The final post in a series on the Jurassic Park films, mainly Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. We will be discussing the films in detail, so spoilers are possible but will be kept to a minimum.
I don’t believe anyone actually invokes the name Frankenstein in any of the Jurassic Park films, but the specter of the mad doctor and his monster loom large. The main lesson we seem to have learned from Mary Shelley’s story is that you don’t mix and match when it comes to nature. (As with Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker, the prominence of patchwork quality of the monster likely has more to do with cinematic adaptations than the original text; we are such visual creatures.) A number of problems at Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are explicitly traced back to the incorporation of DNA from other species into the dinosaur genomes — as if everything would have been hunky-dory with “natural” dinosaurs.