A Monster Wearing Your Skin - Jurassic World and Carrying On a Legacy in Different Ways
tl;dr: it’s kinda genius of the Jurassic World series to self-criticize its own reboots that aren’t too true to the text of previous works, because it actualizes and explores it in a visceral way through its own monsters and plot.
Just an off-the-cuff psuedo-essay that isn’t really getting at what I really want to say, but it’s a step towards articulating what I felt.
Take the Indominus Rex and its progeny, the Indoraptor - so much faster than the creatures they’re based off of, with different, unpredictable behaviors, in strange shapes and sizes - things that shouldn’t exist, and yet, they do.
Pretty apt metaphor for the new flicks.
Here’s my thing with the Jurassic World series - while I like them, they feel intensely different. They go on a different adventure with different tones and beats and stylings from JP1, The Lost World, and even JPIII. A sense of awe and a wide-open world filled with danger becomes directed observance, like seeing a lion in a zoo, and
Jurassic World and its sequel feel like Resident Evil fighting Godzilla. Out-of-control bioweapons and corporate greed, writ large - a far cry from the already unnatural creatures designed in the novel and the first trilogy, and even the remnants of InGen felt like a scaled-down, semirealistic hunting trek, even with, say, Ian’s hi-tech RV and the hunters’ extending vehicles for lassoing creatures - whereas the people misusing Masrani go all-in, with an army of mercenaries and well-equipped weaponry. But it fits - Crichton himself has done similar things, such as sentient nanomachines attempting world dominance in Prey, getting shrunk into the dangerous microworld of Hawaii’s rainforests in Micro, a man turning into a zombie serial killer in The Terminal Man, and, Hell, outright magic in Sphere.
Even Claire and Masrani - if I recall correctly - admit Jurassic World is probably not what InGen and Hammond certainly had in mind after he had learned his lesson, that nature was uncontrollable.
And the best thing, I think is that it is very much a self-aware criticism and acknowledgement of what the new films are - they’re aware of how they’re carrying on an old, dead legacy, and how they will never really be the same as previous trilogies - and, I think, that’s a bit of a good thing, because look at Jurassic Park III.
tl;dr: it’s kinda genius of the Jurassic World series to self-criticize its own reboots that aren’t too true to the text of previous works, because it actualizes and explores it in a visceral way through its own monsters and plot.
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