Dinosaurs have devolved in Jurassic World Rebirth. Directed by Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla), the new movie is set on Ile Saint-Hubert, the site of an abandoned R&D facility where InGen conducted experiments for the original Jurassic Park — and later Jurassic World — until a containment failure incident in 2010. InGen’s scientists, so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should, crossbred dino species to create new “engineered entertainments” for the since-shuttered theme parks.
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But the genetically altered animals were deemed too unsightly for the general public and left on the island, where mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) must venture to collect DNA samples from three colossal species across sea, land, and air in order for Parker-Genix Pharmaceutical to develop a drug that could prevent heart disease.
To do so, they must survive their encounter with the deviations left behind on Ile Saint-Hubert: mutated dinosaurs like the Distortus rex, a malformed Tyrannosaurs rex, and the Mutadons, winged mutant Velociraptor and Pteranodon hybrids. Now that Jurassic World Rebirth is available to own digitally, the film’s bonus features have revealed new pieces of concept art showcasing alternate designs for the gene-spliced Mutadons:
Conceived by Jurassic World Rebirth screenwriter David Koepp, the Mutadons were born of Koepp’s encounter with a bat that had burrowed into a column outside his house.
“As I was looking, these two long clawed hands came out from inside the column, and it pulled up its head, and it was this really big bat that had been sleeping in there,” Koepp, who also wrote the original Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, recalls in the new documentary Jurassic World Rebirth: Hatching a New Era. “And I thought, ‘I’m putting you in a movie.’”
The Mutadons “were a big design challenge,” adds production designer James Clyne. “How much of that do we pull from the original DNA of a dinosaur, and how much do we create on the drawing board ourselves?”
The earliest designs for the Mutadons might bring to mind the monstrous MUTOs — Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms — from the MonsterVerse franchise, which originated with the Edwards-directed Godzilla in 2014. Although the filmmaker based the D-rex on aliens like the Rancor from Star Wars and the Xenomorph from Alien, Edwards decided that the Mutadons should simply be a cross between two familiar dinosaurs.
“After trying all these clever experiments with different looks, we just reached this point like, ‘Are we trying too hard? Should this just be a flying raptor that looks like it could fly?’” Edwards said, adding that the Mutadons should not be “a weird hybrid thing,” but instead, feel like “nature would have arrived at that decision.”
Digital artist Mariam Ferrer Aloy recalls the “long decision process” to imagine the mutants with “a lot of iterations.” In one permutation, the Mutadons “went more raptor” before the director refined the look.
“We had to essentially find something that worked more organically but that had clean lines,” Aloy says. Ultimately, the Mutadons had “vulture features” with the raptor scales from 2001’s Jurassic Park III. “And then, of course, we have the beak at the front. After that, we shortened the beak a little bit just to go back to the raptor features,” Aloy says. “There was a lot of debate about how much of the membrane we have to show while the wing is folded, but in the end, we decided to go for a more hidden look.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is now available to rent or own on Digital HD.
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