Last week we reported on a rumour circulating around the web that Jurassic Park sequel Jurassic World was going to be taking a very SyFy-esque direction with its plot. The rumour stated that there would be a new T-Rex / raptor / snake / cuttlefish hybrid that would be taken down by a group of “good dinosaurs” trained by Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy).
In an interview with /Film, director Colin Treverrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) addressed these rumours. Well, he skirts round them, but he does confirm that Jurassic World will feature a fully-functional theme park:
“Jurassic World takes place in a fully functional park on Isla Nublar,” Trevorrow said. “It sees more than 20,000 visitors every day. You arrive by ferry from Costa Rica. It has elements of a biological preserve, a safari, a zoo, and a theme park. There is a luxury resort with hotels, restaurants, nightlife and a golf course. And there are dinosaurs. Real ones. You can get closer to them than you ever imagined possible. It’s the realization of John Hammond’s dream, and I think you’ll want to go there.”
When asked about the movies themes, Trevorrow said that the movie and how the movie is really about economics and greed, “Our relationship with technology has become so woven into our daily lives,” he explains. “We’ve become numb to the scientific miracles around us. We take so much for granted… What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. ‘We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?’ Next year, you’ll see our answer.”
And the “good dinosaurs”?
There’s no such thing as good or bad dinosaurs,” Treverrow said. “There are predators and prey. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park took human lives, and saved them. No one interpreted her as good or bad. This film is about our relationship with animals, how we react to the threat they pose to our dominance on earth as a species. We hunt them, we cage them in zoos, we admire them from afar and we try to assert control over them. Chris Pratt’s character is doing behavioral research on the raptors. They aren’t trained, they can’t do tricks. He’s just trying to figure out the limits of the relationship between these highly intelligent creatures and human beings.”
But what about that rumour of a new “big bad”?
“There will be one new dinosaur created by the park’s geneticists,” Trevorrow confirms. “The gaps in her sequence were filled with DNA from other species, much like the genome in the first film was completed with frog DNA. This creation exists to fulfill a corporate mandate—they want something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get.”
So it looks like there might be some truth to that rumour. What do we think of this new direction for Jurassic World?
Jurassic World is written by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, and directed by Trevorrow. The cast also includes Vincent D’Onofrio (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), Nick Robinson (The Kings of Summer), Ty Simpkins (Iron Man 3), Jake Johnson (Drinking Buddies), Omar Sy (X-Men: Days of Future Past), David Oyelowo (The Butler), Judy Greer (The Descendants), Katie McGrath (Dracula), Lauren Lapkus (Orange Is the New Black), Andy Buckley (The Office), and the returning BD Wong.
Originally published May 29, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
