Jurassic Park is still the king of the dinosaur movies as Jurassic World fails to match its strong feminist overtones

Photograph: IMG_4881 via photopin (license) (cropped)

Jurassic World always faced a gigantic task in trying to emulate the screen success of its predecessor. Jurassic Park was a groundbreaking movie. The clever classic threw maths and science, an appreciation for nature, botany and ecology, and palaeontology at a popular audience, and fully trusted them to be excited and inspired.

The male lead Alan Grant was a grumpy and unsociable Dinosaur expert. Dr Malcolm, the 'cool' character, was a mathematician and the unorthodox voice of reason. John Hammond, the park's creator and 'villain' such as there was one, was a likeable, charismatic and ultimately very human, billionaire philanthropist.

The Dinosaurs were not monsters but animals, which inspired a gleeful awe from the protagonists. The antagonists were neither the Dinosaurs nor the limited number of 'villains' - who amounted to nothing more than wild animals or flawed humans, respectively - but rather human hubris before nature and the creeping abstract concept of chaos.

But above all else, Jurassic Park gave us a pair of strong female characters: Dr Ellie Sattler and Lex.

Lex, Hammond's granddaughter, doesn't let being a frightened child reduce her to a mere passenger. She faces her fears to outwit predatory dinosaurs and protect her brother. Then she uses her own technical skills, as a self-designated hacker, to proactively help get the park's security systems back online.

Dr Ellie Sattler, meanwhile, was the female lead and an expert in her own right, a palaeobotanist who took immediate command of the situation when she encountered a sick Triceratops. With intelligence and dry humour, she openly and unashamedly calls out sexism on at least two occasions while being unapologetically maternal in wanting children. She is also the one to call out the quixotic philanthropist Hammond on his delusions, showing her growth from being 'overwhelmed' by the marvellous dinosaur island to being frightened but resolved. She acts on her own initiative in emergency situations and is strong and dependable.

Then, we have Jurassic World. In comparison, it was just a monster movie. A dumb but entertaining movie that falls well short of its predecessor's high standard. Worse, however, it has been derided as openly sexist (Shoard, 2015; Battersby, 2015).

The core of the problem is centred on how the female lead is treated. She is a stereotype of a woman made 'unnaturally' cold by being out of her 'natural' element, who warms up by being exposed a strong male and the need to nurture and protect children (Fitzpatrick, 2015). Even being allowed a couple of instances of action movie heroics do little to redeem her from the painful stereotype. She's a smart professional who still gets ordered around by men and ignores expert advice; she's capable and informed but behaves with astonishing naivety; and makes some absurd choices, including remaining in breakneck heels in dangerous situations.

All of this, and some of the other rather bizarre plot choices, tend to overshadow what could have been a fascinating renewal of the message of the original movie. Jurassic Park was all about chaos emerging from order, as small events escalate beyond the human capacity for control (Oltermann, 2015). Somewhere in Jurassic World are messages about our short attention spanned consumerism and a very timely reminder of how easily our human constructed structures can be undermined - but it all got lost or buried along the way.

The biggest and most mystifying question is how Jurassic World, made twenty-two years after Jurassic Park, managed to be so much less progressive than the original. It was an entertaining but ultimately problematic movie that failed to break any new ground and so, in the end, will be largely forgetten. Even over twenty years later, the original Jurassic Park will still be the one viewers reach for a smart and entertaining movie.

References

Molly Fitzpatrick's ''Jurassic Park' is 100 times more feminist than 'Jurassic World''; on Fusion; 17 June 2015.

Catherine Shoard's 'Is Jurassic World sexist? Assessing the film's key females of the species'; in The Guardian; 10 June 2015.

Matilda Battersby's 'Jurassic World sexism – are the claims justified?'; in The Independent; 11 June 2015.

Philip Oltermann's 'The star of Jurassic World isn’t T-Rex. It’s Malcolm'; in The Guardian; 12 June 2015.