'Jurassic Park' Would Be More Dope With One Change
Jurassic Park is a cursed franchise. No matter how hard they try, nothing quite matches the spectacle of the original. Like a cinematic jigsaw puzzle, so many things about the plot, setting, and Jeff Goldblum's chest hair, perfectly aligned to tell a brilliant and terrifying tale of man's hubris. It also has like a goddamned hour of exposition before Dennis' douchebaggery sets off all the murder and mayhem we came in craving.
So here's a crazy idea: What if we just cut out a bunch of that fat?
Now, before anyone hurls a pile of triceratops poop our way, we're aware of the fact that this movie is based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. We can only take so many creative liberties, and some truly beautiful things happen in that first hour. However, for this thought experiment, we're gonna lop off that entire intro with the worker and velociraptor and jump forward a bit. Why? The answer is simple -- it's gonna make Jurassic Park owner John Hammond look like the fever dream Walt Disney maniac he should be.
Let's have Hammond come to the dig site, whisk Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler away to Isla Nublar, when *bam* the T-Rex pops out from behind the waterfall at the helipad. How'd it get there? Don't care. The point is, it escaped, and now our heroes are hauling ass for the jeeps. The Jeeps barely get through the gate, speeding off to the visitor center. The shitty lawyer gets left behind to fulfill his destiny of being eaten by the T-Rex while on a toilet.
As they make that drive to the visitor center, where they think they'll be safe, there's just carnage. They witness the brachiosauruses holding an elephant funeral for one of theirs that fell to the T-Rex. They see the velociraptors get ahold of that triceratops that was sick in the original. This drive is where we can spit out a lot of the exposition, but way quicker.
We get less Jeff Goldblum flirting with Laura Dern (We have our diary to fill that void.), and more dinosaur stand-offs. Radio comms come back, revealing Dennis' plot and giving the gang directions to safety. Meanwhile, Hammond curses that he, "Just wanted to open a damn theme park!" as the raptors and T-Rex descend on them en masse.
The key elements that make Jurassic Park as awesome and scary -- the suspense, the race against time with the storm, needing to protect the kids, Jeff Goldblum -- we can keep all that. We probably don't even need to reduce the run-time all that much. But let's fill that with more dinosaurs instead of Chilean sea bass dinners and cartoons about DNA with Schoolhouse Rock production values.
Top Image: Universal Pictures
