In 2004 John Sayles wrote a ‘half-crazy, half brilliant’ screenplay for
Jurassic Park 4 that featured armed, parachuting dinosaurs. Nicholas
Barber takes a closer look.
The structure is so ancient that it feels almost prehistoric. Some
people take a trip to a remote island, they see some dinosaurs, and then
the dinosaurs try to have them for lunch. It’s what happened in
Jurassic Park in 1993, and by the time the first sequel came out in
1997, the screenplay was already poking fun at how formulaic it was.
“‘Ooh, aah’, that’s how it always starts,” says Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian
Malcolm in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. “Then later there’s running
and screaming.” How right he was. But this self-knowledge didn’t stop
the makers of Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World (2015)
sticking to the formula, and it wasn’t until the second half of this
year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that the series found somewhere
else to go.
How different things might have been. Back in 2004, John Sayles (the
writer-director of Passion Fish and Lone Star) wrote a half-crazy
half-brilliant screenplay for Jurassic Park 4 that took the story all
over the planet, and which pioneered several radical ideas that are only
just being incorporated into the franchise now. Steven Spielberg, the
series’ producer and its original director was keen at first, and it’s
easy to see why: Sayles’ rollicking script is sprinkled with
quintessentially Spielberg-y moments. On the other hand, it’s also easy
to see why Spielberg cooled off on the project. A movie about a
globe-trotting A-Team of genetically modified, crime-busting
Deinonychuses might have strayed just a little too far from the Jurassic
Park films that audiences knew and loved.
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