Costa Rica represents a missed opportunity for the franchise. Steven Spielberg took a dinosaur to an American city in The Lost World, and it worked. It accomplished a visual that many wanted to see after the first movie.
Jurassic Park 3’s abandoned screenplay features a mainland subplot, which is the natural progression after the San Diego sequence in the second film. Swap the concrete jungle for a real one, and one that isn’t isolated on a secret island.
Costa Rica features heavily in the original novel, and we learn that locals believe spirits dwell on offshore islands and kidnap children in the night. Stories of the “Hupia” spread around local communities, with recent reports of lizard attacks on babies across Costa Rica supporting this. In the novel we learn that these attacks are actually coming from de-extinct creatures, courtesy of InGen.
What does the Hupia represent?
The fear of the unknown. Local myths, the paranormal, cryptozoology, as humans we have a fascination (and fear) of what we can’t explain. After more than a decade of experiments by InGen on the islands, using Costa Rica as a connection point to the mainland, stories of the Hupia and other creatures/spirits/monsters would increase and begin to pose a real threat to the communities living in rural jungles.
Always a missed opportunity. Time for a Costa Rica story?
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