Jurassic Park, the original film directed Steven Spielberg, is still the dinosaur film to beat.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom releases in only a few days in India. That would be more than two weeks earlier than the US release on June 22. The franchise, that began with Steve Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park, has grown huge, and remains a cash cow as the unprecedented success of Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom’s prequel, suggests. While all the Jurassic Park films have been box office successes, they have varied sharply in terms of quality.
Here is a ranking of all the films in the franchise in ascending order.
Jurassic Park III: I remember absolutely adoring this film a decade ago, and now I see that my enthusiasm as a child’s foolishness. I suppose watching a T-Rex running in circles would have made me happy then. Jurassic Park III, I realise now, is a mess. The effects are pretty decent, but everything else seems to have taken a backseat. The new characters are dreadfully dull and the plot so boring that even the 90-minute runtime seems long. There is a silly thing in the movie that looks like something a juvenile would write. A phone gets inside a Spinosaurus and the group stranded on the island is warned by the phone that is supposedly still ringing. Inside the stomach of Spinosaurus. Sam Neill and Laura Dern (in a brief appearance) are there in Jurassic Park III, but they are not enough to save this movie.
A still from Jurassic Park III.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park: A direct follow-up of the original, this time Jeff Goldblum’s chaotician Ian Malcolm was in the lead. The film should not have worked, except for Goldblum’s presence. He appears to be getting better with age like fine wine. Even then he had a certain charisma and charm. The Lost World is also the only film in the franchise other than the original that was directed by Steven Spielberg.
Jurassic World: Jurassic World worked because of the same formula due to which Jurassic Park worked. The seemingly dead franchise was revived as Universal hired Colin Trevorrow to helm a new film set at Isla Nubar (the island from the original film). The cast was wholly new, except for BD Wong’s Dr Henry Wu. Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady, while not as interesting a protagonist as Sam Neill’s Alan Grant was, connected with the audience. The film received positive reviews and grossed over 1.6 billion dollars worldwide.
Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park cannot be confined to a particular genre. It has elements of science-fiction, action-adventure, monster and even horror. The high-concept ideas and questions posed by the film (man-playing-god, man-vs-nature, and so on) married breathtaking visual and sound effects and well-written characters to create a mesmerising blockbuster experience that is still to be matched. Consider the scene in which the characters are stuck in automatic cars. The electricity is down and the fences that were supposed to keep the dinosaurs are just metal cables now and can be snapped at will by the apex predator of its times, the Tyrannosaurus rex, whose paddock the characters are currently in. What happens next is pure horror material. You can see that iconic scene above.