As part of the promotional campaign for Jurassic World, Universal Pictures has commissioned the creation of in-world materials that bring the fictional theme park to life. These materials also reveal a great deal of information about the new movie's backstory and what kind of place Jurassic World is.
Key among these promotional assets are websites including JurassicWorld.com and masraniglobal.com.
The park's website looks exactly like you'd expect a world-class destination's Internet presence to look. There are "live" cameras showing the goings-on throughout the park, information on rides and attractions, details on all of the dinosaurs on the island and more. The second website is for Masrani Global, which explains that this massive conglomerate company purchased John Hammond's InGen back in 1998, when it was a hot mess that no one else wanted to touch.
The story goes, as we've gleaned from these websites, that entrepeneur Simon Masrani acquired Isla Nublar along with InGen and decided to complete John Hammond's vision for a dinosaur-themed park. But Masrani wanted to get it right, and was meticulous in his company's efforts, ensuring safety above all else. To create new dinosaurs, his first move was to re-hire Dr. Henry Wu, the geneticist played by B.D. Wong in the original Jurassic Park. Wu became the company's new science guru, in charge of engineering/cloning the dinosaurs back to life.
At the time that Jurassic World begins, the park has been open and successful for ten years. But after a decade, visitor numbers are starting to dwindle, so Masrani orders Wu and his InGen team to spice things up by creating a brand new hybrid creature based on the DNA of various dinosaurs.
How this is done is described in this brand new video from Universal that's set in-story, featuring Wong and a number of actors in-character, walking us through the work that they do. Needless to say, technology has come a very long way in the last 22 years, and the characters in this video comment repeatedly about how advanced the process has become.
They don't even use frog DNA anymore.
Watching this video, the voice of Sam Neill's Alan Grant may whisper dire warnings in your ear about the dangers of "playing god." Which is exactly what InGen is doing in Jurassic World.
As readers of Michael Crichton's original novel might remember, the book had a scene where Dr. Wu tried to convince Hammond that authenticity wasn't required in the creation of their cloned dinosaurs. His point was that they could reprogram the harvested DNA so that the creatures they produced would better match the expectations of the public. For example, they could alter physical features or make the dinos less dangerous. Hammond wouldn't hear of it, but Jurassic World seems to take that concept to its natural conclusion by "rewriting" the entire code that life is built on.
Probably not a good idea, as Chris Pratt's character Owen Grady says in the movie's trailer. Because what is this franchise if not one big warning about the dangers of tinkering with life's building blocks?
Jurassic World is in theaters June 12, 2015.
Be sure to follow T-Lounge on Twitter and visit our Facebook page.
