I am here for exactly one thing: I want to watch a t‑rex eat humans. I also want to see humans, who are hunted by the t‑rexes (and other dinosaurs of varying sizes), grow despite the difficulty of their plight.
There is a long list of things I do not want. This list includes paramilitary plots, anti-capitalist plots (I am not pro-capitalist, but this franchise has been there already), and mutant dinosaurs that never actually existed.
I want dinosaurs. Eating people. Who are otherwise attempting to grow.
I don’t know why I keep paying to see the crap Universal is serving me. This movie does everything wrong. It checks off every box on my list of super-annoying things about this franchise. Rebirth is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, full stop.
To make things worse, there are a couple easy and obvious ways to save this franchise:
Option one: Make it an Aliens-style movie. A small chartered flight crash lands in Jurassic Park. The crew and passengers, a small family and a widower aunt who doesn’t like to travel much, survive the crash. But now they have to survive the park. Will they make it? How do they get off the island? Look, spoilers ahead, but everybody except the aunt and her niece dies. The aunt gets a surrogate daughter, the secretly abusive father gets eaten by a small group of raptors, everybody’s happy. The aunt has to be a relatively new actress (maybe pick up the leading lady from Ready or Not), and the father has to be somebody we all love, like Rob Lowe. (I am not a casting director, but this is the Psycho trick and the Alien trick, and it works.) Then we don’t predict who’s going to die. Who would predict Rob Lowe’s death? We can mine lots of tension out of three or four deaths. It’s somewhere between 90 minutes and 110 minutes. Budget comes in at under $70 million. The movie’s a hit. This is a can’t-miss, obvious plot. Can’t believe they haven’t done this.
Option two: Go nuts and turn this into Apocalypse Now. If we must keep going down the paramilitary road, have some contract military officials — this is off-the-books stuff — head to the Nubar Islands. There’s some wild stuff going on down there. It’s illegal for any country to maintain a presence there, but the US has been doing research for military applications, and the commander at Jurassic Park has gone rogue. These paramilitary people need to take him out, if the dinosaurs and the local natives haven’t done it first. Along the way, they’re going to see some wild stuff. Lots of anti-US messaging, anti-war messaging, and pro-science messaging. (This needs some workshopping, but I’m literally spitballing after three drinks and this is like one think tank away from becoming some sort of anti-Trump masterpiece.)
Option three: fast forward to the future. The dinosaurs have decimated us. We are far from the top of the food chain. There are very few humans left, and the ones who remain are tribal. We have no technology left with which to defend ourselves. A mother and her son must survive as they wish to trek across a desolate United States to find hope in a new community, but they need to avoid getting eaten on the way.
I am, admittedly, very fond of my first idea. Let’s strip it back to basics. This series has clung to the same tired ideas for thirty years. Time to properly reboot it.