A few days ago some major Jurassic World spoilers were leaked and, because they were so spoilery and unconfirmed, I decided not to run with them. But now Colin Trevorrow has come out to Slashfilm and commented on the rumors, expressing his disappointment about them while clarifying what was revealed. Don't go any further if you want to remain spoiler free!!
Trevorrow confirmed that the vast majority of the rumors leaked onto the Internet were in fact true, and that he and his team were extremely disappointed when it happened. I wonder if any heads rolled on set because of it?
"Jurassic World takes place in a fully functional park on Isla Nublar. It sees more than 20,000 visitors every day. You arrive by ferry from Costa Rica. It has elements of a biological preserve, a safari, a zoo, and a theme park. There is a luxury resort with hotels, restaurants, nightlife and a golf course. And there are dinosaurs. Real ones. You can get closer to them than you ever imagined possible. It’s the realization of John Hammond’s dream, and I think you’ll want to go there.....This film picks up twenty-two years after Jurassic Park. When Derek [Connolly] and I sat down to find the movie, we looked at the past two decades and talked about what we’ve seen."
"What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. “We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?” Next year, you’ll see our answer."
Trevorrow also talked about the human characters and how they would be interacting with the dinosaurs, and if there will be bad dinos or good dinos. In general the velociraptors were portrayed as "evil" in the first film but it doesn't sound like that will be the case in Jurassic World...
"There’s no such thing as good or bad dinosaurs. There are predators and prey. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park took human lives, and saved them. No one interpreted her as good or bad. This film is about our relationship with animals, how we react to the threat they pose to our dominance on earth as a species. We hunt them, we cage them in zoos, we admire them from afar and we try to assert control over them."
"Chris Pratt’s character is doing behavioral research on the raptors. They aren’t trained, they can’t do tricks. He’s just trying to figure out the limits of the relationship between these highly intelligent creatures and human beings. If people don’t think there’s potential in those ideas, maybe they won’t like this movie. But I ask them to give it a chance."
One of the big whoppers that emerged and had fans up in arms was over a new, genetically-engineered dinosaur. Trevorrow seems especially sad about this getting out, but he does take time to clarify it and I think makes a very valid point....
"We were hoping audiences could discover this on their own, but yes, there will be one new dinosaur created by the park’s geneticists. The gaps in her sequence were filled with DNA from other species, much like the genome in the first film was completed with frog DNA. This creation exists to fulfill a corporate mandate—they want something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get."
"I know the idea of a modified dinosaur put a lot of fans on red alert, and I understand it. But we aren’t doing anything here that Crichton didn’t suggest in his novels. This animal is not a mutant freak. It doesn’t have a snake’s head or octopus tentacles. It’s a dinosaur, created in the same way the others were, but now the genetics have gone to the next level. For me, it’s a natural evolution of the technology introduced in the first film. Maybe it sounds crazy, but most of my favorite movies sound crazy when you describe them in a single sentence."
So it's unfortunate that all of this stuff came out a full year before the film opens, but that's kind of how things work nowadays. Jurassic World hits theaters June 12th 2015.
