How Dominion's Prologue Perfectly Connects To Spielberg's Jurassic Park

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Jurassic World Dominion's prologue shows the T-Rex 65 million years ago and ingeniously connects to the dinos' origin in Spielberg's Jurassic Park.

The prologue to Jurassic World Dominion ingeniously connects to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. Directed by Colin Trevorrow, who also helmed 2015's Jurassic World, Dominion will end his trilogy as well as the overall six-film saga that Spielberg's Jurassic Park began in 1993. In addition, Jurassic World Dominion will reunite the original Jurassic Park legacy characters of Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who will meet the protagonists of the Jurassic World films, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Fittingly, Jurassic World Dominion reaches all the way back to the distant past 65 million years ago to bring the dinosaur saga to its conclusion.

Originally released with F9: The Fast Saga during summer 2021, Jurassic World Dominion's prologue begins during the Cretaceous period, showing the dinosaurs in their natural habitat 65 million years ago. Soon, the focus falls on a new dinosaur, the Gigantosaurus, which is seen in Jurassic World Dominion for the first time. The massive super predator gets into a battle with a Tyrannosaurus Rex and quickly kills it. When the T-Rex falls, a mosquito lands on its lifeless head and drinks its blood. Jurassic World Dominion's prologue then cuts to 65 million years later as a T-Rex runs amok at a drive-in movie theater. This is because the dinosaurs that were brought to the mainland during Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom were set loose and are now spreading across the planet.

However, it's no coincidence that the T-Rex is the focus of the prologue because that particular super predator is actually the clone of the T-Rex that the Gigantosaurus killed in Jurassic World Dominion's prologue! Every Jurassic Park fan remembers the famous history lesson scene when John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) showed Drs. Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm how he cloned his dinosaurs. The dino DNA was harvested from a mosquito that drank the blood of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period and was trapped in amber for 65 million years. Incredibly, the mosquito that drank the dead T-Rex's blood in Jurassic World Dominion's prologue is the same one that Hammond's genetics company, InGen, found in amber and extracted dino DNA from the blood the insect drank. So Jurassic World Dominion's prologue is the literal origin story of how Jurassic Park's cloned T-Rex and dinosaurs came to be.

The cleverest part of Jurassic World Dominion's prologue is that it doesn't retcon Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park but adds a new level of nuance to the cloned dinosaurs' origin story that fans had long accepted at face value. Of course, Jurassic Park's origin story also established that InGen was never able to get complete DNA strands from the blood they harvested from mosquitos trapped in amber. Hence, InGen used frog DNA to complete the data strands and clone their dinosaurs. So, Jurassic Park's T-Rex isn't an exact duplicate of the super predator that died during the Cretaceous period, and this explains why there appears to be hair, fur, or possibly feathers on the dead T-Rex's body 65 million years ago. What InGen did was design their dinosaurs to look the way people would imagine the prehistoric creatures would look since they had the power to manipulate the animals' genetics.

The rampaging T-Rex in Jurassic World: Dominion's prologue's present-day also connects back to a similar rampage by a Tyrannosaur in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The climax of Spielberg's 1997 sequel saw a captured T-Rex brought from Isla Sorna AKA Site B to San Diego, where it got loose and stomped around the city and suburbs. But that was a different T-Rex from the original one in Jurassic Park, which is the same super predator that is now free to roam Northern California in Jurassic World Dominion. Fans won't know what will ultimately become of the dinosaurs (and humanity) until Jurassic World Dominion releases in June 2022 but Colin Trevorrow's film already smartly connects to Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park in shrewd ways.

Source: https://screenrant.com/