I'm sure there are some people out there who would like to forget the Jurassic Park sequels ever happened. It’s difficult to recreate the same awestruck wonder in an audience after seeing something like a mechanical triceratops and actors running around in raptor suits. While director Colin Trevorrow isn’t disregarding The Lost World and Jurassic Park III entirely, his installment, Jurassic World, is more of a direct sequel to the original film.
Yahoo Movies had the opportunity to visit the set of the year’s highly anticipated movie, and it was there that Trevorrow discussed this aspect of Jurassic World. His film takes place 20-something years after the events of Steven Spielberg’s film, and in doing so it doesn’t acknowledge what happened in the previous sequels. However, this isn’t to say Jurassic World writes these films out of the franchise canon. As Yahoo writes, Trevorrow explained that they are simply "placed to the side," since they took place on a different island.
The original Jurassic Park saw John Hammond (played by the late Richard Attenborough) close down the park after the dry run went horribly, horribly awry. But Jurassic World will see it more than two decades later as a fully functional theme park attraction. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the operations manager on Isla Nublar, which sees thousands of tourists coming to witness the dinosaur extravaganza. BD Wong’s return as Henry Wu, one of the genetic researchers in charge of cooking up dinosaurs in test tubes, is a significant tie back to the first film. As we gleaned from the Jurassic World trailers, he was involved in creating the new hybrid attraction, the Indominus Rex, which he said was designed to be bigger than the T. Rex. Wu had a significantly larger role to play in Michael Crichton’s original novel, which perhaps will inform the new plot.
Another throwback to the original film is the involvement of Phil Tippett, who was the dinosaur supervisor in charge of overseeing the creation of these creatures behind the scenes. This time around, 22 years between the debut of the first film and Jurassic World, he has all the advancements in technology to work with. While actors wore suits on the set of Jurassic Park, Jurassic World sees the raptors created through motion-capture performances, giving each creature its own unique movability.
There’s a lot to take in with Jurassic World. We’ve already seen a whole slew of new and dangerous dinosaurs, including the shark-eating mosasaurus, and with the heavy VFX work, there’s going to be loads more. Do you think it’ll be able to recapture the magic of the original Jurassic Park? We’ll find out when it hits theaters on June 12.
