Sequels are hard. Sometimes they come out better than the original, but that’s a rare feat only achieved by excellent films like Terminator 2, Aliens, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and 2 Fast 2 Furious. Most of the time, the best you can hope for from a sequel is a par continuation of the story. And often, what you get is a pale facsimile of the original, like an artist performing their own forgery, or at worst, The Hangover 2 or Frozen 2.

It can’t be a PG13 movie without a needlessly included teenager

One of the things I’ve noticed about most of the great sequels is that they’re not simply continuations or retellings, they’re actually transformative. Terminator was a gritty chase film, a horror movie where the devil is determined to take everything from the main character. Alien is pure horror, a film which sets out to isolate and terrify you the way it isolates and terrifies its characters before their ultimate demise. Then come along T2: Judgment Day and Aliens, not only different movies with different stories, they take on new genres. While they don’t fully shed their horror roots, they both step more into the action/adventure blockbuster realm to transform how the movie interacts with the audience. Captain America changes things up as well—from a war film to spy thriller, while also upping the emotional stakes. The Winter Soldier is so different from The First Avenger, I sometimes have trouble remembering that one is a sequel to the other. The massive time jump helps the feeling of change as well; gone are the glitzy USO dancers, jaunty montages, and classic struggle between good and evil. We’re in the present now, where so much of the world is gray, including some of our protagonists. And I definitely don’t need to tell you how 2 Fast 2 Furious improved over the Point Break clone of the first movie.

In the movie and in real life. Pretty sure I had one of those stuffies

It’s a high bar, I know, to compare anything to T2 and Aliens, as they’re not only two of the best sequels of all time, they’re also two of the greatest blockbusters of all time. But as good as they are, as good as their predecessors are, they all pale in comparison to Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park is one of the most brilliant films I’ve ever seen. The way it sweeps you up into the narrative, the pure visual spectacle of the thing; Jurassic Park captured the imagination of the nation in a way that the other films couldn’t. And the genius doesn’t end on screen, either; building the whole film as a purchasable real world phenomenon that felt like it could really happen and pushing the merch in the movie itself positioned Jurassic Park as a living entity. The lunchboxes in the movie were available in stores. I was seven years old at the time, arguably too young to go see the violent PG-13 movie in theaters, and yet I had Jurassic Park toys, Jurassic Park tie-in cups from various fast food restaurants (I can’t quite recall, but I imagine that they were from McDonald’s), and a Jurassic Park coloring book. My classroom was practically a showroom for Jurassic Park merchandise, in a way I hadn’t seen before and never saw again. As much as I can’t look past the Disney machine when I look at Disney animated films and even the MCU, it was Jurassic Park’s machine that was the first example I can remember. Maybe it created the machine, I don’t know, but certainly in my lifetime, it was the first that I’m aware of. And yet, when I see Disney’s machine, it takes away from the films and when I see Jurassic Park’s, it only serves to make the movie feel more plausible.

Ellie’s fear was palpable, real, and shared by the audience

So then, how is it that nearly three decades after the movie’s release and 25 years after its first sequel, The Lost World, Jurassic Park is still in desperate need of a truly good sequel? The Lost World was a huge letdown at the time; it did everything a sequel was supposed to do, absolutely by-the-numbers. Bigger stakes, bigger set pieces, and a much higher body count. But it was this by-the-numbers approach that was its ultimate downfall. Mindless violence is fine every once in a while, but horror happens when you care about the characters in peril. The Lost World serves up large swathes of InGen’s zero-to-one-dimensional PMC red shirts for the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna to feed on, tear apart, and swallow whole by a romantic waterfall. I don’t care about any of them—they simply exist to show how dangerous the island is. Not that there isn’t a place for that; but once the protagonists’ party experiences its first casualty, the emotional connection to imperiled characters starts to wane. Luckily, there are enough characters that were new to the series that they could have bought it when in trouble that you’re still interested, for the most part. Malcolm and his daughter had dino-proof plot armor, for sure, but Vince Vaughn and the incredibly talented Julianne Moore didn’t, not by default. But the story of their survival is interspersed with the paramilitary subplot, which acts solely as a ticking clock to worry the protagonists and never threatens any type of emotional resonance. Even our main protagonists can be hard to empathize with at times; they show concern over the loss of their friend, but while literally hanging on for dear life after a multiple Tyrannosaur attack, they quip about getting cheeseburgers. Now, mind you, if Ian were to make a joke, or a comment, not only would that be fitting his character’s detached demeanor, for him, this is old hat. He’s already been almost killed by a T-Rex; he’s one of the few people on the planet who can say that. But for Moore’s Sarah Harding and Vaughn’s Nick Van Owen, this is the first time they’ve been in this kind of danger. Awfully cool, calm, and collected of them, almost callous, in the face of novel and fantastic danger. It’s unbelievable that photographers and paleontologists would be so together in that moment. In Jurassic Park, the characters felt fear—they felt the danger they were in and imparted that fear to the audience. That just didn’t happen here.

He’s happy now, but wait until he sees the average housing costs

We can argue all day about whether the San Diego scenes at the end of the movie add anything or ruin the movie. I think it’s somewhere in between, but it raises a lot of questions. Look, I’ve pored over the T-Rex escape scene in Jurassic Park dozens of times. I’ve all but build a model out of Legos to try and spatially make sense of it. It doesn’t though; the Tyrannosaur paddock shouldn’t have such a huge drop right there. But the movie is otherwise so masterful, you do your best to just move on from that. It was a breathtaking scene, so even if the landscape doesn’t fit what you see in the movie, you forgive it. However, when the ship runs aground in San Diego, with the crew either dead or missing, with a severed hand hanging on to the controls in the intact wheel house, the suspension of disbelief just stops. I’ve tried to reconcile this nearly as many times. As far as I can tell, the drugged Tyrannosaur wakes up, goes into Solid Snake mode, escapes the cargo hold, quietly eliminates the ship captain. At this point, the T-Rex either kills the rest of the crew or they abandon ship, all but one, whose hand is holding the cargo bay door controls. The Rex then kills this crew member while he’s still holding on to the controls and jumps back down into the cargo bay before the doors shut and eventually malfunction. This is clearly quite a clever and dexterous foe, as he lies in wait for the ship to reach San Diego, where he can unleash his next attack. Obviously, the dinosaur knows all about maritime navigation, as all dinosaurs do. And before you say “It must have been the juvenile Rex who did it”, they do explain that the recovering T-Rex came on the plane with antagonist Ludlow before being reunited with its papa and chowing down on Ludlow (whose fate, much like Peter Stormare’s Dieter, felt far too convenient).

So, The Lost World had lots of problems. And yet, years later, it is a half decent action-horror flick, if you approach it with no expectations. The same can’t be said about Jurassic Park 3; and, frankly, the less said about the film, the better. With a preposterous plot and velociraptors so intelligent they set traps and pontificate about the meaning of life while sipping on tea and smoking a pipe, it’s the kind of movie you work hard to forget.

Turns out *The Critic* was positively prescient when it comes to how ridiculous velociraptors would get in the JP series

At least this oft-memed scene gave zookeepers something for their Instagram pages

Then, it was radio silence for nearly 15 years until Jurassic World hit the theaters in the still-ongoing wave of remakes and reboots, somehow becoming one of the biggest films in box office history. One thing was certain; the film’s success showed there was still a desire to see more of this wonderful world of dinosaurs. Much like its contemporary, The Force Awakens, Jurassic World leans heavily on the structure of the original film, changing out a few plot points here and there while new characters grace the screen alongside some of the old. However, where The Force Awakens was successful, Jurassic World doesn’t exactly hit the notes right. It feels like a song played on the piano, but on the wrong register. The movie is overly sanitized and corporatized now—the clever in-movie marketing was replaced by product placement so egregiously bad even the characters groan at it. The real world touches that made the first film feel so plausible instead make you roll your eyes. Instead of marketing its own merchandise, it became a vehicle for cynical product placement and attempted to pull the wool over your eyes by pointing it out, in a semi-tongue-in-cheek fashion. Also, in a stunning turn of script that was clearly from a child’s fever dream, the military dreams of using guided velociraptors to hunt terrorists. If you haven’t seen the movie or just don’t remember it, that’s not a joke. That’s literally a subplot in the film and it serves up one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in any movie. Also, remember when they designed a dinosaur for their dinosaur zoo that can turn invisible? An invisible attraction. An invisible thing people pay money to look at. See any minor or possibly major problems with that? Jurassic World 2: Jurassicker World, or whatever the subtitle was, managed to be even worse.

We’re now on the eve of Jurassic Park 6: Jurassickest World 3: End of the World Somehow. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and readers, though I appreciate each and every one of you, because it’s not streaming anywhere, I didn’t rewatch it before writing this. I couldn’t bring myself to pay money to see it again. As I recall, in another stunning turn of dumbness, a cloned little girl sees the dinosaurs as the same as herself, and releases them into upstate New York rather than allow them to die. I guess I should applaud her act of empathy, but at the time I felt that she’d be responsible for dozens of injuries and deaths. However, based on trailers, it appears that this handful of dinosaurs released in a forested area in the northeastern US (as I recall, it was upstate New York) have now taken over the world to the point that humanity’s very existence is in danger. As thrilled as I am, at any time, to see Laura Dern on screen, whether it’s a guest spot on The West Wing or as a hyper Type-A mom in Big Little Lies, bringing her back isn’t enough for me to not wonder how a few dinosaurs were able to not only evade the police, National Guard, and any number of military branches to successfully traverse the entire world to create an extinction level event. I somehow can’t envision a scenario in which a Tyrannosaur boards a plane to head to Europe. Now, maybe I’m being too harsh on a movie I’ve yet to see and hasn’t even been viewed by critics yet. But Jurassic World 3 is not off to a promising start. Let’s face it—dinosaurs aren’t kaiju. In The Lost World, Roland Tembo came to the island with the express purpose of hunting a Tyrannosaur with a double barrel elephant gun chambered in .600 Nitro. If you’re not familiar, it’s a big, big bullet meant to kill very large animals (elephants, if that part weren’t obvious). A Tyrannosaur could reach heights of about 40 feet. We’re not talking about Godzilla here; these are animals of killable size when you’ve got a military on your side. Tanks, .50 caliber machine guns, missiles, etc.; I can’t imagine dinosaurs would spread the way they seem to have based on the movie trailers. I hope I’m wrong about this film the way I hoped I was wrong about the Halo season finale. But I wasn’t wrong about Halo…

The diverse Scooby Gang of *Camp Cretaceous* prepares for their next threat

However, one good thing did come of these big, dumb sequels: Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. A children’s cartoon with a diverse cast and shockingly more realistic characters than the Jurassic World films, it manages to capture the spirit of Jurassic Park and do it in a way that’s accessible for kids and adults. It’s kind of the perfect way to keep the brand alive, the way The Clone Wars reinvigorated interest in Star Wars after the disappointment of the prequel trilogy squelched it. Now, the newest film is being touted as the conclusion, but sleeping dogs don’t lie and billion dollar franchises don’t just die. Camp Cretaceous plays in the background of the newer films and thus should reach its own conclusion soon, and as the series continues, it becomes less and less believable as part of the Jurassic Park universe (malevolent robot dogs, mind-controlled dinosaur gladiator fights, etc; we’re one brain box away from this becoming Dino-Riders), but it still manages to be more buyable than Jurassic World 3’s supposed storyline. The kids stranded on the island include a dinosaur enthusiast (hard to call him an expert since he’s, like, 12, and there are actual paleontologists in this series), but more importantly, they had ready made shelter and access to food and water infrastructure, and a group of them to share labor and watch each other’s back (unlike the kid from Jurassic Park 3). It’s still implausible, that a small group of kids could survive a dinosaur island in chaos, but Camp Cretaceous manages to lean just towards believability.

*Camp Cretaceous* manages to bring back some of the magic, now if they could only translate this to adult, live action characters

A quarter of a century later and the best thing we’ve seen so far is this cartoon, which, yes, stretches believability quite a bit at times, but overall has been a positive for the series. I truly believe that. Maybe it’ll go the way of Star Wars. I know the sequel trilogy is still rather controversial (and, in my opinion, had two great movies and a stunning act of cowardice for a finale), but it might draw a road map for where Jurassic Park could go. Hopefully, when the next set of sequels comes around, the filmmakers pare down, really look at what made the first Jurassic Park so special, and do their best to recapture that magic, rather than simply going for bigger and bigger.