Amuse me for a moment here. This summer Jurassic Park, the movie, turns 30 years. This Sunday, June 11th, to be exact. Before it became a massive runaway success, a globe-shaking earthquake that never really ceased, it wasn’t considered a contender against Last Action Hero. If anything, it was seen yet another project of a somewhat has-been director doing his passion again. Spielberg wasn’t really having much success with films at the time. Though in many ways him being forced a bit hands-off from the movie’s post-production probably helped it to find a particular tone that’s completely gone in any of the sequels.
Jurassic Park sequels, including the World soft-reboot ones, could never hold the candle against the original movie, or the book. It’s a one-time deal, albeit I admit the Lost World novel is a personal favorite. You can’t repeat Jurassic Park, which is why for the longest time then-future Jurassic Park projects tried their best to expand outside Isla Nublar, the original island. Takes on the Raptors being used as intelligent SWAT members was something I heard being thrown around and after the third movie through the grapevine, while World would take the equally stupid route of taking the dinosaurs off the islands and make them inhabit the modern ecosystem.
A friend argued that this made sense, as Lost World saw these animals thriving despite their built-in lysine dependency. That’s where the movie and the film differ in a major way; the movie is a 1990s celebration of nature in the worst possible way, making eco-terrorists supposed heroes while childishly making businessmen and hunters caricature evil. The book, on the other hand, emphasized on how these animals, millions of years removed from their time and never being natural, were doomed. These creatures didn’t know how to parent; it was always the survival of the fittest in the most extreme case. The ratio of predators and prey was completely off, and the spread of prion-based disease named DX was the final nail in the coffin. Raptors would spread it across the island via bites, as would the Compys as scavengers and waste disposal animals.
Of course, death of Dinosaurs doesn’t really make a good franchise, even though the last movie did that even after shoveling a few new bottoms, they could still dig themselves deeper. As it is, Jurassic Park isn’t really going anywhere with its story in any media, and whatever attempts have been made to make the series worthwhile have bombed worse than my jokes.
So, the next step would be to cash on the original. I can see either Poltergeist or Jurassic Park being the first Spielberg movies to be remade. Here’s where I muse.
Jurassic Park could see a worthwhile remake if it did end up standing on its own two legs. By this, I mean a masterful writer can take both the movie and the book and combine them as part-remake of the film, partly newly adapting the book. The Internet is pages full of comparisons between the two works, and using this as a springboard a writer could pick up the best and the most functioning bits from both of the sources and mix them into something new. For example, this remix-make could be more after the original work and have John Hammond a man after money first and most, but give him shades and colours of the grandfatherly entertainer he is in the movie. Keep the dinner discussion scene from the movie in, while adding an element or two from the books. Everyone wanted the raft scene from the book included into the movie, so maybe add that bit of fanservice in there, despite it already appearing in most of the games (which, in fact, were a mix of the book and the movie) and was a direct source for the third movie’s river scene.
Naturally, this imagined remuxmake should make the best use of the Jurassic Park effect. Change the science, re-imagine the dinosaurs as accurately as possible with a modern understanding of whys and hows. In 1980s and early 1990s dinosaurs were just becoming the more intelligent animals we see in these movies within the sciences themselves as understanding was expanding. The name Velociraptor itself was valid for some six months for a particular animal while Michel Crichton was writing the novel. When the name was changed, the movie staff decided to stick with the name they initially got, because it sounds better and is arguably easier to pronounce by your layman. In effect, part marketing, part sheer convenience.
We know how dated the science in Jurassic Park is because of the movie inspired dozens of people to get into the fields that the novel and film touch upon. This has been these works’ lasting legacy; improving our knowledge on these animals in ways people couldn’t even dream of thirty years ago. This is the aforementioned Jurassic Park effect; something that inspires so much research and change, that the original work that was hard in science at the time becomes wholly outdated.
We could of course claim that the whole cloning bit is the reason why these aren’t dinosaurs, just cloned monsters. They shouldn’t be treated as such and nobody should expect them to look or behave like their ancestral counterparts. I’d argue this approach is largely stupid and invalidates these creatures as animals and gives the creative license sequels took advantage of and rather than have these creations act like animals, they became slasher villains with near-human motives. This is best seen in World movies, where they fail to grasp why cloning was the hot topic of the era. Nowadays it’s A.I. and how well we’ll manage to abuse that while the sour tongues preach about a Skynet future.
Yes, I know there’s a discussion between Wu and Hammond about taking the dinosaurs to a later version 4 point something. This shows that their cloning process, and the patchwork it needs to make fully viable living creatures, required tons of iterations to gain the current population. Hammond, of course, wants authenticity and wants these animals to be as real as possible, or as real as we think or understand they were.
The science is one of the fundamental pillars of Jurassic Park. While it is surface for most people, it is largely consistent and makes sense even in the real-world settings of the era of the late 1980s. However, this would require extensive research of how we could revive dinosaurs to our era. Cloning isn’t possible. Not because of cloning itself, but because the complete half-life of DNA is 6.8 million years. All Dino DNA we could find is amber is already gone.
So, what’s the next crackpot theory that we could utilize and see if it held water for the next decade? The most probable method would be the often-discussed reversal of evolution. In 2009, scientists at the University of Wisconsin mutated chicken embryos to grow dinosaur-like teeth. The very basic idea is that certain sections in the genome mark evolution and certain traits are suppressed while others are allowed to function. By turning these points on and off, we can take steps back n evolution in terms of how things would grow. However, a chicken that would look like a Tyrannosaurus Rex would still be a chicken, would eat like a chicken, and probably would try to mate like a chicken. It’s not a straight reversal. Another similar paper about mucking with nature was about growing chickens with dinosaur legs. Modern birds have splinter-like fibula that are shorter than the tibia, while with dinosaurs these were equally long. To re-enable the genetic code that would make these bones grow as if they were with dinosaurs, birthing chickens with dino legs.
Paleontology is an immensely valuable resource with this, as scientists do need some kind of guideline on what to gun for and what sort of results they should be expecting. Going blindly in and mutating bird embryos to see what ancestral traits pop up is gruesome to think, but would make InGen, Jurassic Park’s in-universe company running the genetics and the park, that much more uncaring and profit-driven.
I do think that by simply updating the science of Jurassic Park, and all the implications that carries with it while tackling the weaknesses both the book and the movie had, we could create a worthwhile new entry. Arguably, it would be less a remake at this point, but the term fits it the best.
I used the term hard science previously as a provocation. Of course, this wouldn’t be hard science per se, as we’ve only managed to scratch the surface of reversing evolution in this manner. However, there is a time and place for everything, and if Jurassic Park itself has shown, anything about this, taking what is known now and taking, it a step forwards has to be taken. Bewilder the audience and have them enticed with further questions they can find answers to either from books or as future scientists and researchers.
Of course, Jurassic Park will see another revival of some sort down the line, but a full-blown remake, highly unlikely. Better that way, for the moment at least. I would love to see someone tackling this idea in a whole new franchise in a new way, but there’s not much room to wiggle in general sense in the high concept of dinosaurs in an entertainment park run amuck.
In the nitty gritty sure, but such a work would have a massive mountain in front of it not to be called just another JP clone. Lost World was a great, challenging idea, but only Crichton made it work.
Aaltomies 