Get The Park Out!

This year is the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and what better way to mark the occasion than by watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The latest instalment of dino-mayhem, again starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, is darker and promises to take the franchise to a new direction.

- Douglas Tseng

 Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow vividly remembered the early rounds of discussions he had with Steven Spielberg on helming a Jurassic Park movie six or seven years ago.

“One of the first things I said to Steven was, ‘Look, if this fails, you will continue to be a legend, while I’ll disappear,” Trevorrow told 8 DAYS in 2015.

Trevorrow had every right to be anxious: Spielberg must be out of his mind to hand the key over to a beloved multi-million dollar franchise to a relative newbie who had only made one movie, Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky time-travel dramedy that cost a little over US$750,000 (S$1 mil).

The ’Berg’s US$150 million gamble paid off handsomely: 2015’s Jurassic World was well-reviewed (it averaged 71 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes) and it grossed more than US$1.6 billion worldwide, making it the most successful installment in the series.

And Trevorrow didn’t exactly disappear. For a while, he was hired to write and direct another coveted gig, the untitled Star Wars: Episode IX, but left the project last year over creative differences with the producers. But, hey, that’s another story for another time.

Cut to the present: Trevorrow is back in the trenches of the dinosaur saga, but this time he’s just the co-writer and executive producer on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; the directorial baton is now passed to Juan Antonio ‘JA’ Bayona.

Spielberg chose the 43-year-old Spaniard after he saw The Impossible, his 2012 disaster thriller set against Indian Ocean tsunami of 2014, starring Naomi Watt, Ewan McGregor and future Spider-Man Tom Holland.