It is hard to believe that it is twenty-five years since legendary film director Steven Spielberg changed the face of cinema with the epic Jurassic Park film. While James Cameron changed things up with Terminator it was Jurassic Park that seemed to start off a whole new trend in Hollywood. Even going back today and watching the original you can’t help but be wowed by what Spielberg and his team managed to create with such realistic looking dinosaurs.
Now a quarter of a century later we are once again returning to the Jurassic world, a world this time that seems to be in tatters. And once again we get that nervous feeling in the pit of our stomachs as we wonder if we are about to see another cinematic marvel… and the stars of Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard say we are not going to be disappointed.
Obviously a fan of the original films Pratt’s eyes light up when he reflects on how the modern day films fit in with what we knew and loved in the past. “The Jurassic movies have always been movies about science and imagination merging,” he says. “It might be dinosaurs chasing people around but at the core of it they are relationship movies – films about people and the relationships that they have with one another and the relationship that those people have with nature… so in this film we are exploring that relationship even further.”
But he also says to expect and lot more action this time around, “The last movie was really physical, but this movie is very physical, like dive rolling out the backs of trucks, diving off stuff and landing in water. We have a whole sequence set in water that took about a week or something to shoot. We’ve got great big fight sequences. They’ve taken the action hero concept that worked in the first movie and expanded on it a little bit for this movie.”
Pratt says one of things that makes Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom so much better is the man in the director’s chair J.A. Bayona who also directed movies like The Orphanage and A Monster Calls. “He is a huge movie buff and he loves all kinds of movies but he does love a movie that has an edge and a danger to it and he is bringing that to this film which is really exciting to see, the music, the slow pace, the suspense… not so much what is there but what might be around the corner and I think that he is bringing it back and that is what these movies have always been, they have been suspense thrillers, they are science and imagination and suspense thrillers. That is what we are doing here and J.A. is really good at that.”
Pratt is also full of praise about his amazing co-star Bryce Dallas Howard. “Bryce is a pro she knows exactly what she is doing,” he says smiling. “I mean she is Ron Howard’s daughter and she has an incredible work ethic, and i say Ron Howard’s daughter because she has that gene, she is a filmmaker, she is a director and she is a producer, she is a storyteller and she really lives for this. And she is very passionate about every step of the way and the process.”
He also laughs when he is asked what it is like to work with his other leading lady – the legendary Blue. “She is so lifelike,” he laughs but also seemingly impressed. “They have one person dilating the pupils, they have one controlling the eyelids, they have controlling the nostrils, one controlling the cheek, it looks she breathes and they pump her jugular, everything moves – her hands, her claws, her neck. There was a team of about twelve guys underneath doing a very choreographed dance to make her look real.”
Like Pratt it is obvious how much Howard enjoyed working on this film and she is quick to fill in the gaps of the franchise’s timeline for us. “This movie starts at a crisis point,” she says. “There is an extinction level event that is going to occur on the island. There is an active volcano and it is going to erupt and all of the dinosaurs are going to die unless Claire does something about it. And that is where we start this movie, that is where we begin and it is so what we are basically starting with is ‘so we have had over twenty years of dinosaurs co-existing with human beings, did we make a mistake, is this nature’s way of correcting itself, should we let nature take its on course or should we step in and protect these animals that we have created ourselves. This is a new world where dinosaurs are co-inhabiting, co-existing and it is no longer the dynamic that we were promised in Jurassic Park or Jurassic World where dinosaurs are caged, dinosaurs are imprisoned, we are going to be in control of the dinosaurs but what you’ve seen is that we are actually not in control of those dinosaurs at all and they are far more dangerous than we could ever imagine. You would think that the scariest thing that would happen would be facing a dinosaur, that’s not the case in this movie. What we see is that there is something even more menacing, even more menacing, that there is something even more bloodthirsty and that thing is mankind.”
Howard says her character has also evolved during that time. “In the first Jurassic World movie we see a woman who has kind of lost her sense of values and compromised her sense of values in the name of profit. Now what we see is a completely different person – she is deeply in touch with her values, deeply in touch with her sense of responsibility and is singularly focussed on protecting the animals that she really didn’t acknowledge their value prior to this. She is a very different woman at the beginning of this film because she has found a sense of purpose and she has found her mission and she will stop at anything.”
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is out now
