Gareth Edwards knows a thing or two about sci-fi films. And whether he’s creating his own unique worlds, like Monsters or The Creator, or working in someone else’s, like Godzilla or Rogue One, the director thinks one thing links the entire genre together.
“[Sci-fi] films are never really about spaceships, robots or dinosaurs,” he told io9. “They feel pointless if they are. They [only] have meaning when the whole thing is kind of an analogy for something else.”
So, what is Edwards’ latest film, Jurassic World Rebirth, an analogy for? While not immediately obvious, Edwards found something he really connected with as he was getting ready to approach the material, and it helped inspire him throughout. “As a sci-fi storyteller, you’re always looking for ‘What’s the hidden metaphor for whatever the crazy sci-fi element is?'” Edwards said. “So I kind of went through this a bit going, ‘What is this really about? What’s this story really about as a mythical thing that you keep in your pocket?’ And it felt to me like the dinosaurs were kind of like films.”
Yes, the dinosaurs are films. Let’s let him continue. “The idea of people sort of slowly not going to the cinema, you know what I mean?” Edwards said. “They started trying different things to make them more entertaining, they mutated them, they created this stuff that people can’t watch or look at. And I kind of felt like this, in a weird way I was getting a kick out of, it was some strange version of the situation we’re in as filmmakers, where, like, how do you get people excited about this stuff again? And then it got interesting for me when you can find the meat on the bone. The science fiction of it all.”
Edwards, of course, is alluding to a bunch of things. The decline of movie theaters. The rise of streaming. YouTube. Twitch. And so on. But it also applies to the Jurassic franchise on screen and off. When the original Jurassic Park was released, audiences were completely wowed by the dazzling special effects. But, in the decades since, effects like that have become the norm and audiences want more.
Then, in the 2015 movie specifically, the first of the latest trilogy, the story centers on a dinosaur carefully designed to get bored audiences interested in them again. Now, by Jurassic World Rebirth, dinosaurs are just an everyday part of life that get taken for granted. Like these big, blockbuster movies. So, Edwards wanted to use his film to build off that.
“My first movie was a monster movie set in Central America and all that, and the way I sold it to everyone back then was it begins where all other monster movies end,” he said. “It was supposed to be like, at the end of King Kong, King Kong falls onto the middle of New York and dies… Imagine a movie where they’re now trying to tidy that up and clean it up. How do you move King Kong out of the way for traffic? And it was funny, I’ve always enjoyed that as a starting point. [One person’s] end is a start for someone else. And when I started reading the script, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like that kind of film I really enjoy, which is dealing with the ending of another movie.'”
Not just the ending of another movie but maybe the ending of movies at large. Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters July 2. Check back soon for more from director Gareth Edwards.
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