The scene in question.

It’s been nearly five years since the release of Jurassic World, the reboot of the long-dormant Jurassic Park franchise. While I enjoyed the movie upon first viewing, watching it now proves it to be much more of a mixed bag than I remember. It has some pretty fun moments, and some pretty bad moments too. Many of those bad moments happen when our characters make dumb and irrational decisions for the sole purpose of advancing the plot. None is more prevalent than the scene where the Indominus rex, our main hybridized dino baddie, escapes. And that is the scene we’ll be attempting to fix today. So what exactly is wrong with it? Let’s start by seeing how it’s set up.

The scene comes right at the end of our story’s first act, where the rising action traditionally begins in a three act story structure. Owen, the macho Raptor trainer, visits the paddock of the Indominus rex with Claire, the manager of the theme park, after the latter asked him to inspect the paddock for flaws on the behest of her boss Mr. Masrani. Through some exposition, we learn the Indominus is highly intelligent but also unstable due to her isolation in the paddock. After some banter between Owen and Claire, they see the I. rex has not made itself known. The security guard in the paddock (who of course is a lazy fat guy stuffing chips in his face) runs a thermal scan of the paddock to no avail, and Owen notices claw marks on the paddock walls. This leads everyone in the room to assume the hybrid (somehow) climbed over the wall and escaped, which begs the question how no one outside the paddock noticed a giant dinosaur climbing over a wall, but I digress.

So putting aside some of the bad dialogue and stereotypes that became dated when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out, the set-up to the escape is well done, but here is where it goes wrong. In a panic, Claire rushes out of the paddock and tells Owen she’ll track the Indominus through an implant in its back at the control room. While speeding off in her product placement car, Claire phones Lowery, one of the tech guys in the control room, and asks him to track the Indominus through GPS. While that’s going on, Owen and the security guard completely throw caution to the wind and enter the paddock with another worker, where they again assume the dinosaur climbed its way out. Back at the control room, Lowery homes in on the Indominus’s signal and sees it's still in the cage. His lady friend co-worker warns Owen and the others in the cage to get out but the hybrid ambushes them before they can get to the door. The security guard opens the huge ass gate to the paddock and gets out. Owen quickly follows him out with the Indominus right on his tail, but it manages to bust out just as the gate is closing, killing a few nameless workers in the process before stalking and failing to find Owen in an actually tense scene.

The main problem with this scene is obvious: Why didn’t Claire just call control before leaving the paddock’s observation room and Owen and the others waltzed right in there? Obviously, you could say Claire simply panicked and acted irrationally in that situation, as people when panicking often do. While I’m inclined to agree with that, it still shows poor judgment on the part of our characters, especially Claire, a character with a rather perfectionist attitude. Now here’s where our fix comes in. The scene will play out like normal up until the moment where Claire decides to head back to control. Instead of hurrying out of the room right away, she calls Lowery while still in the observation room. Lowery runs a GPS scan but here he finds no signal, much to Claire’s confusion. Still, she orders the park’s security forces be put on alert as the Indominus could be anywhere. Here’s where Owen and the security guard can enter the paddock since, as far they know, the Indominus isn’t in there. Another big change will come while the men are inspecting the cage. While looking around, Owen will find a chunk of flesh from the Indominus with the broken tracking implant still in it, (in the actual film, this happens when the security forces are hunting for it in the jungle). Owen comes to the conclusion the I. rex clawed out its implant because it remembered where it was put in, reinforcing that it’s an intelligent creature. They see the blood is still fresh, meaning that the implant was clawed out only recently. Now here is where we can get the big reveal the Indominus was in the cage the whole time, be it through a sneak attack using its camouflage ability that’s only used once in the film and never used again or through some other means. It could even give us a visual reference to the famous “Clever girl” scene in the original film. The scene can play out like normal after, this time with Claire watching over the horror from the observation room, as she stayed put there this time around, and can serve as a good reason to give her character some form of depth, now having witnessed what this creature she helped bring about can do.

While the film does have plenty of other things that need fixing, this scene especially needed one not only to add some much needed suspense to a film that’s seriously lacking some, but also make our characters seem less like idiots for plot convince as well. If you have ideas on how to fix this scene or any other scene in this movie, don’t be shy, I’m open to suggestions and criticism. After all, fixes, uh, find a way.