Posted in: Movies, Universal | Tagged: film, jurassic world: fallen kingdom, Universal Pictures

The Disturbing Implications of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's Ending [Spoilers]

Published Mon, 25 Jun 2018 14:50:23 -0500

Quite a lot happens in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but one of the biggest things happens right at the very end. It has huge implications for the world going forward, but they are implications that likely won't be addressed because it doesn't make good cinema. That doesn't mean we can't address them here, though. However, that does mean we're going to spoil the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, consider this your spoiler warning.

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At the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the dinosaurs are trapped in an area with poisonous gas. These are the last of dinosaurs saved from the island. Claire wants to open up the door and let them out, but Owen warns her that it's something she can't ever take back. She eventually relents and they decide to let the dinosaurs die. That is, until Maisie, who we found out was a clone earlier in the movie, opens the door and declares that the dinosaurs have the right to live like her. That sends the 11 species out into the wilds of North Carolina. The Mosasaurus is already out in the wild thanks to the operation at the beginning of the movie.

We see a montage at the end — two of the shots were spoiled by the marketing — of the Mosasaurus going to attack a surfer, the Tyrannosaurus rex roaring at a lion, three pterosaurs (it's unclear specifically which species) flying against the open sunset and later landing in Las Vegas in the after-credits scene, and Blue running through the desert and stopping in front of the suburbs. The implication being, as Ian Malcolm says in the marketing, "welcome to Jurassic World," being that the dinosaurs have now joined the real world and humans have to adapt. The genetic modification that brought the dinosaurs and the various genetically modified dinosaurs to life is out on the open market, meaning anyone with the right resources could clone their own dinosaurs to use as potential weapons.

It's quite obvious that the setup for the third movie is going to be about the dinosaurs interacting with the human world and more people making their own dinosaurs for their own purposes, thus going back to the "raptors as weapons" plot from the first movie and the entire point of the Indoraptor in the second. There is something much more insidious going on here that won't make a good movie but leaves this version of the world pretty ruined — and that's the environment.

The introduction of a species not native to an ecosystem plays havoc on that ecosystem. That's why the concept of the "invader species" exists and these types of species ruin ecosystems. The food chain and the idea of the apex predator is a delicate balance, and animals have evolved the way they have for a reason. It was a slow evolution over millions of years. The oceans have a balance of predator and prey, but now the Mosasaurus is out there. That is the new apex predator, and it's a huge animal that will require a lot of food to survive. It's going to decimate entire species of fish and other forms of wildlife in a manner of weeks. It has no natural predator, not even man has a chance of really hurting it, and it's going to cause mass extinction quickly.

This applies also to the various carnivores that they let out into the wild. While the dinosaurs on the island had each other to feed off of, there are only a dozen or so dinosaurs running around out there. A herbivore dinosaur could feed an entire T-Rex, for example, without disrupting the natural food chain because of their size. A T-Rex without any other dinosaurs around is going to rip through the populations of deer, bears, wolves, and other forest animals in a matter of weeks. These animals are too big and require too much food to keep things working the way they should.

The herbivores are similar, but not to the extreme level of destruction that the carnivores will cause. They'll decimate entire forests without any trouble, and deforestation causes more problems for other animals. Environments will be destroyed and more endangered species will be forced out of their natural habitats. There is virtually no way to protect state parks or nature preserves from animals that are this big.

Dr. Ian Malcolm, in the movies, says that "life finds a way," and it does. The world is not going to end because these dozen or so dinosaurs are out in the world. (Note: this is not a Noah's ark thing where there were two of a kind. There was one, so there's no way for these dinosaurs to grow in population naturally because this isn't Annihilation — you can't crossbreed species in the wild). However, the destructive properties of releasing these animals into the wild cannot be understated either. The Mosasaurus killing off entire species of whale or the T-Rex killing off the last of the Gray Wolves or a herbivore destroying an entire species of tree doesn't make for an interesting movie. They aren't implications that movie is willing to address, which seems to go against the theme they are going for.

The Jurassic World movies are very much pushing the angle of animal rights, which is good. The movie isn't wrong when it says that these animals deserve to live. It's a good theme, but it's one that doesn't work the moment you think about it for more than a few seconds. The world where the dinosaurs lived and the world we live in now are were fundamentally different. The world has changed through evolution, slowly, carefully, because that's how life finds a way. It comes close to the edge of destruction and slowly moves on. Introducing a dozen or so invasive species into the world we live in now isn't going to end everything as we know it. There are going to be consequences, but they aren't very interesting consequences, so the next movie is likely going to ignore them.

Maybe it won't, but a movie about the Mosasaurus destroying the ecosystem of the ocean doesn't exactly sound like a summer blockbuster. Maybe they can do a mockumentary about the environmental degradation of the dinosaurs as a spinoff movie.

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