28 Years Later, or 'Notes or Koepp': structure and storytelling in Jurassic World Rebirth
A long essay-of-sorts about dinosaurs, children, and the screenwriter as auteur
David Koepp, the writer of Steven Spielberg’s films Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), once expressed the fear that the inscription on his tombstone would read: HE TOOK TOO LONG TO GET TO THE ISLAND. But in Jurassic World: Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards and executive-produced by Spielberg, the seventh instalment but the third on which Koepp has worked, the journey takes longer than ever. The destination isn’t Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica, where the Scottish entrepreneur John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), CEO of InGen, built the original doomed theme park, and where, we learn at the start of the second trilogy, a putatively safer successor, Jurassic World, was later built. ‘There it is,’ Hammond says, pointing from the helicopter, after 15 minutes and 55 seconds. Nor are we bound for the nearby Isla Sorna, Hammond’s ‘Site B,’ where The Lost World takes place. ‘Didn’t it all seem a trifle compact to you?’ Hammond asks, incredulous that the chaos-theory expert, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), didn’t realise that the Nublar set-up was merely a showroom, “something for the tourist,” with the real factory floor – the real dinosaur-generation – elsewhere. We are shown Site B, the place whose existence Malcolm should have foreseen, after exactly twenty minutes.
This time it’s Île Saint-Hubert in the Atlantic, where the owners of the Jurassic World experience, fearing that the punters would get bored with the established geni and type species, established a research laboratory to breed genetically modified dinosaurs. (There has always been a self-reflexive dimension to the central premise in its novel and especially its film form – up-to-the-minute commercial entertainment about the challenges of creating up-to-the-minute commercial entertainment.) Strictly speaking, the film begins on Saint-Hubert, among a group of hazmat-suited scientists, with a fairly stunning, somewhat Final Destination-y set-piece in which the vast, six-footed D-Rex (Distortus-Rex) breaks free after a stray Snickers wrapper gets caught in a ventilator, disabling the security system. But even if this weren’t obviously a prologue, almost a throat-clearer, an early ‘kill’ to get you in the mood and establish beyond any doubt the peril of any return visit, and populated by extras and bit players – and with antecedents in both of Koepp’s earlier scripts – it is announced as a flashback. ‘Seventeen years earlier,’ we learn, before we know what it’s earlier than. Koepp once noted that the premise of an island harbouring dinosaurs is so exciting that ‘the usual cat-and-mouse game’ of postponement, to create anticipation, ‘just doesn’t work.’ I’m not sure whether he meant that it’s unnecessary or counter-productive. Whatever the case, Jurassic World Rebirth doesn’t reach Saint-Hubert, in our 2027 present, until after about an hour of screentime.
The obvious question – given Koepp’s recognition of this danger – is: Why not? What’s going on? The literal answer is a long boat trip. That’s what occupies the film once the pharmaceutical executive Krebs (Rupert Friend) has recruited the mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and the paleontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to extract blood samples from de-extincted but living cretaceous-era dinosaurs which his company believe will provide a cure for heart disease. In The Lost World, Ian Malcolm and his two companions reach Sorna on a barge, and the two-hundred-plus mile journey – ten hours, give or take – is presented in less than two minutes, and for most of that, the island is in the background while the passengers negotiate with the Costa Rican captain about how close he is willing to travel to an island he associates with the mysterious death of fishermen.
But in Jurassic World Rebirth the dramatic possibilities of this sort of journey are far more extensively mined. Koepp has said that one of his regrets about the first film – and by implication, the second – was that computer-generated effects were not sufficiently advanced to portray a dinosaur in water, forcing him to abandon a chase sequence he had derived from Michael Crichton’s novel. Koepp said that the moments in Crichton’s own draft of Jurassic Park – they eventually shared the screenwriter credit – in which the characters talked about their personal lives ‘you couldn’t care less.’ There’s a little of that, during the long sea voyage, though it’s more cursory backstory than heartfelt confession. It seems that Koepp, who after all was inventing the story from scratch, thought a certain amount of this stuff was an acceptable price to pay to enable a central medical-capitalist plot that requires interaction with three kinds of dinosaur – airborne or avian, terrestrial, and aquatic.
Certainly there’s a novelty, at least within the context of this series, to the scenes involving the mosasaur and its spinosauri backup, which attack the crew en route to Saint-Hubert – a sort of Jurassic Ocean mini-movie which doubles as a fiftieth-birthday tribute to the greatest blockbuster ever made by the film’s executive producer and the obvious precedent for these films, Jaws. (‘Sharks are Triassic,’ a character explains in Crichton’s novel.) But the aquatic dinosaur could have surfaced after we reached the island. In fact, the scene that Koepp had been annoyed to drop all those years ago is now here, brilliantly staged if a tad familiar, and it does take place on Saint-Hubert, with a slumbering T-Rex waking up then and relentlessly pursuing a raft down a river.
There’s an internal narrative justification for the journey by water – the need for stealth. The island is off-limits, the mission clandestine, though a helicopter has been commissioned to arrive a day after scheduled arrival in case a return voyage by boat would no longer be an option, which it isn’t. (I am not sure why they took the barge in The Lost World.) But this component was also of Koepp’s making. The secrecy has its advantages in narrative terms. At one point, an attempt to call in a Mayday – which given the circumstances is not an option – results in a violent struggle, with a character being pushed into the water by a greedy villain, a moment borrowed from the second of Crichton’s two novels, entitled The Lost World, which Koepp didn’t use very much for his adaptation, in part because novelist and screenwriter at times were working simultaneously, no doubt to capitalise on the success of the film, or perhaps so that Crichton would maintain his stake in the fictional universe once a sequel to the film became inevitable. (He hadn’t written a sequel in the three years that elapsed between the publication of the novel and the release of the adaptation.) The villainous figure in Crichton’s scene, who commissions the sabotage that undermined the security system on Nublar in the first film, doesn’t feature in the second film, his role in proceedings more or less assumed by Hammond’s nephew, who has no counterpart in the source material. But the most likely reason for the long voyage, if one looks at the film in the context of the series or two series, and of Koepp’s other credits, is to get children onto the island.
In the first film, John Hammond’s grandchildren were staying with him at Jurassic Park. After all, there seemed no reason not to. In reality, this wasn’t true. In the opening scene, the counterpart to the D-rex rampage this time around, a velociraptor killed one of the handlers. But Hammond was evidently in denial about the threat posed by animals evolved to hunt and kill – he hires Malcolm and the others to help reassure the theme park’s investors – and until the sabotage of the computer systems, executed in order to steal embryos, all of the dinosaurs were in electrified cages. In the normal course of things, Hammond’s grandson and granddaughter would never come into proximity with the exhibits, however dangerous, in the way that the staff member did.
But following the events depicted in the first film, there was no question of bringing children in proximity with de-extincted dinosaurs. In The Lost World, Malcolm, having survived the Jurassic Park tragedy, and defied order to hush it up, travels to Sorna, ‘Site B’, to find his girlfriend Sarah (Julianne Moore), who agreed to go there to provide to support Hammond’s argument that the dinosaurs, out of captivity following a hurricane on the island, should be left alone there. (Koepp credited Goldblum with this plot; in Crichton’s version, the causality is different, almost opposite.) But Malcolm’s daughter, Kelly, keen to spend time with her divorced father, hides in a trailer to travel with his crew. In the novel, she ends up there for a more convoluted reason, acting as a stowaway for a wealthy paleontologist forced to teach her high school class after being caught speeding. (Kelly was played by a Black actress, Vanessa Lee Chester, partly because one of two equivalent figures from Crichton’s novel, though not her direct counterpart, was identified as African American.) The film begins with a scene derived from the starting-point for the opening novel – a girl being attacked by a group of little darting compsognathi or compys, albeit on Sorna, instead of Nublar, where her parents have moored their yacht. (In that sense, we got to the island straight away that time too.)
Neither option – presuming safety; a wily, wilful child – was open to Koepp here, not only because the audience had seen them but because they had seen them from him, the last time the series was under his stewardship. Jurassic World, the fourth film, which initiated a new trilogy a decade ago, took the Jurassic Park route – kids, in particular the nephews of the theme park’s operations manager, were about because the dinosaurs were believed to be safe. In the second Jurassic World film, the villain brings the dinosaurs to an estate which is also the home of his putative granddaughter (she turns out to be a cloned version of his daughter), who in the next film is kidnapped and thereby ends up in the vicinity of dinosaurs.
Koepp, to his credit, devises a new solution, albeit one hardly free of problems – a double plot. A man is sailing the Atlantic to Cape Town with his two daughters and the older girl’s boyfriend. After their sailing yacht capsizes following a mosasaur attack, they call for help, bringing the central characters to find them. The earlier films on which Koepp worked also displayed elements of division. John Williams’s score had two recurring themes, or two themes within its central theme, one gentle and lyrical pointing to the element of wonder at science or nature, the other, more rousing, emphasising the film’s identity as an adventure story, while the opening title music and other shorter interludes signalled – or amplified – darkness, terror, and suspense. The characters in Jurassic Park start off together, but they are divided when they travel on the island, which enables a well-known moment of cross-cutting, when Hammond is instructing Ellie (Laura Dern) how to restore electricity to the island just as Alan (Sam Neil) and Hammond’s grandchildren are climbing over a fence which usually carries a 10,000 volt charge. (In an enjoyably dark moment, Alan pretends to be shocked when he first touches it.) In The Lost World, the film begins with one area of division – Ian is going to Nublar, and Sarah is already there. But Ian and his companions quickly find Sarah (at one point during the search, Vince Vaughan’s character calls out her full name, prompting a nice bit of Goldblum-y dryness). Then it turns out that Hammond’s nephew arrives with a crew of hunters to capture the dinosaurs and transport them to San Diego, where the theme park will be revived. Soon enough, though, the two rival crews combine, and the film follows the new larger group.
Jurassic World Rebirth is more devoted to double-plot logic. It introduces us to the family on the boat before they have any relevance to, or need of, Zora and co, and after they have been rescued, the two groups are quickly apart again. So the story essentially follows the mission to extract the blood samples (aquatic done, avian and terrestrial to go) and the family’s narrower attempt to elude dinosaurs. The island is too large for a coincidental reunion, but both groups are headed to an abandoned worker village where the scheduled rescue helicopter is due to meet them, though we know what all but one of the characters doesn’t, that a helicopter there on previous business ended up upside down in the trees with the pilot’s dog tags on the jungle floor. (The village is borrowed from the second Crichton’s book, which slightly undermines the complaint that the sequence set in a convenience store is a tired reprise of the kitchen scene in the Jurassic Park – it might have been used one film and four years later, not six films and thirty-two years.)
The structure affords little opportunity for interaction or cross-cutting of a causal or dynamic kind, only back-and-forth to keep us abreast of the characters’ fortunes. After seeing how the film plays out, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the entire structure has been dictated by the need to get a child in peril. Yet we know that a child won’t die. (It’s striking and maybe telling that Johansson has said she made the film to please her kids.) At the start of The Lost World, one fully presumes that the girl has been pecked apart by the compys. The prologue ends with the mother’s screams, which cuts to Goldblum sighing against the backdrop of an exotic poster. (The dissolve was in Koepp’s script but the yawning figure there was one of Hammond’s investors.) Hammond, explaining the existence of Site B to Malcolm, stresses that the ‘wee girl’ will be ‘fine,’ just as his grandson had been fine after being electrocuted by the fence and thrown to the ground. (The critic Adam Mars-Jones described the pair in the first film as ‘almost grotesquely resilient’.) In Jurassic Park III, a boy and his stepfather are stranded on Sorna after paragliding – the boy survives. Koepp’s claim that ‘sometimes you don’t know who is going to get eaten’ is not true, and – spoiler alert – especially in this case. If the trick to surviving a slasher film is to retain your virginity, the trick to surviving here is to be a minor, or played by a recognisable actor – unless you’re a villain. (Jurassic Park the film has a lower body count than the novel and even spares two central characters, Hammond and Malcolm, though Crichton himself, who had never written a sequel before, quietly brought Malcolm back to life in The Lost World on the ground that he needed him to offer ironic commentary and explain the science, though this did not include his own de-extinction.)
Jurassic Park actually begins with Alan Grant (Sam Neill), on a paleontological dig, frightening a nearby boy about what the dinosaur whose fossils he is examining would have done to its enemies. He is presented as anti-child, and over the course of the film, in the dialectic of child-scarring (and child-scarring) and child-adoring evident in a lot of Spielberg’s films, he is forced to protect Hammond’s grandchildren and in the end seems to be reconciled to the idea of having children with his colleague Ellie. (We know from later films this didn’t occur, though he does have children.) In Crichton’s novel, by contrast, we read:
“Grant liked kids—it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs. Grant used to watch kids in museums as they stared open-mouthed at the big skeletons rising above them. He wondered what their fascination really represented. He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Fascinating and frightening, like parents. And kids loved them, as they loved their parents.”
Koepp’s early screenplays concerned young men – Apartment Zero, Toy Soldiers, Bad Influence. But after he turned thirty, in the early 1990s, he started to write more about children or parent-child relationships, which, on top of his reputation as an effective popular storyteller and a bright new screenwriter-for-hire (notably for Death Becomes Her, a flop that people liked), made him a good fit for Spielberg, who had bought the rights to Crichton’s novel. Koepp’s other project around that time, released six months after Jurassic Park, was Ron Howard’s The Paper, co-written as a spec script with his brother Stephen, then a Time editor, which concerns an old newspaper editor who tries to reconcile with his daughter and ends with a caesarean section. (He told Howard, when he came knocking – supposedly to commission a newspaper comedy, which the brothers were already writing – how much he had liked Howard’s film Parenthood.) Children in perilous scenarios was a feature of many of the films that Spielberg had made since Jaws – E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Empire of the Sun, the Indian Jones films, Hook. And if Spielberg wasn’t a direct influence on Koepp’s writing, they shared some affinities – for the TV show The Twilight Zone, which Spielberg was involved in reviving in 1983, and the classic genre techniques as employed by Hitchcock. Koepp later worked a number of times with Spielberg’s contemporary and pal, the Hitchcock disciple Brian de Palma. Way But Jurassic Park was Koepp’s first big genre project (Death Becomes Her was quirkier, a fantasy comedy). Sure enough, Jurassic Park displaced E.T. as the number one box office film of all time – Spielberg’s most successful offspring, and, unlike E.T., bound to reproduce.
The primary crew in the new film, as in Jurassic Park and to some degree The Lost World, is a woman and three men, though the woman is the first recruit, a closer more in the mould of Ellen Ripley in the Alien films perhaps than of Ellie (Laura Dern) or Sarah in the earlier films, who were both defined at least initially in relation to male characters (Ian Malcolm, Alan Grant), as girlfriend and professional junior. Zora here doesn’t compete with Dr Loomis (an odd Halloween reference, though it also calls into play Sam Loomis, Marion’s lover in Psycho). They have different skillsets. She helps him to abseil down a mountain. He encourages her to share the life-saving blood with mankind, an update for the Big Pharma age of the original film’s argument for academic research at the expense of shady profiteering private science, though the stuff about the dangers of progress in the early films, a central component for Crichton, is dampened in a story in which the animals hauled back from extinction can help alleviate heart disease among human beings (an absurdly rosy premise perhaps, but at least they aren’t being harnessed to reverse climate change). The cross-breeding of dinosaur geni that produces the D-rex is presented as a product of wild and foolhardy capitalist greed, and provides the film with a beginning and an ending, and an element of menace throughout (if we haven’t forgotten about the D-rex). But for the most part, we are engaged with genuine dinosaur species, and there is no question that at least in this context, finding a way to revive them has a beneficial impact. In all, Koepp is less engaged than Crichton, a former doctor and lifelong science fiction writer (he also created Westwold), with the details. The details about parents and children – Zora’s mother has recently died, the Mahershala Ali character lost a son – do not have parallels or analogies in the dinosaur world as they did when Koepp was working more closely with the source material: frog DNA undermining the effort to make the dinosaurs all female in the first film, drawing the T-rex out by wielding its infant in the second.
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I saw Jurassic World Rebirth with a suitable friend, a noted literary agent with a taste for 1990s films about the dangers of the natural world, at the Odeon Leicester Square, which is where I saw The Lost World twenty-eight years ago. (That’s my memory: it’s possible it was the Empire.) Though I have seen the film since, including at the cinema, I recall the thrill of the initial viewing. It marked the first outing of the new – third – Universal logo, and I was dazzled by the colour, the effect of the globe existing in space (see below for comparison). The moment when Goldblum mocks Vaughan for calling out ‘Sarah Harding’ – a name not yet associated with a member of Girls Aloud – was an early instance of someone mocking someone. And the film is very rich. David Koepp was probably the key screenwriter for a blockbuster-minded or Hollywood-friendly filmgoer in that time. His only rival for that role – if you discount James Cameron or for that Crichton, who co-wrote Twister – was his contemporary Akiva Goldsman, who quickly graduated from Grisham to Batman.
Between Jurassic Park and The Lost World, Koepp had co-written another film from that period one didn’t dream of missing, Mission: Impossible, though he was replaced on that project and another of the writers, Robert Towne, was used on the sequel. Of the two later films he wrote which starred Tom Cruise, one of them he was brought in by Spielberg (War of the Worlds) and in the other he was replaced or at least joined by Cruise’s favourite Christopher McQuarrie, albeit to no advantage (The Mummy). Koepp’s notable original scripts include a number of more or less single-set suspense films: De Palma’s Snake Eyes, Fincher’s Panic Room, and Soderbergh’s Kimi and the recent Presence, one of two Soderbergh films distributed this year on which he was the writer (the other being Black Bag).
Koepp has directed six films in all, many of them involving children – and babies, and pregnancy – the most high-profile, Mortdecai with Johnny Depp, a commercial failure. Many of his big-budget commissions have involved Spielberg to some degree – War of the World, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull – and The Paper started a relationship with Ron Howard which resumed when he joined then replaced Akiva Goldsman, Howard’s other pet writer (A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man), as the writer of Howard’s Dan Brown series. Working from a treatment by James Cameron, Koepp wrote countless drafts of Spider-Man, the first in the trilogy that featured Tobey Maguire century. One of Koepp’s contributions – albeit in the context of telling the origin story of a well-known character – was to take longer to get to the suit: ‘My big pitch was it should take a really long time for Peter Parker to become Spider-Man.’ Three other writers worked on the project but he was eventually awarded sole credit. The film established the superhero film as the dominant genre of the twenty-first century, rescuing the genre from the opprobrium to which they’d been consigned, after Tim Burton left the Batman series, by films like The Shadow – which Koepp himself wrote, with Alec Baldwin in the role – and Batman & Robin, starring George Clooney, which won Goldsman a Golden Raspberry for worst script. But his script for the Spider-Man sequel wasn’t used, and he is not credited on any of the recent crop of Marvel or DC films. A 2018 script about DC’s Blackhawk – for Spielberg – and a 2020 script about the Green Hornet were never produced.
Insofar as Koepp continues to be used for summer films it is on the basis of successful collaborations that started three decades back. He wrote a draft of the film that was eventually released as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), and he has written Spielberg’s next film, as yet untitled but reported to involved UFOs – a blockbuster one presumes, albeit one scheduled for a winter release. (It will reunite Koepp with Colin Firth, who played a cinema owner with a murderous flatmate in Apartment Zero.) Koepp’s new relationship with Stephen Soderbergh proves to be something different, though Black Bag was a genre film – spy thriller – with a fairly sizeable budget (roughly $50m). So it seems likely that from now on, Koepp’s relationship with anything resembling a tentpole movie will come via Spielberg. (His dealings with TV have so far been fleeting.)
The Jurassic Park sequence doesn’t have an auteur. Crichton’s original idea has always been present – de-extincted dinosaurs and their commercial exploitation, questions over whether they can be tamed, should be protected, etc. Spielberg has been involved to some degree in the films. Universal has the IP. There’s John Williams’s score (Alexandre Desplat is the credited composer on the new film). Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s now fifty-year-old effects company, creates the glistening, minutely textured creatures. But you could argue that David Koepp has been the only common creative force in the best films in the series, even if Jurassic World Rebirth lags some way behind the first two. Once you acknowledge how little of Crichton’s second novel he used in The Lost World, it’s clear how much the series bears his stamp, the particular ways he realised ideas devised in development with Spielberg. Despite the commercial success of the Jurassic World films, there was a sense that the most recent one, Jurassic World Dominion, tested the audience’s patience and that, as the title seems to imply, a reboot of sorts – new cast, new quest – was essential. And though the new film is eccentric and in places deficient, it is clearly the work of the writer who did so much to originate the tone, and the contours of the fictional universe. Koepp was certainly an intriguing as well as a moving choice. It remains to be seen if he will be asked to confront the next set of problems thrown up by the franchise – to finish, or if that’s too idealistic, replenish, what he started.