Jurassic Park: Too Big to Fail

Well, thanks.

I spent the weekend watching cheesy blockbusters. It was a service and a much-needed break from Reese Witherspoon characters being terrible people. And now my mind’s fixated on Jurassic Park.

I’m watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the second installment of the recent reboot. It’s terrible, but this is about the third time I’ve watched it. The plot is secondary. It’s background noise and I like seeing the dinosaurs do shit. It’s been that way since I walked out of the theater with my mom at the end of Jurassic Park 3.

When Jurassic World came out in 2015, I was excited. I dragged my wife with me to see it and we both thought it was fine. It was enjoyable and probably enough, maybe forever. But there was something there to chew on. I just didn’t have the time to justify the pursuit. But we know what’s going on right now and I just started my 7-day free trial of Cinemax to watch Fallen Kingdom. Might as well scratch that itch.

If I pay attention enough to know when anything important happens with the dinosaurs and ignore most of the dialogue, I get a clearer picture of what somebody’s trying to tell audiences with these movies: This franchise is about a start-up that should never have been funded. But thanks to an overly ambitious billionaire with the heart of a child and obscene resources, the game had its fool. John Hammond provided a trustworthy face and a jovial personality to sell the idea of creating dinosaurs for an amusement park. It provided the perfect distraction from the fact that dinosaurs were being bred on an island off Costa Rica.

It never mattered whether Hammond’s vision was brought to life. Once a dinosaur is created, there’s going to be a market, with players from all sides looking for a piece of the action. Sell the dream, pour money into research and development, and create a monster that’s too big to fail and the general public loves. (See: Uber, Facebook, etc.)

Fallen Kingdom is far removed from Hammond’s original dream. Hammond, himself, is dead and responsible for what will soon develop into global chaos--but he meant well. The dinosaurs have lived on and are up for auction to the highest bidder. Decades' worth of R&D funding has allowed scientists to create designer dinosaurs. Mercenaries do the bidding of financiers looking to secure and flip assets.

Everything’s changed, yet this was always how it was going to be. Dinosaurs are gold. The game becomes who controls the supply. In the case of the film franchise, that power lies with Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg directed the original and it’s sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. For the last three, he’s stuck around as an executive producer, presumably to give the production a credible name and influence the direction of the franchise from afar. After all, these dinosaurs were his vision.

The fictional Hammond is Spielberg’s avatar. Jurassic Park the attraction and the real-life movie is about a man with a vision and resources giving the public something they want. For Hammond and Spielberg, it’s not about money; they already have enough of it. The project is about creating dinosaurs for fun, without fully understanding what that means and how much blind trust must be given to other people to assure everything goes to plan.

It doesn’t matter whether Spielberg’s had enough of the project or if Hammond’s dead. They gave people dinosaurs and, now, too many people are involved to make them go away, and we have to deal with it.