Most franchises that run this long eventually become about the franchise instead of the people in it. New leads show up, old ones get a nostalgic cameo, and the theme park (sometimes literally, in this case) keeps expanding while the actual characters quietly calcify into action figures. Jurassic Park has done plenty of that too. But it’s also done something rarer, which is let three characters age, change, break up, get back together, and grow into genuinely different people across more than thirty years of movies. Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm aren’t just legacy cameos. They’re the closest thing this franchise has to an actual emotional throughline, and tracking what happens to them from 1993 to Dominion tells you almost as much about the series as the dinosaurs do.

I want to walk through each of their arcs, because they’re doing genuinely different work in the story. Grant is the reluctant convert. Sattler is the character who keeps getting more interesting the longer the series runs, provided the writers let her. And Malcolm is the constant, the one who barely changes because he was already right about everything back in 1993 and has simply been waiting for the rest of the cast to catch up.

Alan Grant: The Man Who Didn’t Want Kids and Kept Getting Them Anyway

In Michael Crichton’s original novel, Alan Grant is a fairly straightforward figure. He’s a renowned paleontologist with a genuine fondness for children, especially the ones who like dinosaurs, and none of the prickliness that defines his film counterpart. That prickliness was Steven Spielberg’s invention. Spielberg wanted a source of dramatic tension that didn’t exist in the book, and screenwriter David Koepp has said the medium of film needed the audience to feel something was personally at stake for Grant beyond scientific curiosity. So the movie version dislikes kids, resents being asked to babysit, and gets stuck babysitting anyway. It’s a simple, almost sitcom-level premise, and it works because Sam Neill sells the gradual thaw so well.

By the end of the first film, Grant has gone from a man who visibly recoils from children to one who’s willing to die protecting Hammond’s grandchildren. That’s the whole arc in miniature. It’s not subtle, but Spielberg wasn’t going for subtle. He was going for the shot of Grant faintly cradling Tim on the tree branch, which, incidentally, was Neill’s own idea to have his character nearly faint at his first sight of a living dinosaur, a moment that has since taken on a life of its own online.

Jurassic Park III picks up years later with a more cynical, more physically weathered Grant. He’s broke, professionally sidelined by the fact that InGen has created actual dinosaurs and rendered a chunk of paleontology moot, and dismissive of the idea that his life’s work has been made irrelevant. He calls InGen’s creatures “genetically engineered theme park monsters,” which is both a joke and a genuine defense mechanism. Director Joe Johnston wanted Grant to be a more cynical version of himself given what he’d been through, and Neill has said he was thinking of Lee Marvin’s world-weary character in Point Blank as a model. It’s a good instinct. The Grant of the third film isn’t traumatized in an obvious, dramatic way. He’s just tired, and he’s found a new kid to bond with in Eric Kirby almost by accident, which mirrors his arc from the first film without repeating it beat for beat.

Then comes the long gap. Grant doesn’t appear at all in the first two films of the Jurassic World trilogy, which makes sense given how invested the franchise was in moving forward with new characters. Neill even joked in interviews that Grant had probably either died or given up paleontology for accounting. By the time Dominion rolls around, Grant is older, more isolated, and running an underfunded dig site that keeps getting deprioritized because de-extinct dinosaurs have become the more exciting story. There’s something quietly sad about that setup. The guy who spent his whole life uncovering the past has been made obsolete by a company that skipped the fossil record entirely.

What I appreciate about Grant’s arc across four appearances is that it never resolves into something tidy. He doesn’t become a family man. He doesn’t triumphantly return to prominence in his field. He just keeps being a stubborn, competent guy who gets pulled back into chaos he didn’t ask for, which is honestly the most realistic throughline the franchise offers.

Ellie Sattler: From Grad Student to the Character Everyone Wishes Got More Screen Time

Ellie Sattler’s journey across the franchise is the most interesting of the three, mostly because it’s the one that changes most dramatically depending on who’s writing her in a given installment. In the novel, she’s Grant’s paleobotany graduate student, sharp and capable but positioned as a mentee. Spielberg elevated her considerably for the film, partly because he felt she hadn’t gotten enough attention in the book, and made her Grant’s romantic partner instead. That reframing gave Laura Dern more to work with, and she used it. The scene where Sattler heads out alone to restore the park’s power, over Hammond’s objection that a man should probably be the one to go, is one of the more quietly feminist beats in a movie mostly about people running from a Tyrannosaurus.

Dern has talked about working closely with Kathleen Kennedy and writer David Koepp to keep Sattler from becoming what she called an oversexualized action heroine. The practical costume, the glasses, the insistence on writing in a line of dialogue like “dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth,” all of that came from a deliberate effort to make her someone real rather than a type. It mostly worked. Sattler is frequently cited as one of the more well-rounded action heroines of the era, and Dern herself has called the role her favorite of her career.

Jurassic Park III shrinks her down to a supporting cameo, which has always felt like a missed opportunity given how much the first film built her up. She’s married with two kids by this point, on good terms with Grant but no longer involved with him, and mostly exists to receive a phone call and dispatch the cavalry. It’s a reasonable enough choice given the constraints of the production, since her scenes were reportedly shot in a single day, but it’s also the point where a lot of fans start to feel like the franchise didn’t quite know what to do with her outside of her relationship to Grant.

Dominion course-corrects in a big way. Sattler is now divorced, working as a soil scientist, and the one who actually drives the plot by investigating genetically engineered locusts threatening the global food supply. It’s a genuinely good use of the character, giving her professional agency independent of Grant or Malcolm, and it reflects Dern’s own interest in climate issues, which she and the filmmakers folded directly into the role. Whether Dominion fully sticks the landing on all of that is a fair question. Some critics felt the film undercuts her competence in a couple of scenes played for comic relief, and that’s a valid critique. But the overall trajectory, from grad student to overlooked girlfriend to the person actually solving the mystery, is a real arc, even if it took three decades and some uneven writing along the way to get there.

The Breakup and the Reunion

It’s worth pausing on the Grant and Sattler relationship specifically, since it’s one thread running through all of this rather than the whole story. The first film ends with them as a couple, with Sattler wanting kids and Grant resisting the idea. By Jurassic Park III, they’ve broken up, and Sattler has married someone else entirely. Joe Johnston has said he made that choice partly because he felt Dern looked too young by that point to still be paired romantically with Neill, given the twenty year age gap between the actors, and partly because he just didn’t buy them as a couple anymore. It’s a pragmatic, slightly blunt reason for a breakup, but the film handles the fallout gracefully. Grant and Sattler remain close friends, and their scene together, where he shares his raptor communication theories and she’s clearly still processing her own trauma from the first film, is one of the quieter, more grounded moments in an otherwise fairly disposable sequel.

Dominion reunites them romantically, a decision Trevorrow, Dern, and Neill were reportedly all in agreement on well before filming. It’s the kind of reunion that could easily feel like pure fan service, and some critics have said exactly that. But there’s also something satisfying about it if you’ve tracked these two characters since 1993. Neill has said Grant’s motivation for getting involved in the events of Dominion at all comes down to missing Sattler, which tracks with a guy who spent the first film learning to want a family and then spent the following decades alone with his fossils.

Ian Malcolm: The One Who Was Right All Along

Malcolm is the odd one out in this trio, mostly because his arc is less about change and more about vindication. He shows up in the first film as the resident skeptic, the mathematician who tells Hammond that his controlled, sterilized dinosaur population is a fantasy because biology doesn’t respect that kind of control. He’s right, obviously, almost immediately and at great personal cost, since he ends up with a badly broken leg for his trouble. In Crichton’s novel, Malcolm is even killed off, or at least reported dead, only to be revealed alive in The Lost World once fan reaction to Goldblum’s performance made him too valuable a character to leave buried.

What’s fun about Malcolm across the films is that he doesn’t really grow so much as get reused. He’s the voice of chaos theory in the first film, the reluctant protagonist dragged back to a different island in The Lost World, a brief cameo in Fallen Kingdom, and finally an in-house philosopher for the very company he’d be warning everyone about in Dominion. That last one is almost too on the nose, but it fits a character whose entire function has always been pointing out that humans keep making the same mistake and calling it progress. Jeff Goldblum has leaned into the role’s sex symbol status too, something that traces directly back to one open-shirted pose in the original film that’s since ended up as tattoos, memes, and even a statue in London.

Malcolm doesn’t need a redemption arc or a reunion plot because his whole point was never personal growth. He was the guy who saw the problem clearly from minute one. His constancy is actually the joke and the tragedy of the character. Nobody in this universe ever really listens to him, and yet he keeps getting invited back anyway.

What These Arcs Actually Add Up To

Taken together, Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm give the Jurassic Park franchise something most long-running series lack, which is a sense that time is actually passing for somebody. Grant goes from reluctant guardian to weathered survivor to a man running out of funding and patience. Sattler goes from overlooked student to underused cameo to the person who finally gets to lead her own investigation. Malcolm stays exactly who he was, proving the point that he never needed to change because he was making the right argument from the start.

None of these arcs are perfect. Sattler deserved more screen time in the third film. Grant’s absence from two-thirds of the Jurassic World trilogy leaves a strange gap in his story. Malcolm’s later appearances sometimes flatten him into comic relief rather than the sharp cynic he started as. But the fact that these characters have arcs worth critiquing at all, thirty-three years and seven films later, says something. Most franchises this size would have quietly retired them after the first sequel. Jurassic Park kept finding reasons to bring them back, and mostly, it was worth it.

What’s your take on how these three have held up across the franchise? I’d love to hear which arc you think landed best, and which one you feel still deserves a better ending.