Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World short, Battle at Big Rock, will provide some resolution to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s cliffhanger ending. After a fourteen-year hiatus, the Jurassic Park franchise came roaring back to life with 2015’s Jurassic World, a soft reboot directed and co-written by Trevorrow. The film was a billion-dollar hit and was followed three years later by the almost equally lucrative Fallen Kingdom, with Trevorrow serving as the co-writer and producer only this time. However, he will return to the helm for the finale to his dino-trilogy, the untitled Jurassic World 3, when the film arrives in 2021.

Until then, Jurassic fans will be able to satisfy their desire to watch dinosaurs terrorize humans with Battle at Big Rock, an eight-minute adventure set to premiere this Sunday, September 15, on FX. Directed by Trevorrow (who cowrote the script with his Jurassic World 3 writing partner, Emily Carmichael), Battle at Big Rock will focus on a brand-new set of non-dino characters. At the end same time, the short aims to provide some resolution to Fallen Kingdom’s tantalizing conclusion.

In an interview with Collider, Trevorrow confirmed Battle at Big Rock takes place a year after the events of Fallen Kingdom. As he explained, it follows a family on a camping trip to Big Rock National Park, which is located 20 miles from the Lockwood estate (i.e. where the dinosaurs from Isla Nublar were set free, towards the final minutes of Fallen Kingdom). Trevorrow went on to confirm this is the “first major confrontation” between humans and dinosaurs, and discussed how the short both pays off Fallen Kingdom’s cliffhanger while also setting the stage for Jurassic World 3:

André Holland (Castle Rock) and Natalie Martinez (The I-Land), as seen in the exclusive photos from Collider, star in Battle at Big Rock as two of the people who unexpectedly cross paths with some dinosaurs in the short. Trevorrow confirmed the film will include two species of dinosaurs that’ve never appeared in a Jurassic movie before, in the forms of the herbivore Nasutoceratops and the carnivorous Allosaurus. And while it won’t have the production values of a full-blown Jurassic World feature, it sounds like Battle at Big Rock will look and feel pretty professional overall. It’s even being photographed by Batman V Superman and Kong: Skull Island’s Larry Fong, with Star Trek: Discovery and Legion orchestrator Amie Doherty handling the score.

The world is bigger than just the characters we’ve been following in the films. We’ve finally taken the story off Isla Nublar, we wanted to show a glimpse of that new reality. If this really happened, you’d see a series of random disconnected incidents that would create a pattern of chaos. I wanted to see one of those incidents.

All things considered, Battle at Big Rock ought to provide some enjoyable supplementary world-building for Jurassic World 3. It’s not a must-see for anyone who wants to keep up with the Jurassic World films, but might be all the more intense to watch because there’s no guarantee its leads will make it out alive (unlike Jurassic World protagonists Claire Dearing and Owen Grady). Not to mention, by the time Jurassic World 3 picks up, humanity will have already started to adjust to living on a planet where dinosaurs roam freely. As such, Battle at Big Rock may provide a small, but welcome taste of what the presumably terrifying adjustment period before then was like.

Battle at Big Rock premieres this Sunday, September 15, on FX, before becoming available online immediately after.

Source: Collider

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