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Jurassic World 2's T-Rex Is STILL The Original
Twenty-five years and four movies since Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and the T-Rex featured in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is still the original. And she has the scars to prove it.
Three years after the events of Jurassic World, Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) return to Isla Nublar to save the dinosaurs from an active volcano threatening all life on the island. However, what begins as a rescue op soon reveals itself to be the basis of a dark conspiracy that threatens humanity with the risk of extinction. And while the primary focus in Fallen Kingdom falls onto the Velociraptor named Blue and the most recent abomination from InGen dubbed the Indoraptor, the Jurassic franchise wouldn't be the same without its trademark T-Rex. And it really is the OG.
Nearly three decades in, and the queen bee from the original movie is still running rampant. In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex battled Velociraptors, car tires, and Jeff Goldblum; then, during the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III, she sat on the sidelines (the T-Rex in The Lost World, unofficially referred to as "Tyrannosaurus Doe," was located on the second island, Isla Sorna, and the T-Rex defeated by the Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III was a different dinosaur altogether).
However, when the Jurassic franchise earned a soft reboot with Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World in 2015, the original T-Rex made her triumphant return. This was confirmed by Trevorrow prior to the release of Jurassic World, when he told the Los Angeles Times that "she's a little older, and she's angry." But even without Trevorrow's confirmation, the original T-Rex's identity is apparent to any fans of the original who have a keen eye for detail. The T-Rex featured in Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom not only resides on the original island, but bears a unique set of scars across her neck given to her by a pair of pesky Velociraptors in the final act of the original movie.
That the same creature has appeared in three movies (matching Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm and B.D. Wong's Henry Wu for most films in the franchise) is rather impressive. With the introduction of new technology and new dinosaur breeds, it would have been easy for the new Jurassic trilogy to go all-in on the genetically-engineered future: as the ads for Jurassic World said, "Bigger. Louder. More teeth." Why even bother digging up the past when something new has already been introduced? Because that's the entire M.O. of the entire Jurassic franchise: not letting the past die.
There is, of course, the nostalgia factor, but the T-Rex in the Jurassic World trilogy additionally reflects a major theme in these movies that humans are constantly trying to dig up and restore the past. In fact, once you strip away the nostalgia elements, it's actually a reminder of the long-term ramifications of bringing an extinct species back to life; it can have an impact a quarter of a century later, and beyond. The past will eventually come back to bite you - sometimes literally.
