So, I was re-watching Jurassic Park, I used to be obsessed with this film when I was a kid. I had the making of book and fell in love with John Bell's concept art. Anyway, it got me thinking about how brilliant and unconventional the story is for a blockbuster. Like, for instance, there's not much a love story there at all and we barely get any indication that Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler until it's stated.
What really struck me is how varied the antagonistic forces are. You have;
- John Hammond who, almost right to the end, thinks he's doing the right thing and his park can be fixed.
- The Tyrannosaurus which also kinda becomes the surprise hero at the eleventh hour.
- The Velociraptors which are introduced killing someone and face off with the heroes at the end.
Jaws is very similar in that, while the shark is the monster, the Mayor is the real villain since he should know better. Plus, Quint is like a sub-antagonist for Hooper who is himself a sort of sub-protagonist.
I guess it goes to show that you can have a very mixed set of antagonistic forces without the need to have a single person masterminding it all. In fact, the key antagonist can be doing the wrong things for what they believe are the right reasons.
Just before Covid kicked in I was looking forward to being on the new Jurrasic Park film set as it was going to be shot in British Columbia, Canada. Then Covid hit. I haven't heard much since but did see a sales advertizement for over a dozen animatronic dino's for sale. I believe the production moved to the UK but that is just rumors to me.
Wow! I didn't know about any of this. How cool would it be to be on a Jurassic Park production! I was fortunate enough to get into Universal Studios and walk through their tour. I got to get up close with one of the gas Jeeps and the dinos being restored. There's a guy in my town with a Wrangler replica and the funny thing is his surname is Hammond.
From what I can see, Jurassic World: Dominion is currently shooting. The set photos show the crew wearing masks and the update on IMDB pro was done this past July. They didn't list any locations, but one of the shots looked like the Hawaiian jungle location they have used before. Release date is June of next year.
The main antagonist IMO is new technology itself, the impossibility of predicting how it will spool out. (I may be influenced by having read the book first.) You could call that a theme too, I guess, but it seems too exigent to be just a theme.
I think that's the crux of it. While science without ethics is certainly the key antagonistic element, it needs to be personified into a villain/villains in some way.
Michael Crichton has a lot of books that are just an awesome read. Jurassic Park is great, but the guy's got a lot of other good stories out there too. I highly recommend reading them. I believe quite a few even made it to the movies.
Well, the original West World for starters. He's the go-to guy for theme parks decimated by out of control science experiments.
I'll take a Kong / dinosaur movie over transformers any day.
When they get it right with dinosaurs and Kaiju, they get it SO right.
I swear to God, if I watched the original King Kong movie again right now I would still cry when he gets shot down.
So easy to get invested.
That's an interesting topic really. Do the best monster movies actually cause you to fall in love with the monster? Makes me wonder if that's what they were trying to do with the latest Godzilla movie.