Jurassic Park is a nearly perfect film, and it really didn’t need a sequel – but as the saying goes, “Life, uh, finds a way.” Here we are 25 years and five sequels later. Jurassic World Dominion isn’t the WORST way to cap off a sequel trilogy in recent memory, but it’s certainly more of a whimper than a roar. However, there’s another Universal Studios franchise that Jurassic Park could take cues from. I’ll give you a hit: it’s the one with all the cars.

The original Jurassic Park had a lot going for it – the source material of Michael Crichton’s excellent novel made for an airtight story, it had an incredible cast without feeling too Hollywood, and behind the camera, Steven Spielberg was in top form. And, of course, it wouldn’t have become such a cultural touchstone without the groundbreaking special effects that brought the dinosaurs to life. They were breathtaking in 1993, and they still hold up great nearly 30 years later.

A word often thrown around about Jurassic Park is “WONDER” – the movie is filled with moments where characters are dumbstruck with awe, whether it’s watching a baby raptor hatch, or hearing a triceratops’ heartbeat, or looking up and seeing a real, live dinosaur for the first time. In these moments, we’re right there with them. They can’t believe John Hammond actually brought dinosaurs to life, and we feel the same about Spielberg and company.

At least that’s how it was for a lot of us seeing it the first time, and it’s understandable to want to chase that high. But that’s genuine movie magic, and trying to replicate it is about as realistic as cloning actual dinosaurs. A John Williams needle drop at the right moment might tug some heartstrings, and a cleverly executed callback might dredge up some fond memories of your first time seeing a classic, but that’s nostalgia. Ironically, a film franchise about resurrecting 200-million-year-old animals deserves better than just capitalizing on the past.

See, here’s the thing: Jurassic Park has so much more going for it than just that sense of wonder. It’s got action scenes, horror elements, and a surprisingly good sense of humor. At its core, Jurassic Park is a monster movie. It combines tropes like Frankenstein’s “reckless pursuit of knowledge” with King Kong’s “nature’s fury” and reimagines them as a gigantic, hydraulically-powered T-Rex puppet that instantly became as iconic as any movie monster before it. And really, if you want to get pedantic, this is a sentiment shared within the movies. In Jurassic Park III, Alan Grant dismisses the idea that Hammond’s clones even count as dinosaurs, calling them “genetically engineered theme park monsters, nothing more, nothing less.” In monster movies, the monsters are the real stars. Not only is it okay if the characters and story take second billing to the featured creatures, it should be encouraged.

Jumping the Shark

Jurassic Park isn’t Universal’s first rodeo when it comes to franchising a hit summer film about big animals eating people that was directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a bestselling novel. That already happened with Jaws. Spielberg’s Jaws was arguably the first summer blockbuster, and it disrupted the entire motion picture industry, changing how movies are made to this very day. Despite the first film’s success, Spielberg was NOT open to the idea of making another. In 1975 he told the San Francisco Chronicle he’d been offered Jaws 2, but didn’t dignify it with a response, going on to describe sequels as “venal” and something that was done for the sake of exhibitors, not audiences. In any case, Jaws sequels happened without Spielberg, and the series went on for another two movies before the fourth entry jumped the shark so high it sank the franchise entirely.

Obviously, Spielberg soon warmed up to sequels, and wasted no time following up Jurassic Park with The Lost World, which didn’t even try to adapt Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, instead cherry-picking fun elements and incorporating ideas from the first book that hadn’t been put on film yet. The Lost World cleaned up at the box office, but the general consensus to this day is that it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie. In fact, it’s flat-out dumb as hell at times. You might recall the scene where a middle-schooler uses gymnastics to kick a raptor out a window. However, The Lost World did one thing extremely right: it raised the stakes, with a grand finale that turned a T-Rex loose on the mainland to wreak havoc in true monster movie fashion.

It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a sequel without some form of escalation. It’s a fine line to walk: not enough escalation and you have a disappointing rehash of the first installment; too much and you have a story that collapses under the weight of its own ambitions or goes so over the top it’s hard to take seriously. Luckily, there’s another Universal movie property that’s gotten this down to a science: The Fast and Furious franchise. It began as a movie about an undercover cop delving into the world of street racing to bust a ring of DVD player thieves. Nine movies later, Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson are driving a Pontiac Fiero into space. Has this series gotten a little stupid? Absolutely! But it’s all in the name of making a fun and entertaining movie.

Entertainment is subjective, but there’s some evidence to support this claim: by and large, the more bombastic Fast & Furious sequels have gotten, the better they’ve been received critically, and the more they’ve made at the box office.

Go Big or Go Home

Jurassic Park BEGAN as a movie about a dinosaur theme park where the dinosaurs break out and terrorize everyone, which is already an almost comically outlandish premise. How do you escalate that concept? Well, aside from the T-Rex’s brief San Diego vacation, it took four sequels to actually get the dinosaurs off an island. Even after rebranding the series Jurassic World, it took a movie and a half to go beyond the theme park setting. And from there, for whatever reason, Fallen Kingdom turned dinosaurs loose in a mansion, a setting that’s even SMALLER than an island! Dominion FINALLY gave us a glimpse of a literal Jurassic World, where dinosaurs are an invasive species. But it ultimately reigned things in and relegated most of the dinos to a remote valley, which, for all intents and purposes is… just another island.

Of course, this was between backburnering the big lizards to focus on genetically engineered locusts and human clones. That could make for compelling plots in another film franchise that doesn’t have a whole sandbox full of dinosaurs to play with, but that’s not what most people bought tickets to see.

There’s an argument to be made that the human characters are why the first Jurassic Park is so good, and there’s no denying that they’re great. There’s a certain charm to being reunited with Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler and the unforgettable Ian Malcolm – but again, nostalgia is cheap, that original wonder can’t be recaptured, and fixating on these characters misses the whole point of why we’re familiar with them in the first place. They went to an island to see some dinosaurs, because who wouldn’t want to see a dinosaur?

That’s not to say you ONLY need dinosaurs. In fact, it's quite the opposite. A human element is necessary to resonate with human audiences. Are the Fast films just about cars? Of course not, they’re also about family – but they’ve never lost sight of the fact that the promise of fast-moving vehicles is what got people in the door in the first place. The human relationships are the connective tissue between car chases and wrench fights and batshit insane setpieces that defy the laws of physics whenever it makes for a cooler scene.

Any six-year-old can tell you that a car is different from a dinosaur, but they do have a few key things in common: virtually everybody knows what cars and dinosaurs are, and if they EVER thought they were cool, they probably still do. It’s quite fitting that Universal has film franchises about cars and dinosaurs, because the appeal of those things is exactly that – universal.

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

The Jurassic World films have some really fun moments, but too often, they trip over themselves focusing on something other than fun – whether that’s trying to expand the Jurassic Park mythos by delving into the finer plot points of shifty biotech companies and corporate espionage, or bending over backwards to set up a callback to something from the first film. Or both, like bringing back Lewis Dodgson. In the words of Dennis Nedry, “See? Nobody cares.”

The original Jurassic Park is genuinely smart science fiction. Among other things, it plays with real-world concepts like DNA, chaos theory, virtual reality, cybercrime and the UNIX operating system. But we are far past the point of no return for smart Jurassic Park sequels. That ship has sailed… and there was a T-Rex on board. It wrecked San Diego. They made a whole movie about it.

So, where do you take the series next? The writing’s on the wall… or rather, written on a banner falling from the ceiling at the end of the first film. Show us what it’s like when dinosaurs rule the earth, again. Give us an actual Jurassic World where the dinosaurs have established dominion over mankind. Zombie fiction has shown us time and time again you can tell interesting human stories against a backdrop of people getting eaten. If that sounds too bleak, build a Jurassic Park on the moon, or if we’re really short on ideas, hire Dominic Torreto and company to hijack a train full of pissed-off velociraptors. Get it? Because they’re ALSO fast and furious. The series needs to evolve beyond just giving the dinosaurs more feathers.

Universal will not make a better, smarter dinosaur adventure film than the original Jurassic Park, so why try? Make like a brachiosaurus and be big and stupid. We give a lot of dumb blockbuster movies a pass by saying “they’re a ton of fun if you turn your brain off,” and equating them to theme park rides, but in this case, it all started with a theme park – maybe these movies SHOULD have more rollercoaster DNA.

Yurei Deco premieres on July 3, 2022, on Crunchyroll.

Science SARU's latest anime, Yurei Deco, is a vibrant and colorful take on augmented reality, as well as a poignant loose adaptation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Still, clumsy tech talk and thin characters hold back the show's otherwise solid promise in its initial three episodes.

The latest show by the studio behind Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, The Heike Story, and Devilman Crybaby takes place on Tom Sawyer Island, an augmented reality world where characters go to school from their rooms and sit on a virtual video call with their peers — you know, the distant future. Meanwhile, they have a little device on their eyes that allows them to decorate the surrounding world (from billboards, to shop signs, to facades on buildings and houses) however they see fit.

Of course, they need to pay in order to do that, with "love" serving as the local currency, earned by doing things others approve of and assign value to. With no crime, no hate, no unhappiness, everything seems perfect on Tom Sawyer Island, except where the mysterious Phantom Zero strikes, draining all the love in their surroundings.

The plot follows an average girl named Berry who, thanks to her broken deco device, is able to see an otherwise invisible girl named Hack and the two stumble across one of Phantom Zero's attacks. When Hack gets the blame for the attack, the two unravel a web of lies at the heart of their entire society.

Translating a piece of literature so deeply connected to Americana as the works of Mark Twain to an entirely different culture is no small task, but it's not surprising that writer Dai Satō, who worked on Cowboy Bebop, Stand Alone Complex, and Wolf's Rain, manages to find universal themes in the novel and bring it to a futuristic setting. Sure, there are more obvious references, like splitting the name Huckleberry Finn among the main characters, but where the show shines is in its exploration of societal hypocrisy. Berry may live in an utopia where no one is ever unhappy, but that's because there's extreme censorship where everything "undesirable" is quickly eliminated in secret – where anything that goes against the norm or the mainstream is unseen.

This is why it's so poignant that — just like in Twain's novel — it is the Yurei (literally "ghosts" in Japanese), those who are socially dead or invisible, who are the only ones who can actually see what is going on. How this plot thread resolves remains to be seen, but it makes for a promising start to the show.

Unsurprisingly, given this is a Science SARU anime, Yurei Deco is vibrant, colorful, and visually imaginative. To make the possibilities of augmented and virtual reality come to life, the show changes its art style and aesthetic depending on whose point of view we are experiencing, as deco allows one to change their surroundings virtually. A bland and boring building will look 3D and elaborate in one scene, or minimalistic and 2D the next. Even more than Belle or Summer Wars, Yurei Deco shows how malleable a virtual world can be for the user.

Where Yurei Deco falters is when it comes to actually making its technology clear. For a show all about how technology blends into our daily lives, with a story all about a system that is not what it seems at first, the distinction between the fully virtual world and the augmented reality deco system, as well as how the deco even functions, is not clear enough. It could be better explained as the story continues, but out of the gate it leaves something to be desired. Likewise, in its first three episodes, the characters of Berry and Huck are quite thin and under-defined beyond just "the weirdo with the funny speech pattern" and the "normal one."

Masaaki Yuasa, who created the original concept of Yurei Deco with Dai Satō, may have retired, but his influence can still clearly be seen here. Despite some concerns, the show has a lot of promise and is already a visually distinct and narratively weird show deserving of more attention this summer.

Warning: The following contains full spoilers for the Westworld: Season 4 episode "Well Enough Alone."

To read our review of last week's Westworld: Season 4 premiere, "The Auguries," click here.

"Well Enough Alone" contained rudimentary Westworld intrigue and revelations — including notable unveilings about Charlotte's evil plan and the introduction of a new theme park at the end — but it also very much felt like an addendum to last week's premiere, focusing a bit too much on lengthy scenes featuring host William being smug and taking down political foes. This scenario was already the centerpiece of Season 4's opening A.I. chess move at the Hoover Dam so seeing William do more of the same felt like a misuse of time.

It's good that Ed Harris is getting more to do in Season 4, and "Well Enough Alone" even gave us, briefly, real William (even if it was just a scene where Charlotte woke him, taunted him, and then put him back in cold storage), but as the host pawn of Charlotte, the public face of her diabolical plot to enslave the world, his scenes are already wearing thin. At a certain point, because William is so vague with his threats (a lot of it's very "do what I say, or else"), you might think he enjoys the metaphoric "mustache twirling" villain game too much. If not, then maybe he should try being more direct and saying "Look, fall in line or I'm going to kill you and replace you with a robot." Float that idea. See how it lands.

Check out our video review of Westworld's Season 4 premiere here…

There wasn't much happening this week that added to the saga, though the episode wasn't bereft of movement either. Caleb and Maeve flirted a bit on their adventure, pointing toward a romantic past we've not been privy to involving them possibly hooking up in a lighthouse as human/host couple. Anyhow, they bopped along, following William's trecherous trail of replacing prominent figures with hosts and/or loading them up with "flies" that puppet them while they're alive and awake (or reclaiming old Dolores hosts, like Angela Sarafyan's Clementine). There was appropriate action and violence — including menacing guest spots for Heroes' Jack Coleman and Deep Blue Sea's Saffron Burrows — but compared to what's come before it, on the show, it seemed like a rather simplified puzzle trail.

This streamlining of story is most likely by design now (following critiques about Westworld being more structural gimmick than substance), though the show also feels very sparsely populated these days; a lot of empty pavilions, business parks, and wide open spaces with only a few characters present. Even when Caleb and Maeve head to the "obvious trap" daytime opera, the auditorium's empty (as were the entire grounds outside, which the duo didn't seem to notice).

This week's ending, of course, dropped the curtain on how Season 4, despite being a decade away from the Westworld massacre, will circle back and give us theme park antics. The Golden Age, revealed to both Caleb and Maeve (on a train complete with Lili Simmons' returning "Clementine 2"), seems to be a Roaring '20s playground, no doubt hiding nefarious intentions. What could be lurking beneath the fun here, behind the choice between white and black fedoras? Let's sift through Charlotte's wicked game a bit, and also pull Christina's story into the mix.

Season 3 of Westworld saw humans being, more or less, controlled by machines. It was all background noise of course, under the watchful eye of Rehoboam, but the script had been appropriately flipped. The only snag was that people didn't know their lives were being molded and manipulated (and capped). Now that humanity's A.I. cruise control is gone, thanks to the riots, Charlotte wants to go bigger and badder.

What Charlotte says to William (and also the dude from the Justice Department) — about doing the same to humans as humans did to them — seems to imply not just A.I. dominance but also the cruel added ingredient of imprisonment. Much like how the hosts were treated at Westworld, humans might be destined for a world where robots controlling them is no longer a secret, almost like a global theme park where everyone's lives are pre-written and masterminded by gleefully merciless bots, basically turning all humanity into NPCs. Is Charlotte after the Sublime Key so she can retrieve all the hosts from there, or lock people in there Matrix-style? Or both?

How does this connect to Christina? Well, she writes stories for NPCs and a paranoid guy just tracked her down (though now it seems he died a while back — a game loop?) and accused her of controlling his entire life. Seeing as how we're in a show that loves to play around with time, it could be that Christina's story is taking place years after the Caleb and Maeve drama, in a future where people are already being "Free Guy'd" around life, like game characters. Is it the Sublime? The twist here though, right now, which seems to fly in the face of Charlotte's plan, is that it's still a secret and only a few can see through this Matrix (and can "hear the music" from "the Tower"). There's little doubt that these two stories — the only two stories for the first two episodes — are connected, but the specifics still need to be learned.

At Anime Expo, VIZ Media shared the world premiere trailer of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War and new key art for the anime set to arrive in October 2022.

As reported by Anime News Network, the trailer focuses on the Stern Ritter characters and this new anime will be based on the "Thousand Year Blood War" arc of Tite Kubo's manga.

World Premiere of BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War PV at #AnimeExpo.

The Quincy King has arrived. Ichigo, please save Soul Society. #BleachTYBW pic.twitter.com/luu5xO9flX

— VIZ (@VIZMedia) July 3, 2022

Kubo himself appeared in a video message to fans during Bleach's Anime Expo panel and said that fans can "expect modern contemporary coloring and a new and refreshing viewing experience with the new anime."

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War will premiere on TV Tokyo in October and VIZ Media will be releasing the series in English.

The story will cover the final arc of the manga, which covers volumes 55-74, and the series' returning cast will also include characters that didn't appear in the original anime but are reprising their roles from the Bleach: Brave Souls video game.

The Bleach manga was first released in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2001 and ended its run in 2016. Its popularity led to an anime adaptation that ran for 366 episodes from 2004 to 2012 alongside four films, two OVAs, video games, novels, stage plays, and even a live-action film that was released in 2018.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Netflix has revealed the opening title sequence for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the upcoming anime set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077.

The "so-stylish-it-hurts opening" is accompanied by Franz Ferdinand's This Fffire and was shared during the Trigger 10 Year Anniversary & Announcement Panel at Anime Expo 2022.

2022年9月配信 アニメ『サイバーパンク エッジランナーズ』公式オープニング映像が公開！ @trigger_inc #Edgerunners pic.twitter.com/FSVFmWJU8y

— CD PROJEKT RED Japan (@CDPRJP) July 3, 2022

Alongside the opening credits, Studio Trigger also showed the first episode of the series to those in attendance and confirmed that Zach Aguilar, the English voice actor of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba's Tanjiro Kamado, will be lending his voice to main character David Martinez.

Martinez is a street kid who is "trying to survive in a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future. Having everything to lose, he chooses to stay alive by becoming an edgerunner—a mercenary outlaw also known as a cyberpunk."

The 10-episode series will also focus on a netrunner named Lucy and a recent official clip revealed that part of the story will take place in the same location as The Pickup mission from Cyberpunk 2077. For those unfamiliar, that is the mission where V and Jackie have to pick up the robot spy-spider from the Maelstrom gang.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners will be released on Netflix in September 2022 and remains one of our top 10 most anticipated new anime of 2022.

For more, check out how David Martinez was referenced in Cyberpunk 2077 and 10 essential anime to watch before Cyberpunk: Edgerunners arrives.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.