Page - 162 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

162 siting futurity feature in a franchise of novels, films, animations, comic books, video games, and Universal Studios water rides. That the world has become a rather different, more intense place than it was when Michael Crichton’s novel was published in 1990 is evident in the franchise’s fifth film and second in the Jurassic World se- ries, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018, dir. J.A. Bayona). Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 in the Terminator series goes from being the threat in the original to the only force strong enough to save the good humans from the more evil machines that are developed in later sequels, so too is it a staple of the Ju- rassic franchise to have the dinosaur that was originally seen as the greatest threat turn around and save the good humans from a more dangerous clone. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom makes two innovations to this pattern that justify its title. First, it is the first time that the cloned dinosaurs do not just break out of the theme park in which they are enclosed on a fictional Central American island — they and their DNA make it to the mainland and, not irrelevantly, north- ern California, i.e., the home of Silicon Valley. Second, it is the first time that not only dinosaurs are cloned but also humans, in the subplot twist in which the granddaughter of one of the original dinosaur cloners turns out to have been cloned after her mother died, something about which her grandfather and father disagreed and which could be what has driven the father over to the dark side. It is not a coincidence that at the beginning of the film the dinosaurs on the island are confronted with an extinction event in the form of a volcanic eruption, from which a select few are rescued in an ark-like transport. The lesson of the Jurassic World series seems to be that it is no longer just the case that, as W.T.J. Mitchell noted back in 1998, “The author (like many of his fellow human beings and all NAWMAs [North Amer- ican White Male Adults]) may even feel, at times, like a dinosaur himself” (Mitchell 1998, 7). Rather, in the Jurassic World series humans officially become dinosaurs both in facing the threat of extinction in being surpassed by clones, but also in being sub- ject to the same process of cloning as the dinosaurs.