A definitive ranking of every ‘Jurassic Park’ movie
There is no cliffhanger at the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece, Jurassic Park.
After the harrowing events on Isla Nublar, the main characters make it out alive, gliding across the ocean to safety in a helicopter. In a perfect, dare I say poetic, touch, Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) looks out the window and sees a flock of pelicans flying beneath them, highlighting the connection between the dinosaurs from millions of years ago and the present day.
The main issue with resurrecting Jurassic Park for sequels is that everyone at the end of the film agrees that bringing dinosaurs back from extinction is a terrible idea, even John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who spearheaded the effort. How can you possibly rehash the same idiotic idea six (and counting) more times? Various writers and directors have approached this conundrum over the years and have largely proven that the answer is not very well at all.
That said, there have been several creative attempts, including having a kid get stranded on the island after a watersports incident and having the island sink into molten lava. No matter how far they try to stray from the original plot, all of these sequels have included certain mandatory throughlines. At best, they seem like homages and at worst, they seem like a complete and utter lack of imagination.
There is always at least one precocious child who ends up in danger. There is usually some sort of deus ex machina when a dinosaur attacks another dinosaur just before it’s about to kill a main character. There is always some Icarus figure who thinks he (it’s always a he) can control nature. And there is usually at least one nerd whose death serves as comic relief. Contrary to what some of these sequels seem to hope, however, these tropes alone do not constitute a good movie.
Ranking every Jurassic Park movie from worst to best:
‘Jurassic World Dominion’ (Colin Trevorrow, 2022)
There is an extended version of this film, and I’m going to be completely transparent here and tell you that I gave myself grace on that one. Two and a half hours is long enough. In fact, it’s too long by approximately two and a half hours. There’s no need to suffer through an additional 20 minutes. The general idea behind this instalment is that the people making it regretted where they ended things with the previous movie.
In 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, some super dinosaurs escape a black market auction and end up living alongside humans on the mainland US. But Dominion really doesn’t want to deal with that, so it starts with a news reel that gets it all out of the way quickly and then switches to a conspicuously dinosaur-free plot-line involving a cloned child, Bryce Dallas Howard’s guilt about once being a corporate gal, and Chris Pratt’s preoccupation with being the stereotypical American Man. He rides horses while wearing a cowboy hat. He chops wood. He hammers stuff. And in case you missed it from the first and second Jurassic World movies, he has a motorcycle that seems to need a lot of repairing.
The plot here involves a tech billionaire who has engineered a plague of enormous locusts in order to convince everyone to produce locust-resistant Biosyn crops. Again, where are the dinosaurs? God knows how much Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum were paid to appear in this soulless exercise in franchise overreach, but no number of zeroes could make it worth it.
‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ (JA Bayona, 2018)
To their credit, the people who wrote Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom really seemed to want to do something different. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is now a dinosaur rights activist after spending years trying to exploit them at the Jurassic World theme park. Chris Pratt has graduated from fixing his motorbike to building a cabin with his own bare hands. And instead of taking place largely on Isla Nublar, we are asked to endure an urban setting after the island melts down in a volcanic eruption. Here on the mainland, we meet a cloned child named Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who arrives seemingly out of the blue and fails to make a case for why we should care.
This film deserves modest praise for attempting to do something new, but without the teeming life of the jungle, it all feels a bit sterile. Perhaps if the characters ever seemed like human beings rather than blockbuster archetypes, it would be easier to get swept up in the intrigue, but since they never do, it’s hard to care about all the action and abductions and dinosaur flailing. Ultimately, it’s a CGI spectacle that feels wholly divorced from Spielberg’s original vision.
‘Jurassic World’ (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)
Depending on what you were hoping for from this reboot, you might have been delighted by Jurassic World. Even the critics seemed pleasantly surprised. If you were hoping to see what 2015 CGI could do with dinosaurs, you were probably thrilled. If you were hoping to delve back into the muddy, rain-drenched jungle with a handful of endearing scientists, you were probably sorely disappointed. This film played it safe by retreading familiar territory. Two kids go to visit a relative who runs a dinosaur theme park on Isla Nublar and end up on the wrong side of the electric fence. Unfortunately, some key elements are missing.
For one thing, the new main characters – Chris Pratt as a Navy veteran-turned-raptor whisperer and Bryce Dallas Howard as the park’s operations manager – are so lacking in personality that they never once make you believe in them, let alone care. This is only exacerbated by the fact that they have no chemistry whatsoever. For another, the filmmakers seem to have decided that since CGI had improved so greatly since the original trilogy, they might as well make everything CGI.
Some of the film was shot in Hawaii, apparently, but it may as well have been a green screen. The setting is so pristine that it looks as though it has just been scrubbed clean. Whenever the characters run through the jungle or get caught between warring dinosaurs, their makeup remains smudge-free, their hair is elegantly mussed, and the dirt on their faces looks like bronzer. The dinosaurs might look more realistic than they did in the earlier films, but the island and the people do not.
Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001)
At this point, you will have realised that this worst-to-best ranking is the series in reverse-chronological order, but that just happens to be how the movies shake out. There will be plenty of people who argue that the third Jurassic Park is inferior to the reboots. Yes, the CGI in Jurassic Park III is hideously outdated from the moment the kid starts parachuting in the opening scene, but it doesn’t detract from the thrill of seeing Sam Neill fight for his life in a torrential downpour while being attacked on all sides by murderous dinosaurs.
The premise is a long shot, even by the standards of dinosaur theme parks. Dr Grant is short on cash for his archaeological exploits and agrees to do a fly-by of Isla Nublar with a supposedly wealthy couple (Tea Leoni and William H Macy). They have other plans, and he quickly finds himself in a crashed aeroplane on the island with dinosaurs bearing down on them.
Again, the CGI leaves much to be desired, but Dr Grant remains one of the most loveable characters in the franchise. It also manages to be completely immersive despite the shonky special effects. There is a sequence near the end when the characters are trapped in a sinking cage in a tsunami of a rainstorm, and it is more visceral, muddy, and suspenseful than anything the rebooted series has yet delivered.
‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’ (Steven Spielberg, 1997)
Steven Spielberg literally phoned in this movie. When a family concern forced him to be absent for the first part of filming, the studio set him up with a fibre optic video link to direct from afar. Even when he got back onto set, however, he wasn’t pleased with how things were going. He’d made box office history with the first Jurassic Park and won an Oscar for Schindler’s List in the interim, and when he found himself back in the realm of dinosaurs, it left him cold. “It made me wistful about doing a talking picture,” he said, “Because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie.”
Still, a bad Steven Spielberg movie is infinitely better than most other directors’ best efforts. It’s like asking Usain Bolt to run a 100-metre sprint with the stomach flu. He’ll still trounce 99.999% of the competition. The Lost World relies on the dubious charms of Jeff Goldblum as chaotician Dr Malcolm, who reluctantly agrees to go back to a dinosaur-filled tropical island at the behest of Hammond’s nephew. Malcolm thinks he’s there to retrieve his girlfriend (Julianne Moore), who is a scientist conducting research, but discovers that they have both been brought there under false pretences.
The strength of this film is how messy it is. The characters spend a large chunk of their time soaking wet and covered in mud. It looks absolutely miserable, and it’s a joy to watch. Additionally, there is a larger cast of supporting characters to distract from Goldblum’s antics, including the eternally mesmerising Pete Postlethwaite. Lost World lacks the tightly wound perfection and character development of the first film, but it’s still significantly better than the ones that came after.
‘Jurassic Park’ (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Some of the rankings here are arguable, but this one is not. In fact, it feels a bit silly to group this masterpiece with the others because it is so laughably superior. Aside from Jaws, Spielberg has never made a film that so flawlessly combines suspense and spectacle with character. From the moment Hammond crashes Dr Grant and Dr Sattler’s archaeological dig in the desert, we know we’re in safe storytelling hands. The easy banter between the scientists makes you believe that they existed before the film started, and the simple set-up (Hammond needs two respected experts in the field to sign off on his new dinosaur theme park to appease the insurance company) is easy to follow without being predictable.
The CGI of 1993 doesn’t hold up, but it doesn’t have to, because the filmmaker who made us terrified of open water in 1975 without showing more than a few glimpses of the shark knew that the audience will invent a much scarier monster with their imagination than anything he could possibly show on screen. In one scene, the gamekeeper lowers a cow into a dinosaur enclosure with the metal arm of a crane, and instead of showing the creature ripping the animal to shreds, all we see is the wild disturbance in the foliage followed by the mangled metal crane rising slowly from the wreckage.
Just because cutting-edge technology exists doesn’t mean it should be used as often as possible. The fact that a film about dinosaurs made in 1993 is still immeasurably better than more modern efforts is a testament to how Spielberg managed to make Jurassic Park about more than the gimmick of special effects. Show this film to a kid born after 2010, and you can bet that they will still be just as mesmerised as the ones who saw it in the theatre when it came out.
