All the Jurassic Park films, ranked
It all came from the head of Michael Crichton. The late science fiction writer – and occasional director (Coma, Westworld) – conceived of a prehistoric wildlife park in the present day, hatched through genetic engineering, when dinosaur DNA is found and extracted from the gut contents of mosquitos trapped in amber.
Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park flew off the shelves, and could hardly have been better-tailored to the talents of Steven Spielberg, whose 1993 adaptation was a world-conquering, record-shattering blockbuster. If there were people on the planet who didn't see it, there weren't many.
The lure of Crichton's concept – here's your golden ticket to a dinosaur island! All will be explained! – was decidedly sequel resistant. Everything goes wrong in the first film, spectacularly, as Mother Nature bridles against human meddling and the creatures break loose. Sam Neill's paleontologist Alan Grant, Laura Dern's paleobotanist Ellie Satler and Jeff Goldblum's chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm are our chief witnesses to the grave mistakes of InGen, the corporation owned by Richard Attenborough's avuncular-but-deluded John Hammond.
How, then, was this PG-rated dino-carnage to be serially extended without an audience crying foul? The core concept was unrepeatable, and return visits to the island never seem like a particularly bright idea – certainly not for the various dead scientists, park wardens, publicists and legal advisers whose corpses litter each film. InGen's apparent commitment to trial and error, in the circumstances, is beyond reckless.
This was the paradox that screenwriters on the franchise needed to solve. For my money, they've struggled more and more to do so, though Universal's accountants would beg to differ: six films in, the franchise has been one heck of a profit-spinner, to the tune of $6bn at the box office and counting.
Griping about plausibility feels daft, but you still need a certain amount of guiding intelligence behind all this. But over the course of the 31 years since Spielberg's original, it fell away. It's a tale of two trilogies – the first three films with 'Park' in the title (1993, 1997, 2001), and then the next three with 'World' (2015, 2018, 2022), which chased the bottom line so arbitrarily they all but ran the IP into the ground.
Is the new one, Jurassic World Rebirth, good enough to power it back up and raise the bar again? All will be revealed below.
7. Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
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