Returning to Crichton’s Novel Bodes Well for 'Jurassic World 2'

When it was announced in April that Jeff Goldblum, actor and expert laugh-growler, will be reprising his iconic role as chaos theorist Ian Malcolm next summer in Jurassic World 2, fans rejoiced.

As for myself, a pedantic Jurasshole for whom these movies are practically a religion, I worried that Goldblum's inclusion could backfire, leading the franchise even further into crappiness than Jurassic World, a film in which a woman in heels outruns one of the largest land carnivores of all time.

But things might be looking up. During a recent interview with an MTV podcast, Colin Trevorrow, the director of Jurassic World and co-writer of the sequel, revealed that he drew heavily from Malcolm's passages in the 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.

"You know, I did rely on Crichton for a lot," Trevorrow said. "I used a lot of Crichton's dialogue."

This is like John Williams' music to my ears, because the novel's scientific ruminations should be as essential to the franchise as ferocious she-tyrannosaurs running amuck and eating people.

The continued neglect of the novel's themes beyond the original Jurassic Park (1993) has stunted every film that has followed. Even wonderfully absurd sequences, such mother and baby Rexes bonding over man-eating in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), or the legendary Nokia ringtone chase of Jurassic Park III have not been able to compensate for the abandonment of the philosophical stakes of the novel.

In the novels, Crichton presents Jurassic Park as a series of increasingly complex stories, which rely both narratively and thematically on Malcolm's perspective as a chaos theorist, even though the events unfold through multiple third person narrators. The two novels in the Jurassic Park series represent successive stages of catastrophic failure to control the movements and behavior of the dinosaurs as a result of Jurassic Park founder John Hammond's hubristic underestimation of complications caused by computers, biology, and disgruntled employees.

"If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained," Goldblum says in the raptor-hatching scene of Jurassic Park. "Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh…well, there it is."

For Crichton, this meant not only that the dinosaurs were bound to break free of their paddocks, it also foreshadowed their inevitable escape beyond the island test sites. The book's tension is ratcheted up by a timebomb B-plot starring a bunch of enterprising raptors that manage to stowaway on a ship to the mainland. This eventual contamination of our Anthropocene civilization with zoological relics from the Mesozoic is the "seventh iteration" foreseen by the book's prophet: Malcolm.

This clash of ecosystems could easily be the lifeblood of the cinematic franchise, reviving Malcolm's misanthropic skepticism over discovery as a benevolent or redemptive process, just as Goldblum's 1993 version memorably did.

The fact that Crichton's Malcolm is pumped up on morphine for the last half of Jurassic Park, in the wake of a fatal tyrannosaur bite, makes him all the more quotable, which bodes well for Jurassic World 2. Trevorrow's choice to rely on Crichton also raises the question of whether the character might be seen only in flashbacks, or could be killed off, as Crichton intended, before Goldblum made the character far too marketable to stay dead.

Only time will tell whether the newest iteration of the cinematic franchise will return it to the glory of the original, or if the creators will opt to just throw some more people into the jaws of pterosaurs that are in turn devoured by mosasaurs. But if there's hope for the series to transcend its decades-long rut as some unholy hybrid of dinosaur horror and product placement, in the words of a tyrannosaur-bitten Malcolm, please chance it.

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