The footage that comprises this teaser trailer – the trailer for the trailer, if you will – is brief, but striking. First of all, there are the iconic gates – updated, but still instantly recognizable. As they slowly open, we catch a glimpse of a winding roadway that passes over an expanse of water. Then, there’s the obligatory ‘running with the dinosaurs’ scene. The point to note here is that the vehicle being used is much more akin to the trucks used by groups on safari, rather than state-of-the-art modern vehicles with glass roofs, as in Jurassic Park. But then, by contrast we see a futuristic transparent pod, taking two visitors across a dinosaur paddock, alongside a large herbivore. Finally, we see the control room, where Bryce Dallas Howard watches over banks of monitors – one of which, in the bottom right of the screen, shows a distinct area of concern on the island. As she turns, Chris Pratt appears with a look that suggests there may be some real trouble ahead.
Despite its brevity, it absolutely plays into the attitude of modern movie-going audiences that director Trevorrow told Slash Film had informed the development of the script. While enjoyable, the clips of the dinosaurs in this teaser are no longer mind-blowing in the way that these shots once would have been, back in 1993:
“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.”
This is the biggest message successfully conveyed in this teaser – that you are about to see a Jurassic Park movie, with all the elements you would expect to see, but there’s something being held back that filmmakers are not revealing just yet. This is emphasized by the music, which is hauntingly slow, with simple piano notes from John Williams’ famous Jurassic Park theme. Jurassic World composer Michael Giacchino has used parts of Williams’ original score within his own music for the film, further underlining the fact that this is Jurassic Park – but not as we know it. It almost generates apprehension as much as anticipation. Remember how stunning Spielberg’s big dinosaur reveal shots were the first time they appeared? It begs the question – what have these filmmakers got up their sleeves to top that for today’s audiences?
The full trailer for Jurassic World will debut on Thursday November 27th, 2014 at 9pm EST, while the film itself is released on June 12th 2015.