Jurassic Park 4 to be...well, see for yourself (spoilers)

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2004-08-28 03:19pm

So... now that that?s out of the way, let?s talk about JURASSIC PARK 4 by William Monahan and John Sayles. We?ve been hearing vague rumors about this one for a while now, and I mean vague. There?s not a solid piece of information out there so far, based on the Google search I ran earlier tonight. I can tell you that a few of the rumors I read are close to right, but nothing had the details nailed down.

Steven Spielberg has been quoted as saying that they had the ?mother of all ideas? for this sequel, and that if they?d come up with it earlier, this would have been the third film. He claims this will completely reinvigorate the franchise, and Kathleen Kennedy promises that it?s nothing like the other films so far. Normally, those sorts of comments could be dismissed as hype... but in this case, they?re not kidding around. Bill Monahan wrote the first draft based on a story by Spielberg. Monahan?s a busy guy, but most of his stuff hasn?t hit the screen yet, so don?t feel bad if you don?t recognize his name. Ridley Scott?s wrapping up work on his KINGDOM OF HEAVEN right now, and wants to make TRIPOLI at some point, while Martin Scorsese is just gearing up to make THE DEPARTED, which Monahan adapted from the Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS. As a result of all these other obligations, Monahan moved on after that first draft, and none other than John Sayles was brought on to bat clean-up. I know that most people think of John Sayles as Mr. Indie Cinema if they know his name at all, but he?s also a big-time script doctor and, more importantly, he came from an exploitation background. ALLIGATOR, PIRANHA, and THE HOWLING are all great early genre scripts that he wrote, smart and funny and very aware of what they?re supposed to do.

I?m pleased to report that this second Sayles draft of JURASSIC PARK 4 sees him working in full exploitation mode. I?ve talked to a number of people about this draft, and it seems to radically divide them in terms of reaction. Some people adore the premise and get excited as soon as they hear it. Some people (including the person who gave it to me) are convinced it?s the worst thing they?ve ever read and a signpost on the road to Hollywood Hell. Personally, I think it?s well-written and certainly inventive, but I also think it just might be the single most bugfuck crazy franchise sequel I?ve ever read, and I?m not sure we?re ever going to see this thing onscreen. It just doesn?t seem possible that Universal would make something this vigorously whacked out.

I spent the entire first act of the script thinking I had it figured out. I knew where it was going. Problem was, every time I thought I had it figured out, something happened that seemed to change the entire premise of the movie.

The script starts at a Little League game somewhere in America, an idyllic scene that quickly goes bad when pterosaurs attack the kids and their parents. It?s a cool scene, and I couldn?t help but immediately anticipate what might lay ahead. Dinosaurs in America. All-out warfare on home soil.

This should be fun. In a series of television clips, we learn that this is the first attack on North American ground following months of this sort of thing in Central America and Mexico. The UN has created a task force to exterminate the dinosaurs. Awesome, I thought. A bad-ass heavily-armed United Nations task force versus the dinosaurs. Bring it on! But then the script throws its first major curve ball, introducing Nick Harris, an unemployed soldier of fortune. Nick?s the lead in the movie. Not Alan Grant. Not Ian Malcolm. Despite all the rumors to the contrary, those characters are not back for this film. Instead, we meet Nick as he watches those same reports on TV that we are. He?s approached by an ex-commander of his and offered a meeting about a job. He?s warned that the guy he?d be working for is a little bit strange...

... which brings us to John Hammond. It?s a great cameo role for Richard Attenborough, and he?s said several times that he is looking forward to it. In the script?s single wittiest scene, we catch up with the eccentric ex-billionaire who is now the most-sued man in history according to the Guiness Book Of World Records. He?s been declared incompetent by his heirs and his company has been taken over by other corporations.
Technically, Jurassic Park isn?t even his problem anymore, but he still feels responsible for the dinosaurs and the damage they do. Hammond?s got a big idea: breed some new dinosaurs that can?t reproduce and introduce them into the wild population. A Judas strain that will kill off the dinosaurs within one generation. Easy enough, except the UN has outlawed any breeding of new dinosaurs by anyone and they?ve prohibited the sale, mining, or possession of amber worldwide. Hammond?s got scientists ready and waiting to go, but he needs genetic material to work with. As soon as Hammond mentions where that material might come from, I thought for sure that I was ahead of the script again. Oh, of course! The shaving cream can that Nedry stole. He?s going to hire this guy to put together a team of mercenaries, and they?re going to spend the whole film on Isla Nublar getting picked off one-by-one while trying to find the samples.
After all, the first three films are all pretty much carbon copies of each other, excuses to turn people loose on the island. I almost set the script down at that point, disappointed that they?d do something so predictable again after all this talk about how they were going to turn things upside down. Page sixteen, and I was sure I knew the rest of the script without even reading it.

But I was wrong... again.

Nick Harris does indeed got to Isla Nublar, but he goes alone. He does indeed track down the shaving cream can that Nedry stole, but that?s a mere five pages later. And as soon as he finds it, he?s attacked not only by excavaraptors (think trapdoor spiders), but also by security rangers who work for Grendel Corporation, the mysterious Swiss holding company that took over Jurassic Park from Hammond. Seems they want those genetic samples for their own purposes... whatever those may be. Nick has to get off the island, evading his pursuers, human or otherwise. He manages to make it back to the mainland just long enough to hide the shaving cream can before the security team catches up with him and gasses him into unconsciousness.

All of that happens by page 39, at which point I realized I had no idea where this thing was going, and I quit trying to guess. It kept confounding my expectations. It certainly didn?t feel like it was just another rehash of the same formula. When Nick wakes up, he?s in the tower of a medieval castle in the Alps. Seriously. That?s the precise moment when the entire enterprise goes so over-the-top loony that you?ll either go along with it for the entire insane ride or reject it roundly as a big bag of ludicrous. Nick is introduced to Adrien Joyce, the major domo henchman of Baron von Drax, CEO of the Grendel Corporation. Joyce isn?t a moustache-twirling bad guy bent on torturing Nick into revealing where he hid the shaving cream can. Instead, he offers Nick a job, and in order to explain the job to him, he has to take him on a tour of the entire castle, which turns out to be a fairly sophisticated genetics lab where Grendel Corporation has been breeding some dinosaurs of their own design, cross-breeds that never existed in any era of nature with all sorts of custom modifications.

I want to tread lightly on what happens over the course of the rest of the film on the off chance that Mary Parent or someone at Universal is seriously going to make this thing. There?s the eight-year-old-boy side of me that thinks that a DIRTY DOZEN-style mercenary team of hyper-smart dinosaurs in body armor killing drug dealers and rescuing kidnapped children will be impossible to resist. And then there?s the side of me that says... WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Nick is put in charge of training these five dinosaurs, X1 through X5, and the first thing he does is name them. ?Any soldier worth his pay has a name to answer to, not a number,? he says. So we are introduced to Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes, and Spartacus, each of them a specially created deinonychus, which is sort of like a miniature T-rex. They have super-sensitive smell and hearing, incredible strength and speed and pack-hunting instincts, and they have modified forelegs, lengthened and topped with more dextrous fingers, as well as dog DNA for increased obedience and human DNA so they can solve problems well. All of this is topped off with a drug-regulating implant that can dose them with adrenaline or serotonin as the situation demands.
And go ahead. Look at the calendar. We?re a long, long way from April 1st right now.

By the end of the film, there are set pieces that are much, much bigger than anything we?ve seen in the other films, and much crazier. They?re all well-written, and there?s a glee to the bloodletting that you have to admire. There?s also a blatant set-up for a JURASSIC PARK 5 that is just too good for the studio to pass up. That is, of course, if they actually decide to make this one.

In the end, this represents an enormous gamble for Universal and Amblin?, and I admire them for at least exploring this as a possibility. They?ve thrown some damn good writers at it so far. If they make it, it?s anyone?s guess how fans of the series so far are going to react. This is no-holds-barred SF/horror/action with none of the staring-up-at-a-special-effect-in-awe tone of the first three films. This is a drive-in movie, slightly unhinged from page one, with some truly hissable human villains and some outrageous monster characters. Will it work? Will we ever see it onscreen to find out?
Only time will tell. Until then...

Tsyroc · Post by **Tsyroc** » 2004-08-28 03:47pm

How is it that something can make me think cool and WTF at the same time?

I think it deviates too far away from the original premise and sort of comes across like someone was reading a few too many Valiant comics back in the early 90s when they re-introduced Turok.

I suppose they want to go that way because they figure Peter Jackson is going to have cool dinosaurs and King Kong in his next movie so they had to come up with something different.

DocHorror · Post by **DocHorror** » 2004-08-28 04:03pm

It sounds like some strange kind of fan-wank. But who knows, it could get made and suprise the world!!

CmdrWilkens · Post by **CmdrWilkens** » 2004-08-28 04:10pm

Well I'll grant this, if it is set to run the way its scripted thats a pretty decent job of confounding expectations.

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2004-08-28 04:11pm

Um... Deinonychus is what the velocoraptors in the first film technically were...

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2004-08-28 04:21pm

Ah, but can it beat the awesome mightiness of Boa vs. Python?

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-08-28 04:25pm

I never trust anything AICN posts. Ever.

bohemianfey · Post by **bohemianfey** » 2004-08-28 04:41pm

This is so far-fetched I'm actually intrigued. I hope they make so I can either a) have an awesome movie to talk about or b) have a shitty movie to make fun of.

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2004-08-28 06:21pm

Now why would they stop there? Lets wieve titainum threads into their skin, powerful hydrolic legs, replace an eye with a sophisticated laser tracking and identification system, jet packs, engineer them to exhalel a flamable gas so they can breath fire, acid blood, stealth cloak technology, steel reinforced bones, human level sentience, and trained in shinobi magic. Then they get their asses kicked by the dinos, and the Turtles show up and finish off the dinosaurs(I dare you to name me on movie that couldn't have been made better by adding the Turtles to it)

I'd pay 8 dollars just to watch the signs of confusion on the audience's face.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2004-08-28 06:27pm

Dalton wrote:I never trust anything AICN posts. Ever.

Actually, AICN has been pretty reliable when it comes to reviewing early scripts. They had everything on Kill Bill a year or so before it was released, and they had the scoop on the ending twist of The Village last year also.

A lot of what they post is shit though, and the reviews are terrible.

Admiral_Handsome · Post by **Admiral_Handsome** » 2004-08-28 06:32pm

Oh great! Another bunch of vibrating puddles/cups-full-of-water scenes. Thats all we need. Remember J park 3 with that dinosaur with the phone in its stomach? There was one scene when that piece of crap somehow snuck up on the main actors without them noticing it was there until the phone rang in its guts. How crap was that! As if you wouldn't notice a huge walking multi-ton beast 10 metres away!

Oh yeah, and those V raptors are going to be able to do calculus in this movie as well as know how to drive vehicles. Thats how damn smart they have become.

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi · Post by **Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi** » 2004-08-28 07:06pm

That sounds different. If it gets made, it will either be on par with the first, or a giant wank piece that would make viewers wish that they just took the script for the third movie and changed the names.

Demiurge · Post by **Demiurge** » 2004-08-28 09:00pm

Wow. This is worse than the last two combined... and multiplied ten times.

P.S. I want to see a wisecracking ninja Rex doing backflips and swinging nunchucks around.

Mutant Headcrab · Post by **Mutant Headcrab** » 2004-08-28 09:01pm

A better idea would be something from a Calvin & Hobbes strips.

It's T-Rexes! In F-14s!

Gustav32Vasa · Post by **Gustav32Vasa** » 2004-08-28 09:14pm

I cat decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It begins OK but goes downhill the more I read it.

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2004-08-28 09:39pm

That's so out there I would feel obligated to go see it at least once if it was ever made.

SAMAS · Post by **SAMAS** » 2004-08-28 09:54pm

Holy crap I wanna see this movie.

Something that out-there just has to be made, if for no other reason to prove we can out-weird Japan once in a while.

Wicked Pilot · Post by **Wicked Pilot** » 2004-08-28 10:09pm

Couldn't they have let the franchise end after movie #1? I smell suck in the air, again.

18-Till-I-Die · Post by **18-Till-I-Die** » 2004-08-28 10:43pm

Dude they totally stole my story!

Still i shall be there when/if this movie opens provided it isnt a hoax.

Mutant Headcrab · Post by **Mutant Headcrab** » 2004-08-28 10:53pm

Just thought of something. The thing says that the focus of the movie will be the can that Nedry had in the first movie. Didn't the guy who gave Nedry the can say that it would only keep the material viable for thirty hours? By the time they get it wouldn't it have been, you know, a little over thirty hours?

Anarchist Bunny · Post by **Anarchist Bunny** » 2004-08-28 10:58pm

Mutant Headcrab wrote:Just thought of something. The thing says that the focus of the movie will be the can that Nedry had in the first movie. Didn't the guy who gave Nedry the can say that it would only keep the material viable for thirty hours? By the time they get it wouldn't it have been, you know, a little over thirty hours?

We have a movie where dog DNA for obedience and human DNA for a little inteligence increase is being spliced into dinosaurs, I don't think its too far of a stretch for mud that encased the can to act as a cyrogenic.

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2004-08-28 11:00pm

Mutant Headcrab wrote:Just thought of something. The thing says that the focus of the movie will be the can that Nedry had in the first movie. Didn't the guy who gave Nedry the can say that it would only keep the material viable for thirty hours? By the time they get it wouldn't it have been, you know, a little over thirty hours?

Just a little.

They would have to make some convulted thing about the mud it was buried under keeping it cool enough.

Dorsk 81 · Post by **Dorsk 81** » 2004-08-28 11:29pm

If they make that film, I will persoanly take it upon myself to find and destroy every copy of it and then I'll go on to erasing evey moron involved with its making. And I'll do it while wearing a fucking big purple Barney costume.

Agent Fisher · Post by **Agent Fisher** » 2004-08-28 11:36pm

But how did they know about the can?

The security system was down. No one saw him take the embryos and put them in a can. And how will the find it?

But with the Super smart dinos, part of me goes COOL!! but most of me goes WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY SMOKING??

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-08-29 12:12am

They should've stopped with the second movie. What's next, a damn "reality" TV series / mockumentary sticking a group of people on Site B?

oh wait.....some jackass at Fox will think its a good idea and will try to make it happen.