Warning: SPOILERS for Jurassic World: Dominion.
The opening scene of Jurassic World: Dominion will deliver sights that Steven Spielberg could only dream of when he made Jurassic Park. Director Colin Trevorrow's 2022 dinosaur movie will close out both his Jurassic World trilogy and the 6-film Jurassic saga Spielberg launched in 1993. However, five minutes of Jurassic World: Dominion footage will accompany IMAX screenings of Fast & Furious 9 so fans can get an early glimpse of the dinosaurs in their literal heyday.
When it was released 28 years ago, Jurassic Park was an astounding, state-of-the-art blockbuster that delivered completely realistic dinosaurs, which was something audiences had never experienced before. A blend of cutting-edge CGI technology and Stan Winston's animatronics, Jurassic Park was also a roller-coaster adventure story but it was the dinosaurs that truly dazzled and left an indelible impression that has lasted for a generation. Yet despite the revolutionary technical wizardry Spielberg and his visual effects team employed to bring prehistoric beasts like the T-Rex, the Brachiosaurus, and Velociraptors to life - and what they achieved still holds up to modern VFX standards - CGI was still in its infancy and they were limited by the technology of the era. Spielberg also maintained the general plot of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel so the director's dinosaur dreams were contained to the dinosaur theme park run amok.
Back in 1993, Spielberg couldn't deliver a sequence like Jurassic World: Dominion's prologue: Trevorrow opens his film back in the Cretaceous era, 65 million years ago. Fans will get to the dinosaurs as they really lived and they'll witness the literal origin of Jurassic Park. In Dominion's opening scene, which also introduces several species of real-life dinosaurs the Jurassic movies haven't shown before, a T-Rex gets into a fight with and is killed by one of the film's new dinos, the Gigantosaurus. However, a mosquito lands on the T-Rex's corpse and sucks its blood before becoming trapped in a tree's amber - and this is the exact same mosquito that InGen recovered and tapped for dinosaur DNA, which enabled John Hammond's (Richard Attenborough) geneticists to clone the T-Rex and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park!
Jurassic World: Dominion's prologue is an ingenious way to bring the story full-circle and homage another of Jurassic Park's memorable sequences when Hammond gave Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) a tour of Jurassic Park's genetics lab to see how the dinosaurs were made. They watched an amusing animated short film describing how a fly bit a dinosaur, got trapped in amber, and had its blood containing dino DNA extracted so that InGen's scientists could clone dinosaurs. Although in the cartoon, the fly bit a Brachiosaurus and not a T-Rex, Jurassic World: Dominion's opening sequence is still the same origin story fully realized.
Jurassic Park's origin cartoon was a snappy and entertaining way to convey Michael Crichton's pseudo-science explaining how the dinosaurs were cloned, and it also perfectly suited John Hammond's reputation as a huckster and showman. But if Spielberg had today's technology back in '93, it's quite possible he would have opted to show the real dinosaurs living and breathing in the Cretaceous era 65-million years ago too. Certainly, no one complained about what wonders Spielberg delivered with Jurassic Park at the time, but Jurassic World: Dominion taking advantage of modern advancements in visual effects means the movie can wow fans (and likely Steven Spielberg himself) in a way the legendary director could only dream of almost 30 years ago.
