Jurassic Park 4 is back in development, leading once again to murmurs that the script focuses on "weaponized dinosaurs."
Indeed, rumors of a scuttled "genetically altered dinosaur soldier" draft of the fourth Park flick have been circulating for years — and a wonderfully zany batch of JP4 concept art has recently come to our attention. Did we dodge a bullet here? Perhaps. The real question is, "Do you enjoy your bullets stuffed with parmesan and peyote?"
These images come to us from NeoGaf (via Reddit) and detail illustrations allegedly by concept artist Carlos Huante and models by Industrial Light & Magic.
Why the heck would humanoid reptiles appear in a Jurassic Park film? Back in 2007, Ain't It Cool News published a synopsis of a JP4 script draft by John Sayles and Bill Monahan. This script was about a mercenary under John Hammond's employ retrieving the shaving-cream-can-ensconced embryos Dennis Nedry lost on Isla Nublar in the first film:
The UN has created a task force to exterminate the dinosaurs [...] A bad-ass heavily-armed United Nations task force versus the dinosaurs. Bring it on! But then the script throws its first major curve ball, introducing Nick Harris, an unemployed soldier of fortune. Nick's the lead in the movie. Not Alan Grant. Not Ian Malcolm. Despite all the rumors to the contrary, those characters are not back for this film [...] Hammond's got a big idea: breed some new dinosaurs that can't reproduce and introduce them into the wild population. A Judas strain that will kill off the dinosaurs within one generation. Easy enough, except the UN has outlawed any breeding of new dinosaurs by anyone and they've prohibited the sale, mining, or possession of amber worldwide. Hammond's got scientists ready and waiting to go, but he needs genetic material to work with.
In this draft, the mercenary protagonist travels to the island solo and runs afoul of "excavaraptors (think trapdoor spiders)" and a paramilitary team run by the Swiss "Grendel Corporation." He's taken into their custody, whereupon everything flies off the rails worse than a gymnast versus velociraptor duel:
When Nick wakes up, he's in the tower of a medieval castle in the Alps. Seriously. That's the precise moment when the entire enterprise goes so over-the-top loony that you'll either go along with it for the entire insane ride or reject it roundly as a big bag of ludicrous. Nick is introduced to Adrien Joyce, the major domo henchman of Baron von Drax, CEO of the Grendel Corporation. Joyce isn't a moustache-twirling bad guy bent on torturing Nick into revealing where he hid the shaving cream can. Instead, he offers Nick a job, and in order to explain the job to him, he has to take him on a tour of the entire castle, which turns out to be a fairly sophisticated genetics lab where Grendel Corporation has been breeding some dinosaurs of their own design, cross-breeds that never existed in any era of nature with all sorts of custom modifications [...]
Nick is put in charge of training these five dinosaurs, X1 through X5, and the first thing he does is name them. "Any soldier worth his pay has a name to answer to, not a number," he says. So we are introduced to Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes, and Spartacus, each of them a specially created deinonychus, which is sort of like a miniature T-rex. They have super-sensitive smell and hearing, incredible strength and speed and pack-hunting instincts, and they have modified forelegs, lengthened and topped with more dextrous fingers, as well as dog DNA for increased obedience and human DNA so they can solve problems well. All of this is topped off with a drug-regulating implant that can dose them with adrenaline or serotonin as the situation demands.
Frankly, this all sounds completely hilarious, particularly if one of the dinosaurs was fluent in UNIX. (Shoe's on the other foot now, humans!) Hat tip to Precious Roy.
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