With exactly a year to go, Universal announced earlier this week that fans will finally be able to get a first look at Colin Trevorrow's highly-anticipated Jurassic World: Dominion later this month, with a five-minute extended sneak peek that will screen prior to all showings of Justin Lin's F9 in IMAX later this month.
Since the announcement, new details have emerged, revealing that the sneak peek will actually be a prologue to not only Dominion, but to the entire Jurassic franchise. The film's opening sequence takes place 65 million years ago, and reveals the never-before-told origin story of Rexy while also introducing several new species in their natural habitat long before humans ever came along.
Thanks to Collider, we have a detailed footage description, revealing an epic battle between a pair of ancient titans and where the film will pick up in modern-day.
"The preview takes place both in the past and the present, kicking off 65 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, and the score was done by composer Michael Giacchino. The preview plays like a nature film where we are following a number of dinosaurs as they wander around the land. It's peaceful and quiet, allowing us to take in the beauty of our planet before humans arrived. In addition, since we’re back in time, we get to see seven new species of dinosaurs, created by the team at Industrial Light & Magic, that have never been seen in any Jurassic film before: Dreadnoughtus, Quetzalcoatlus, Oviraptor, Nasutoceratops, Iguanodon, Morus intrepidus, and Giganotosaurus.
Towards the middle of the extended preview we encounter a T-Rex and a Giganotosaurus fighting, and after a short battle, the T-Rex is killed. As we get a close-up on his eye dilating, we see a mosquito fly in and suck out some blood from the area nearby. Is it the same amber mosquito that John Hammond has on his staff in the first Jurassic Park movie? That is undetermined, but it’s pretty clear this is the origin story of the T-Rex we have come to know and love in the Jurassic films.
As we cut to 65 million years later, we are following the T-Rex as it is racing through a forest being chased by people in a helicopter trying to take it down with a tranquilizer dart. As the race through the forest continues, the T-Rex enters a drive-in parking lot where chaos unfolds as people scramble to escape the massive dinosaur. As the sequence ends, you’ll be left wanting more.
While I could go on and on about why the footage was so impressive, the main thing that left me speechless was how amazing the VFX was in bringing these dinosaurs to life. In the footage you can see the webbing in some of the mouths, chipped teeth, and hair! Trust me, if you are a fan of the Jurassic World series, you are going to want to buy a ticket to F9 in IMAX to see this footage."
Along with the description, Empire Magazine sat down with Trevorrow to get a few details about what to expect from the film and learned the reasoning behind starting the story so far back in history. He also seems to tease that there may be a rematch between the T-Rex and the Giganotosaurus brewing...
"It was always part of the story. I really wanted to not just tell an origin story for the T-Rex that we love, but to really put into visual terms this story that we've been told for 30 years about how dinosaurs were made from DNA fossilized in amber. Sometimes we put a human face on things — I wanted to put a dinosaur’s face on things and see what actually went down. And now canonically we know that the dinosaur that we love, the T-Rex, was brutally murdered by the Giganotosaurus. And that's part of the story we're telling for the film."
Jurassic World: Dominion hits theaters June 10, 2022.