I'm all about letting people make their own choices, and I try not to get involved. But Jeff Goldblum will return for the Jurassic World sequel, and I can't bite my tongue anymore. I mean, this has nothing to do with Goldblum and everything to do with his character, Dr. Ian Malcolm. Malcolm is a genius and an innovator, and I have nothing but admiration for the work he's done in the somehow-twinned fields of Chaos Theory and Keeping Yourself Alive During Dinosaur Attack. However, he really needs to call it a day.
Goldblum's character was introduced in the original Jurassic Park, in 1993, and survived both that movie and its 1997 followup The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When the mathematician didn't crop up in Jurassic World in 2015, I was hopeful that he'd learned his lesson. But nope. The actor has signed on for the Jurassic World sequel, due out Jun. 22, 2018, alongside fellow franchise survivors and fools Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, and new additions Justice Smith, James Cromwell, and Toby Jones — which means the character is still brimming with hubris.
Don't get me wrong. I'm really excited to see the movie, and Dr. Malcolm is an excellent addition to any cast of characters, any time, as far as I'm concerned. But this shouldn't be about me and my concerns. This should be about a man, whose chosen profession and the historical epoch of his birth should never have brought him into the path of a dinosaur ever in his whole life, who willingly chooses to cross paths with them for a third — and let's be honest, probably final — time. And this is after they've done everything in their power to murder him the first time around.
It's like that old saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, probably a dinosaur should eat my head. Trauma does terrible things to the human body and brain, but if Malcolm sat down and thought about this for literally five seconds, I suspect he'd recall that the two worst moments of his life so far have happened in or around Jurassic Park. Stay away from the park, dude!
I honestly can't wait to find out more about Goldblum's role in the sequel. How they manage to explain his death-defying burst of courage this time around might be just as interesting as his appearance in the movie itself.
