One of the biggest mistakes the sequel trilogy (except for the second half of “Fallen Kingdom”) committed was forgetting that the first “Jurassic Park” is scary as hell. “Chaos Theory,” on the other hand, is more grown up and with higher stakes than its predecessor, never shying away from the danger of dinosaurs meeting humans. We constantly see dinosaurs maim and murder people (off-screen, but still), and there are plenty of set pieces that are as nail-bitingly thrilling and scary as those in Steven Spielberg’s original classic, like when the first episode of season 2 pits teenagers against dinosaurs on a container ship in the middle of the ocean with no escape (or when a jungle cruise adventure upriver goes wrong and suddenly there are hippos and dinos trying to kill one another).
As showrunner and executive producer Scott Kreamer told IndieWire, “We harken back to the original [‘Jurassic Park’] a lot, and that’s an all-ages horror movie. It’s definitely going to be too scary for some, and we made a lot of people nervous with the line that we were treading when we first started going.”
Where “Chaos Theory” season 1 showed the ways having undomesticated animals run wild in the middle of populated areas would result in mayhem, the second season reveals what happens when pre-historic animals meet modern ones. (No surprise, it goes terribly wrong for everyone.) It’s a hair-raising sequence when the show’s kids, who are navigating a river in Senegal, encounter a hippo who seems hellbent on killing them for no reason (as hippos tend to do). Then, before they can evade it, a suchomimus arrives and starts fighting the hippo. It’s like something out of Discovery Channel’s “Animal Face-Off,” brutal yet as awe-inspiring as the sight of dinosaurs in the very first “Jurassic Park.” Most importantly, the sequence fulfills the promise of “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” in showing the consequences of unleashing dinosaurs on humanity.
But before you start thinking dinosaurs can just come in here and obliterate all our mammals, think again — because season 2 also makes it clear an apex predator is an apex predator no matter what era they live in (as seen when a pride of lions devours a dimorphodon).