Colin Trevorrow Had One Major Rule For Jurassic World Dominion
Look, people come to the "Jurassic World" movies for one simple reason: we love dinosaurs and, for some inexplicable reason, this franchise is the only one that's consistently putting dinosaurs on the big screen for all of us to gawk at in awe and terror. (Apple TV+ recently debuted the widely-heralded "Prehistoric Planet" docuseries, at the very least.) You'd think studio executives would have clued into this extremely straightforward moneymaking machine by now and greenlit as many dino-friendly IPs they happen to have laying around — remember when Peter Jackson had the foresight to pit King Kong against a trio of T-Rexes years ago and it was the coolest thing ever? — but apparently not!
One thing's for sure: director Colin Trevorrow isn't making that mistake. This week's "Jurassic World Dominion" is uniquely set up to provide the most dinosaur action the franchise has ever seen, now that the prehistoric creatures have been let loose onto the mainland. But crafting this blockbuster into a trilogy-capper worthy of the original film's mystique wasn't as easy as merely throwing as many digital (and practical!) dinosaurs onto the screen. The filmmaker went so far as to lay down some ground rules about how exactly they ought to depict the extinct, larger-than-life reptiles. As he explained to Total Film, Trevorrow totally understands the natural appeal of dinos:
"I know that there's something in all of us — it's probably the child in all of us — that imagines dinosaurs running randomly through the streets of cities, and eating people out of their Starbucks, and causing cars to crash into each other."
But it required a bit more finesse than that to bring them to life in "Dominion."
'What if this insane thing actually happened?'
Nobody's coming to "Jurassic World" for realism, to state the obvious, but that doesn't mean that logic has no place in the franchise. The original became a classic precisely because it grounded such schlocky action in living, breathing monsters that you almost felt like you could actually touch. With "Jurassic World Dominion," director Colin Trevorrow took a similar approach to making his dinos relatively believable. He went on to tell Total Film that he took his cues from a very reasonable inspiration: our own natural world.
"But it was important to me that we try to at least approach it from a place of reality: what if this insane thing actually happened? The rule that we made was, we tried not to have dinosaurs do anything or interact in any way that animals wouldn't in our modern world. You know, we have bears and tigers and lions and things that will eat you if you go into their territory, or mess with their young. We have animals in zoos. We weaponize them. We put them in our homes as pets. We sell them in markets. So all of these different realities are in this film in different ways."
We already glimpsed a black market dinosaur auction in "Fallen Kingdom" (hilariously undervalued prices aside), paralleling the very real-world scourge of endangered animals being bought and sold for various profitable reasons. From the looks of it, "Dominion" will take that even further by showing how humanity treats de-extinct dinosaurs exactly as they've done with untold amounts of exotic animals over the centuries. Kind of a bummer, really!
We're going out on a limb that "Jurassic World Dominion" won't be all doom-and-gloom when it arrives in theaters on June 10, 2022.