‘Jurassic World’s’ Indominus Rex: Genetically Modified Horror

Jurassic World opens in two weeks and audiences will be wandering into the thick of the summer tent-pole movies, but you’d better be aware of what’s roaming out there with you — it’s big, it’s terrifying…it’s Indominus Rex.

The park in Jurassic World is a brand new spot, 20 years older on another island, created in the wake of the terrible events in Jurassic Park — which conveniently skips over the less popular second and third sequels of the original trilogy. This new world of dinosaurs, unlike John Hammond’s first version, is open to the public and the people who own the park have gotten to a point in the business where they’re trying to cater to the whims of an insatiable audience who wants more. So the park’s operations manager, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), gives the go-ahead to genetically modify the Indominus Rex. And if it was made to be bigger than a T-Rex with the intelligence of a Velociraptor, it’s hard not to agree with dinosaur behaviorist Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) that it “probably [wasn’t] a good idea.”

In the clip below, you can see Pratt running from the I-Rex.

As with all other Jurassic movies, it goes from bad to worse to run as fast as you can away from monsters with big, sharp teeth who want to eat you. But you can take a little comfort in the fact that aside from this movie being fictional, the Indominus is too. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) talked about the creation of the monster.

“It’s not a real dinosaur. The Indominus was meant to embody our worst tendencies. We’re surrounded by wonder and yet we want more. And we want it bigger, faster, louder, better. And in the world of the movie the animal is designed based on a series of corporate focus groups. Like in the same way a lot of movies are. They sit a bunch of people down and they ask them, ‘What can we do to make the dinosaurs more entertaining for you? What would make you tell a friend to come to Jurassic World?’ And their answer is, of course, ‘We want to see something bigger, faster, louder, more vicious; we want a killer.”

And in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for moment, with extra bite, “they get what they ask for.”

I see what he’s doing there — we the moviegoing audience want the same thing, in all that we do, but especially with popular movie sequels. When Dearing tells Grady that, “Corporate felt that genetic modification would up the ‘wow factor.'” His reply is simply, “They’re dinosaurs, wow enough.”

But that’s the thing with humanity — enough, is never enough — if we’ve seen it, or done it, before, we want something more.

Catch Jurassic World and get an up-close and personal look at Indominus Rex at a theater near you on June 12.

[Image courtesy Universal Pictures via MovieWeb]