Eli Mills is the main antagonist of the 2018 film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He was the assistant and finance manager of Benjamin Lockwood, the former partner of John Hammond during the foundation of Jurassic Park and seeks to make a profit off of selling the dinosaurs trapped on the island of Isla Nublar by any means necessary, which includes killing those who either outlived their usefulness or those who stand in his way.
Background[]
Mills was hired by Benjamin Lockwood to be his finance manager ever since he graduated from college, and also met Claire Dearing at the said fundraiser. He also met Henry Wu and hired him to create the first genetically-modified hybrid dinosaur, the Scorpios rex, to help him with his illegal operations beneath Lockwood Manor. However, when the Scorpios proved too unstable, Mills objected to using it for his corrupt business practices, but only because its unpredictability would hurt his operations.
Personality[]
When he first appeared, Mills started off as an honest and trustworthy gentleman dedicating his life to upholding Lockwood's legacy of creating and preserving dinosaurs, even being close to Lockwood's granddaughter Maisie and hiring Claire and Owen to his cause of rescuing the dinosaurs due to their extensive knowledge of the defunct Jurassic World.
However, as time goes by, Mills' true nature begins to unfold: that of a vain, manipulative, sadistic, antisocial, greedy, ambitious, treacherous, black-hearted and truly dangerous sociopath, as he actually intends to sell off the dinosaurs as living weapons on the black market.
To that end, he was willing to murder anyone who stood in his way, as seen in his attempt to dispose Owen and his allies by leaving them to die at Isla Nublar; he even murdered Lockwood to cover his tracks and attempted to have Maisie under his custody for financial reasons as she stands to inherit Lockwood's fortune, and he later tries to kill Owen and Claire with two mercenaries once they manage to crash his auction.
He was even willing to kill Hawkes and Reed should they ever foil him in his plans, showing that his coldness isn't even limited to his own mercenaries, though likely it was just a bluff due to his cowardly nature.
Mills also cruelly confessed that Maisie was actually a clone of Lockwood's deceased daughter and that she was the true reason behind the break-up between Lockwood and Hammond, as the latter opposed human cloning. It is also implied that, since Maisie is a clone, Mills wanted to keep her so that he could have Dr. Wu and his scientists perform presumably painful experiments on her with the intent of improving any future bio-weapons they could create.
Judging from how he pushed her into her own room and how he spoke to her for the last time, he possibly viewed her as much of an inhuman animal as the dinosaurs. However, he has little to no actual knowledge of dinosaurs, as he couldn't find Blue without Owen Grady, ran away from a Stygimoloch (a herbivore, yet he still treated it no different from a carnivore) and quickly forgot that the T. rex was still close to the mansion. In addition, it was revealed that Lockwood didn't clone Massie, it was Charlotte that did, revealing that Mills might be delusional or misinformed about her real fate, making his gloat being in vain cause he believed a lie that he was true, when really it wasn't.
He is also a yet short-sighted, wimpy and cowardly businessman with the behavior akin to a spoiled child, being unsatisfied with his already powerful position and unwilling to admit his own flaws as his own actions are much more self-destructive and so poorly thought out that it pretty much negates his self-righteous claims. He is also quick to blame others for his self-inflicted mistakes and faults.
His buyers expressed doubt and annoyance in his self-proclaimed competence when he didn't have the dinosaurs at the Lockwood estate yet, and even his own employees think of him as an idiot and look down at him as Dr. Wu views him as a child with no vision or spine whatsoever, while Wheatley is just impatient with him.
Adding further to his bad judgment, he would unwittingly risk exposing the very secrets he tried cover up as he was willing to carelessly sell the highly unstable Indoraptor without considering the legal consequences, such as possibly cause many military dealers to reject the hybrid, due to his uncontrollable nature. It is also possible the Indoraptor's creation would implicate Mills in, and the courts would pass a law that would ban making any more, thus showing Mills' plans were doomed to fail regardless whether he would have succeeded or not.
In conclusion, Mills had to have been his own worst enemy as his greed, sense of denial, short-sightedness and unwillingness to listen to reason proved to be his downfall; this was shown as when Maisie released the dinosaurs from captivity, instead of escaping immediately, Mills attempted to retrieve the Indominus sample to create more hybrids, only for Rexy, the old park's T. rex, to devour Mills along with A Carnotaurus and destroy the sample.
Appearances[]
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom[]
Mills first appeared in Lockwood's estate, where he greeted Claire Dearing (the former operations manager of Jurassic World) and told her about the impending crisis of Isla Nublar, as an imminent volcanic eruption may destroy the island and kill all of the dinosaurs residing there, and that the government will not rescue them because doing so would lead to disastrous results for the mainland.
Mills told Claire that Lockwood has financed an operation that will help rescue the dinosaurs from the cataclysm and transport them to another island as their new reserve. He also tells Claire to hire Owen Grady for the mission due to his extensive training of Velociraptors (particularly the last surviving one known as Blue).
Accompanying Owen and Claire were Ken Wheatley and his team of mercenaries, whom Mills had hired to capture the dinosaurs for him to make money. After capturing Blue, Wheatley and his mercenaries betrayed Owen, Claire, and their friends by leaving them on the island to die while capturing more dinosaurs and bringing them to the ship in cages. This made both a distraught Owen and Claire realize that the rescue operation was nothing more than a ruse to capture the dinosaurs and sell them off for profit.
Though Owen, Claire, and their friends manage to evacuate the exploding island, they watch sadly as an unfortunate Brachiosaurus is left to die in the inferno of the island. Once the group arrives at Lockwood's Mansion, they end up being apprehended by Wheatley and locked up by Mills, who reveals that he's behind the plot and that he intends to sell the dinosaurs (including the Indoraptor) as weapons to arms dealers and warlords for profit (just like Vic Hoskins), all while mockingly calling Owen and Claire the "Parents of the New World".
When Lockwood finds out about Mills' true intentions from his granddaughter Maisie, he angrily confronts Mills for his betrayal, but Mills kills Lockwood by smothering him with a pillow while confining Maisie to her bedroom.
Just as Mills proceeds with his plan by hiring an auctioneer Gunnar Eversol to auction off the captured dinosaurs, Owen manages to release himself and Claire by having a Stygimoloch to break them out and disrupt the auction, just as the Indoraptor is being presented for auction against Wu's objections. Mills, who was horrified that Owen and Claire escaped and ruined the auction, tried to tell his men to retract the track so the buyer could get the Indoraptor, but Owen foiled it and disconnected the track to prevent the auction from proceeding further.
After the Indoraptor escapes and kills Wheatley and Eversol, Owen rescues Maisie before he and Claire are confronted by an enraged Mills, who reveals a shocking truth: Maisie is actually the clone of Lockwood's real daughter and the true cause why Lockwood and his partner John Hammond broke up (as Hammond opposes human cloning) and intends to have the other two executed for ruining his plans.
Just then, the Indoraptor kills the two mercenaries and attacks the heroes, allowing Mills to escape with the Indominus sample. Fortunately, Owen gets Blue to fight the Indoraptor, sending the hybrid to fall on a glass roof and get impaled on the horns of a Agujaceratops skull on display. Owen and Claire then freed the other dinosaurs from captivity (due to a toxic gas leak thanks to a mercenary's misfire) into the mainland, much to Mills' distraught as he sees his remaining men being trampled to death by the dinosaurs.
Battered and in pain, Mills tries to take the Indominus sample to escape, but by an unexpected surprise, Rexy, the original park's Tyrannosaurus rex, snatches him up in her jaws and brutally devours him (with a Carnotaurus also biting off his bottom half before being scared off by Rexy) before trampling the Indominus rex sample, destroying the last piece of evidence of the I. rex's existence and ending the creation of future hybrid dinosaurs, thus leaving Mills' plan in vain. This, in turn, avenges Lockwood whom Mills had killed in the process.
All that's left of Mills was his severed right leg that was then eaten by a pack of Compsognathus, which was detached when Rexy devoured him before she escaped with the other dinosaurs into the forest. With Mills' plot foiled and the dinosaurs now residing in the mainland, the humans decided (per Ian Malcolm's suggestion) that they (along with other animals) will have to co-exist with the dinosaurs (as seen with Rexy and a lion roaring at each other in a zoo).
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous[]
While he doesn't appear in the series thus far, Mills is shown to be the one who Henry Wu was working for by the time the Camp Cretaceous campers were already stuck on Isla Nublar six months after the downfall of Jurassic World. He sends a mercenary team, Hawkes and Reed included, to recover a specimen of the deceased Indominus rex in order for Wu to create a new deadly hybrid dinosaur for weaponry: the Indoraptor.
During this time period, one of the campers, Brooklynn, is taken hostage by Mills' mercenaries under the threat that if her fellow campers don't give Wu his laptop back, then they'll kill her. While Kenji almost gives the laptop to Wu to save Brooklynn's life, Sammy destroys Wu's laptop during an Ankylosaurusstampede, rendering him unable to get the extra files from there to create more hybrid dinosaurs.
However, since he already got the Indominus ribcage to continue his illegal operations with Mills, Wu convinces Hawkes not to shoot at the campers because his vengeance isn't worth the time and effort.
Trivia[]
- Eli Mills was the third human villain in the franchise (after the novel version of Lewis Dodgson and Billy Yoder, and before Danny Nedermeyer, Soyona Santos, and Rainn Delacourt) who tried to kill another human with his bare hands. However, unlike Yoder, Danny or Delacourt, Mills was successful. That makes him the second human in the franchise to succeed at killing another human being, the first being Dodgson and one of the only three human villains to succeed in killing another human, alongside Dodgson and Santos.
- In the novelization of Fallen Kingdom, Mills kills Lockwood with a lethal dose of morphine rather than smothering him with a pillow.
- Mills is the first villain in the film franchise to kill another human being, being followed by Soyona Santos.
- Despite his villainous nature, Mills did bring up some valid points, as seen when he calls out Claire for authorizing the creation of the Indominus rexand exploiting her and the other dinosaurs for money, and Owen when he berates him for growing attached to the raptor squad while ignoring the fact they were being trained for military applications. Later on, when he tries to kill Owen and Claire after they ruin the auction, Mills angrily states none of this would be happening if Hammond didn't "play God" when he created the original park. Unfortunately, Mills is the representation of what he claims he isn't.
- Mills was meant to be both a more realistic portrayal to how people like Peter Ludlow often behave in real-life and a cinematic adaptation to the novel version of Lewis Dodgson. However, while his first meta symbolism stayed relevant, the second meta symbolism became moot when Dodgson came back in Jurassic World: Dominion.
- Due to the revelation that it was Charlotte who created Maisie not Lockworld, Mills "reveal" about her origin turned out to a lie, indicating he was either delusional or that he was fed false information regarding the true circumstances of Charlotte's death, therefore diminishing his claim due to believing in something that turned to be another falsehood, one even he fooled himself into believing. It's even possible he lied about it just to get Claire and Owen to give up Maisie, though it is unlikely as his tone was genuine, likely indicating Mills did believe the story and was less informed than he initially claimed. This makes his murder of Lockwood end in vain as he unwittingly kept the true circumstances of Charlotte's death a secret, with only Henry Wu and Lewis Dodgson knowing what really happened.