Warning: Spoilers For Jurassic World: Dominion Below!
The Jurassic Park franchise intentionally weakened the fearsome velociraptors, and this gradual change has been a very beneficial one. Jurassic World: Dominion brings the raptors—the series’ central velociraptor Blue and her offspring Beta most notably—and their fellow dinosaurs back to the big screen, with humans and dinosaurs finding themselves sharing the world with one another. It also marks another big step forward in the evolution of the velociraptors in the series.
While Dominion continues to show the hunting skills of the velociraptors, especially in its fast-paced Malta chase sequence, it also brings the arc of the raptors in the Jurassic Park franchise full circle. There was once a time when they were shown as little more than intelligent killing machines. However, the velociraptors have incrementally moved in a very different direction.
That’s not to say that either the velociraptors or Dominion‘s new dinosaur addition of the atrociraptors have been de-fanged, literally or metaphorically. However, their transformation over the course of the Jurassic Park franchise’s near-three-decade span has made the raptors into dinosaurs that have become shockingly relatable in human terms. Here’s where the velociraptors began in Jurassic Park, and where they’ve progressed to by Jurassic World: Dominion.
Jurassic Park’s Velociraptors Were Terrifying Hunters
When they were first introduced in Jurassic Park, the velociraptors were built up as intelligent and merciless predators. Even more so than how long director Steven Spielberg held off on showing the T-Rex, the velociraptors didn’t appear on-screen until the third act. Fully living up to their description as devious and coordinated pack hunters by Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Jurassic Park portrayed the velociraptors like pre-historic slasher movie villains.
While the velociraptors were in relatively little of The Lost World: Jurassic Park on its setting on Isla Sorna a.k.a. Site B, they continued to live up to their reputation in the movie’s tense long-grass hunt sequence and human character’s narrow escape from them in the abandoned InGen compound. While the T-Rex’s arrival was at least heralded with a warning in the form of water ripples and thunderous footsteps, the Raptors snuck up and slaughtered their prey in the blink of an eye. For as terrifying as Jurassic Park and The Lost World portrayed the velociraptors, the Jurassic Park franchise would soon begin to show another side to them.
Jurassic Park III & Jurassic World Weakened (& Humanized) Velociraptors
Jurassic Park III dove much further into Grant’s discoveries of the vast intelligence of the velociraptors with the revelation of their ability to communicate with each other, an element that adds support to Jurassic Park III being underrated, as Sam Neill feels. This led to the raptors being shown as much more of a community, simply trying to retrieve the eggs hastily stolen from their nest by Grant’s grad student Billy Brennan (Alessandro Nivola). While the velociraptors were still dinosaurs to be feared, Jurassic Park III was the first movie in the series to portray them in a not fully sinister light.
Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom humanized the velociraptors even more with the relationship between Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his trained raptor Blue. Not only did Blue exhibit the keen intelligence raptors are known for, but she also became a staple of the franchise with her genuine connection to Grady. In just one velociraptor, the Jurassic World movies showed that the dinosaur species were more than simply feral hunters, but could actually form strong relationships with humans. After Blue was freed with the other dinosaurs in Fallen Kingdom‘s ending, her journey and that of the velociraptors would take another huge step in Dominion.
Jurassic World Dominion Completes Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor Change
Set four years after Fallen Kingdom, Dominion shows Blue building her nest near the log cabin of Owen Grady, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) and raising her young offspring Beta. After Beta is kidnapped by Biosyn dinosaur poachers, Grady makes a promise to Blue to bring her young raptor home. Though the enraged Blue cannot hold back her angry snarling at Grady, their connection holds strong with Grady being good to his word when he fulfills his promise to Blue by the end of the film.
While Blue’s role in Dominion is fairly minor, her connection with Grady is still palpable in her decision to camp close by and keep watch over the cabin, as if seeing herself as a protector of him, Claire, and Maisie. Beta also acts as a vessel of velociraptor humanization with her own budding connection to the human trio. That doesn’t mean her Raptor instincts are fully shed (she does still have to be tranquilized to be safely transported home), but both she and Blue no longer see humans as prey with the emotional bond they develop. One need simply see Dominion‘s ending to see their connection on display, with Blue and Beta silently bidding their curiously beloved humans farewell as they head back into the wild.
Why Jurassic Movies Changing Velociraptors Worked So Well
While the Velociraptors were portrayed in villainous terms at the beginning of the Jurassic Park franchise, complete with intelligence in excess of primates, as stated by Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III, their gradual anti-hero evolution has been one of the best elements of the series for a few key reasons. One of the main ones is how much it has brought the intelligence of raptors to the forefront. In their purely antagonistic days, the intelligence ascribed to velociraptors by Grant was entirely on a predatory level, but expanding it into social and familial terms made the velociraptors into more than simple monsters to be fled.
The velociraptors, most especially exemplified by Blue and Beta, would come to reveal themselves as creatures with emotions and personalities. This made them unequivocally the most intelligent of any dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park franchise, but it also gave the audience an actual interest in the Raptors themselves. Upon the velociraptor’s origins in Jurassic Park, their presence on-screen was as feared as Jurassic Park‘s spotlight usurping T-Rex by moviegoers as much as the characters themselves. Despite this, their slow transformation as non-human characters made audiences connect with and even cheer for them just as much as the actual humans. Blue and Beta have been the main avatars of this change, but it is a metamorphosis that cannot be denied in how far the velociraptors have come to gaining audience sympathy and even love.
Though Blue has been the most centralized velociraptor in the whole of the Jurassic Park franchise, the raptor’s evolution as dinosaurs has still been species-wide and evolved visibly over the course of six movies. The research of Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) was very on point in the impressive intelligence of the velociraptors, but even they were only able to pull back the curtain so far. The Jurassic Park franchise has slowly but surely softened its portrayal of the velociraptors, and in doing so, shown them as pre-historic creatures with far more in common with man than ever seemed possible.
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