This year has given us two wildly different adaptations of Michael Crichton’s work. One is a TV series about a park run by greedy humans who thought they were in control, until everything goes south, and the park’s attractions start killing people and trying to run away. The other is a movie about a park run by greedy humans who thought they were in control, until everything goes south, and the park’s attractions start killing people and trying to run away.
Westworld and Jurassic Park have always shared themes and plot points, but a funny thing happened while I was watching the second season finale of Westworld: I realized I had seen this ending somewhere recently. It was in J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Full Spoilers Ahead…
Westworld was always going to be about a park going wrong, where everything turns into chaos and the robot hosts start killing the human guests. The second season finale of the show, The Passenger, takes it a step further, as we see Dolores change bodies to a robot copy of Executive Director Charlotte Hale and secretly make her way off the Island park with the core memories of a few other hosts, dead set on eradicating humanity. The doors to the park have been blown wide open, and the show can go anywhere as there is now a robot hiding amongst humans, completely unbeknownst to them.
In the second installment of the Jurassic World reboot/sequel trilogy, we learn that Isla Nublar, home to the now-defunct Jurassic World theme park, is also home to a now-active volcano that threatens to obliterate all dinosaur life from the face of the Earth. Instead of the logical solution of transferring the animals to the near Isla Sorna, they are moved to California where a sinister business guy auctions the dinosaurs off to the highest bidder. In the last few minutes we find out that a little girl we were made to believe was the granddaughter of John Hammond’s secret business partner, Benjamin Lockwood, was, in fact, a human clone. Oh, and all the dinosaurs escape and are now free to roam the continental United States.
It is easy to see how Michael Crichton was inspired by his work on the original Westworld when it became time to write his novel about a park going wrong and the dangers of genetic engineering. Both are about illusions of control, and the dangers of playing God. While the similarities in plot may be a bit superficial, it is in the themes explored and the future possibilities for both franchises that we find the connection between dinosaurs and hosts.
First of all, while Westworld and Fallen Kingdom present their endings as surprising twists, they were always the inevitable end to the promise set up by both franchises. A conflict between mankind and a new species we ourselves created for our amusement. The lesson in both the original Westworld and Jurassic Park was that humans should not mess around in creating things we cannot control, as they will always get out of control. The dinosaurs escape, and the robots programmed to be harmless turn against their masters in bloody fashion. But now they are hinting at something more, at a future where humanity doesn’t just learn from its mistakes, but it pays for them in blood and extinction.
That’s right, they were always going to end up as Planet of the Apes-type stories with humanity struggling to co-exist in the same world as robots or dinosaurs, and our eventual demise. The original premise of Westworld was that the robots would turn on people and start killing, so their ultimate goal was to replace mankind as the ruling species. When it comes to dinosaurs, Dr. Alan Grant said it best: “Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?” Sure, we have weapons, but that’s where the human-dinosaur hybrids come into play!
One of the interesting things about Fallen Kingdom was how it could be perfectly divided into two distinct movies. The first one is an ending to the franchise, a goodbye to the island. The second is a teaser for the next installment in the franchise, one that ups the sci-fi to the max and delivers on the promise of having dinosaurs roam free and terrorize the suburbs. In the same vein, the robots in Westworld have rarely set foot outside of the park (and when they did their memories got wiped). This season was all about bringing down the establishment, both by killing all of the park’s top officials, and by having the hosts jump off a cliff and die. By the end, the park is gone (though we know from Jurassic Park that has never stopped anyone), there are no more hosts, and Dolores is free to do whatever she wants – with the ability to build infinite bodies for herself and her lieutenants. Both the film and the show are now free of expectations tied to the rest of the franchise and can explore a multitude of stories.
Westworld has always been about showing us the worst of humanity in and out of the park. Unlike Michael Crichton’s other work featuring a futuristic amusement park, these humans aren’t merely greedy, they are straight evil, and have no regards for the hosts that have now gained consciousness. The human guests not just mistreat the robot hosts, they rape and kill everything they come across and then laugh it off. A big part of the season was devoted to William, a shy kid who finds he has a liking to killing and raping all the robots he can. So when Dolores finally gains consciousness and kills her human creator, we root for her and the other hosts to get free and fight their oppressors.
When it comes to the Jurassic films, they have always shown the greediness in humanity and our inability to see how little control we have over things, but when the dinosaurs get free and start eating people, we see that as a mistake getting bigger, not divine justice against evil men. That is, until Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This is the first time we see a person being killed by another person, humans being left to die by other humans and plenty of acts of random violence and hatred. This is the first film where we actively root for not only the killing of a few greedy and selfish humans, but for the replacing of mankind as the dominant species on Earth. I could argue that the sight of the dying brachiosaurus alone was enough to make everyone in the audience hate humans, without the need of evil planning and murder.
What will become of Westworld? Will Dolores build an underground army? Will she get access to the nuclear codes? Will Maisie Lockwood ever get accepted as a human clone? Will Dr. Henry Wu finally give the people what they want and make human-dinosaur hybrids? Only time will tell. Two things are certain: humanity’s future doesn’t look bright, and it’s an excellent time to be a Michael Crichton fan.
Rafael Motamayor (@GeekWithAnAfro) is a recovering-cinephile and freelance writer from Venezuela currently based in Norway. He has written for Flickering Myth, Birth.Movies.Death, THR’s Heat Vision, and SYFY.
