The Jurassic World Director Finally Gave Us All the Truth Behind the Leaked Plot

Colin Trevorrow, director of the upcoming Jurassic World, was forced into damage control mode when leaked plot details got us all excited about Chris Pratt as a dino-Pokémon trainer. The movie is still just over a year away, but we now know a whole lot about the movie and the truth in the rumors.

And there’s actually plenty of truth in them. Although, things may have been taken out of context a little, because there’s a big difference between reading a plot detail on the Internet and seeing it unfold in a movie theater.

That’a difference Trevorrow isn’t too happy about, either. He told /Film (whose full interview is definitely worth a read):

That’s the thing about leaks, sometimes they aren’t misinterpreted or false. They’re real story elements that the filmmakers were hoping to introduce to the audience in a darkened movie theater. But unfortunately, in 2014, you read about it on a computer. Last week was discouraging for everyone on our crew–not because we want to hide things from the fans, but because we’re working so hard to create something full of surprises. …I hope whoever leaked it is actively trying to undermine what we’re doing. Because if they’re trying to help, they’re doing it wrong.

But… are there “good guy” dinosaurs that Chris Pratt has trained to fight the “bad guy” dinosaurs, though? Probably not. Trevorrow elaborated:

There’s no such thing as good or bad dinosaurs. There are predators and prey. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park took human lives, and saved them. No one interpreted her as good or bad. This film is about our relationship with animals…

Chris Pratt’s character is doing behavioral research on the raptors. They aren’t trained, they can’t do tricks. He’s just trying to figure out the limits of the relationship between these highly intelligent creatures and human beings. If people don’t think there’s potential in those ideas, maybe they won’t like this movie. But I ask them to give it a chance.

So, he’s not actively training “good” dinosaurs to fight off bad ones, but what I take away from this is that there’s a strong likelihood that we’ll see dinosaurs that have learned that Pratt is a friend act based on that connection.

But what about crazy cross-bred dinosaurs and the rest of the plot details? Trevorrow said the movie will take place in a fully functional dinosaur park 22 years after the original Jurassic Park (which I’m going to go ahead and guess is called “Jurassic World”). The mutant T-Rex we heard about isn’t so much a freakish mutated monster as it is a way to keep the park’s audience interested, since the public in the film has become as desensitized to real dinosaurs as we have to CG ones.

The mutation of the T-Rex comes from filling the gaps in its recovered DNA (as was done with the dinosaurs in the original) with the DNA of other animals to make it “something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get.”

Basically, none of the leaked details were outright false, but they made it seem like the movie was getting crazier than Ian Malcolm’s laugh. Instead, Trevorrow’s version sounds like it’s getting back to what was so compelling about the first Jurassic Park: an examination of what happens when the allure of profits overrides our better judgment, and what happens to our dominance over nature when our technology fails.

Trevorrow said:

When Derek [Connolly] and I sat down to find the movie, we looked at the past two decades and talked about what we’ve seen. Two things came to the surface.

One was that money has been the gasoline in the engine of our biggest mistakes. If there are billions to be made, no one can resist them, even if they know things could end horribly.

The other was that our relationship with technology has become so woven into our daily lives, we’ve become numb to the scientific miracles around us. We take so much for granted.

…We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. “We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?” Next year, you’ll see our answer.

(/Film via io9 and The Mary Sue, image via Jurassic World)

Meanwhile in related links

• Here’s a song made from Ian Malcolm’s laugh
• We’re so excited that Chris Pratt will be in this movie
• Transformers: Age of Extinction has dinobots!