Obviously, this article contains Fallen Kingdom spoilers.
One of the new characters we meet in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is Benjamin Lockwood, played by veteran actor James Cromwell. As we quickly learn, Lockwood was the former business partner of the late John Hammond, and it was actually the two of them who together created what eventually became Jurassic Park. We also meet Maisie Lockwood (actress Isabella Sermon) in J.A. Bayona’s film, who is John Lockwood’s granddaughter. Well, she’s initially presented as Lockwood’s granddaughter, that is.
Early in the film, we’re told that Lockwood’s daughter had died in a car accident some years prior, leading him to essentially play the role of surrogate father to his daughter’s daughter, Maisie; the little girl lives with Lockwood at his estate, overseen by a live-in helper, Iris. But the film seems to be hinting at something strange about Maisie, which is eventually revealed to be a pretty massive twist for the franchise at large. While it initially seems that Maisie is merely a dead ringer for her late mother, we eventually find out that, well, she *is* her mother.
Maisie, the film tells us in a surprising twist, is actually Lockwood’s daughter. After her death, Lockwood used his daughter’s DNA to create a clone of her, which created a rift between Lockwood and Hammond that was never healed. In other words, the reason we never heard about Benjamin Lockwood in any of the previous films, Fallen Kingdom explains to us, is because Lockwood was written out of the Jurassic Park history books for going one step too far with the high-tech DNA wizardry he and Hammond perfected. While Hammond stopped at bringing dinosaurs back to life, Lockwood took it upon himself to bring his dead daughter back to life; human re-animation, for Hammond, was one area best not trifled with.
How does the reveal of Maisie’s not-quite-human origin play into the events of Fallen Kingdom? Well, it becomes clear in the final act that Maisie’s bizarre origin story exists in the film for the primary purpose of giving Maisie a direct link to the dinosaurs; after all, she, like them, was cooked up in a lab. This comes into play at the very end of the film, when Maisie makes the incredibly irresponsible (but totally understandable, both cause she’s a child and especially because she’s a fake-child) decision to set the surviving dinosaurs from Jurassic World free into, well, the world. Whereas Owen and Claire decide to let them die in containment rather than escape the Lockwood Mansion, Maisie can’t abide that. As she says in an admittedly corny final life before hitting the big red button, “They’re alive… like me.”
Maisie’s storyline aside, the “we cloned a human” reveal in Fallen Kingdom is a bold choice for a franchise that had never previously played around with human DNA. Sure, the revival of a long-gone, prehistoric species was perhaps always more impressive than bringing back one dead human being, but it’s nevertheless an addition that breaks new ground for the series. And even if the next film(s) doesn’t at all play around with that idea any further, what’s done can’t be undone: in the Jurassic Park/World universe, human beings can be cloned!
Could we someday down the line see the rebirth of John Hammond himself? Even more out there, could a new hybrid dinosaur be created that’s… part human?
The latter idea, now entirely possible in the world that these films inhabit, is actually one that the franchise has *almost* played around with in the past. As you’ve maybe heard over the years, a very early idea for the unmade Jurassic Park 4 included creatures that were half-human, half-dinosaur!
Around 2005, William Monahan and John Sayles had written a script for Jurassic Park 4 that boldly introduced the idea of human DNA and dinosaur DNA being combined for weaponization purposes, aspects of which eventually found their way into the Jurassic World films; after all, both films to date have played with the idea of weaponization and feature hybrid dinosaurs as villains, and Fallen Kingdom messes with human DNA experimentation for the first time. But the Monahan and Sayles concept took all of these things to new levels of absurdity.
As we’ve been told, that iteration of the project was to reportedly center on “a secret genetics lab that has been cross-breeding humans with dinosaurs. The result is an army of grotesque and intelligent humanoid dino freaks with problem-solving intelligence and the ability to fire automatic weapons.”
Early concept art – drawings and even sculptures – that was allegedly whipped up for this proposed project hit the net several years back, which you’ll find below. The legitimacy of the art has been brought into question more recently, with Industrial Light & Magic shooting down initial reports that it was their handiwork, but the art nevertheless paints a picture of what dinosaur/human hybrids might look like. And while they’d probably be cool as the featured creatures in their own movie, we’re thinking they’re just not right for Jurassic World.
We’ll likely never seen dino-humans in the Jurassic World franchise – according to Colin Trevorrow, we won’t even be seeing any more dinosaur hybrids in the next film – but along with Maisie Lockwood’s reveal in Fallen Kingdom comes a whole lot of intrigue. For better or worse, this dinosaur-inhabited world just got a whole lot more interesting.
You can’t help but wonder if Maisie is the *only* human clone out there…
