Somehow, the cloned dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are about to return for the seventh film in the series, a soft reboot called Jurassic Park Rebirth, which will take us back to the islands where dinosaurs still rule the Earth. It’s been a long and winding road (full of murderous raptors) to get to this point, and although Rebirth is bringing back original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, there has been a lot of dinosaur continuity between 1993 and 2025.
Based on the 1990 novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, the original text dealt with one of the author’s favorite themes: a sci-fi theme park run amok. Like his 1973 film Westworld, Crichton seems to have an obsession with recreating the past through sci-fi means, and then having contemporary humans get hunted by modern-day-Frankenstein monsters. And yet, unlike the darkness of Westworld (and the relative grimness of Crichton's two Jurassic books), this concept also lent itself to strangely idealistic movies in which the horror of recreating extinct life is mashed up perfectly with a childlike love of dinosaurs. The first Jurassic Park is also, almost certainly, the best-known role of actor Sam Neill, who recently passed away at the age of 78.
