The Jurassic Park franchise is now more than a quarter of a century old. I recently watched the latest installment not really expecting to see a movie, but rather a collection of very impressive special effects.
And I was not disappointed. What I saw didn’t feel like a movie in the traditional sense. I happily watched giant dinosaurs chasing people, and I didn’t feel a bit emotionally involved. And that was ok, because the dinosaurs looked completely awesome, as expected.
I found myself wondering why I felt so detached from all the chasing and chomping happening on the big screen. At some point it occurred to me that it was because of what I now think of as the “Jurassic Park superpower”.
Basically, any character who you care about in a Jurassic Park movie is completely invulnerable. The biggest baddest carnivorous dinosaur cannot harm such a character, no matter how hard it may try.
This includes any character who is a hero, or a heroine, or a cute child, or simply has a good self-deprecating sense of humor. Which of course leaves the bad guys.
Bad guys in these movies have a sort of anti-superpower. The iron clad rule in a Jurassic Park movie is that if you are the sort of low minded fool who willfully unleashes the mighty beasts of death and destruction (usually because you want to get rich), then said beasts will inevitably devour your sorry self before the end credits roll.
It would ruin everything if anyone on-screen realized they were actually in a Jurassic Park movie. None of the good guys would ever run away in terror, the bad guys would know better than to mess with Mother Nature in the first place, and the whole enterprise would fall apart.
Good thing they don’t know.