First a bit of backstory. In 1990 a man named Michael Crichton wrote “Jurassic Park” as a novel. The novel showed the danger of unrestricted biological tinkering similar to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” showing that your creations can be your undoing. The book was a success and was picked up by Steven Spielberg in 1991 to be made into a movie.
The plot of “Jurassic Park” is that this millionaire wants to his life’s dream to come true, a theme park full of dinosaurs. He has created the best genetic engineering company ever with the technology to bring back dinosaurs based off of blood remnants in frozen mosquitos.The problem is, investors are scared to back him up out of the fear that having giant lizards roaming around near humans is a bit dangerous. So he sends people over to test the park before it opens to let people know it’s safe, but a tropical storm knocks out power letting all the beasts out. The film revolves around one group surviving the island until they are rescued.
The film was released in 1993 and blew people away right off the bat with its amazing special effects and inventive storyline. Back then, it seemed as if the dinosaurs we had always imagined had crawled out of extinction and onto the big screen. Of course, it’s not all great. The characters can be a little stupid at times, and there are little plot holes here and there. For example: Why don’t the flying dinosaurs just fly off the island, or any marine dinosaur just swim away? Regardless you can look past these small nitpicks and still enjoy the movie.
After “Jurassic Park” was a massive box office success and was loved by critics, it would only make sense to capitalize on the success of the movie with a sequel. Released in May of 1997, “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” won big at the box office, but was considered lackluster by critics. I also didn’t really care for the film. The story goes that after the park was closed for being a huge safety hazard for visitors, the park owners gathered up the remaining dinosaurs they could find and placed them on another island, where they were genetically engineered to die off or kill each other. However, a hurricane destroys the facility keeping them together, and they now roam the entire island freely and kill off almost all the staff placed there. The owners saw this as their chance to finally document dinosaurs in their natural habitat, so they send in the cast of the first movie because they have experience with Jurassic Park. The entire plot is them trying to survive this obviously poorly thought out idea, but along the way they discover a group of dinosaur poachers working for a rival company that wants to establish their own Jurassic Park. So they kidnap a baby T-rex and with the power of plot convenience, the mother always knows where the newborn is at all times. The ending is like “Godzilla,” except without all the cool stuff about Godzilla. But still, at least they put in effort to capture the feeling of the original film. It tries to get the messages across, has stunning visuals, memorable characters, and it more or less hits those marks.
“Jurassic Park III” is without a doubt the weakest film of the three, and is clearly just milking the franchise for all it’s worth. This movie is like a paint by numbers book, you have your “whimsical dinosaur” moment, your “science has gone too far” moment, your “characters are sad” moment, your “big dinosaur is chasing you” moment and all that jazz. I believe they stopped trying with the CGI dinosaurs at this point– most of it looks awful. The plot for this is that this rich family was vacationing at the island from the second film and their son goes missing. So instead of calling an authority like the Coast Guard or Navy they call the main character from the first two films instead, because we needed an excuse for this story to exist. But in the plot twist of the century, they get into trouble and need to survive on the island! No surprise that the film did moderately well at the box office anyway.
At the time I’m typing this review, “Jurassic World” isn’t out in theaters yet. Will I see it? Probably, even though it seems like just another modern remake of something you loved as a kid because it blew your mind and now idea-empty studios are taking advantage of that nostalgia. And because being a nerd is cool now, and everything old is better, because everything new is such “junk.” It seems that things like “Jurassic Park” and “Terminator” and superheros are in the spotlight. Instead of worrying about opening or not opening, we see a park that has already been opened for a while, safely guarding the visitors from the massive flesh eating lizards and making an actual profit while doing so.
However, like the movies, people are getting tired of seeing these massive lizards because they just do the same thing over and over again without changing anything. So the management of the park decide to ignore almost every sci-fi movie that has been made and make their own new super dinosaur to bring in new visitors. By the looks of the trailer it seems that “Jurassic World” is some sort of Sea-world with gigantic violent resurrected creatures instead of horseshoe crabs and dolphins. But eventually, people got bored with seeing these giant creatures swimming, walking around and eating horses and stuff of that nature. In order to make ends meet with visitors, a bunch of mad, respectfully out of the box thinking scientists decide to jury-rig their own new type of dinosaur and have it walk around and eat things to entice people to come back. That brings the question: What is taking business away from the Park? How can people get bored with watching real, living, breathing, dinosaurs- DINOSAURS-the titans that went belly up before mankind even crawled out the evolutionary pool? What happened? What changed? Why do people not come anymore? I doubt it’ll be as bad as “Lost World” or “Jurassic Park III” but probably will not top the original in most people’s hearts.