Eli Mills

"Jurassic World… the island… all of that is in the past."

- Eli Mills talking about Jurassic World.

Elijah "Eli" Mills is the main antagonist of the 2018 science-fiction adventure summer blockbuster film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

He was the assistant and finance manager of Benjamin Lockwood, one of the co-founders of the original Jurassic Park (alongside John Hammond). He 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 stand in his way.

He is portrayed by Rafe Spall in his first villain role.

History
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. It also turns that Mills previously sent a mercenary team to recover a specimen of the deceased Indominus rex in order for Henry Wu to create a new deadly hybrid dinosaur for weaponry: the Indoraptor.

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. 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). Just then, the Indoraptor kills the InGen Contractor and attacks the heroes, allowing Mills to escape with the Indominus sample. Fortunately, Owen gets Blue to attack the Indoraptor, sending the latter to fall on a glass roof and getting impaled to death on a Triceratops skull on display.

Maisie then freed the other dinosaurs from captivity into the mainland, much to Mills' distraught as he sees his remaining men being trampled to death by the dinosaurs. Mills tries to take the Indominus sample to escape, but by an unexpected surprise, a Tyrannosaurus grabbed him with her jaws and devoured him to his death before crushing the Indominus rex sample, destroying the last piece of evidence of the I. rex 's existence and ending the future of hybrid dinosaurs forever. All that's left of Mills was his right leg, which was detached when the Tyrannosaurus devoured him before she escaped with the other dinosaurs.

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 shown with the Tyrannosaurus and an African lion roaring at each other in a zoo).

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 manipulative, sociopathic, greedy, ambitious, and treacherous businessman, 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, albeit feeling remorse for said murder, and he later tries to kill Owen and Claire with two mercenaries once they manage to crash his auction. He even sadistically 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 pressumably painful experiments to her with the intent of improving any future bioweapons they could create.

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 rex and 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.

Mills' greed proved to be his downfall; this was shown when Maisie released the dinosaurs from captivity, Mills tried to escape while attempting to steal back the Indominus sample to create more hybrids, only for the T. rex  to devour Mills to his death and then the sample gets destroyed.

Trivia

 * Eli Mills was the third human in the franchise (after Lewis Dodgson and Billy Yoder) who tried to kill another human with his bare hands. However, unlike Yoder and Dodgson, Mills was successful. That makes him the first human in the franchise to succeed at killing another human being.
 * Eli Mills may have known and worked with Vic Hoskins to weaponize dinosaurs prior to the downfall of Jurassic World as Mills had actually attempted to carry out Hoskins' plan by creating the Indoraptor which was a fraction of the Indominus Rex's size, deadly, intelligent, and able to hide from the most advanced military technology as a living weapon unlike anything ever seen, just as Hoskins had said before his death. Mills may have learned about Owen and the raptor squad through Hoskins.

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