Some part of my brain still responds to the idea of a new Jurassic franchise movie with excitement, even though experience tells me it’s going to fail to fill the dino-sized shoes of Jurassic Park. It’s the same with Alien. Maybe there’s some element of the inevitable in that because it’s a genuine challenge to make anything that follows as exciting as the first time you were introduced to a great original story, especially when so many of the best gags and scares have already been done so well. Some sequels or spinoffs rise to the challenge by capturing the spirit of the original and weaving it into their own story, but when they try to top it by amping everything up that’s where it goes off the rails for me. It’s like putting a hat on a hat on a…T. rex.  

Jurassic Park (1993) was the total package. It had a fantastic premise based on a Michael Crichton book, directed by Steven Spielberg, with entertaining characters, a well-paced mix of fun and tension, and a thought-provoking message, all wrapped up in the wonder of dinosaurs. There are so many iconic moments from the original film that have stuck with me, like the water rippling in their cups as the T. Rex escapes its paddock, or the guy it grabs for a snack straight off the toilet seat in the outhouse. The dinosaurs were both amazing and terrifying and I had no trouble understanding why John Hammond would want to create Jurassic Park, even though I could clearly see what a terrible idea it was going to turn out to be. Hammond was like Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas but with dinosaurs, laughing and insisting “that’s not my Christmas!” as Sally shows him an omen of a burning tree. Jurassic Park was destined to go down in flames but Hammond really just wanted to do something wonderful for the world.

Fast forward to the Jurassic World era and you still have characters who love dinosaurs, but now the focus is on unappealing people trying to make scarier hybrid dinosaurs to get more money from visitors who their marketing department has presumably told them will lose interest in the same old dinosaurs (Jurassic World, 2015). Or rich fools who want to weaponize them and sell them to the highest bidder (JW Fallen Kingdom, 2018). Or a pharmaceutical executive with an overabundance of cash and a deficiency of empathy who wants to take samples from them to manufacture a new medication and make a fortune off of selling it to sick people (JW Rebirth, 2025).  All believable scenarios, sadly, but why so serious?

None of the ideas people have about what to do with dinosaurs in the Jurassic World movies are good ones, but they’re less charming and relatable bad ideas than the wide-eyed wonder of a dinosaur wildlife attraction. As a kid I would have loved Isla Nublar more than just about anything on earth if I’d been able to go there, although I reckon my folks would have had the good sense to say no even if it existed. It would not have been my mother’s type of vacation in any case. Jurassic Park really captured the beauty and joy and awe of a dinosaur park, as well as the larger-than-life terror of becoming their prey.

When you have an original monster, like Alien or some kind of kaiju, there are no associations and you can make it scary in any way you want, but somehow when you manipulate something that already exists and is already scary to try and make it scarier it can backfire and just seem like overkill. In the Jurassic World films it’s not enough to have dinosaurs on the loose aided by the flawed judgement that stems from greedy entrepreneurialism and scientific hubris. They have to be bigger, smarter dinosaurs. Mutant hybrid dinosaurs. People have to need samples from three kinds of dinosaurs in three separate locations on land, sea, and sky. Why does everything have to be bigger, louder, and have longer arms? That T-Rex isn’t big and scary enough…srsly? A Megagigagigantosaurus is just unnecessary.

I would gladly have watched a movie where an idiot billionaire decides he wants to own a bunch of dinosaurs and ends up with them trashing his mansion and chasing him through the ballroom. It did not need to have the already transgenic Indominus rex now crossed with a velociraptor and engineered as a weapon to be sold, nor did it require the plucky clone of said billionaire’s granddaughter. I would also happily have watched an entire Moby Dick adventure movie about the escaped Mosasaurus that they teased at the end of the first film but never delivered on beyond a boat and a few surfers getting chomped, or an Island of Dr. Moreau mad scientist scenario where Dr. Henry Wu has gone off the deep end and is just making whatever he wants on Isla Nublar. Although that last one comes close to Dr. Jane Tiptree’s plot to replace all humankind with her biogenetically engineered dinosaur spawn in the ridiculously cheesy Roger Corman-produced Carnosaur, which was released one week before Jurassic Park and hailed as the worst movie of 1993 by Roger Ebert.

I didn’t hate the Jurassic World films, but I had the same problem I do with a lot of current blockbuster action flicks, which is that the buildup is lacking and the pitch is unsustainable. There’s a combination of diminished contrast and cognitive overload that just makes me disconnect. It’s like they’ve forgotten how to create tension and don’t realize that the stakes are actually lower if the stakes are always high. Ridley Scott’s Alien was incredibly successful at being scary not just because the Xenomorph was so well designed and scripted, but because most of the time it wasn’t actually on screen. It just had the potential to be on screen slavering right behind you, or worse yet secretly inside someone waiting to burst out at any moment.

In contrast, I felt like Alien Romulus had an underinvestment in dread. Everything happened so fast and there was just so much everything that happened (vague spoilers ahead). Gestation has always been fast in Alien movies but here they don’t give any time for the tension between people and the fear of the aliens to play out. You’re not left wondering who is infected, where the alien is, or when it’s going to appear, because you find out almost right away. I wasn’t even sure that the guy who caused the most conflict and was responsible for dooming a bunch of them would have a moment where he realized what he’d done, and although he kind of does it’s so short it’s not really satisfying. I was disappointed because there was so much more potential for the characters and world they created at the beginning if they’d just expanded on that instead of adding more and more threats.

There are multiple aliens, corporate hacked evil androids, zero-G floating acid (very cool and beautiful but navigating it is the narrative equivalent of hanging off a building by one finger), a bioengineered hybrid xenomorph baby that also grows at warp speed and is way less scary that an actual xenomorph, and just in case you didn’t know you were supposed to be worried there’s a countdown to the space station they’re on crashing into the rings of a planet. Putting a literal timer on the action only works to up the stakes if what the characters are doing feels like it would actually take that amount of time to do. Instead, it almost always just makes me conscious of how improbably much is being crammed into what is supposed to be seconds. By the time the alien hybrid reaches up from the proverbial grave to crack the space helmet of the final girl while she is dragging behind the ship by a cord above the asteroid belt as the ship is about to crash, I’m surprised I can see her helmet under all the hats.   

The entertainment industry is so focused on combatting reward system adaptation by giving us more, but the things they’re giving us more of aren’t what engages me. It’s not a simple exponential equation, so adding 10 T. rexes does not make it 10 times scarier. In fact, it seems that we’ve reached a tipping point to an inverse ratio where the more they add the less I care. If any of the threats were truly as dangerous and terrifying as they should be for a good movie plot device, you wouldn’t need to send in that much backup. It’s like hiring five assassins to kill someone and they each jump in while the others are in the middle of doing their job. It’s a mess, and by the end I no longer care which one gets the job done, I’m just ready for it to be over. When everything is a crisis, the emotional pitch becomes what my grandma would have called “old hat”. Or in this case, old hat on a hat on a dinosaur.  

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Alex MacFadyen thinks Godzilla would actually look very dapper in a fedora.