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J. A. Bayona

Fallen Kingdom
Posted on August 4, 2018

Fallen Kingdom and Empathy for Dinosaurs

Guest Post

Nothing will ever be Jurassic Park. In an interview for Fallen Kingdom, executive producer Steven Spielberg recalls his experience directing the franchise-opener explaining, “the moment that brought this home for me as a filmmaker was when the T. Rex started to attack two modern Ford Explorers, and you saw the modern world and you saw the prehistoric world meeting up 65 million years later. To me, that’s when I really felt we had captured lightning in a bottle.” That sensation, what Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) evokes when she asks Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), “Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur…it’s like, a miracle. You read about them in books. You see the bones in museums. But you don’t really believe it,” cannot be replicated.

Fortunately, that is not what Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) is attempting to do. Rather, the film evokes the memory of those emotions, via visual callbacks and recurring characters, both human and non, to drive J. A. Bayona’s purpose—empathy. The director insists, “It’s not about people rescuing people anymore; it’s about people rescuing dinosaurs. The whole movie’s about empathy. An empathy toward the dinosaurs.” This objective is simple, and Fallen Kingdom excels at simplicity—in jump scares, with Blue, demonstrating the dangers of commodifying life. However, the questions the film raises are inherently complex, and, though fun, Fallen Kingdom sometimes finds itself lost in its own complexity.

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Posted on July 4, 2018

Fallen Kingdom: Failed Experiment

Guest Post

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.

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