Fallen Kingdom - April 18

The latest, and apparently the last, JW: FK trailer was released today. And?

And it is set in a world where dinosaurs – well, non-avian dinosaurs – will live alongside humans freely from now on, it seems. This puts JW (the movie franchise) right next to FH and the rest of Ubisoft™ games – firmly in the realm of fiction.

Here is the thing…actually, several things. FH itself is continuing to improve; the new training mode of the game truly makes things better and easier in the game, so there is no reason to complain about it, not in the immediate range. Many of FH’s initial flaws were technical, so Ubisoft™ fixed them with minimal fuss, and by now FH acquired or re-acquired enough of a stable fanbase to keep itself, well, stable. And flourishing. Good for them indeed, and if they have not released any of new heroes, then that is not a problem either: with the ‘regular cast’ increased from 12 characters to 18, there is someone for everyone already.

…If we are talking about Ubisoft™, then yes, there was the ‘Far Cry 5’ game released by it earlier in 2018 too. It is a good game, but very different from FH not just on the obvious level, but from the initial layout onwards. People have enjoyed playing it as well, but enough of them also agree that it is not the best ‘Far Cry’ game either. I am not really a big specialist of those Ubisoft™ games, so I am not going to go down there, sorry. …But ‘Far Cry 5’ still deserves a mention, because it is an Ubisoft™ game as well, if nothing else.

Back to the JW franchise? Look. From the start, even Michael Crichton made it an AU – if you read his first novel, for example, you will learn that that is a world where genetic modification was a part of common-day life; Hammond (the book character, and a different from how he was depicted in the movie), had a dwarf elephant, the size of a cat or a rat; his archrival, (the one who bribed Nedry in the first place), tested some sort of an anti-rabies vaccine on cattle in South America, and illegally too, but it didn’t feature in the movies, so that’s not the point – the point is that in the novels, the Jurassic Park and its’ associated existed in a universe that was alternate to ours from the start; and now…

Now we are going into the full realm of science fiction, just with dinosaurs rather than space travel or whatever. The Indoraptor looks like a cross between a raptor from the JP3 movie and a D&D troll, while acting like an all-too-human stalker of young children…but so did the dinosaurs, or rather – especially the carnivores – in the original novels; they just couldn’t help but to kill humans just because, and the previous JW movie was actually more restrained than the JP3 film was in that area. Anything else?

The mosasaur seems to act rather like a monster shark from the recent monster movies would, but so what? ‘The Meg’ is also coming later in 2018 and it shows that the shark – or rather, an idea of the shark – has appropriated its’ own place among fictional monsters, so there is that. So far, no one has tried to create a ‘Jurassic shark’, but I am sure that between the ‘Deep Blue Sea’ movie series and the upcoming ‘Meg’ movie someone will.

…In related news, ‘Westworld’ the TV series is returning to TV in 2018 too; it is a Jurassic Park but with androids (mostly cowboy androids, but there are others, or there will be), instead of dinosaurs. The S1 of the series was already very exciting, so there is every reason to believe that the S2 will be just as good. Hurray!

…And that is it for now, see you all soon.