ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY The Ultimate Guide to Jurassic Park

By The Editors of Entertainment Weekly

Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first Jurassic Park film in this Entertainment Weekly special edition, The Ultimate Guide to Jurassic Park.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Entertainment Weekly
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547843671

Book preview

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

FALLEN KINGDOM

Dino-Might

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard return to the island of misfit dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the franchise’s darkest, most suspenseful installment yet. By Tim Stack

Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Maisie (Isabela Sermon) hide from the Indoraptor.

FIRST, YOU HEAR THE ROAR OF DINOSAURS . . . then come the screams.

Every few minutes, the swell of John Williams’s iconic score stirs up again, and the vocal terror of thousands of families being scared by an animatronic T. rex can be heard ringing through the Universal Studios Hollywood amusement park, where Jurassic Park—The Ride remains a hugely popular attraction. What most riders don’t realize is that just several hundred feet away, on the movie studio’s back lot, director J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls) is combing through footage of the latest installment in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

After seeing Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original, a young Bayona was transformed. I remember perfectly that I felt I was watching a moment in movie history, says the Barcelona native. I thought from that moment on, everything you could imagine, no matter how crazy that could be, would be possible to see onscreen in a realistic way. It was movie history.

Now Bayona makes his own history with Kingdom, the highly anticipated sequel to 2015’s Jurassic World. That film, costarring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, finally opened the dinosaur theme park promised in the original film and naturally led to bloody chaos. (It would also go on to gross more than $1.6 billion worldwide, making it the most successful installment in the series.) But Bayona’s Kingdom has a genre-shifting twist halfway through: The island is destroyed, and the action moves to an enormous American estate where characters are trapped indoors with a rampaging new terror, the Indoraptor. Think Jurassic meets Panic Room.

The first half, you have a whole dinosaur movie on the island, so you have what you expect from a Jurassic movie, says Bayona. Then the second half moves to a totally different environment that feels more suspenseful, darker, claustrophobic, and even has this kind of gothic element, which I love. The only other time the Jurassic franchise has seen the dinosaurs leave their tropical locales was the climactic moments of 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, when the T. rex stampeded through San Diego. Adds Pratt: At the end of the day, we’re all trying to make something that will be part of the Jurassic empire and tonally match the previous movies, but we’re going off in a new direction.

Kingdom picks up four years after the events of World, with Jurassic World in ruins and the dinosaurs now roaming free. But the threat of an erupting volcano brings about a debate over the previously extinct creatures. Explains writer-executive producer Colin Trevorrow, who directed World: You have this ­extinction-level event on that island, and the world is looking at these creatures that we created and asking, ‘Well, what is our right? Do we let them die because we created them and they shouldn’t be here in the first place, or do we have a responsibility to save them?’

Jurassic World’s former operations manager Claire (Howard) used to think of dinosaurs as only a monetary tool, but in the new installment we find her leading the charge to save them, founding an activist organization called the Dinosaur Protection Group. Basically her sense of purpose now is to ensure that these animals have the same protections as any other endangered species, explains Howard. Joining forces with Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), who’s the former partner of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), she launches a rescue mission to save dinos from the island and bring them back to a sanctuary that Lockwood has created in America.

The change in Claire extends to more than just her dino feelings. After the Internet complained about Claire’s spending the entirety of World running in heels, the character has found a happy medium in her footwear. I wanted it to be clear from the beginning that Claire has changed, but she’s still wearing heels. A person can have an inner journey and still love heels! Howard says with a laugh.

Though Claire’s love of Louboutins hasn’t diminished, her romance with Pratt’s Owen has definitely fizzled. She is, however, able to woo the island’s former raptor trainer back by playing on his feelings for his favorite dino. She appeals to my better self when she brings up Blue because she’s still alive, says Pratt. Claire’s going to try to get the dinosaur out of harm’s way, and I can join her if I want. And of course I do. Spoiler alert: We go back. I’m in the movie!

Also in the movie: Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm. The chaos theorist was at the center of the first two films in the franchise but then sat out Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World. Well, the black-­leather-jacket aficionado is back, albeit briefly, for Kingdom. I saw him as kind of Al Gore, says writer Colin Trevorrow. He’s got a beard now, and he’s like, ‘I told all of you this was going to be a disaster, and sure enough it is.’ Malcolm has one pivotal scene where he testifies to Congress