Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona, 2018) is an experiment in nostalgia. Like many of the other franchises cluttering theaters these days, the latest Jurassic Park installment reawakens our admiration for its original. It elicits memories of prior experiences watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). I myself will never forget the first time I saw it, when at the age of four or five, I ran screaming from the theater because the T-Rex broke loose and ripped the lawyer off a toilet—“when you gotta go, ya gotta go.”
Like me, many Jurassic Park fans can similarly identify lines of dialogue with their moments in the film. Perhaps the dialogue was so well-written, so representative of their moments, and delivered so well—by fully fleshed-out characters with plausible motivations and complete backstories—that enthusiastic audiences can easily recall it. Several of the more intuitive lines, like those above, are spoken by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who specializes in chaos theory and predicts the fall of the park. It’s no wonder, then, that the character returns in Fallen Kingdom, whose taglines read: “life finds a way” and “the park is gone.” The former is the oft-cited Malcolm line, the other something he insistently prophesizes.
