Jurassic Park IV Could be the one that ruins or saves the franchise...
#1
Posted 26 March 2006 - 10:42 AM
"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.
[b]
Now im excited about this one. the first half of the script sounds good. but what the fuck is up with marine dinasaurs that this guy has to train. thats why i dont believe this is a valid script. mainly because Sam Neil, Jeff Goldblum, and others have publicly announced that they have signed on to JP4. What do you all think?
#2
Posted 26 March 2006 - 10:51 AM
I'd like a qui-gon jinn please with an obi-wan to go.
#3
Posted 26 March 2006 - 11:32 AM
That mentioned script there looks rather boring, too. I mean, Grendel Corporation? Oh please... can it get any lower than that? This is not about a good story anymore, this is just picking on those cute little dinosaurs.
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#4
Posted 28 March 2006 - 12:17 PM
The scene I kept returning to see with JP was the one with with the bronto eating from the tree and the big BOOM when he hit the ground. Boring for many of you, I'm sure. But it didn't try to pretend to be something it wasn't.
Not up to that point anyway.
#5
Posted 28 March 2006 - 12:38 PM
#6
Posted 28 March 2006 - 01:33 PM
Do you like Godzilla films by any chance?
I'd like a qui-gon jinn please with an obi-wan to go.
#7
Posted 28 March 2006 - 04:34 PM
#8
Posted 28 March 2006 - 06:46 PM
As far as the Jurassic Park movies go, the first movie was pretty amazing on a couple of levels. For one, it was a technological marvel, and the fact that the CGI still holds up against today's standards is impressive. Secondly, it took a mediocre book by a mediocre author and made it into something a little more interesting. To this day, JP is one of few instances where I'll take the movie over the book any day. The Lost World, however, was a travesty in both areas. The book and movie were both bland, uninteresting, and repetitive. So with my utter disgust still in place, I never bothered to see the third one. The trailers made it look pretty horrible.
#9
Posted 28 March 2006 - 10:16 PM
#11
Posted 29 March 2006 - 12:33 AM
The Jurrasic Park films are spaced too far apart and not planned for, so they have a different feel. I think the first one was the only one that needed to exist.
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#14
Posted 05 April 2006 - 02:51 AM
a four?
the only way that'll work and be interesting is;
1. go aliens style... have the government try to use them as weapons, as if they wouldn't.
2. triassic park:
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#15
Posted 09 April 2006 - 08:51 PM
Also: The Chefelf.com Lord of the Rings | RoBUTZ (a primative webcomic) | KOTOR 1 NPC profiles |
Music: HYPOID (industrial rock) | Spectrox Toxemia (Death Metal) | Cannibalingus (80s style thrash metal) | Wasabi Nose Bleed (Exp.Techno) | DeadfeeD (Exp.Ambient) |||(more to come)