Quick, impulsive post based off recent news that's lighting up the Twitterverse and that my opinion about will not fit into 140 characters.
You gotta give mad props to "Jurassic Park 4", because this thing just flat out refuses to die. I wrote a post about my thoughts regarding a fourth "Jurassic Park" way back in 2011, and I'm not even going to bother linking back to that post because they're pretty much the same for this latest announcement. I apologize, but I'm going to be That Person on the Internet and repost some of my thoughts about the possibility of a fourth "Jurassic Park" movie.
The big question is, "Why?"
Ignoring for the moment that this is a sequel to a long-dormant franchise, the last movie was objectively terrible, and it has a release date but no director. Sounds like a winner already but could you even make a halfway-decent "Jurassic Park" movie in the 2010s? We've learned (and here I am going to use a very scientific term) a metric sh*t-ton more about the signature dinosaurs in "JP" since even the third movie, and at this point things like naked coelurosaurs would look stupid. Not only that, if they decide like, "Okay, fine, we'll have the velociraptors actually look like velociraptors," how are you going to do that without a massive retcon? Furthermore, you can't really do anything with the reoccurring human characters, nor can you really introduce new ones, without it feeling really forced. (Then again, who cares about the humans in a "Jurassic Park" movie? :)
So you would either have to do a massive retcon. Or come up with an excuse as to why the velociraptors don't look like velociraptors, or indeed like any healthy animal that has ever existed in this reality. Or go for broke and do something totally, stupidly insane like the anthropomorphic dinosaur soldier hero squad idea that was floating around a while back.
Or -and call me crazy- maybe come up with a totally new and different prehistoric animal franchise?
About the only thing that might make sense at this point would be a prequel. Consider that the current writers gave us one of the few recent prequels to a long-running franchise that was actually worth a damn, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". And in the novels, there's a lot of implied (and not) backstory which could fuel a good "JP" prequel. All from memory, since it's been a while: A better explanation of the lysine contingency. The genetic engineers being asked to make the real live goddamn non-avian dinosaurs look and act more like what people "expect" (in the late 80's remember). Alan Grant being called in the middle of the night with the question "seriously, what would a baby Miasaura eat?" since the Park scientists have no zookeepers among them and have *no* experience with animals. Struggles with adapting the animals to modern diseases and parasites. And of course they could show exactly how the Park scientists learned how unruly the pterosaurs and maniraptors are...
Whatever happens, remember this'd be the first "Jurassic Park" movie released in the wake of this wonderful thing:
Important Addendum: Nope. Nope, I do not even want a fourth "Jurassic Park". Here's the reason, via Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. (Dammit, it's not even the "no feathers" announcement [I wasn't really expecting a different outcome anyway]. It's the smug, "Suck it, nerds" attitude of the announcement.)
