Colin Trevorrow explains why Jurassic World: Dominion‘s prologue didn’t make the final cut
Fans can probably guess why the clip was cut from the two-and-a-half hour film
Aux News Colin Trevorrow
It’s hard to imagine there’s anything left on the cutting room floor of these behemoth, two-plus hour mega-blockbusters, but of course, there’s always more content. Just ask Colin Trevorrow, whose prologue for Jurassic World: Dominion isn’t even in the movie.
It was, however, released online for the viewing public late last year to wet everyone’s whistle for the coming dino invasion. The better part of the prologue is a peaceful, nature-movie take on when dinosaurs ruled the planet before cutting to the not-so-peaceful coexistence 65 million years later.
In a new interview, The Wrap questioned Trevorrow about the “beautiful and Malick-ian” cut scene. But the clip was “Maybe too Malick-ian for a big summer movie,” the director admitted. “It was the beginning of the movie, it’s the first five minutes of the film and something I’m very proud of. In our negotiations for how long this movie could be, and it’s still a pretty long movie, we realized that it was going to have to go.”
“Universal supported my request to just give it to everyone for free and let people watch this prologue as a way to bring them into the world that we were creating,” he went on. “Hopefully, and I could almost say assuredly, someday you will be able to see it again.”
Truthfully, you can see it again whenever you want. You could even watch it right now (below):
But Trevorrow presumably means “see it again” as part of a theatrical release, or at least “see it again” with the rest of the movie following immediately after. The Wrap asked if a director’s cut might be “coming our way,” to which Trevorrow responded, “We’ll see. We’ll see how things go. Fingers crossed.”
That’s right, if you’re really dino crazy, you might be rewarded with an extended cut of a two-and-a-half hour movie. That’s modern cinema for you!
42 Comments
OK, so why the fuck are dinosaurs loose in America?I didn’t watch the first two.
It’s the damn Democrats!
Thanks Obama!
The 2nd Coming of Jesus happened at the end of the 1st one and that started the Rapture which involved dinos coming back. Also it turns out Ian Malcolm is a clone of Jesus sent back in time to correct the timeline.
It was called the velocirapture
As foretold by the VelociPastor.
In the middle of a… velocipasture?
Nice try. We all know Jesus is a clone of Ian Malcolm.
A little girl set them loose upon the world. Literally. And we’re actually supposed to care about her and NOT view her as the villain.
Are…are you serious?It’s one of THOSE plot devices?
A little girl let about 50 dinosaurs at most loose from a facility…and now, they’ve somehow managed to multiple to thousands, including a bunch of species that were decidedly not released in the initial freeing, and they have spread to every corner of the globe somehow.
She’s not any girl; she’s a human clone as genetic messing-arounds by InGen got further out of hand under the other guy who worked with Hammond. So when the dinos that had been brought over to Northern California for black-market sale were on the verge of dying, the girl opened the gate as a defiant move that those dino clones were alive like her.Dominion tries to alleviate some of her responsibility by showing other parts of the world was already bringing dinos to the mainland via black-market selling, but still, kids, man. No wonder Alan didn’t want them!
A cool side-effect of this plot line is that it bled over into the new JW: Evolution 2, which is a sim game in which you run your own dinosaur park. In the first game, you’re ostensibly just building your own dinosaur zoo/theme park for profit. However, in the second, it’s reframed as you building refuges for wild dinosaurs, emphasizing the humanitarian side of the work. In the first game, you sent teams of archeologists to find fossils to create new dino genomes, while in the second, you send out extraction teams to take in wild dinosaurs that are sighted around the world, sometimes explicitly rescuing them from poaching or other inhumane situations. The two games are really similar in gameplay, but that change to the campaign plotline makes the games very different in tone and scope.
No wonder Alan didn’t want them!See, I liked the kids in the original JP. They act like kids would – in awe at the dinosaurs, but still with a sense of self-preservation and smarts. Idiot defiance and obliviousness is what I don’t like in movies, and that’s what they did in the later ones, where the kids simply do stupid things to create drama and move the plot forward. It’s not just kids, of course, I hate this trope in, but the reason they use kids is so we, the audience, don’t feel like when can call them out on it. Awww, so she snuck aboard the RVs to go to Dangerous Dino Island even though her dad explicitly told her not to – but she’s just a kid!It’s a cheap trick, and not the good kind.
Plus, as Alan pointed out, kids smell.
In the second World film, a previously thought to be inactive volcano, on the island Jurrasic Park (and Jurassic World) were built on, turns out to be very active. So the new owners of the island decide they should save as much of dinos as possible. This turns out to be a ruse and the dinos are actually being sold on the black market. Chris Pratt, new eco terrorist Bryce Dallas Howard, and friends, let them all escape into the San Fransisco high lands. Not before a bunch of dinos get transported around the world.
Rumspringa.
I almost saw this yesterday because I had the day off and figured a noon-o’clock movie with an edible might be the right distraction but held off because the reviews have been so bad.So I didn’t but I keep seeing clips that look pretty cool and, really, how bad can it be? It has dinosaurs.Then I remember that I having similar thoughts about Die Hard II: Die Harder (it’s a Die Hard movie! With Dennis Franz! and John Amos as a bad guy!) every few years and end up regretting it.
I saw it with an edible, and even thought the movie is garbage, I had a BLAST watching it
I need more recommendations for big dumb action movies that edibles make fantastic. So far Jupiter Ascending is at the top of the list: we watched it while high and we had SO MUCH FUN because that movie is just total batshit insanity.
The Jurassic franchise is the Die Hard II of franchises.
Never occurred to me before, yet it is the perfect description. So I thank you for that.
I think it will mostly boil down to how much you like the original “Park” cast. I was able to dull my senses during the “World” part of the movie and delighted in seeing the old guard, who aren’t glorified cameos and are thankfully a big part of the entire movie.
Die Hard 2 rules
at least it was cut so deep into production that we still got the awesome feathered T. rex in Jurassic World Evolution 2.
if I’m honest, that was pretty blah, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the movie. (Which i do want to see regardless of the fact Fallen Kingdom sucked)
It’s very much not indicative of the movie, not the least of which because the only time you see dinos running around the mainland is the opening two minutes of the film.
Lawrence of Arabia is 3 hours 42 minutes. Ben Hur is 3 hours 32 minutes. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is 2 hours 41 minutes. The Bridge on the River Kwai is 2 hours 41 minutes. Long films aren’t some invention of “modern cinema.” Maybe the stories modern movies have to tell aren’t strong enough to carry a 2.5 hour movie for all 2.5 hours, which is why everyone complains complains complains blah blah blah.
Also, rather than weakly falling back on the inane “movies are so long these days” trope maybe just come up with a better way to end your dinosaur movie story?
I think modern audiences are more advanced so the stories have to be longer. We’ve seen the heroes journey played out so many times at this point there is some necessary setup and subversion that has to happen that inevitably adds to the run time
I’ve seen some stats over the years indicating that movies have gotten longer, on average, since the earlier days of cinema. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to scrape together runtime data, especially with IMDB at hand.
Lawrence of Arabia, at least, had an intermission.
Agreed mate, I’ve often said there’s no absolute “too long” for a film, just films that don’t justify their running time.At nearly 4 hours “Once Upon A Time In America” is one of my favourite films. But any give Judd Apatow film is almost always 20 minutes too long.
So recut JW:D with an entr’acte? Got it!
The nature documentary vibe was cool but I can see why they didn’t think it added anything but extra run time to the movie.
It’s really distracting that the first dinosaurs we see apparently teleported into place as there’s no disturbance in the mud around their feet, and then later there’s those kids just chilling out in the back of a pickup as literally everyone around them is screaming in fear. Someone please tell me the actual movie doesn’t have weird gaps in logic like these.
There’s some suspension of disbelief to begin with, even past the whole “old mosquito DNA + frogs” dinosaur movie you’re watching. In the first one, if the brachiosauruses were as big as depicted, Alan and Ellie wouldve spotted them miles before getting to their feet, and everyone would’ve heard and felt Rexy coming to the rescue inside the compound at the end.“Just repeat to yourself it’s just a show…”
It’s another movie (of six) about dinosaurs chasing people around a park. How much logic do you need?
It’s a shame, Dr. Ellie Sattler leading a dinosaur revolution on Coruscant really put the rest of the film in context.
Honestly I thought this scene was better than the entire movie. It had (a) genuine suspense (ok not a ton but for a few seconds), (b) some level of human interest, and (c) dinosaurs.Yes, in my dino-cloning movie I’d prefer if most of the plot revolved around cloned dinos, and not, say, cloned locusts (that threaten *plants*… I mean, that’s bad, but it’s not “thriller-adventure movie bad”), and a cloned person.
*whet
Quit stealing my moves
“Quit stealing my moves” -> “Quit stealing my moves!”
“Wet” in “wet your whistle” is the right word. Now if they wrote “wet your appetite,” that’s something else.