Warning: This review may contain, what are considered by some, spoilers.
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| Credit: Pixabay.com |
In last week’s post I said that Steven Spielberg isn’t a horror director and so
that the first Jurassic Park
movie did not have the degree of horror as did Michael Crichton’s
book of the same name. And I don’t think Spielberg is
any more a director of horror movies today than he was when he made
the first Jurassic Park film. However, the latest of the
Jurassic Park films, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,
which I saw last weekend, contains a lot more of the horror element
than probably any of the other sequels, even more than the original
novel. Believe it or not, it has a gothic theme to it. How much more
horror can a science fiction film such as that get?
Although
the movie starts off with
an expedition on
Isla Nublar, the
island that the dinosaur
“theme
park” was re-built
on but then destroyed in the previous installment,
it soon enough moves to the estate of a Benjamin
Lockwood. Lockwood
was friends and business
partners with John Hammond, the
founder of the first park who was featured in the first
two films. Much of the movie takes place on the estate that
consists of a towering, stone mansion (more like a palace). Many of
the dinosaur attacks occur in this setting and a lightning storm adds
to the gothic horror element.
But it’s not only
dark mansions and thunder-and-lightning storms that make gothic
horror movies,
including gothic
science
fiction
horror movies like
Fallen Kingdom.
As with gothic literature, this movie involves a sinister secret
locked away (literally) in the manor. There’s even a more straight
forward Frankenstein-esque theme to the film when one of the
characters refers to a genetically engineered creature as
a patchwork of various species of dinosaurs. To add to this,
(Warning! Warning!
Potential-spoiler alert!) like in another famous
gothic story, one by Poe, there is a fall in this movie and it isn’t
just the island of Isla Nublar as the movie’s title suggests.
Fallen Kingdom has a lot of intense action and thrills both on
the island and off it and, therefore, at the Lockwood estate.
The characters and
their motives are well-developed considering this is an
action-oriented film that is not directly based on any of Crichton’s
books but only on their concepts. There are very few characters from
the books in this movie (as in the first Jurassic World).
However, the heroes of Jurassic World, Claire and Owen, return
in this film. They lead an expedition to transport the dinosaurs of
the island, which is threatened by a live volcano, to a sanctuary
where they can live freely without threat to anyone. Or so the
expeditioners are told. Behind
the plan of the project is a much
more commercial and less
humanitarian agenda.
While staying true
to the main concepts of the first Jurassic Park film, this
movie takes it’s own unique course, particularly with the gothic
theme, rather than simply rehashing on the first movie like Jurassic
World did. I said in the last post that I preferred Jurassic
World over Fallen Kingdom. However, I have to admit that I
only saw the former once which was during its release three years ago
and I don’t have a sharp memory for details. But, when I refreshed
myself on it through some research, it occurred to me how much of the
movie was a rehash of Jurassic Park (as
good as it was in other respects). So, especially considering
that it’s not directly based on any of the books, as the previous
movie wasn’t, I have to say that Fallen Kingdom was
the better of the two. One of the few things I had fault with
this movie, though, was that it could have given more time to the
attack scenes involving the larger dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus
Rex and the Mosasaurus.
I’m not sure if
the gothic horror elements were Steven Spielberg’s idea, since he
did not screenwrite or direct the movie but executive produced it.
But these elements are twists in the franchise that bring out the
terror that Jurassic Park the novel did. That works for me!
Have you seen
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom? What did you think of the
gothic theme? Feel free to leave your comments in the box below.
Until next time . .
.
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