There’s a lot for Jurassic Park fans to love about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The movie resolves some important plot points from the original movie and also has some emotional callbacks to other movies in the series.
The sequel focuses on saving dinosaurs rather than people running away from dinosaurs screaming, though there’s some of that in there, too. There’s also a fictional dinosaur advocacy group — the Dinosaur Protection Group — that Claire Dearing from the previous Jurassic World has started in the sequel.
The DPG was actually an important bit of marketing for the movie, with a website and video explaining what the group’s mission was as part of the promotional rollout for the film.
Syfy Wire wondered what real-life animal activists felt about the DPG and how they would handle an impending dinosaur extinction, and it turns out that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are big fans of the group in the film. In particular, PETA senior vice president Lisa Lange said the movie’s rescue mission is similar to something PETA has done during natural disasters in the past.
“PETA sends in rescue teams when a hurricane or another natural disasters happen and animals are suffering as a result of that natural disaster,” Lange says. “So, I guess that would be kind of a comparison. And then, you do whatever you can to allow these animals to continue living and continue eating and not suffer. For us, suffering is the big issue.”
PETA even wrote a blog post about the animal advocacy lessons in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and praised the series for helping people think about the impact humans have on animals in the real world.
“Really all of these Jurassic Park movies have really encouraged people to think about the bigger picture and the role we play in the devastation of the environment and the animals who live in it. We’re just so grateful of the filmmakers for that,” Lange says. “And in addition to that, we’re extremely grateful that they made a movie about — well, it’s about dinosaurs, obviously they’d never use a real dinosaur — but they’ve made a movie about animal lives, about animal protection, [and] our bad tendencies as the human race without exploiting one animal to make the point. [These movies] only use animatronics and CGI. And that’s just lovely. So not only did they get across a very important message that we really hope is sinking in with people, but they did it without harming the hair on one animal’s back. And that’s tremendous.”
Lange noted that one of the movie’s characters, billionaire Benjamin Lockwood, is an advocate for PETA in the real world.
(Via SyFy)