Why do we keep going back to Jurassic Park?

There is a heartbreaking image halfway through “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” that surprised me, and I think it speaks to the larger reasons why the Jurassic movies keep being made for willing audiences despite the fact that they are getting less and less original.

A volcano is erupting on Isla Nubar, the Pacific island where the dinosaurs of Jurassic World remain after decades, threatening the lives of the creatures. A team is dispatched to save the dinosaurs, presumably to move them to a new sanctuary. In a thrilling action set-piece, the volcano eruption causes a dinosaur stampede with our heroes in the middle of it, as stampedes are likely to happen in these movies. In the nick of time, the heroes and their rescue animals scurry onto a waiting ship. But the camera lingers on a lone Brachiosaurus, swallowed up by a cloud of ash, looking plaintively at the camera, beyond rescue.

It’s an image that calls to mind the central mystery behind the existence of dinosaurs since humans began discovering their remains over the last two centuries – just as surely as they once walked the planet, they no longer do. The idea that we didn’t know about them for so long seems to frustrate something inside us, as well as fascinate. It’s an idea stated in Stephen L. Brusatte’s recent, excellent book, “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World”

“We humans now wear the crown that once belonged to the dinosaurs. We are confident of our place in nature, even as our actions are rapidly changing the planet around us….If it could happen to the dinosaurs, could it also happen to us?”

“Jurassic World” is the fifth film in a series spawned more than 30 years ago by Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park.” I recently went back to the book, its sequel, and watched all of the films, not sure what I was looking for. 

Crichton’s original novel is well-known, but perhaps not as much as the Spielberg film based on it. The novel fits squarely into Crichton’s oeuvre of techno-thrillers with hints of science fiction, where mankind experiments with elemental forces and learns, to his dismay, how little he knows.

“Park” begins, not with the idea of an amusement park for the superrich stocked with dinosaurs, but with a short prologue about the dangers of then-emerging biotechnology. Crichton introduces what, at that time, would have been a revolutionary idea – biotechnology, dealing with the science of life itself, has the potential to do more for humanity than atomic power and computers, he says. But as so many times with Crichton, he gives this as a warning. Biotechnology may have been unlocked through the cold, rational, patient work of scientists, but it has commercial implications far removed from those of science or even basic ethics, he is saying. “There are no detached observers,” he writes. “Everybody has a stake.”

He puts most of these concerns in the mouth of Dr. Ian Malcolm, a scientific voice arguing that nature is even larger than we can imagine, not one system by itself but part of several among even larger systems. That is why he responds to the park with horror, understanding that there is something, in a scientific sense, unholy about what John Hammond has attempted. Crichton makes the decision to have Malcolm die of his injuries in the novel, making us wonder if the author fears a death of sanity among the scientific community. (He resurrects Malcolm in the following book, probably because of Spielberg’s decision to leave him alive in the film.) In an extended dialogue, Malcolm compares scientific discovery, and the race to be the first, as a kind of rape. Instead of observation, there is always the temptation to act. When Ellie Sattler asks if he means the destruction of the planet, Malcolm says that’s “the last thing I would worry about.”

When it came time to make the film “Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg had the perfect property with which to show everything he had learned in his first 25 years of movie making. In a sense, the creation of the movie “Jurassic Park” is about moving pictures. The aim is to depict dinosaurs and humans interacting, something that never happened in history. It’s an idea that he sums up in an image later in the movie – words projected on the face of a raptor. More importantly, we must have the dinosaurs chase and threaten our human characters. To accomplish this, Spielberg and the visual effects team employed computer generated image technology in a way that hadn’t been seen before. The first hour of the movie sets this up. 

We enter knowing the concept. We expect to see dinosaurs. Twenty years before, Spielberg directed “Jaws,” forced by a malfunctioning mechanical shark to withhold sight of the animal from the audience for long periods of time. He can now show dinosaurs in detail, and yet he still uses the same technique as before to draw in the audience. Our first sight is waving tree branches, like something out of the original “King Kong.” He has begun a strategy of conceal and reveal. Consider that in 1993, there was still some suspense as to whether he could pull it off.

The next scenes introduce our characters – Grant, Sadler, Hammond, Malcolm with the lawyer. We are introduced to a relationship between Grant and Sadler – they never kiss – and, by the unexplained presence of a child at an archeological dig, the idea that they may be planning the next step. (There was no relationship in the novel.)

Richard Attenborough is cast as Hammond, which is an interesting decision. The genial businessman who we first meet in the novel later morphs into an embittered man blaming everyone else when the park’s obvious problems destroy his dreams. By casting the smiling character actor/director in the film, Hammond becomes a grandfatherly, Walt Disney-esque figure, and thus, more ominous. We may feel some sympathy for this man at the same time we see how he has perverted science in the name of commerce.

The great reveal comes not as an attack however, but on a hill with a herd of Brachiosaurs, straining to eat from trees. It looks – it feels – lifelike. And non-threatening.  The stately music of John Williams gives us the appropriate awe before nature.

Then we are reintroduced to the concept, how the park was created,  and Malcolm is there to remind us of the problems, as he was in the novel, though in a more limited basis. Next comes the egg hatching for another moment of awe, and the idea that “life finds a way.”

Muldoon, the great white hunter, is there to illustrate how dangerous the creatures are. There is a storm coming, and then the last, expected magic ingredient – kids. Hammond’s grandchildren are there because…well, children love dinosaurs.

Even still, Spielberg does a curious thing. He frustrates us, making us like the child carried to the zoo who can’t see the lion lounging out in the sun. There are no dinosaurs that we can see. But that will change, at the moment when everything converges to make the last half of the movie an almost continuous chase. He knows the thing we want to see is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, so even here, he hesitates, giving us the impact tremors, the bobbing water in the cup holder of the SUV. The electrified fence is there to create its own kind of suspense.

Without meaning to, Spielberg and Crichton created several archtypes that keep reappearing throughout the “Jurassic” series: The noble male scientist. The resourceful female. The underhanded technician. The hunter. The exploiter. The well-meaning but doomed capitalist. Spielberg also created several scenes and situations the series has returned to again and again. A contemplative pause before nature’s awesome power and grandeur. The humans running in the middle of a dinosaur stampede. Our heroes threatened by one menace which is in turn neutralized by a larger, heretofore unseen threat.

The end of “Jurassic Park” leaves us with a problem, as it did its markers. The dinosaurs are still alive on the island. Don’t we want to go back? But how do we keep from telling virtually the same story, over and over? It’s a problem they haven’t yet overcome.

To satisfy his fans, Crichton gave us “The Lost World,” and reading it, you sense that he wrote it trying to tailor the story to what he expected Spielberg would want. He brings back Malcolm, again contrives to have children on the island, and invents a rival biotech company interested in the technology that created the dinosaurs. There is an indication, at the book’s close, that the dinosaurs days are numbered.

Again, there are the ominous warnings:

“Scientists pretended that history didn’t matter, because the errors of the past were now corrected by modern discoveries. But of course their forebears had believed exactly the same thing in the past, too. They had been wrong then. And they were wrong now.”

Spielberg, though, was satisfied to take only a few elements of Crichton’s book in order to satisfy the audience’s supposed second wish for a Jurassic movie – having a dinosaur chase people not on Isla Nubar, but in urban and suburban America. 

 The first hour of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” played better than I remembered. That’s largely due to the good cast and Spielberg concentrating on the human interactions. We see Pete Posteltwaite in the role of the hunter, this time, only slightly sinister and able to walk out alive in the end. Arliss Howard is the obligatory evil capitalist exploiter of the dinosaurs. From the moment Jeff Goldblum’s daughter shows up, you know she’ll wind up on the island somehow.

A formula is already taking shape, even though it has been somewhat tweaked. Information is withheld to get the hero back on the island, because no sane person would want to go back. Those who are going for the first time are ignorant of the danger or arrogantly assume they can handle it. Still, must we always encounter the T-Rex in a rainstorm?

I remember thinking when the movie came out that the entire reason to have “The Lost World” was to have the shot of the T-Rex drinking from a swimming pool. That’s perhaps why the last third of the movie seems to come off the rails, as though all the story has led up to this, and there isn’t much here besides a procession of visual jokes reminiscent of Spielberg’s “1941”– Japanese people running from a dinosaur, meant to remind us of Godzilla. The dinosaur dashing past the customs sign prohibiting animals past this point. A child waking up parents because of a monster. Spielberg also dispenses with Crichton’s ending – the dinosaurs will survive, so we can again return.

A few words here about "Jurassic Park III:" In its stripped down story, it reminded me of the way sequels used to play out – with less money, fewer stars, a smaller story, a smaller set. The cast is again excellent, with Sam Neill brought back for most of the action, joined by William H. Macy and Tea Leoni. But the action is again all too familiar. Its main selling point seems to be – Pteranadons! The timely rescue of the U.S. military replaces the by-now expected resolution with one as old as the movies themselves. 

“Jurassic World,” released 14 years later, understood that even though we don’t think a park with dinosaurs can succeed, we want it to. We want to see it, just as much as want it to fail catastrophically.

We are reintroduced to a few familiar faces, like B.D. Wong. We are impressed with Bryce Dallas Howard’s moxie and beauty, and charmed by Chris Pratt’s goofy raptor trainer. The Great White Hunter is also an exploiter in Vincent D’Onofrio’s Hoskins, who wants to find a military application for the dinosaurs. When our child protagonists stumble onto the old Jurassic Park visitor center from the first movie, we are supposed to feel the appropriate nostalgia before the awe of previous box office glories.

Of course, we haven’t left well enough alone. In a nod to Crichton’s original inspiration, the park’s creators have engineered their own ultimate predator, Indominus Rex, in an attempt to one-up nature and create even more thrills. But because Indominus is man-made, it is ultimately defeated by a tagteam of the T Rex and the Mosasaurus – again one threat neutralized by a larger one. “Fallen Kingdom” has gotten better at rendering dinosaurs, and gives us a roomful of capitalists bidding on them. Marx would have loved the sight of primeval animals slaughtering a room of high-rollers, mixing ideology and evolution.

Despite its scientific trappings, the Jurassic series has always been about sheer entertainment. Its concept was meant to thrill, though I wonder how many times it can thrill given the safe ground its makers continue to inhabit.

I’m reminded of the sight of John Hammond in the first movie, hovering over melting ice cream, fearful for the lives of his grandchildren. He has spared no expense to bring his dreams alive, and they have hatched a nightmare:

“You know the first attraction that I ever built when I came down from Scotland was a flea circus – Petticoat Lane. Really quite wonderful. We had a wee trapeze, and a merry-go…carousel. And a see-saw. They all moved- motorized of course. But people would say they could see the fleas… But this place…I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion, something that was real, something they could see and touch…an aim not devoid of merit.”

The dinosaurs, like our doomed Brachiosaur swallowed in ash, offer an echo from a past we never had a chance to forget. They didn’t leave books or buildings, just their bones.

They remind us of deep time – oceans of centuries where we did not walk the earth and would not for longer than we can comprehend. They remind us of our mortality – in that they are no longer here. They remind us of our stature – you are small, little man, and weak, and you too will die. And will there be anything left of you when it is all over? We power your cars and your cities. What power will anyone find in what ultimately remains of you?

The end of “Fallen Kingdom” promises yet another adventure, now that dinosaurs have been loosed upon the world. Yet, I have the suspicion that future Jurassic Worlds will till the same ground, resurrecting the same fossils, like pumping tired oil wells. 

But not all fossils are best left underground. 2017 saw the publication of an unearthed Crichton novel, “Dragon Teeth,” which gives us dinosaurs (of a sort) in a western. The novel, which the late author wrote in the 70s, tells the story of a young Yale man caught between the real-life fossil hunters Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. The two are looking for bones in the west in 1876, which gives Crichton a chance to construct a lovely, fun, rollicking adventure. Crichton again gives us vain scientists, racing to make the discovery, but our hero, William Johnson, merely went West to win a bet. He cares nothing about the unseen giant beasts of the dim past, even though he is present at a moment of their rediscovery.

“You and I are the first men in recorded history to glimpse these teeth. They will change everything we think we know about these animals, and much as I hesitate to say such a thing, man becomes smaller when we realize what remarkable beasts went before us.”

There is something wonderful about the scene, late in the book, when Johnson finds himself the guardian of these million-year-old bones, even though he cares little for them and barely understands their importance. One feels the stubborn insistence of man, that he matters because he exists – now. 

Whatever may happen to the species in the future, his existence is of paramount importance. The dinosaurs had their shot, as Malcolm would say later. 

Why not make the most of today? 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

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