We were all excited to see the trailer for Jurassic World featuring Chris Pratt and a shark-eating dinosaur yesterday, but before Colin Trevorrow came aboard Jurassic World, there was the very long-gestating Jurassic Park 4. That original JP4 script, by John Sayles and Bill Monahan, involved weaponized dinosaur soldiers, or what look like human-dino hybrids. According to a 2007 post from Ain’t It Cool News, this was the synopsis for the screenplay:
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.
Here’s a description of those “soldiers”:
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.
Concept artist Carlos Huante and Industrial Light & Magic even went so far as to create concept images for Jurassic Park, and I think it’s safe to say that we should be relieved that the original film was scrapped in favor of Trevorrow’s version.
Sources: Carlos Huante I09, Reddit, and AICN
