Hoofprint Press: #WorkshopWednesday - The Weight of Expectation

On Monday, I said I'd follow up my Jurassic Park 30th anniversary post with a post about the Jurassic World films, and I decided to turn it into a Workshop Wednesday post, so here we go.

Let's talk about the weight of expectation.

The beauty of adding an installment to an existing world is, well, obviously, the world already exists. You're adding new layers that can only be built upon what came before, taking the story further than you could with the original, foundational narrative. You can't, for instance, have a trained-raptor chase scene in Malta without seeing a raptor hatching in 1993. Whether or not the audience loves that Malta chase scene, though, is one of the pitfalls of writing within existing properties: a pre-existing world is familiar to the audience, and its members bring certain expectations with them to each new installment.

The original Jurassic Park was an event. It became an instant icon, beloved by kids and adults. It makes sense that Crichton's follow-up novel, The Lost World, would get the film adaptation treatment. It wasn't as well received, but well enough to warrant a third film, this one a film-only effort, since there were no more books. At the time of their releases, I remember not liking them as well, but still being happy enough to return to the world of JP. Upon a rewatch this past winter, I felt more or less the same. The sanitized film version of The Lost World is much less intense and real-feeling as the novel. If you judge based on lone character from the first film carrying a follow-up film on their own, surrounded by new characters, Alan Grant cuts a much more compelling figure than Ian Malcolm, in my opinion, but the third film remains my least favorite of all six.

Something about the end of it strikes me as terribly sad. In the beginning we see Alan visiting Ellie's family, very clearly still smitten, but he never took his chance, and now he looks on forlornly as she plays house with someone else. On the island, he's surrounded not by capable professionals, but by two panicky tourists - obviously, they're trying to find their son, not to tour, but they're liabilities rather than assets - and by a protege who ends up pulling a monumentally stupid stunt with the raptor eggs. They get off the island, in the end, but where the first film ended with that lovely sequence in the helicopter, the kids asleep on Alan's shoulders, Ellie smiling, soft with exhaustion, and the sun glittering off the water as a flock of pelicans, modern-day dinosaurs, keep pace alongside. The music sweeps our heroes grandly back to the mainland, and despite the loss, and the terror, and the harrowing escape, it feels as if there's a future out there waiting for them all, and that perhaps it can be a hopeful one. By contrast, for me at least, the third film feels very melancholy. Alan's just fought the same battle all over again, older, more exhausted, and still alone. You could argue that the movies are about dinosaurs and action sequences, that as long as though two requirements were met, that's all that was needed, and you wouldn't be wrong...but to me, had the third film been the last in the franchise, it would have felt like Jurassic Park ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But then!

I'm going to be honest with you, I was 100% onboard when I saw the first trailer with Owen training the raptors. I was six again, thinking, if I worked at Jurassic Park, I'd totally imprint with a baby and have a special bond with it. That storytelling decision alone proved to me that someone working on the film looked at the viewers who'd grown up with JP and asked themselves, what did all of those kids want most in 1993? We wanted Magical Horse Girl bonds with dinosaurs, and Jurassic World said, I'll get right on that.

Blue and Owen's relationship is my favorite thing about the Jurassic World movies. The first of the three films was pretty well-received, with mixed responses to two and three. Three, especially, didn't perform well with critics, but I can't remember the last time I listened to critics. I have my own quibbles, but on the whole, I think the films do a good job of 1) Establishing new and engaging characters, 2) Living within the rules of the established world while carrying forward the consequences of current actions, and 3) Remembering what made the first film special.

From its inception, Jurassic World faced one major challenge: the weight of expectation. Forget rampaging dinosaurs: the scariest obstacle of all was an audience deeply familiar with, and comfortable in, and protective of the sandbox in which this new team was about to play. I feel their pain. Obviously, I haven't written, and likely never will write anything as well-known and loved as Jurassic Park. A girl can dream, but some dreams are just plain ridiculous. But no matter your name or noteworthiness, if you write a new story in an existing series, fans of that series will come to it with certain expectations. Occasionally those expectations are impossible to meet: a new story can't be exactly like the ones that came before it, or else it's not a new story at all. The characters will have gained knowledge and experience; new characters will enter the story; old challenges have been faced and new challenges await. A total lack of progress, plot-wise and character-wise, would be frustrating and stagnant, so it's impossible to recreate an earlier story - but you can try to recreate the feeling that story inspired.

Typically, recreating a feeling means upping the ante. The addictive part of any story, the thing the audience craves, is not the conflict itself, but the emotion the conflict inspired in them. For instance, with Dartmoor, the upping of the ante was inevitable. In Price of Angels, the club faces off against a handful of evil rednecks. A small-scale enemy. Since then, the baddies have gotten bigger and badder, and now the club is squaring off against international sex-trafficking rings, and the FBI, and the Russian mafia. I've seen it argued that the series is "stronger" when the Dogs are facing small-scale villains, but here's the challenge: if they kept fighting evil rednecks every book, and never got any better at it, the overall story hasn't progressed one iota. The battle stops being suspenseful or thrilling or even frightening when it's the same battle over and over. It's like walking through a haunted house. Scary the first time. Maybe even the second. If you walked through the same haunted house fifty times in one night, and you knew exactly where each scare was, it stops being scary at all. Same with Dartmoor: the club can't face new challenges if the club and its members don't grow. As a writer, I have to find new ways to create suspense and intrigue and a chance for love to save the day, but you'd get tired of the same plot retread in each novel. (Sidenote: rereading is a fantastic way to revisit older stories, and I'm on a reread/rewatch kick myself right now.) As a writer, you want to move forward, to allow the natural progression of your fictional world to unfold, but you want to hold on to what the audience found special about earlier stories.

It's a tricky balancing act, one that's guaranteed to polarize portions of your audience. How do you keep writing when there are voices in the back of your head already predicting those inevitable snarky reviews? How do you focus on this story, right now in front of you, while honoring the past, and without letting those future nay-sayers get you hung up with indecision? I'm working on Dartmoor book 10, and I already know what the critics are going to say. Because I'm bookending Fearless, I'm waxing poetic about the swamp, and its haunted waters, already knowing the novel will be called "bloated," "too descriptive," "slow," etc. Mercy and Ava are married, have three kids, and are juggling all that entails, as opposed to restarting a taboo romance against her father's wishes like in Fearless, but this book will be accused of "not feeling like" Fearless. I can look at each beat, each scene, and see exactly how it will be torn to shreds.

Even if, like me, you don't let the ebb and flow of outside opinion dictate your storytelling, that weight of expectation exists, and must be shouldered, resisted, met in small bites, disregarded in others. It's the silent partner in the corner of the room; the bigger the franchise, the bigger and scarier the silent partner in the corner. In my own work, the best course is to stay true to my characters, knowing I can't please everyone. In some big pieces of media, the goal is to subvert expectations totally...to the point that the story becomes disjointed, meaningless, and naught but a shell of its origin, like with Games of Thrones. Sometimes, the weight of expectations is the only consideration, to the point that the characters have zero agency or impact. *Oscar Isaac voice*: "Somehow, Palpatine has returned." Given the absolute shitshow that has been franchise endings in recent history, I'm here to boldly say that Jurassic World didn't do so badly.

Setting aside my love of trained raptors, let's look at the logic of the concept within the world of Jurassic Park. In-universe, with the technology already there, the island there, the dinosaurs there, it makes sense that someone would try to get the park up and running for real this time. It's a logical next step, given the circumstances, and is also very satisfying for viewers to see the park operating as Hammond always envisioned - perhaps in a much more advanced and engaging way than he ever could have imagined. But with the park up and running, and running smoothly, where's the conflict? In this film we get a twofer: rampaging dino, and malevolent government-funded entity wanting to use dinos as weapons. (Sidenote: casting Vincent D'Onofrio instantly adds an element of the unexpected to any character, so using him here turned what would have been a very flat Sinister Gov Guy into one with a little of that D'Onofrio WTF magic.) Following through with the logical train of thought: a T-Rex got loose and terrorized everyone in the first film, so doing the same would be, well, more of the same. How do you up the ante? Creating a new breed of dinosaur fits logically in-universe, and they do a decent job of explaining its unpredictability on its mashed-up genetics, and its utter lack of socialization. The horse-trainer part of my brain was tickled by all the animal psychology in this film. Likewise, the raptor training involved that important blend of bond and respect necessary for training strong-breed attack and personal protection dogs. It's like Schutzhund for dinosaurs.

I'm not going to use the word "flaw" here, because that word gets thrown around in reviews when the reviewer really means "weak point" or "silliness I couldn't get on board with." A flaw is an error, or an unforeseen drawback that actively damages the story in some way. I don't really think this movie damages itself, but it does have weak points and bits of silliness. I know viewers complained about the kid storyline, and it was admittedly my least favorite portion of the movie. Narratively, it serves a few purposes. One, it shows us some of the park attractions we wouldn't otherwise see: the petting zoo, the tram - fully-enclosed to allow safe T-Rex feeding views - and the mosasaur show. Taking their little hamster ball off-course is dumb, and predictably disastrous, but it gets Claire and Own out in a truck searching the park for them. A different reason for sending them out alone could have been concocted, but I think the kids were used because it fulfills a callback: having kids at all. Tim and Lex, and Alan protecting them, were a major driving force in the first film, a role that Claire's nephews fill in JW. I tend to give writers a little more leeway as a writer myself, so I can see the writing decision here: risk the goofiness of having kid characters? Or not include any kids, and risk the audience wishing there were kids here, like in the first film? That's a dice roll decision, and I don't envy them.

Another major point of silliness is Claire going to fetch the T-Rex to fight the new dino. Ah, yes, let's add another giant carnivore to this party. Couple that with some of the overblown, lingering facial-expression shots and slow-mo running of that sequence, and it's just silly. Also, yeah right would the raptors help the T-Rex. (ALTHOUGH: it's not uncommon for predators to team up against a common enemy in the wild, so who knows. The crows and hawks hate each other at my house, but will join forces to wage war on the great horned owls, so...*shrugs*) But the T-Rex scene isn't just silly: it's also a great big, extended callback to the first film, with the script flipped. In JP, a T-Rex on the loose is rightly terrifying; but this time, it's salvation. And on a purely emotional, JP kid level? I cheered when she came out of her paddock and joined the fight. My inner six-year-old freaking loved it, so I forgive all its silliness. Not only did I forgive it, but I walked away from the film grinning, and that means the film was an artistic success. At least in my books it was.

I find the same holds true for the next two films as well. I found the volcanic eruption, and subsequent death of the dinos on Isla Nublar genuinely upsetting. That final shot of the Brachiosaurus on the dock, crying? Yeah. That felt bad. It felt really bad. Like seeing the slain Diplodocus herd in the previous film. The mainland shenanigans succeed and flounder in different ways, the villains get their comeuppance, but not after sowing seeds of chaos. The whole mansion scene running from the Indo-raptor feels drawn-out and very static from a character growth standpoint. Nothing meaty or important is happening when everyone's running and screaming. But I still think the "logic" behind the story works. They're still tampering with genetics, and none of the revelations in this film - even Maisie - negate the science of previous films. Jurassic World does a really good job all the way through three films of building on what came before, rather than tearing it down and starting over, which is no mean feat, let me tell you. I think it makes sense some of the dinos were saved from the island, and we see in the following film that turning them loose had real consequences that aren't swept under the rug for convenience. If you make a narrative decision, you have to stick with it, and these movies do.

The last film, Dominion, was the most critically reviled of the three. I don't think it was the trainwreck some of them claimed. In fact, I think the basis of the plot carries its weight and the conclusion is much more satisfying and emotionally rewarding than, say, the end of Jurassic Park III. Where it struggles is in some of the blending of new crew with old; there are too many direct callbacks that make some moments too silly, and so much action that the character beats get lost along the way.

I think the locust angle actually plays. Again, the natural progression of sciences already established, wielded by malevolent, government-funded entities.

The reintroduction of our OG crew was filmed to be a little hokey on purpose, but I'm here for it. Ellie standing on the truck's running board, pulling off her shades against the wind. Awesome. Same with the familiar music swelling as Alan turns at a dig site and reveals his face to the camera. I love the callback of Ellie showing up in his camp, and them fixing drinks and talking: it reminded me of Hammond opening champagne for them in the very first film. I liked Ian being all schmoozy and touchy like he was in JP, and I'll even take the callback where he's later trying to walk them along the control room map with walkie-talkies.

But oh, was there was some silliness in the forced team-up scene-framing and dialogue in the last quarter of the film. The biggest offenders are:

Alan and Ellie's awkward run-in with Maisie
Ian and the flare when it's taking them forever and a day to get up the ladder while Giganotosaurus tries to eat them all.
The cringey girl power moment with Claire and Ellie in the control room.
Dodgson and his Barbasol can heirloom that was found in the mud and made it off the island how????
Alan helping Owen and Maisie with "the pose" while they triangulate on Blue's baby (Beta? iirc)
Dino pushing off of what??? to fly up through the ice and attack them.
WHY are you trying to LASSO a Parasaurolophus from a HORSE?? Do you want to DIE???

Whew. Deep breath. There's other quibbles, but they're little, taste-specific, and I'm not going to go into them.

All of that aside...I still had a good time. I smiled and laugh-groaned over the silliness, because none of it changed the meaning of the film. None of it happened at the expense of a logical and rewarding conclusion. I think we've gotten so jaded, but a little silly's okay now and then. More realism would have meant more gore, more death, less fun.

At the end of the day, Jurassic World honors and builds on the OG film, and that's what counts for me. And it bought us nine more hours in a universe that I've loved since childhood. I got my Alan and Ellie kiss, finally! And Blue remains the Best Girl.