Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Turned Ian Malcolm Into a Prophet

Sunday, May 16, 2021

Jurassic Park's fate was predicted early in the franchise by Ian Malcolm. Since then, his thoughts have made him something of a prophet.

In 1993, Jurassic Park introduced the world to Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician invited to explore the groundbreaking park before its grand opening. Malcolm posited an ethical idea before a power outage unleashed its deadliest dinosaurs on the island's inhabitants. He believed that the dangers of wielding genetic power and creating these creatures would ultimately backfire as evolution and nature find a way to expand into the modern world. His comment was treated as a joke when he presented it, but years later, his words of wisdom have turned him into a prophet.

The Jurassic Park franchise has always been popular for its dinosaurs and the terrifying situations that arise from interacting with them. But at its core, in both the films and books, the series is about genetic power and how its misuse can do more harm than good. The original film teases the applications of genetic science when Dr. Wu says they deny the necessary chromosome to make dinosaurs male, effectively halting unmonitored breeding. While that plan ultimately failed and the dinosaurs began to produce offspring, the concept of designing dinosaurs is the point of interest for Wu and other parties.

In the first film, Malcolm stated to John Hammond that "genetic power is the most awesome force the planet has ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who has found his Dad's gun." What Malcolm couldn't have predicted was that Hammond and his scientists wouldn't be the only ones trying to wield the gun. As the franchise continued, companies like InGen desperately tried to obtain samples or live dinosaurs to create their own Jurassic Park. While their plans were thwarted, the Jurassic World films continued the idea with a new park that was not only functioning but, with the help of Dr. Wu, also creating entirely new dinosaurs that never existed.

In the more recent films, interested parties wanted to use dinosaurs like the Velociraptor for military applications. Since that raised ethical issues, Dr. Wu used the same hybrid make-up of the Indominus Rex to create the Indoraptor, a smaller, deadlier and slightly more obedient version of its predecessor. By creating these creatures, Dr. Wu proved that everything Malcolm warned him of decades ago was finally going to come true.

By the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the final steps in genetic power and the evolution of these dinosaurs had come to pass. The young girl in the film, named Maisie, was revealed to be the cloned daughter of Hammond's old business partner Benjamin Lockwood and decided to free the dinosaurs into the United States. Maisie's creation, along with the dinosaur's freedom, strengthened Malcolm's words two-fold, as he was now alive in a time that genetic engineering had made human life and the illusion of control established in Jurassic Park had finally faded away.

When a volcano threatened to make the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar extinct again, Dr. Malcolm believed that nature was telling humanity that the dinosaur's time had passed once again. However, the higher powers of the world went against this logic and stole a percentage of them to sell to the highest bidder. Had Hammond and his scientists heeded Malcolm's warnings decades ago, his adage that "life finds a way" wouldn't come to pass, and his prophetic warnings of the future wouldn't weigh so heavy on his shoulders.

Source: www.cbr.com/