Has any film ever made more money cruising off of pure nostalgia than Jurassic World? Recently bumped down to #6 on the box office charts, the 2015 hit still made an absurd amount of money playing on the desire of a new generation to scare their kids with the dinosaurs that traumatized them. The only thing more hollow than Jurassic World is..well, any other sequel to Jurassic Park. All the elements from the first film return in the fourth film, but the difference is in the director’s chair: Spielberg turning in his last great blockbuster vs. Colin Trevorrow showing how short of Spielberg he is.
The film’s attempt to differentiate itself borrows a lot from The Lost World (and is apparently what Fallen Kingdom will continue to explore): the weaponization of dinosaurs and genetic editing. Primary Incompetent Geneticist Dr. Henry Wu’s tinkering in this film led to the creation of the I-Rex, a camouflaging master and T-Rex/Velociraptor hybrid. I don’t have a big problem with the I-Rex. It’s a nice creature, and its final battle with the original T-Rex is fantastic (coulda done without Deus Ex Mosasaur). But what it represented: a new generation of dinos that were spackled together by scientists rather than recreated from nature is a storyline that I think will eventually extinguish the dinosaur renaissance. If not in the wake of the fifth film than after the already greenlit sixth.
