Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom set up a bizarre plot twist it never delivered

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a deeply silly movie that warps the DNA of a franchise far enough to justify turning a monster-heavy adventure into gothic horror. It’s a popcorn movie for people who don’t mind if human characters do stupid things so the script can justify the dinosaurs escaping.

Fallen Kingdom also spends a lot of its running time setting up what would have been one of the most ridiculous plot twists possible, and then backs away from it at the last moment to instead deliver something that seems to even bore the characters in the movie.

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]

One of the major characters in the film is Maisie, the granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood, a partner of John Hammond’s who is never mentioned in any of the previous films. Lockwood also has an amber walking stick and apparently much of the early dinosaur cloning took place in his estate, which has a Batcave-sized lab and holding facility in its basement.

Hammond and Lockwood fell out over an argument about whether they should make the robotic hosts of the theme park sentient, or maybe I’m getting my worlds mixed up and they argued about dinosaurs or something. The whole thing feels like a giant retcon to justify the bizarre choices made in Fallen Kingdom’s script.

Universal Pictures

Lockwood has a younger associate who wants to sell the dinosaurs for weapons or exotic animals for rich people to hunt in game preserves or whatever they want to buy them for, and Maisie finds out about his nefarious plan by being very good at sneaking around the estate grounds. Which is fine — she’s a precocious kid.

But from the beginning, there’s still something a little off about Maisie. She’s introduced in a scene where we’re shown how adept she is at hunting her nanny through the faux prehistoric landscapes in the same estate, before revealing herself by roaring. Adults refer to as a wild animal, albeit in a joking manner.

Lockwood adopted Maisie after the death of her mother in a car accident, or at least that’s what we’re told. The identity of Maisie’s mother remains a mystery for most of the movie; we’re shown that there are pictures of her in an album that Lockwood keeps, but doesn’t show her.

The camera also spends a lot of time zooming in on Maisie’s eyes, in a way that’s eerily similar to how we’re often shown the other dinosaurs. It’s not very subtle.

“She was made with Raptor DNA,” my daughter whispered to during the first third of the film. I told her it was unlikely that Fallen Kingdom would get that weird. After about ten more visual clues that she may be connected to the dinosaurs in a way that’s deeper than inheriting the estate in which they were created, I had to admit that my daughter’s theory was probably right. She gave me a very strong “told you so” look that’s impressive for her age, and we both waited to see how all this would pay off.

The evil capitalist of the movie later hisses “you don’t even know what she IS,” at our heroes, and my body was ready for the claws and screeches from the character as she ripped apart some of the bad guys. But he then reveals that she’s a clone of her mother and that’s... the entirety of the twist.

The tension built up during the rest of the film is deflated so quickly I swear I heard someone make a sad trombone noise in the theater.

Maybe you were just reading too much into things?

Maybe I was! But when I came back from the movie and talked about my theory I found it was shared by numerous co-workers. Our own Matt Patches mentioned it in his post about the film’s post-credits scene, and a few of my friends started referring to Maisie as “dino girl” even before I was able to ask about their thoughts. The consensus seems to be that yeah, she’s a raptor.

“Around 2003, John Sayles (Piranha, The Howling) wrote a screenplay for a never-produced Jurassic Park IV, in which a mercenary retrieves Nedry’s DNA-carrying Barbasol, only to be captured by an evil baron who’s created an army of Black Ops raptor SEALs, and wants the mercenary to lead them into battle,” Patches wrote. “In one scene, the raptor soldiers parachute down and waste to a battalion of machine-gun-toting drug dealers. Later drafts reportedly featured dino-human crossbreeds.”

The concept art and story ideas from this version of the movie were widely mocked online, but the idea of weaponized dinosaurs played a huge role in the last two Jurassic World films. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine the writers returning to the idea of a human-raptor hybrid, and making that character a young woman gets us excited about a Jurassic World 3 that’s also a spiritual successor to Logan.

Marvel/Twentieth Century Fox

The other possibility is that the movie was shot to support the Maisie-is-a-dinosaur plot point and then someone involved with the movie got scared of how goofy the idea was at the last minute. But it feels unlikely that this would be the case when the film’s final editing remains so committed to hinting at the “Maisie is Blue’s cousin or whatever” reveal.

It’s likely that Maisie is actually going to be the villain of the franchise, since it was her decision to let the dinosaurs free in the end. That choice is likely going to lead to a whole lot of people being eaten, or maybe the next film will jump forward in time about ten years and Maisie is ruling a world controlled by dinosaurs with a small resistance forming to take her down and return Earth to human rule.

One of the best aspects of Fallen Kingdom is how far it stretches the origin ideas of Jurassic Park into an entire worldview where even post-apocalyptic sequels seem possible, if not likely. Whether or not Maisie ends up being a dinosaur herself, it’s pretty clear that she’s going to have blood on her hands, whether that blood is figurative or literal.

Remember when these were family films?