Spoiler Culture is at war with itself. On one hand you have the intense inquisitiveness and anticipation coming from both fans and bloggers. Interest is so high that eagerness and thirst for knowledge often becomes a form of invasive prying. Conversely, the Internet is so full of spoilerphobes, if you leak out too much information, you’re likely going to receive a torrent of angry missives from audiences. It’s a very fine line for writer and reader and the boundaries of responsibility for the author are often blurry. You want to share information, but you don’t want to spoil an entire movie for yourself and the audience. But that fixation for “secret” information is like a spore that becomes toxic when it hits the Internet, breeding a unhealthy air of desperate and curdled curiosity gone wrong.
It’s a tricky balance for writers, and if it’s something you consider on a daily basis, “Jurassic World” director Colin Trevorrow has some words for you. Recently very spoiler-ish details of his next ‘Jurassic’ installment were leaked online. In a recent interview, Trevorrow confirmed and clarified some of these plot details, but not without first reflecting on the troubled era of spoiler culture and what it does to movies.
“That’s the thing about leaks, sometimes they aren’t misinterpreted or false. They’re real story elements that the filmmakers were hoping to introduce to the audience in a darkened movie theater. But unfortunately, in 2014, you read about it on a computer,” he told /Film in an email interview.”
“I hope whoever leaked it is actively trying to undermine what we’re doing. Because if they’re trying to help, they’re doing it wrong.”
“Last week was discouraging for everyone on our crew," he continued. “Not because we want to hide things from the fans, but because we’re working so hard to create something full of surprises. When I was a kid, you got to discover everything at once, it washed over you and blew your mind. Now it only takes one person to spoil it for everyone else.”
His last comment on the subject is the kicker though and illustrates the dark side of acquisitiveness and how it becomes invasive. “I hope whoever leaked it is actively trying to undermine what we’re doing,” he said. “Because if they’re trying to help, they’re doing it wrong.”
Salient words to be sure. So what were those leaked plot details? Well, you can read them here if you like. And Trevorrow more or less confirmed some of these details, or at least clarified some of them (Irony alert: some spoilers in the director’s comments below).
“Jurassic World” takes place twenty two years after "Jurassic Park," and one of the intriguing concepts that Trevorrow and his writers employed was modern-day corporate greed. “We looked at the past two decades and talked about what we’ve seen. Two things came to the surface,” he explained. “One was that money has been the gasoline in the engine of our biggest mistakes. If there are billions to be made, no one can resist them, even if they know things could end horribly.”
Culture’s numbness to technology and all it’s amazing advances was the second element they wanted to explore. “Those two ideas felt like they could work together,” he added. "What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. ‘We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?’ Next year, you’ll see our answer.”
Other details include (fairly real spoilers here, fyi, hopefully less ire-provoking since they are at the end of the article): cross-bred dinosaurs, that fact that animals (and dinosaurs) are neither “good or bad,” but simply predators or prey, and the movie takes place in a full functional park, a kind of biological preserve or safari that also includes a luxury resort.
Perhaps the most interesting sentiments of them all is the suggestion that Trevorrow wants to go his own route and not simply provide what you’d expect from “Jurassic Park 4.”
“We’re trying to tell a bold new story that doesn’t rely on a proven formula….I understand the risks of leaving the safe zone….It may not happen in the same way everyone expects it to, but it’s the way I believe it needs to happen," the director said, adding: "Will this one be different from the other movies? You bet it will. And I’m not going to pass the buck if it doesn’t work. This one’s on me.”
Can we say we’re starting to get excited? “Jurassic World” hits theaters on June 12, 2015.