In the early 1990s the world changed. As the Cold War came to an end, technocratic scientism arose from the ashes of the old struggle among the superpowers. In the US and Europe, unparalleled material prosperity dissuaded most people from looking too closely at the possible implications of the internet and biomedical innovation. But in popular literature, Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel Jurassic Park, published in 1990, forced us to imagine all the ways we were unleashing unstoppable beasts on ourselves by trying to bend the created order to unnatural ends. It was a page-turner that fleshed out CS Lewis’s thesis in The Abolition of Man: “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”
In 1993, director Steven Spielberg gave Crichton’s novel the full Hollywood treatment, complete with a now-famous score by John Williams. It was a spectacle of computer-generated effects that audiences had never experienced, entertaining us while at the same time ushering in the end of cinema as we had known it. John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough, appears as a sort of Walt Disney character who finds a way to use science to provide humanity with the ultimate nostalgia trip, and the ultimate multi-media thrill: a dinosaur park filled with living, breathing prehistoric creatures. In the film Hammond seems motivated simply by the challenge itself, but in Crichton’s novel, Hammond tells one of his colleagues that “the ultimate object is to make money … lots and lots of money”.
The film and its five sequels, including this summer’s Jurassic World: Dominion, have certainly made a lot of money. Thanks to Crichton’s screenplay, the original followed the book closely, leaving us reticent to believe science could either solve our problems or give us more than we could ask or imagine. Dominion, while hitting many nostalgic notes that will satisfy longtime fans, concludes with a naïve if not reckless message: even if our scientists have made huge mistakes, we have no choice now but to live with them and even to celebrate them, no matter the cost to humanity.
Dominion features Jeff Goldblum in a return role as mathematician Ian Malcolm, by far the best character in the original Jurassic Park book and film. As the annoying prophet of doom chastising everyone who blindly follows science and its dirty money, Malcolm’s most famous quip may now be applied to everything from in vitro fertilisation to genetically-modified corn to self-checkout registers at the supermarket: “Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” In Dominion, however, Malcolm gives in to the almighty dollar, serving as an in-house intellectual at the wicked, appropriately-named Biosyn Corporation, headed by Lewis Dodgson, a minor character in the original film, now played by Campbell Scott. Dodgson is a scatter-brained billionaire geneticist-industrialist-philanthropist who is the banality of evil incarnate. It is a far cry from the larger-than-life villains of yesterday’s films, and of yesterday’s world.
The Catholic viewer of Jurassic World: Dominion will find much to ponder amid a convoluted plot and far too many characters to keep track of, including the return of Sam Neill as Alan Grant and Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler. The original film’s question of animal cloning broadens here in the character of Maisie, a human clone, cared for by the childless, unmarried couple, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard). Maisie forces us to wonder, if we wipe out the unnatural dinosaurs, how should we relate to the unnatural humans? And should we simply accept agricultural innovations required to solve the problem of artificially-created threats to our food supply, like giant locusts?
At the end of Jurassic World: Dominion, we are offered a blithe vision of “coexistence”, but Catholics should imagine instead the bleak portrait of “progress” which Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) described in his 1991 book A Turning Point for Europe as “located below the level of what is genuinely human, and in its depths it is conceived against man”. The failure of the original amusement-park project in the first film, along with the failure of every other dinosaur-related scheme in the subsequent films, reminds us that the cult of scientism is really all for nothing.
In Jurassic Park, Malcolm opines that “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.” In my reckoning, the “G”-word never appears in Dominion, nor does any appeal to the basic moral considerations Crichton explores in the first book and screenplay. But this morality, far from an obstacle impeding our advancement to a better world is, in Ratzinger’s words again, “the defence of man against the attempt to abolish him”. Spielberg’s original film – despite all the big science it took to make it – affirms the goodness of moral limits on humanity’s innovations. Jurassic World: Dominion just makes “lots and lots of money”.
You may find Jurassic World enjoyable for an outing to the cinema. But if you go, do not check your humanity at the door.
Andrew Petiprin is the Venerable Fulton J Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute
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