This means that the identity of the movie franchise is existentially chained to the dinosaurs being overtly majestic and awe inspiring and all kinds of positive shit and everything remaining decidedly PG-13 at worst because of how well this all worked in the first movie and how it unfortunately made a fuckbucket of cash with the Jurassic World reboot, which means that any and all execs involved will move heaven and earth to make 1000% sure this shit is adhered to by the writers and directors, and the writers and directors themselves are all too often just lost in trying to emulate the OG either in total movie concept or just in aesthetics and vibes.
I know that by this point harping on about how edgy and dark n shit the original novel was is long since passe, especially given the spree of shitty to (very rarely) mid analog horror fanfics of the franchise since then, but honestly a whole lot of the failed sequel concepts and synopses would have almost certainly worked out a whole lot better if the franchise had never been burdened by the Spielbergian family friendly legacy of the first movie with the dinosaurs depicted as horrifyingly dangerous and mutated walking abortions that are all functionally psychopaths due to how fucked their brain chemistry was from birth and how they received zero socialisation growing up, and the various attempts at reviving the "Jurassic Park" concept in-universe being ever more cynical ploys to wallpaper over the horror and risks under the assumption that so long as they add an extra security gimmick then they can make shit safe enough to become profitable.
I don't think the identity of the film franchise is necessarily tied to the dinosaurs being overtly majestic. I think the bigger issue is that they don't allow the franchise to evolve and tell the story that needs to be told. The things in the first film work because it is the first film. There is something majestic and awe inspiring about seeing these creatures for the first time. Same thing with there not being a lot of weapons in the first film: it is okay to have this story where it is hard to survive as you are thrown to the mercy of the predator dinosaurs.
You can't however replicate that though with every following film. It reminds me of one of the critiques that was made about the Christopher Reeve
Superman films: each film that followed the first tried too hard to recapture the magic that the first film brought with it. Namely by having that same scene with Superman taking Lois Lane flying because in the first film that was a mystical moment. Stories need to have a beginning, middle and ending. Same thing for film franchises. The story is going to have to evolve with each film, you can't just tread water with what the first film did. One of the reason why remakes oftentimes are so poorly received is that you can't capture the same magic in a bottle twice.
I think what gets under peoples skin about this franchise is that there is an obviously good three or four film structure that would make for a great film franchise, but they have never allowed this series to follow the course that needs to be taken. They got stuck in the mold that the first film set and have not been able to themselves free from it, instead just flailing around.
Lost World was really bad. I liked 3 more. I loved JP the book, then liked the movie as much as any movie can be after a good book.
Lost World the book sucked. It has a few good descriptions of the victims being eaten by dinos, but that's it and none of that went into the movie. Terrible. JP3 was 'ok'. JP1 - JW -JP3 are my ranking from great to ok.. JP2 was awful, and I only skimmed Fallen Kingdom and Dominion and were painful. Going to skip this entirely it seems.
The Lost World encapsulates a lot of the problems with the franchise: insufferable characters that you want to see die, lackluster action, repeating the same thing with the same dinosaurs you saw in the last film. On top of that it made the critical blunder of actually have the world inside the film universe be competent and realize these things have to be quarantined to keep humanity safe.
While smart, that decision right there removes any possible subsequent films being interesting since they will once again be centered around the island.
The premise of this movie, as I mentioned in a previous post, is simply another affirmation to me that the plot of Fallen Kingdom was an attempt to jump the shark with audiences, and the current generation of movie writers are not really smart or creative enough to do anything of any real substance with the premise of “dinosaurs alive in the real world”. This is why Dominion and Rebirth, despite taking place in the “Neo-Jurassic Age”, are still essentially dinosaur thrillers that take place on an island (in Dominion: an isolated valley in the Dolomites; functionally an island, and in Rebirth: wherever the hell this island is), even though the original island of Nublar has been done away with. The plot of this movie could easily have taken place on Nublar or Sorna, but it can’t have taken place there now because Sorna was “cleaned out”, and Nublar was destroyed for no good literary reason so that dinosaurs can be forced onto the mainland as a plot device, even though they aren’t really being used in that fashion anyway. So instead this movie takes place within a facility that has no logical reason to exist where it does and only creates more plot holes and continuity errors within the existing franchise.
The problem with the Jurassic World film trilogy is that it largely once again just repeated what the first three films without any of the charm being present. It danced around the idea of giving us what we always wanted to see but never actually did it. The concept of Jurassic Park presents an interesting concept that promotes a grand problem: what happens when creatures whose extinction enabled us to become the dominant species of the planet return to life?
They have never allowed these films to actually fully explore that concept. It seemed like Fallen Kingdom and Dominion were actually going to do just that, but they once again neutered these films.
