Jurassic World: Dominion is finally here, and it’s not very good. In our review, Emma Jane wrote in our Jurassic World 3 review the film had its fun moments, but for the most part, it was over-reliant on nostalgia and had a pretty poor script.
I’d probably go one step further and say the film is downright boring, so dull in fact that while watching it, I started reminiscing about some of the gnarlier moments from the Jurassic Park movies. In the first film alone, you get to see a lawyer murdered on a toilet by a T-Rex, a hunter mauled by a clever girl, and Wayne Knight gets disembowelled by a dilophosaurus he was going to run over.
But what’s the cruellest death in the franchise? Well, most people would probably choose the death of Zara (Katie McGrath) in Jurassic World. In case you’ve forgotten, poor Zara had the misfortune of being carried away by an escaped Pteranodon and dropped in the Mosasaurus’ tank. As the flock of Pteranodons attack her in the water, the Mosasaurus leaps out of the water and swallows her whole.
Zara’s death was so cruel because she was such a harmless character who barely got any screentime before being killed off. Fans labelled the death gratuitous, and Jurassic World director Colin Treverrow eventually spoke about Zara’s fate.
“Zara was about trying to surprise moviegoers, who I think can see everything coming,” Trevorrow told the Jurassic Outpost podcast. “We’re all screenwriters. We’re all screenwriters, and an earned death — that’s a screenwriting term — to me, unearned death is the definition of terror.”
Still, in my opinion, as cruel as Zara’s death is, it’s nothing compared to the death of poor Eddie Carr in The Lost World. Meek old Eddie was the tech expert for the InGen Hunters but was surprisingly heroic. When two T-Rexes attacked Ian Malcolm, Sarah Harding, and Nick Van Owen, he tried to distract the dinosaurs but did his job a bit too well.
As he tried to escape the deadly dinos, one of the T-Rexes managed to grab him, swinging him around wildly and trapping Eddie in his mouth. The second Rex then turns around and grabs Eddie’s legs tearing him in half. While the first T-Rex eats what’s left of Eddie, the second doesn’t have the good grace to eat what’s left, simply chucking his legs away.
It’s a genuinely shocking moment in a Steven Spielberg movie and made all the worse because he was just trying to save the lives of three people he hardly even knew.
If you love all things Jurassic World, check out our guide on the original Jurassic Park cast, or if you want to know more about the future of the franchise, we have a guide on Jurassic World 4.