[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]
On what’s
not new in the recent Jurassic Park
sequels/reboots/whateverwecallthemnow, and what is.
I blogged
about the original Jurassic Park (1993) almost exactly a decade ago,
as part of a 2015 Memorial Day BlockbusterStudying series. This post will
definitely be in conversation with that one, so I’d ask you to check it out if
you would and then come on back for today’s thoughts.
Welcome
back! Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the whole of any of the newer Jurassic
Park films, which kicked off with 2015’s mega-hit summer
blockbuster Jurassic World and has continued through Jurassic
World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Jurassic World Dominion (2022), and
the forthcoming Jurassic World Rebirth (2025). But I have seen lots of
clips and have read a lot about them, and it seems clear to me that they are continuing
the trend on which I focused in that 2015 post: drastically simplifying the
complicated scientific ideas and multilayered characters that Michael Crichton’s
original novel did feature, in favor of much more cartoonish heroes and
villains, lots of dino action, clever deaths, and the
like. I have little doubt that if the films did more of the former and less of the
latter, they not only wouldn’t be the blockbusters they are, but probably
wouldn’t exist because the first one wouldn’t have been the success it was
either. But if we’re going to claim that we’re investigating ethical and moral
questions around science (to quote a wise man, “Your
scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop
to think if they should”), I’d prefer that we do so with a bit more
thoughtfulness than these films display.
Spoiler
alert: this isn’t going to be one of those final paragraphs where I make the
case for a radical re-viewing of my post’s topic. But there is one new element
to Jurassic World (and, I believe, its sequels) that I find more
interesting: Chris Pratt’s character
Owen Grady, an ethnologist who has learned how to train and work with dinosaurs
(specifically velociraptors, the franchise’s consistent breakout dinostars).
That’s a pretty ludicrous concept, which of course makes it totally appropriate
for a series that has depended on such at every step. But does it also represent
something distinct for the series, it seems to be: an emphasis on dinos as
characters in their own right, and even potentially heroic ones, rather than a
challenge that our heroic characters must overcome (they’re not necessarily
villains in the earlier films, a title reserved for the human bad guys, but I
think “challenge” is an accurate term). If we’re gonna keep making blockbuster
dinosaur films, reframing them as more clearly about the dinosaurs seems like a
very good call.
Next
blockbuster tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?
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