Shadows of Jurassic Park: Top Non-Dinosaurs of the Big Screen

Lately I’ve been thinking about Jurassic Park. These thoughts aren’t spontaneous. They’ve been forced inside me by the marketing forces that be, the world so rampantly preparing me for our next dinosaur adventure that I can’t help but fantasize, once again, about the creatures of simultaneous awe and terror which seem to endlessly feed the imaginations of film makers everywhere.

Jurassic World might be right around the corner, there’s something else going on ticking on my mind. Dinosaurs existed. They were real. That’s why the first Jurassic Park was so damn good, because it lingers so close to reality.

This is reality, folks.

In movies, though, they’ve inspired a host of other creatures, never real, yet nevertheless affecting in their own way. For a filmmaker, overcoming the hurdle of convincing an audience that a creature is real is made infinitely more difficult by the fact that it never existed in the first place. Still we grasp so tightly onto some of these big guys.

I want to know why they matter, and how they came to matter, in the context of their relation to dinosaurs, literally our original monsters, as represented in Jurassic Park. Like the historical beasts, these fictional ones are intelligent, but not anthropomorphic. They’re uncontrollable, but not without purpose. They reflect on humanity, but they’re beasts. Consider this a game, of sorts. How do these movie monsters build on the real-world image of the dinosaur, and how do they divert from it? Let’s start with the most blatantly obvious bad-ass ever to challenge your understanding of scale.

WARNING: Spoilers Served up on Over-sized Platters

Godzilla

A behemoth in more ways than one, Godzilla is the monster on the horizon so large you can’t avoid seeing it. He looms by simply showing his face, and demolishes by simply walking. Of complete and utter dominance in the food chain, of near-apocalyptic indestructibility, Godzilla is somehow a force lacking in the malevolence movie goers assume in a creature that needs a mile-wide panoramic to show in full. He is, miraculously, a force of good. Godzilla is nature, and man’s inability to control it. That should remind you of Jurassic Park, because that is Jurassic Park.

The potential utopia imagined by John Hammond, the white-suited creator of the park, never comes to fruition for just one reason: nature finds a way to break free. Godzilla, especially as depicted in last year’s American film, performs the ultimate balancing act by awakening from the sea to fell the only two predators on the planet that pose a threat to him. Humans benefit, of course, with the peace brought on by the existence of only one force too great for them too handle.

Hammond could never accept this. In his journey control the dinosaurs, themselves representative of a dominant force in Earth’s true history, Hammond’s vision fell to utter ruin. So, in this way, Godzilla represents the collective presence of all the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, only he’s so utterly humongous as to never even tempt the humans to exert their control over his will.

Toothless

I debated including the true star of both How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2 on this list. There’s such a strong personality in the character of Toothless, it prevents you from distilling his presence down into just one thematic purpose. We’ll try anyway. He’s a dragon that’s actually a stray dog.

Our understanding of Toothless evolves in perfect thematic stride with the first movie. He appears as a shadow in the night sky, erupting devilish bursts of fiery energy from his gut. He’s a demon. But, later, he’s wounded and grounded. The shroud lifted, a friendly face appears. It wasn’t like we assumed him to be. As he transitions from mysterious and terrifying to adorable and endearing, the resident vikings slowly come to understand the outlier dragons as much more than the natural enemy, and eventually they become natural friends. It’s a kid’s movie, but the heart of it is strong. Know, before you act.

Eventually, we know Toothless to be an intelligent, emotive creature capable of an empathy matching that of his human counterparts. I’m going out on a limb here, but I want to say that’s the equivalent of Chris Pratt’s raptor pack to be seen in Jurassic World. If they do it right, we should be crying when one of them falls to the big bad dino. In any case, there’s also the question of respect at play in both stories. Respect what you don’t know as much as what you do. Jeff Goldblum is the equivalent dinosaur in that equation.

Cloverfield

If Godzilla is nature, then the Cloverfield monster is chaos. From the moment it crash-lands into America’s beating heart, New York City, calamity ensues without a moments recession. The true image of the Coverfield monster isn’t the beast itself; it’s this:

Liberty and freedom literally beheaded, civilization torn in half, an invisible, inescapable force of destruction.

You don’t need to see this thing to know it’s there, but the horror of that fact is you can’t ever know when it’s going to stumble in your way and totally muck up your day. A group of mid-twenty friends scramble through the city as skyscrapers fall around them, meeting their ends in equally horrible and random ways. Chaos is nature’s fuel, which makes the Cloverfield monster our T-Rex, through and through. You might just about see it coming. That means it’s too late.

Oh, and if the only reason you’re reading this is for the pictures; fine, here you go:

That’s the best I’m willing to do.

Gareth Edwards’ Monsters

On another about-face, we approach the lovers of the non-dinosaur road. Gareth Edwards was rewarded with the directorship of 2014’s Godzilla due very much to his directorial debut, Monsters. You might have finished Godzilla a little baffled at the titular character’s diminished screen time, but if you had seen Monsters beforehand, you’d understand Edwards’ thinking. He’s a designer of build-up, then explosive release. But when Godzilla ultimately spewed an irradiated beam of energy through a M.U.T.O.’s neck, Edwards’ own creations did something a little different. They mated.

After an entire movie of destruction and despair, our two human travelers come across two very non-human travelers. Turns out, when the military isn’t on the attack, they’re just animals like the rest of us. They seek companionship, maybe even love, and it’s our fear of them that turns them into monsters. The visual design is deliberately alien in an attempt to mask their alarming sensitivity until the very end. Pierce that veil of hostility and you see some humanity. Jurassic Park went for this moment high up in the trees, when three stranded survivors welcomed the passing-by of a feeding brontosaurus. It’s a moment of levity in a film of constant danger.

Xenomorph

Finally, somehow more terrifying than Godzilla at a mere hundredth of the scale, the Xenomorph of the Alien movies is adaptation at its most vicious. The raptor, in other words. Turning something so essential to our understanding of the world, adaptation and evolution, into something so primal to our fear of it, the dread of a smarter foe, is at the heart of both these creatures’ efficacy in suspense and fear. We’re a species that prides and thrives on intelligence. Introduce a physically superior hunter with an intelligence to match, and you’ve got a recipe for a franchise.

“Clever girl.”

Honorable Mentions

The Dragon that Mercifully Ended Reign of Fire in the Best Way Possible

Video Game Mention: Evolve, for the Hunt of It

Kanye

Grand Conclusion

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, this was all just a thinly concealed attempt to get you to watch Jurassic Park again. Also, dinosaurs are cool and Godzilla could eat them all.

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