Create, Share, Rinse, Repeat!

On Friday evening I watched the latest installment of the Jurassic Park series; Jurassic World. And while I did enjoy it (who doesn't enjoy dinosaurs chasing Americans all over the place) I was left feeling a bit cheated. When Michael Crichton first wrote Jurassic Park, and its sequel The Lost World, I was immediately enamored with the idea of resurrecting dinosaurs. Who wouldn't want to see these magnificent ancient beasts up close and personal! When the first Jurassic Park movie came out, I loved it! Obviously, as per Hollywood Standard Operating Procedure, they changed quite a bit of the storyline, but the end result was still brilliant!

Unfortunately they then decided to release Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. The novel was an absolute masterpiece, so the good folks at Hollywood decided not to keep any of it, and instead did their own thing. Which sucked. Badly. You would have thought that they would rather end it there and move on to other things. But no, they then decided it was a good idea to try for Jurassic Park 3. That was so bad that I won't spend any time elaborating on it! Obviously as a result of the massive failure of JP3, the Hollywood folks decided to try and redeem the franchise. It took them 10 years and a multitude of script rewrites before they came up with a decent plot for Jurassic World. Which brings me back to the title of this post. See if this sounds familiar:

• a dinosaur park opens, and people can go and visit it
• something goes catastrophically wrong and a dinosaur escapes
• it just happens to be the biggest, baddest one they have
• two kids happen to be in the middle of it
• they are rescued by a dinosaur expert
• the dinosaur eats many people
• the park gets shut down

This is almost a carbon copy of the plot of the first Jurassic Park! They just updated the graphics, added a few subplots here and there and cast Chris Pratt, which happens to be brilliant in just about anything. The T-Rex gets replaced with a genetically engineered super predator (oh yeah, spoiler alert) and there are still Velociraptors everywhere. This seems to be the trend these days. Hollywood is running out of ideas, and so it is just using a Xerox copier and some updated graphics to bring out new films. I guess the only thing we should be really glad about is the fact that they didn't try and reboot it......