Jurassic World Dominion packs a whole lot of nostalgia into its two-plus hour run time, most of which lies squarely on the shoulders of returning franchise stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. Though Goldblum has had brief cameo roles in the other World movies, Dern and Neill are reuniting with their prehistoric pals for the first time since 2001’s Jurassic Park 3. But this trio isn’t the only surprise blast from the past–though this one may be pretty easy to miss if you’re not extremely up on your Jurassic Park trivia. Thankfully, we sat down with writer/director Colin Trevorrow who shed some light on the movie’s most unexpected Easter egg.
There will be spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion from here on out, so please proceed with caution.
In Dominion, the dinosaurs are only a small fraction of the threat. They’ve managed to gain a surprisingly thorough foothold in the world in the four years that have passed since the events of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, and are mostly just a dangerous-but-lowkey inconvenience to human life anymore. Instead, the biggest issue facing mankind at the present moment is a swarm of mutant locusts that are ravaging crops around the globe, threatening food supplies and ecosystems. It turns out that these locusts were engineered using prehistoric DNA harvested from dinosaurs by a company called BioSyn, run by an eccentric billionaire named Dr. Lewis Dodgson.
BioSyn is a name that might sound familiar if you’re a fan of the Jurassic Park novels, where they featured with relative prominence as a rival to InGen, the company responsible for the development of the park and the resurrection of the dinosaurs. In the movies, however, the name simply doesn’t come up–but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist in the cinematic arm of the franchise.
If you remember back in the first Jurassic Park movie, Dennis Nendry (Wayne Knight) meets with a man outside of Isla Nublar to engineer some corporate theft. He teases this competitor–pointedly named Dodgson (“Dodgson! We’ve got Dodgson over here!”)–before accepting a massive bribe to steal dinosaur DNA using a very James Bond-like can of Barbasol shaving cream with a false bottom.
Of course, the plan famously goes south when Nendry is killed by a pack of tar-spitting Dilophosaurus in one of the original movie’s most iconic scenes. The can of shaving cream never makes it off the island and is never seen in the movies again. It does–briefly and with dubious canonical relevance–make an appearance in one of the Jurassic Park video games, but for simplicity’s sake, we won’t get into that.
Fast forward to Jurassic World Dominion. Lewis Dodgson–the very same Dodgson–is now being played by Campbell Scott and running BioSyn. It’s a very small detail that’s easy to miss–at least, until Dodgson starts scrambling around trying to save the half-crushed Barbasol can from the impending destruction of his office. And if things don’t quite click then, they probably will when Dodgson himself gets an on-screen death that exactly mirrors Nendry’s, tar-spitting dinos and all.
“Campbell Scott is one of my favorite actors,” Trevorrow told GameSpot, “and to be able to bring him into this movie. […] We dug into the personality of someone whose brain is just firing off in all kinds of different directions, who is not necessarily a scientist themselves, who is more the spokesperson for the company but who has certainty taken all of the credit for all the inventions of all these brilliant young people–and who is so ruthless that, of course, when he was an underling at BioSyn back in 1993 was the guy to give a shaving cream can to Dennis Nendry.”
“We started with that,” Trevorrow continued. “Like what kind of guy would do that that early in his career, and if he managed to be in charge some day, if he worked his way all the way up, think about how many people he’d have to step over to get to that point–and we just built from there.”
Of course, Dominion doesn’t exactly answer the mystery of how the shaving cream can got off of Isla Nublar in the first place–but either way, it most certainly has, and retains some great sentimental value for Dodgson these days, despite its ultimately failed efforts. Sentimental enough, even, that it’s worth dying for.
Jurassic World Dominion is in theaters now.
Source: Gamespot
