Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - How the Jurassic Franchise Lost its Soul

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July 23, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:06

How the Jurassic Franchise Lost its Soul

They literally don't know what this story is about.

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	The film franchise spawned by Jurassic Park has lost its soul because its modern custodians don't understand the story that Michael Crichton was trying to tell.
	Crichton's phenomenally successful novel Jurassic Park was released in 1990.
	The plot hinged on a particular blind spot in the technocratic regime of the Island Resort.
	The dinosaurs were tracked by a sensor array which could identify the dinosaurs by type and match that to a database of dinosaurs which Ingen had produced.
	If any were missing in the tally, the software would let Nedri and Arnold know, and the rogue dinosaur could be apprehended or assisted.
	The system was calibrated with the fear of losing specimens in mind because, through the magic of Henry Wu's genetic engineering, all of the dinosaurs were made female, and each one cost a great deal of money to produce.
	If one was lost or sick, then it was imperative to recover or heal it, as Jurassic Park was going to be a business and no business tolerates unnecessary waste.
	This all seems reasonable enough, assuming you have full control of events.
	The twist in Crichton's novel is that actually, some things are not as they seem.
	We make a lot of assumptions, and not all of them are valid.
	In the book, to put the dinosaur DNA together, the Ursat's DNA of other animals had to be used to fill in the blanks, and the use of frog DNA had given at least some of the dinosaurs the spontaneous ability to change their sex when confined in a single sex environment.
	The dinosaurs with this DNA inherited this ability, ergo, some of the dinosaurs had changed sex and begun to breed.
	The park's managers had been blissfully unaware of this though, and as they had been looking for a predetermined number of dinosaurs, once the system had found that number, it stopped looking.
	When they changed the parameters to look for more dinosaurs than they were expecting, they discovered that the dinosaurs were multiplying all over the park.
	They realized then that they were in a lot of trouble.
	It is through the voice of chaos theorist Ian Malcolm that Crichton delivers the story's true meaning and message.
	Thou art not God.
	The incredible potential and power of science made John Hammond blind to the limits of what can be known in advance of the act because of the terrible complexity of the world.
	He thought he had created dinosaurs and would bring them to the world for all to see, and at the end of the novel, his dinosaurs eat him alive.
	Arnold and Nedry thought that they had designed a foolproof surveillance and security system which would keep the dinosaurs contained, but instead outside of the limits of their vision, the dinosaurs were loose and out of their control, and they got eaten too.
	All stories must attempt to teach the audience something about themselves or the world, and the moral of Jurassic Park is a warning about hubris.
	You might indeed have access to phenomenal power, but you are mortal and you do not have the capacity to control it.
	You might master the ability to create first order effects, but you can't foresee, let alone control the second order effects of what you've done, and this is where the real danger in progress lies.
	In the short term, science and technology seem like wondrous marvels, but if you don't operate with sufficient prudence, they will come back and destroy you, and the amount of caution you must exercise increases proportionally with the amount of power that you wield.
	This is what John Hammond discovered when he was being devoured by the fruits of his own creation, and what Ian Malcolm warns him of throughout the course of the book.
	Malcolm's perspective on chaos theory informs the moral lesson of the narrative.
	It is the business of science to bend nature to our will.
	The danger inherent in this is that nature contains a great deal of potential energy, and when we unleash this, we do not really know what we are doing.
	Even if we can figure out how to get the first order effects, the second order effects are just as important and equally as dangerous.
	Crichton is warning us against the hubris of going too far outside the Tau too fast, and that we ought to instead be more accepting of the limits the universe has imposed upon us before it blows up in our face.
	The secondary point that I am making here is that the dinosaurs are not the villains.
	The dinosaurs are a force of nature that we have brought down upon ourselves.
	Jurassic Park is not a monster movie.
	As far as I'm aware, The Lost World is the only sequel Crichton ever wrote and is the end of the Jurassic Park canon as laid out by the books.
	It sets the tone for the moral of the remaining films with the following message.
	Leave the mess you've created alone, nothing good can come of it.
	Both the film adaptation and its sequel Jurassic Park 3 carry this message forward.
	Going back to the island is a bad idea, and you ought not to do it.
	The dinosaurs cannot be employed for economic or military reasons, and you shouldn't try.
	In 2015, the Jurassic Park franchise was rebooted with Jurassic World, which at first glance looked like an adequate spiritual successor to Jurassic Park, but upon closer inspection, we notice that the moral of the story has been inverted.
	The park appears on the surface to be working.
	This new iteration of the park appears to have learned from the mistakes of the previous one, and man has finally harnessed the awesome power of genetic manipulation.
	The park this time has its very own dinosaur wrangler in the form of Owen Grady, a man who has some measure of control over the Velociraptors, and as we have shown in later films, can do his Jedi mind hand trick on basically any dinosaur.
	Compare this to Jurassic Park's Robert Muldoon, who is constantly stressed by the dinosaurs, always on edge that one day the Velociraptors might get out, and this is what eventually kills him.
	The park in Jurassic World had been operating for some time, and apparently people have become bored with dinosaurs as they're just another kind of theme park attraction and don't capture the imagination like they used to.
	To get over this, the scientists manifest not dinosaurs, but instead hybrid monsters that will wow the pundits, leading to the creation of the Indominus Rex.
	This is a mixture of several dinosaurs, giving it the size and power of the Tyrannosaurus with the intelligence and cunning of a raptor.
	It uses its intelligence to trick the human administrators and then escapes from its paddock, which allows it to wreak havoc across the park, leading to a cascading failure.
	The problem with Jurassic World is that, unlike Jurassic Park, the mutant dinosaur has become the main villain of the piece rather than the scientific technological system itself.
	In Jurassic World, the system didn't fail.
	Instead, the escape of the Indominus Rex is due to the fact that it tricked the humans into releasing it.
	The problem isn't the system, it's user error.
	In fact, the system itself had demonstrated that it was remarkably successful, as everything was fine until the Indominus escapes.
	In every way, the dinosaurs have become domesticated and controllable.
	Owen Grady can command the raptors, and by later movies, the raptors are treated as if they're essentially like dogs.
	Even the Indominus Rex is only defeated when Claire Deering releases the Tyrannosaurus Rex from its cage so they can fight it.
	In fact, the end of Jurassic World sees the Indominus Rex defeated by a coalition of the humans, the Raptors, and the released Tyrannosaurus, which obediently does battle with the Indominus Rex.
	For some reason, the normal dinosaurs have decided that they too would team up to fight the abomination, which is eventually eaten by the mosasaur, and then the coalition peacefully ends, and everyone just goes about their business.
	Indeed, the raptors themselves don't even escape in this film, and only defect to the Indominus Rex after they take the raptors out to hunt the Rex.
	And the Rex itself is an artificial construct, which just outsmarts the people who created it.
	But even then, the Raptors end up switching sides back to Owen Grady, and then they team up with the humans to fight the Indominus Rex in the end.
	What is the moral of the story in Jurassic World?
	It's tempting to say that it has followed in the footsteps of the first movie, implying that manipulating nature has catastrophic consequences, but this isn't really what happened at all.
	Instead, a well-functioning park was put into disarray by a clever villain in the form of the Indominus Rex, rendering the normal dinosaurs as non-threatening and mastered by the scientific technological system.
	The moral of the story appears to be something along the lines of, don't create super smart evil villains for profit, which isn't really something we need to be instructed on.
	The closest we have in Jurassic World on the theme of the uncontrollable nature of the dinosaurs is when Vic Hoskins is killed by the Velociraptors he sought to employ as a weapon.
	However, the moral of this story arc is not about the uncontrollable power of nature, but instead about the illegitimate and immoral intentions of Hoskins himself.
	He is killed by the raptors after trying to use them as a means to an end, instead of respecting the raptors as an end in themselves, unlike Grady, whom they never harm.
	So where Jurassic Park was a warning about man's hubris, Jurassic World becomes just a monster movie.
	And unfortunately for the franchise, things only go downhill from here because the underlying warning about the use of the power of science seems to be not well understood by whoever is writing these scripts these days.
	2018's Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom was a generally weak sequel, which sees Owen Grady and Claire Deering return to the island, ostensibly to rescue the dinosaurs from a second extinction event at the hands of a volcano.
	The dinosaurs are now portrayed not as a cataclysmic threat, but instead as an endangered species which mankind has an obligation to rescue as they can't survive on their own.
	Claire Deering has even founded the Dinosaur Protection Group which has dedicated itself to preserving the dinosaurs and sets out to rescue them from the volcano and move them to another island where they won't be interfered with by the humans.
	The dinosaurs have been rendered impotent, weak, incapable of even surviving by themselves, and in dire need of human intervention.
	The dinosaurs are rescued and taken to Benjamin Lockwood's Manor, where there is a dinosaur auction.
	And I guess this is evil.
	At the auction, we discover the Indoraptor, another engineered neo-dinosaur that has been once again primed to be used for military purposes.
	Apparently, it can be directed by the use of a laser, which is pointed at the target to mark them out.
	This feature returns in the next movie, revealing that the writers simply have no idea how dinosaurs ought to be used in a military context.
	Because if I can point a laser at someone, wouldn't it be more efficient for me to just point a gun at them?
	And wouldn't I want to direct the raptors at targets I can't presently see to use them as seek and destroy drones?
	The Indoraptor escapes from its cage because an arrogant human decides to tranquilize it and take one of its teeth, but it turns out the creature is not affected by the tranquilizer.
	However, it pretends to be affected, and then it kills the man as it comes into his cage, allowing the Indoraptor to escape.
	Again, the system itself isn't the failure, the failure comes from the villain tricking an innocent, but one of the characters in the story.
	The Indoraptor then goes on to play the part of the evil villain stalking the protagonists around the mansion until they eventually dispatch it.
	As with Jurassic World, the film had been made into a monster movie.
	The moral lessons and the villain are essentially just a rehash of the previous film, except the escape of the Indoraptor is more stupid than the previous film and is a far less interesting antagonist.
	The movie ends with dinosaurs escaping around the world somehow and the ecosystems adjusting themselves to accommodate to their new additions.
	Jurassic World Dominion was released in 2022 and is a confused mashup of nostalgia baiting and anti-corporate climate change propaganda.
	Lewis Dodgson is resurrected from the first movie, as if anyone can remember who he was, and he's decided to set up a kind of dinosaur reserve in Italy to study them for scientific discoveries which could aid mankind's knowledge of medicine.
	Ian Malcolm is there as the court philosopher of this new company Biosin, warning about the potential problems, but nobody is really listening.
	The final scenes of the film show the dinosaurs needing protection from man and not the other way around.
	The main issue of the film is that Dodgson has genetically engineered mutant locust swarms that escape containment and threaten a planet-wide famine.
	The Giganothosaurus is positioned awkwardly as the monster that needs to be defeated, even though it's not really a villain, and there's the silly subplot of the military dinosaurs which is once again resurrected in the Atrociraptors.
	This fails to resolve into anything interesting.
	The entire plot is confused.
	It doesn't reach any kind of internal harmony and defaults to and then storytelling to keep the plot moving and force the protagonists to arrive at the foregone conclusion.
	Ian Malcolm is trotted out once more to give a hollow echo of the moral of the original film, but it fails to land as once again it's not the system itself that fails, it's human error and human greed that is the problem.
	The implication is that the system is perfectible, if only we could automate enough of it out of the hands of its fallible and immoral operators.
	The moral of the dangers of science is probably in there somewhere if you look hard enough, but it doesn't really seem to be well understood by any of the characters, and the theme is really about corporate greed and malfeasance.
	This was not the primary issue in the original Jurassic Park and is poorly explored in this movie.
	John Hammond was not a grasping, profit-driven, corporate shark.
	He was a kindly and idealistic man who sought to bring wonder and delight to children all over the world, which is why his story is one of folly and not villainy.
	We finally arrive at the brand new installment in the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth.
	This film is the furthest from the moral of the original movie and marks the franchise's full transition from exotic philosophical thriller to a more formally Godzilla-like monster movie.
	As with all Jurassic sequels, the writers must struggle to find a reason why anyone would go to an island populated by very large and dangerous animals.
	The latest half-baked premise is that a team of mercenaries are employed by Big Pharma to extract the blood of three of the largest kinds of dinosaurs on the island, as they believe that they contain enzymes which would allow some kind of medical breakthrough on heart disease or something and extend the lives of millions of people.
	Instead of dinosaurs repopulating the earth and changing the ecospheres in unprecedented ways, as was implied in Dominion, instead they have basically died off everywhere except for a narrow band around the equator, which the world's governments have declared off-limits to protect what remains of them from extinction.
	There is a new island that is apparently one of the testbeds for the creation of the insane mutant dinosaurs, and Rebirth has decided to just go all in on them being silly monsters now.
	We are introduced to the Distortus Rex, a gargantuan six-limbed, freakazoid monster that looks like it'd be more at home in an alien movie, and some flying raptor things called mutadons, which look like they were just plucked out of pitch black.
	Along with a family who get thrown into the mix, the mercenaries successfully extract the blood of the three largest dinosaurs and have an unsatisfying escape from the island.
	The entire thing is very mediocre and you're missing nothing by not watching it.
	However, in Rebirth, the purpose of the mission is essentially the opposite of the moral of the original Jurassic Park.
	Instead of challenging the power of science, Rebirth seeks instead to justify it.
	Science has become the magical MacGuffin which is being used in a very abstract way to save humanity.
	The mercenaries must risk their lives for the advancement of science and in the end choose altruistically to give their prize away for free so everyone might benefit from it.
	Even the escape of the Distortus Rex is down to human error as some idiot scientist discards a sweet wrapper which is sucked into a vent and fries the locking mechanism allowing it to escape.
	Here we have a complete inversion of the moral point of Jurassic Park and why they will never again produce a good film in this franchise.
	The soul of Jurassic Park was to challenge the status quo regarding our view of science.
	It was a warning against meddling with things for which we cannot predict the second order consequences and in it was concealed a subtle advocacy for a traditional way of life.
	In the original Jurassic Park the relationships between Hammond, his grandchildren and Alan Grant are changed for the film to emphasize the need for the connection between the older and younger generations.
	This is what is actually wholesome and good for man.
	The resurrection of the dinosaurs represents mankind's step into the unknown as they use science to open a Pandora's box from which they know not what will emerge.
	The lesson is that we ought not to meddle in these farthest reaches lest we destroy ourselves.
	Take advantage of nature at your peril.
	Moreover, the scientific technological systems we create to manage and regulate the new world are not sufficient to completely control the powerful forces we are unleashing.
	It is not that the humans fail the system, it is that the subject of the system is too complex to be controlled in such an overbearing and managerial fashion.
	The arrogance of believing that we can master such things is not down to the fallible nature of man, but the scope of the goal itself.
	However, with the Jurassic World franchise, the dinosaurs have been reduced to the status of pets or vulnerable endangered species.
	It could have been that the resurrected dinosaurs would have been able to breed and repopulate, but now they can't even live without human assistance, and they're not the main event anymore.
	That honour goes to the weird artificial monsters that represent not Faustian man's folly, but instead the individuated moral failings of their authors.
	Once again, it is not the system that is at fault, it is the people operating the system.
	I don't believe that the franchise is actually recoverable at this point, and there's really no other story to tell from the original premises.
	There is one last thing to consider about the Jurassic franchise, which is at once a recurring theme within them and the reason that they still produce these films.
	They keep making money.
	For some reason, the writers of the films from Jurassic World onwards repeatedly attempt to assert the plotline that the parks are no longer making any money because people have lost interest in dinosaurs.
	It is baffling that the people producing these films think that this would be the case as the Jurassic films are one of Hollywood's last reliable money-making franchises because people still absolutely love dinosaurs.
	Obviously, the original Jurassic Park film is by far the most successful, but all of the previous Jurassic World films topped a billion dollars in revenue and Rebirth seems to be on track to do the same.
	Even Jurassic Park III, the least successful of the films, made four times its budget.
	This is despite the Jurassic franchise not producing a single noteworthy film since 1993.
	And it seems to me that it's really that people just like seeing well-rendered dinosaurs on the screen, even if the story that puts them there is little more than a video game plot to justify the action.
	People still enjoy the spectacle of dinosaurs and want to see more.
	And just as a side point, I always have to take my kids to the cinema to watch the new Jurassic film when it comes out, and it's full of families with their kids there as well.
	At this point, it seems that the Jurassic franchise is actually being hindered by its own premises, and that if a different dinosaur franchise, or if a new theme for the Jurassic movies could be found, then they could once again become beloved,
	and the writers might actually be able to make films that were actually worth watching, because it seems that the people who are making these films aren't willing to criticize science or the managerial technological system that is supposed to contain the park.
	If these concepts can't be challenged, then you can't write a Jurassic Park film.
	You have to write something else.
	So do that.
	Create something new about dinosaurs that is a commentary on some other aspect of the human condition and stop bumbling around with Crichton's clever meta-analysis of science and society.
	Put simply, it's very clear that the people writing these movies are not as clever as Michael Crichton, and so really they should just write some schlocky dinosaur action flick without putting any of the meta-commentary about science and managerialism to the fore.
	They don't understand it well enough, and they're not prepared to challenge it.

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