Jurassic World Needs To Go Back To Jurassic Park Sci-Fi Roots
The Jurassic World films have been entertaining in their own way, but the franchise has gotten further from its roots than we ever could have imagined. Jurassic World was a serviceable enough reboot, but Fallen Kingdom inexplicably became a haunted house film, and Dominion spent more time fretting over mutant locusts than runaway dinosaurs. This is clearly a franchise that needs to return to its roots, and we have the perfect solution: whether via prequels or sequels, the next Jurassic World films need to explore the events that happened before Jurassic Park.
Explore The Events Leading Up To Jurassic Park
If you’re wondering how the Jurassic World films can better explore events that occurred much earlier in the mythology, all you have to do is crack open Michael Crichton’s original Jurassic Park novel. It creates a handy timeline of major events that led to the disastrous opening of the original park. If Jurassic World is ever going to return to its weird sci-fi roots, the best ways of doing so are contained within those pages.
In the original Jurassic Park novel, all of the main action takes place in 1989. One decade before that, John Hammond’s Foundation leases Isla Nublar from Costa Rica. If Jurassic World was willing to go in a hard prequel direction, it could be interesting to see how Hammond and other major figures managed to secure the cooperation of Costa Rica and various other governmental and commercial entities without tipping their hand about the development of Jurassic Park.
More John Hammond And InGen
The original novel’s timeline also makes it clear that John Hammond developed the InGen corporation in 1982. Considering this corporation ended up becoming such a major force in the first Jurassic World film (they were purchased by another corporation in 1998 and their Technologies Division was crucial to making Jurassic World happen), it would be cool to see what their earliest involvement in the original Jurassic Park was really like.
For something completely different, we wouldn’t mind a Jurassic World movie that explored the wonderfully crazy way that John Hammond originally drummed up investor interest in Jurassic Park. He had what he called his “Pachyderm Portfolio,” and he would give speeches to get investors excited about his ability to create custom biologicals for consumer purposes.
Show The Darker Side Of The Doctor
At the height of these presentations, he would take the cloth off a cage he brought with him and reveal that he had successfully cloned a tiny elephant. This always wowed investors and helped Hammond raise the capital he needed, and he never let them know the elephant was a bad clone with behavior problems that eventually died, a fate shared by its creator, a man with terminal heart cancer.
In short, Hammond was a much more high-tech and arguably much more amoral version of P.T. Barnum, and it would be great to get a Jurassic World film that focused on this side of him and not the charming, doddering grandpa that we see onscreen in Jurassic Park.
Other Possible Routes
There are a couple of other interesting avenues the next Jurassic World could explore, including showing us the actual construction of Jurassic Park or even following the animosity between Hammond and Biosyn, the company that franchise villain Lewis Dodgson works for and eventually runs. Considering that Dodgson even played a major role in the Camp Cretaceous series, it would only be fitting to have a future film set before Jurassic Park that explored his evil origin story.
Bring Back The Dinosaurs
No matter what changes the powers that be make to the next Jurassic World film, it is going to fall flat unless it channels some of the original magic of Jurassic Park. That may mean focusing less on Chris Pratt and more on giving us a meaningful, dino-centric plot. If Universal is incapable of doing so, it may be best if this franchise follows its famous dinosaurs into complete and utter extinction.
