurassic Park sequels is that they’ve turned the franchise into the one thing Spielberg didn’t want Jurassic Park to be: a series of monster movies with nameless humans and now commonplace CGI. Every sequel places the dinosaurs above the humans and gory kills over character growth.

Can you name any of the characters introduced in the sequels? I can name the actors, easily: Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Did you remember that they played Sarah Harding, Nick Van Owen, Paul Kirby, Amanda Kirby, or Claire Dearing? You did not.

In fact, I was so blown away by how unmemorable the name of the lead character in the record-smashing blockbuster Jurassic World that I asked my co-workers if they could name Chris Pratt’s raptor-whisperer. It took brainstorming and no fewer than 12 guesses to finally stumble across Owen Grady. Honestly the names I got when I asked this question on Twitter make just as much sense as “Owen Grady.”

Lucky Triceratops.

Who are these people, these people played by perfectly fine actors, trotted out on screen to run away from prehistoric monsters rendered in perfectly fine CGI every few years?

Jurassic Park thrilled so effectively and efficiently because it made you care about that hacker teen and her sweet, nerdy brother that were suddenly the snack at the centre of a Jeep, peeled away tyre by tyre by a hungry T-Rex.

The Lost World has dozens of Velociraptors tearing an equal number of mercenaries to shreds, and Jurassic World visited an unjustly grisly and sudden death upon a Bryce Dallas Howard’s assistant. Jurassic World III doesn’t have anything to say beyond “Wouldn’t it be rad if a dinosaur attacked a boat?” And I get it — that’s a pretty rad sentence! But as a follow-up to the wondrous world established in Jurassic Park, it’s just 92 minutes of hollow box office cash-in.

Proof that the sequels prioritise the wrong thing, the previous two films and the latest Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdomhave beefed up the dinosaurs, as if the problem with the sequels were the dinosaurs being two dainty. The Spinosaurus, the Indominus rex, and the new Indoraptor were all meant to make us care more, proportionally to how big they were?

Instead of introducing these cloned monstrosities, the Jurassic sequels should consider spending some time with the humans. We need to care about the humans enough to quote them … or at least just remember their names.

This story originally appeared on Decider and is republished here with permission.