The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

[Jeivar]

Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.

Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?

Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

What do you guys think?

[tomandtish]

Jeivar, I agree with you, especially on the sequels. Lost World is especially bad in that nearly every death can be traced directly to the actions of the "heroes". After Lost World I haven;t seen any of them in the theater, and this newest one will be no exception. I'll catch it on cable since all I want to see is unrealistic dinosaur fights.

However, there's one thing I'd like to address....



The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?


The lawyer gets grief not for his money making attitude, but that he changes to it so quickly and abandons his initial position. Remember, he was initially representing the interests that brought Grant, Saddler, and Malcolm (GSM) to the island in the first place. The events (seen and assumed based on scenes).


1) Worker is killed while setting up the park.
2) Investors express safety concerns. Gennaro (lawyer who is representing THEIR interests) confronts Hammond to bring in experts. Remember, if the experts aren't satisfied, he's not satisfied.
3) Hammond brings in GSM, (presumably those three at urging of Gennaro and the investors).
4) On their way to the park GSM and Gennaro see dinosaurs for the first time.

At this point Gennaro immediately switches to "We're going to make a fortune". He is no longer paying attention to the experts that HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE PAYING ATTENTION TO. More importantly, he obviously no longer is looking out for the interests of the investors, who are HIS ACTUAL CLIENTS. He simply sees the dollar signs and everything else goes away.

His attitude would be more understandable if he was Hammond's lawyer, but he isn't. He's there to assess the investment of the park relative to its safety, and he completely abandons it.

[Peelee]

As much as I love Jurassic Park, Crichton was somewhat famous technophobe, and many of his books revolved around advanced technologies not working out like we wanted. I think that's the most I'm allowed to say here.

[comicshorse]

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.





I have this theory that Katie McGrath ( who plays the PA )is trying for the position of the new Sean Bean from the number of times I've seen her die horribly on screen

Also I presume the quote is from Herzog's film about the guy who lived among bears for years before being killed by one ?

[Jeivar]

The lawyer gets grief not for his money making attitude, but that he changes to it so quickly and abandons his initial position. Remember, he was initially representing the interests that brought Grant, Saddler, and Malcolm (GSM) to the island in the first place. The events (seen and assumed based on scenes).


Well, you may have a point. It's been a long time since I saw the movie.


Also I presume the quote is from Herzog's film about the guy who lived among bears for years before being killed by one ?

Yes. Grizzly Man.

[Berserk Mecha]

The Jurassic Park films are generally pretty bad about showing their themes. There's an strong message of 'Thou shalt not tamper in God's domain' in the films that really isn't shown.

In the first film, everything was going swimmingly until corporate sabotage fouled it all up. There is one confirmed incident at the beginning in which a raptor kills one of the workers, but that's beside the point. It's Nedry that causes the security procedures to fail and allows the dinosaurs to escape. And yet, there is more focus on the failures of the park as opposed to the greed of the people bribing Nedry.

In Jurassic World, they give a huge pair of idiot balls to Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard that allows the Indominus to escape. And from there, it's a convoluted domino effect that leads to the I. rex smashing into the aviary and releasing the pterosaurs that immediately go after the guests instead of the fresh apatosaurus carrion in the field. And then there's another convoluted twist that allows a formerly isolated and sociopathic animal to become the alpha of the raptor pack and turn them against the humans.

And yet, the message is supposedly that Jurassic Park can't work and shouldn't be made.

[Peelee]

The Jurassic Park films are generally pretty bad about showing their themes. There's an strong message of 'Thou shalt not tamper in God's domain' in the films that really isn't shown.

In the first film, everything was going swimmingly until corporate sabotage fouled it all up. There is one confirmed incident at the beginning in which a raptor kills one of the workers, but that's beside the point. It's Nedry that causes the security procedures to fail and allows the dinosaurs to escape. And yet, there is more focus on the failures of the park as opposed to the greed of the people bribing Nedry.

Nope, nopenopenope. You're objectively wrong.

So, only focusing on the movie and not the book, we can still show the island is a colossal failure before Grant and Co. ever set foot on the island.

Remember, they're only up for the weekend. It's a three-day tour of the island. On the first day, Nedry brings down some security systems, and they reboot the island. On the second day, Grant finds a cracked egg on the island. While not explicitly stated in the movie, the egg is the exact size, color, and texture of the raptor eggs we saw first. So, to start with, dinosaurs are already breeding, which means the park is already out of control; since the egg has already hatched, we know this has been going on for some time. Second, dinosaurs (or, at least, raptors) are now demonstrated to have already escaped their confines, even before Nedry was able to do anything.

Nedry disabled some security systems, but left all the dino pen systems in place. When he didn't come back, the only way to bypass his lockout was to restart the entire system, which then ran on auxilliary power and thus wasn't powering the fences, so all hell was free to break loose and it was much, much easier to see the failure. But the park had failed well in advance, they just didn't know it yet.

[Berserk Mecha]

Just because the dinosaurs were breeding in the wild doesn't mean that the park was a colossal failure. In the books, it was shown that compsognathuses and velociraptors had escaped beforehand and that it could become a huge problem. The opening scene of the book is about a clinic receiving a man with a velociraptor bite. But in the film, the dinosaurs breeding had no effect whatsoever on the plot and the failure of the park.

Are we sure that the egg that Grant and the kids find on the second day was a velociraptor egg? The footprints that lead away from the nest looked more like those of a triceratops or a sauropod. I'd have to watch the scene again to be sure.

And the raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the entire system. This is something that had never been tested and if circumstances hadn't been so dire, they might have prepared themselves better. And they wouldn't have had to reboot the system in the first place if there hadn't been corporate sabotage. Hence, it's all Nedry's fault.

[Peelee]

Just because the dinosaurs were breeding in the wild doesn't mean that the park was a colossal failure. In the books, it was shown that compsognathuses and velociraptors had escaped beforehand and that it could become a huge problem. The opening scene of the book is about a clinic receiving a man with a velociraptor bite. But in the film, the dinosaurs breeding had no effect whatsoever on the plot and the failure of the park.

Are we sure that the egg that Grant and the kids find on the second day was a velociraptor egg? The footprints that lead away from the nest looked more like those of a triceratops or a sauropod. I'd have to watch the scene again to be sure.

And the raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the entire system. This is something that had never been tested and if circumstances hadn't been so dire, they might have prepared themselves better. And they wouldn't have had to reboot the system in the first place if there hadn't been corporate sabotage. Hence, it's all Nedry's fault.

The raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the system, but the raptors had already escaped and bred, or had bred and managed to chuck their eggs out (assuming the egg was a raptor. Book confirms it, movie doesn't, but again it shares the exact charictaristics of the eggs we see hatching in the hatchery). That means that, sans Nedry, the only thing between the island and a bunch of eaten tourists is time. Even if it wasn't raptors, that's free-roaming, untracked dinosaurs on an island specifically designed to not have free-roaming, untracked dinosaurs. Even the gentlest dino walking around free means they have huge problems on their hands.

Also, if you want to play the backtrack game, Nedry did the sabotage because Hammond was insisting on extra unpaid work not in the contract, hence it's all Hammond's fault. Or, the system only needed to be rebooted because Nedry got lost, which wouldn't have happened if there had been no storm, so it's all the storm's fault. Or, Nedry did the corporate sabotage for the rival corporation at Dodgson's behest, so it's all Dodgson's fault.

I'm not saying Nedry was a hero or anything; dude absolutely played a part in the isand's downfall. But he didn't cause anything, he just sped it up.

[thorgrim29]

There should have been a lot more redundancy built into the security system though, especially since they know that they're going to get hit by a few hurricanes every year. The shareholders were right to be concerned, they got talked into sinking masses of money into a kindly old grampa's dream project and apparently let him do whatever he wanted with it for however long it took to get the park to that point (I'm going to guess 10 to 15 years from the first cloned dino proof of concept to the time of the first movie). Hammond is a good face for the company but he never struck me as the kind of guy you'd put in charge of a multi-billion dollar investment and the lives of dozens of people.

[Peelee]

There should have been a lot more redundancy built into the security system though, especially since they know that they're going to get hit by a few hurricanes every year. The shareholders were right to be concerned, they got talked into sinking masses of money into a kindly old grampa's dream project and apparently let him do whatever he wanted with it for however long it took to get the park to that point (I'm going to guess 10 to 15 years from the first cloned dino proof of concept to the time of the first movie). Hammond is a good face for the company but he never struck me as the kind of guy you'd put in charge of a multi-billion dollar investment and the lives of dozens of people.

Oh absolutely. Hammond, in both book and film, was a complete huckster. He even admits it openly when he talked about the flea circus. He presented to people what they wanted to see, is all.

[warty goblin]

The answer is obvious. The dinosaurs are, and always have been, the actual protagonists and heroes. The humans are just the viewpoint characters, and only really matter insofar as they are in the vicinity of dinosaurs. People who do bad things to dinosaurs are punished, doing bad things to people is essentially irrelevant because people don't matter all that much. Of course people who don't do bad things to dinosaurs are also punished, because dinosaurs don't give a crap and, again, humans are irrelevant.

This is thus the rare series that presents, not so much a nihilistic view, so much as one that is determinedly not anthrocentric. A t-rex eating a person is about as morally problematic as a human eating a bacon cheddar cheeseburger. When viewed from this perspective, I find it philosophically refreshing.


Of course I'm also on the record as saying that the next movie really should be T-Rex and Velociraptor Kill Stuff.

[Berserk Mecha]

A'right, so I found the scene on YouTube:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJxTXe7bQiM

The footprints of the hatchlings look like they have two stubby toes. I guess that'd conform to the posture of a raptor if the larger claw were held off of the ground. So, yeah, that's an oversight on my part. But the film could still have shown that the dinosaurs breeding was a danger. The three adult velociraptors in the film all escaped from the confined pen after the system was rebooted. But wouldn't Muldoon and the others have known if one of their raptors had escaped? Especially if they were all kept in that small pen? Is that an oversight on the film's part?

I do agree that the computer system should have had more redundancies. But wasn't the point of the tour to test if would all work in the first place? Seems rather condescending to condemn the park as a failure when the people in charge are actively trying to fix the kinks. Isn't that why they brought Malcom along? ...Come to think of it, what was his purpose again? (Aside from being Chriton's mouthpiece, of course.)

[Peelee]

The answer is obvious. The dinosaurs are, and always have been, the actual protagonists and heroes. The humans are just the viewpoint characters, and only really matter insofar as they are in the vicinity of dinosaurs. People who do bad things to dinosaurs are punished, doing bad things to people is essentially irrelevant because people don't matter all that much. Of course people who don't do bad things to dinosaurs are also punished, because dinosaurs don't give a crap and, again, humans are irrelevant.

This is thus the rare series that presents, not so much a nihilistic view, so much as one that is determinedly not anthrocentric. A t-rex eating a person is about as morally problematic as a human eating a bacon cheddar cheeseburger. When viewed from this perspective, I find it philosophically refreshing.


Of course I'm also on the record as saying that the next movie really should be T-Rex and Velociraptor Kill Stuff.

IIRC, Spielberg claimed the T-Rex was the hero of the first movie, since she came up and saved everyone from the raptors at the end, so you've got some good support behind you there.

[Narkis]

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

You are completely missing the point, which is that raptors in the film are much smarter than expected and not so different to humans instead of just some dumb wild predators.

[tomandtish]

A'right, so I found the scene on YouTube:
I do agree that the computer system should have had more redundancies. But wasn't the point of the tour to test if would all work in the first place? Seems rather condescending to condemn the park as a failure when the people in charge are actively trying to fix the kinks. Isn't that why they brought Malcom along? ...Come to think of it, what was his purpose again? (Aside from being Chriton's mouthpiece, of course.)

Yes and no. It is on paper. But what's unclear in the movie is WHO got to pick the experts, and whether they are picking the right experts (they aren't). These are somewhat separate issues.

First, WHO is picking the experts? Did the investors say "You have to gets some experts in here to evaluate the place. We want Ian Malcolm and some dino people", and Hammond said "OK" and grabbed two people who he thought would be sympathetic to him ("you're supposed to be on my side.")? Or did the investors specifically insist on those three? In the book all three had done some long-distance consulting for the project before (without really knowing the end goal), so they weren't total strangers.

But more importantly, the experts they bring in are AT BEST supplemental to what they actually need. What they really needed were:

Experts in containing large animals - zoo keepers, etc.
Experts in computers to evaluate all this automated software
Experts in construction to evaluate the man-made barriers.
Etc. Etc.

The ones they brought in are a botanist (who can admittedly tell them that they have some poisonous plants), Malcolm (who as someone else stated seems to be the prophet of doom but doesn't actually have any relevant skills), and Grant, who knowledge and experience (when it comes to dino behavior) is all theoretical. These three are extremely limited in determining the viability and especially the safety of the park.

Now, is this a plot hole? Almost certainly. But if we want to explain in within the context of the movie, it's that the tour is a sop to the investors and isn't actually intended to do anything, since if you were serious then you would have invited people who actually had something useful to offer.

[Strigon]

Yes and no. It is on paper. But what's unclear in the movie is WHO got to pick the experts, and whether they are picking the right experts (they aren't). These are somewhat separate issues.

First, WHO is picking the experts? Did the investors say "You have to gets some experts in here to evaluate the place. We want Ian Malcolm and some dino people", and Hammond said "OK" and grabbed two people who he thought would be sympathetic to him ("you're supposed to be on my side.")? Or did the investors specifically insist on those three? In the book all three had done some long-distance consulting for the project before (without really knowing the end goal), so they weren't total strangers.

But more importantly, the experts they bring in are AT BEST supplemental to what they actually need. What they really needed were:

Experts in containing large animals - zoo keepers, etc.
Experts in computers to evaluate all this automated software
Experts in construction to evaluate the man-made barriers.
Etc. Etc.

The ones they brought in are a botanist (who can admittedly tell them that they have some poisonous plants), Malcolm (who as someone else stated seems to be the prophet of doom but doesn't actually have any relevant skills), and Grant, who knowledge and experience (when it comes to dino behavior) is all theoretical. These three are extremely limited in determining the viability and especially the safety of the park.

Now, is this a plot hole? Almost certainly. But if we want to explain in within the context of the movie, it's that the tour is a sop to the investors and isn't actually intended to do anything, since if you were serious then you would have invited people who actually had something useful to offer.

First off, Grant was requested by the insurance company; the lawyer says so in the cave mining scene. It's also implied by Hammond that the lawyer also selected Malcolm. ("I bring scientists, you bring a rock star")
Secondly, Malcolm definitely has relevant skills; as a chaotician, he has enough experience with complex systems to know that Hammond's plan for controlling one is impossible. Whether it's a dino preserve, a weather pattern, or a water droplet sliding off your hand is just window dressing.

Now, the zoo keeper, computer expert, and construction engineer all sound reasonable, but to the insurance company, the major problem was that these were dinosaurs. As far as they were concerned, the fact that it would be a good zoo was a given; the unknown portion was the prehistoric animals. Was that a mistake on their part? Possibly. But if they had brought all those people in, then when it failed we'd all be screaming at them for not bringing a dinosaur expert.

[Cristo Meyers]

You are completely missing the point, which is that raptors in the film are much smarter than expected and not so different to humans instead of just some dumb wild predators.

They're also leaving because:

Grant successfully mimics a distress call with that 3d printed raptor sinus cavity thing. It's less 'they gave us the eggs back, let's go' and more 'there's another pack coming, let's get out of here'

I mean, I'm not sure that's better, it's certainly pretty high up on the implausibility meter.



This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

This was the first thing that started rubbing me the wrong way almost immediately about JW too, and it all went downhill from there.

[tomandtish]

First off, Grant was requested by the insurance company; the lawyer says so in the cave mining scene. It's also implied by Hammond that the lawyer also selected Malcolm. ("I bring scientists, you bring a rock star")

Good point. I'd forgotten that scene.




Secondly, Malcolm definitely has relevant skills; as a chaotician, he has enough experience with complex systems to know that Hammond's plan for controlling one is impossible. Whether it's a dino preserve, a weather pattern, or a water droplet sliding off your hand is just window dressing.

Zoos are inherently complex systems. This is just a new one. People try and control complex systems all the time with various degrees of success. Going to the moon involved complex systems and things they didn't know about. When it comes to money, they are going to want reasons. "It's going to fail because X", not "It's going to fail because it's going to fail", which is all Malcolm seems to say. As someone who has had to both support AND attack state-funded projects, you never get away with just saying "because" in real life. And that's all he seems to do. Heck, if I look at what Malcolm says objectively, I have no reason to believe him, because he has no evidence at all.

(And if him just saying so is enough, then they've decided to shut it down anyway and he's just the excuse).



Now, the zoo keeper, computer expert, and construction engineer all sound reasonable, but to the insurance company, the major problem was that these were dinosaurs. As far as they were concerned, the fact that it would be a good zoo was a given; the unknown portion was the prehistoric animals. Was that a mistake on their part? Possibly. But if they had brought all those people in, then when it failed we'd all be screaming at them for not bringing a dinosaur expert.

Yes, that's why I said supplemental. Because given that things are failing anyway, the families of those who died are going to be screaming at them for not bringing those I listed. Because it obviously WASN'T a good zoo. Too many points of failure that are too easily sabotaged, and oh BTW your non-breeding dinosaurs are breeding.

[Tvtyrant]

Even as a kid I wondered why they started with so many different types of dinosaurs. Wouldn't it have been safer to do 1, then use the proceeds of showing it off at existing zoos to work towards more?

[Peelee]

Even as a kid I wondered why they started with so many different types of dinosaurs. Wouldn't it have been safer to do 1, then use the proceeds of showing it off at existing zoos to work towards more?

Safer, yes. More profitable? Not at all.

[Strigon]

Zoos are inherently complex systems. This is just a new one. People try and control complex systems all the time with various degrees of success. Going to the moon involved complex systems and things they didn't know about. When it comes to money, they are going to want reasons. "It's going to fail because X", not "It's going to fail because it's going to fail", which is all Malcolm seems to say. As someone who has had to both support AND attack state-funded projects, you never get away with just saying "because" in real life. And that's all he seems to do. Heck, if I look at what Malcolm says objectively, I have no reason to believe him, because he has no evidence at all.

(And if him just saying so is enough, then they've decided to shut it down anyway and he's just the excuse).

Ah; if you're saying he's not the best choice for explaining why the park would fail, I agree. Not only could he not fully explain, the essence of his field of study was that he couldn't know what would happen. Which is more or less what he said all along. Frustrating if you're looking for ways to fix the park, or legal justification for shutting it down, but if your point was that his expertise wasn't relevant to Jurassic Park, I'd have to disagree.
And, let's be clear, zoos are complex, but nowhere near as complex as Jurassic Park was. The more complex the system, the less control you can have. Jurassic Park wasn't a bunch of animals in cells. It wasn't a bunch of animals in cells with humans around. It wasn't even a bunch of animals we know nothing about, from many different eras, with humans around.
If we consider the book as canon, it was hundreds of animals, from many different eras, in an artificially recreated system meant to mimic nature. With humans roving around, and some animals in cells. Hammond encountered problems due to the unpredictability, but every attempt to fix them made things more unstable in the long run.
If we only consider the movies, it was an unknown number of animals, some in pens, some wandering free, from many eras and with human intervention.
If he had built the island, let it reach an equilibrium, and then tried to fit in his park within that equilibrium, things might have been different. Instead, he tried to make the natural equilibrium bend to serve his needs, which is far, far more difficult.

Go to any natural reserve on the planet, and you'll find that the humans are not in charge. They fit in, somewhere, and they can steer events one way or another - eliminating a species growing too quickly, for example - but they look nothing like Hammond's vision for Jurassic Park. And that's with animals who have always existed together, and ones we know well. Once you start throwing in dinos, things only get worse.


Yes, that's why I said supplemental. Because given that things are failing anyway, the families of those who died are going to be screaming at them for not bringing those I listed. Because it obviously WASN'T a good zoo. Too many points of failure that are too easily sabotaged, and oh BTW your non-breeding dinosaurs are breeding.
Well, you said supplemental AT BEST. Which sort of implies that you really thought they were even less important. Or that's how I read it, anyway.
And I'd say it was a fine zoo, mostly. The sabotage was definitely an issue, but mostly an automation one. As far as the non-breeding dinosaurs breeding, that's not much of a zoo issue.
Zoos don't normally clone and genetically engineer their animals (yet), so the male-to-female thing doesn't really apply. And the raptors escaping (since they're the only ones we know got out) is also somewhat irrelevant, since they're said by Muldoon to be more cunning than anything he's ever seen, plus they're coordinated and startlingly ferocious.
What I mean to say is, had Jurassic Park been populated by modern animals, I don't think the zoo parts would have failed. Thus, I consider it a perfectly fine zoo.

[Saph]

Oh absolutely. Hammond, in both book and film, was a complete huckster. He even admits it openly when he talked about the flea circus. He presented to people what they wanted to see, is all.

The film Disneyfied him a lot though. Superficially, he's presented as this kindly old man who just wants everything to work out for the best. It's only when you stop and think about it that you realise "wait a minute, doesn't nearly everything that goes wrong in this park trace back to this guy one way or another?"

In the book, Hammond

panics, falls down a slope in the darkness, breaks his leg, and gets eaten by compys. By that point, it's pretty clear that he deserves it.

[Peelee]

The film Disneyfied him a lot though. Superficially, he's presented as this kindly old man who just wants everything to work out for the best. It's only when you stop and think about it that you realise "wait a minute, doesn't nearly everything that goes wrong in this park trace back to this guy one way or another?"

In the book, Hammond

panics, falls down a slope in the darkness, breaks his leg, and gets eaten by compys. By that point, it's pretty clear that he deserves it.

He also largely funded his company by showcasing a pygmy elephant with dwarfism as a normal elephant fully genetically engineered to be the size of a housecat. Just like the flea circus, he didn't really have anything and passed it off as if he did. Helluva character.

[Rogar Demonblud]

I couldn't even make it through the first act of the first movie before my suspension of disbelief crumbled. Even as a kid back then, I knew the modern atmosphere was too low a concentration of O2 for dinos (it was 33-35% oxygen back then, and it looks like the carbon dioxide level was half what it is now). They should have been slowly suffocating.

As for the rest, it's just another survival horror series, arguably still with zombies (creatures brought back from the dead).

[hamishspence]

In the novel, one of the characters actually comments on how the sick stegosaurus (rather than sick triceratops as in the movie) is wheezing like a mountaineer on top of a high mountain - for that very reason - the oxygen content of the air is a bit too low for it.

The "they're hybrids, not pure-bred dinos" theme, can explain away some things though.

[Rater202]

ON Jurassic World...

The problem with making Dinosaurs for military operations isn't that it's inherently wrong--IIRC, that's kind of the purpose of the raptor pack: To see if raptors could have been trained to work with humans.

The problem is 1: The Indominus was made for military operations... At the insistence of one ACU commander(the guy who got eaten by a raptor and, IIRC, had no idea what he was talking about when referring to the raptors earlier) and Wu... Without the knowledge or permission of the CEO of either the Park or the Parent companies. They were basically going behind everyone's back to do it.

2: The Raptor training program wasn't completed yet... and yet they still made a bigger, smarter, more agressive, and more sadistic raptor that could turn invisible. Then they confined it and it's sibling alone in a pen that was far too small for one such animal, let alone two, which resulted in a large, inherently predatory and sadistic creature of near human, if not human*, intelligent becoming a complete and utter sociopath.

The problem isn't that they made a weaponized dino. The problem is that they took "make something scary" as blanket permission to screw everyone over and make a complete and utter monster for the personal profit of two people and mucked it up every step of the way.

(Trivia, apparently Wu had been working on weaponized hybrids for longer than just the dominus without getting caught--On the Jurassic World website, there's a hidden page that indicates that there's an agressive prototype-hybrid on the island from 3, with that implicitly being an explanation for the inaccurate even by serious standards Spinosaurus.)

A smart person who wanted to make weaponized dinosaurs for profit would have waited until the research on training raptors was back, and then hybridized the raptors with something more docile and easily trained.

*There's a distinctly primate looking nervous system depicted in a lab scene that revealed some of the Indominus' parent species,and while not explicitly stated in film earliar drafts of the film did have the Indominus and it's counterparts in earliar still drafts as explicitly part human.

[Gnoman]

Nope, nopenopenope. You're objectively wrong.

So, only focusing on the movie and not the book, we can still show the island is a colossal failure before Grant and Co. ever set foot on the island.

Remember, they're only up for the weekend. It's a three-day tour of the island. On the first day, Nedry brings down some security systems, and they reboot the island. On the second day, Grant finds a cracked egg on the island. While not explicitly stated in the movie, the egg is the exact size, color, and texture of the raptor eggs we saw first. So, to start with, dinosaurs are already breeding, which means the park is already out of control; since the egg has already hatched, we know this has been going on for some time. Second, dinosaurs (or, at least, raptors) are now demonstrated to have already escaped their confines, even before Nedry was able to do anything.

Nedry disabled some security systems, but left all the dino pen systems in place. When he didn't come back, the only way to bypass his lockout was to restart the entire system, which then ran on auxilliary power and thus wasn't powering the fences, so all hell was free to break loose and it was much, much easier to see the failure. But the park had failed well in advance, they just didn't know it yet.

I haven't seen the movie in years, so I don't quite remember what made it to the film. Did the movie talk about how Hammond banned any weapon that could actually harm one of his expensive dinos, or mention the automated medical systems dispensing unneeded medicine? Those are a couple of really strong points of evidence in favor of the "Hammond's idiocy and penny-pinching is what doomed the park" angle.

[Peelee]

I haven't seen the movie in years, so I don't quite remember what made it to the film. Did the movie talk about how Hammond banned any weapon that could actually harm one of his expensive dinos, or mention the automated medical systems dispensing unneeded medicine? Those are a couple of really strong points of evidence in favor of the "Hammond's idiocy and penny-pinching is what doomed the park" angle.

You mean the Lysine Contingency? They mentioned it, but never really addressed it afterwards like the book did. It wasn't unneeded at all, the dinos just started to eat lysine-rich foods, but they still needed lysine. Also, even in the book he wasn't about to openly ban all of Muldoon's guns; they compromised on how many he was allowed to have, and how and where to store them. I don't believe it's addressed in the movie at all, though, dive they charge the focus of the primary antagonist to the raptors which didn't need the most specialized gun and neurotoxin they could get.

[Gnoman]

You mean the Lysine Contingency? They mentioned it, but never really addressed it afterwards like the book did. It wasn't unneeded at all, the dinos just started to eat lysine-rich foods, but they still needed lysine. Also, even in the book he wasn't about to openly ban all of Muldoon's guns; they compromised on how many he was allowed to have, and how and where to store them. I don't believe it's addressed in the movie at all, though, dive they charge the focus of the primary antagonist to the raptors which didn't need the most specialized gun and neurotoxin they could get.

Not the Lysine Contingency, there was an earlier part. One of the bugs Nedry was supposed to fix was


The automated fecal analysis (called Auto Poop), designed to check for parasites in the animal stools, invariably recorded all specimens as having the parasite Phagostomum venulosum, although none did. The program then automatically dispensed medication into the animals' food. If the handlers dumped the medicine out of the hoppers to prevent its being dispensed, an alarm sounded which could not be turned off.

As for the weapons, Hammond absolutely refused until Muldoon took extreme measures.


Muldoon wanted guns as well. And he wanted shoulder-mounted TOW-missile launchers. Hunters knew how difficult it was to bring down a four-ton African elephant-and some of the dinosaurs weighed ten times as much. Management was horrified, insisting there be no guns anywhere on the island. When Muldoon threatened to quit, and to take his story to the press, a compromise was reached. In the end, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers were kept in a locked room in the basement. Only Muldoon had keys to the room.

[Peelee]

Not the Lysine Contingency, there was an earlier part. One of the bugs Nedry was supposed to fix was

Oh, right. No, that's not addressed in the movie. Practically nothing about Nedry is, other than that he was unhappy with the terms and Hammond scolding him. Which is a shame, because it really made him a little sympathetic and fleshed out why he did what he did. "A little" being the key words there, he was still a huge tool, it's just Hammond was an even bigger one.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The movie probably needed another half-hour of set up for the pay offs they were expecting. And maybe they could have worked in that bit with the automated census system and how f+++ed that was.

[Darth Ultron]

I think the Jurassic Parks have a Bigger problem then the ''bizarre morality'', and it's just he Hollywood Way.

First off, the Jurassic Park movies exist for one reason and one reason only: To show Dinosaurs eating People. To put it simply: they are Classic Hollywood Monsters Movies.

And monster moves follow a formula: Introduce people, Introduce monsters, have monsters eat people....and end movie.

So, Once Upon A Time, someone saw the book Jurassic Park. They skimmed the back cover and said ''wow, wicked cool awesome! Lets make a movie about dinosaurs eating people! It will be super awesome 4ever...oh, and make us tons of money!"

So cool Hollywood writer comes in and writes a dozen or so ''dino eats person'' bits. Then they hire the other guy to make a flimsy ''sort of story plot'' to ''sort of kind of'' link all the Dino Death together to ''sort of'' make a movie.

And that is what you get: Introduce people, Introduce monsters, have monsters eat people, with some fluff in between.

And, like good modern monster movies you want lots of ''not scary'' and ''adventure like'' chase bits where the Dinos chase and ''almost'' eat people(though they won't eat all the Stars..wink wink...and there is no way ever, ever, ever they will eat a kidz).

And so you get the Jurassic Park Movies....

[Peelee]

The movie probably needed another half-hour of set up for the pay offs they were expecting. And maybe they could have worked in that bit with the automated census system and how f+++ed that was.
Seriously, the book was absolutely terrifying, again that census system made for a really awesome "holy crap" moment.

ISo, Once Upon A Time, someone saw the book Jurassic Park. They skimmed the back cover and said ''wow, wicked cool awesome! Lets make a movie about dinosaurs eating people! It will be super awesome 4ever...oh, and make us tons of money!"

Or, once upon a time Michael Crichton told Steven Spielberg that he was writing a book called Jurassic Park and they both started discussing the movie rights and how to proceed and really dude this isn't even obscure knowledge, I'm pretty sure it's in the foreword to one of the printings. Despite what you always seem to think, the world is not entirely made of 14-year-ods.

[LaZodiac]

Seriously, the book was absolutely terrifying, again that census system made for a really awesome "holy crap" moment.


I don't remember the numbers anymore but yeah that was such a good scene and I do kind of wish they made the first Jurassic Park more cerebral in how it approached the material.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

[McStabbington]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

True enough, though looking back on it now 20-some years later, the primary effect of that scene now is to make Ian Malcolm look like an even bigger tool, because he actually recognized the problem before things went haywire. Then he only pointed it out once Nedry had fubared the security grid, and there were both resulting fatalities, and actual people, including children, stuck out in the park. Cool reveal or no, it was a downright sociopathic thing to do not to point out the problem immediately, rather than waiting until after everything went to pot.

On the overall point, I largely agree, though I suspect it's more because the writers aren't really given a lot of time to work, and the producers involved in the series haven't really concerned themselves with overarching themes since the original. The first JP film, was, IMO, an upgrade over the books largely because Spielberg is a very humanistic director. You can quibble here and there with whether or not a paleobotonist was the best choice for an "expert evaluation", but you can't argue that the film had a pretty clear theme about not tampering with nature, a classic theme for monster films that goes all the way back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it provided us with a fairly richly-textured cast that broadly seemed quite sympathetic. Gennaro and Nedry aside, nobody was really a villain, which fit with the movie's idea that it's not so much evil that was the problem, as simple unpredictability in systems with lots of moving parts.

The ones that follow up on that? Yeah, those tend to have a pretty grim, nigh-malevolent tone towards humans generally. They're pretty unpleasant, to be honest.

[LaZodiac]

The specific numbers didn't (don't?) really matter. The census system was told to look for X number of dinos, it said their were X number of dinos. Grant suggested looking for X+1, computer said there were X+1. They upped the number sought by like 100, and nearly got that.

For some years I used that as an example of how not to approach a problem. Don't assume everything is all right if an arbitrary benchmark is met. Put another way, Verify, then Trust.

I am aware they don't matter but I remember the baseline "this is what we want" number being way way way under the number that they were actually at, and that being a really good, smart horror moment. That's what I'm getting at.

[Rogar Demonblud]

No quibbles on that, cousin. They had that moment in the movie, just in a different place. The impact tremors in the cup of water. Best slow build up to the human-eating force of nature since the Jaws theme.

[Bavarian itP]

I couldn't even make it through the first act of the first movie before my suspension of disbelief crumbled. Even as a kid back then, I knew the modern atmosphere was too low a concentration of O2 for dinos (it was 33-35% oxygen back then, and it looks like the carbon dioxide level was half what it is now). They should have been slowly suffocating.

As for the rest, it's just another survival horror series, arguably still with zombies (creatures brought back from the dead).

And then the book drops the ball when they encounter 2-foot-dragonflies ... and Grant "explains" that insects that big existed in the Jurassic ... except that these need the high concentration of oxygen even more than the dinosaurs.

[Ramza00]

The Lysine Contigency is something that always super bothered me. So we have 20 amino acids which all animals need to live, for how the building blocks work is DNA=>Amino Acid=>Proteins where each of these being 3 different types of blueprints and one blueprint creates another blueprint. Aka DNA can not make Proteins without the 20 amino acids, they are necessary building materials. Lysine is one of these 20 amino acids.

Now with Amino Acids we have 3 groups of them.


5 Amino Acids are considered non-essential amino acids for our bodies can create them and create them easily.
6 Amino Acids which the body of animals can make but only under certain conditions and it is better to get these amino acids through diet. These are the conditionally essential amino acids.
9 Amino Acids that no animal, literally nothing with a Spinal Chord can make, and these are called the essential amino acids for you must get these amino acids from your diet.

So Lysine is of the 3rd category, Lysine is an essential amino acid and it is stated the Dinosaurs are bred in a way that they can't make Lysine. Well that is the case for all animals, literally everything with a spinal chord must get Lysine through diet. That is because Plants can make Lysine and thus you must eat plants to get Lysine or eat something else that eats plants (aka meat.)

So yeah this Lysine Contigency makes no sense on the face of it. All animals acquire Lysine through diet, if the plan is to have an amino acid contingency you should have one where you can't get it through diet for normally you get it via producing it yourself and you disrupt this producing it yourself. But yeah all the dinosaurs were going to eat other food and get Lysine so turning off the Lysine pills was never going to work. Aka you picked the wrong Amino Acid to put in your Book, Mr. Crichton :smalltongue:

[LaZodiac]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

(dinosaurs are birds you **** frog dna would not work like that at all oh my god)

[Mechalich]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

(dinosaurs are birds you **** frog dna would not work like that at all oh my god)

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

[Rater202]

1: Jurassic World wasn't a reboot, it's a sequel.

Presumably, the reason why the Dinosaurs don't have feathers there is because some of them are reused from the original park(Rexey is explicitly the same T-Rex from Jurassic Park 1) and because the new ones have to at least convincingly pass as being the same animals as the old ones for consistency's sake.

I mean, I don't think it's ever been stated conclusively that the Park is meant to be scientifically accurate in-universe and the animals are explicitly said to not be "real" Dinosaurs at least once.

Also, in the very first movie, Dr. Grant is in Arizona and refers to what is clearly a Deinonychus skeleton as Velociraptor mongolius, a species that is 1: Not found on the North American continent or even this hemisphere and 2: Nowhere near that big.(A proper Velociraptor is roughly the size of a turkey, albeit significantly more vicious.) so them big ass raptors in the movies are scientifically accurate in-universe, so who knows what else is differant?

(Also, It's my understandings that most examples of dinosaurs with feathers or proto-feathers where 1: therapods and 2: found in colder climes than a Tropical island in the southern hemisphere. If the frog DNA doesn't explain it, then that might.)

[Mightymosy]

Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.

Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?

Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

What do you guys think?

Bolded and underlined by me -> I'm soo happy I'm not the only one after all who finds this disturbing.
When I watched the movie no one seemed to care.

Unfortunately, it's not just Jurassic Park genre, it's all of Hollywood (and probably European movie as well).

A lady not into kids? -> antagonist or cannon fodder
In horror movies? -> GRUESOME DEATH AHEAD!

True story: When I watched Jurassic World and saw that girl playing with her phone and showing disinterest in the kids, I immediately knew she was gone get murdered. I even called it in the cinema (not earning much praise, I'll admit :-D)


It's just so.......Arghh. :facepalm:
Can't they just get out of this rut for once? Jesus

[Bavarian itP]

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

In even more fairness, the novel clearly states that dinosaurs are more like birds than like reptiles. Wu contemplates about this, because it made his job harder (because birds, like mammals, don't have DNA in their red blood cells, so they needed white ones, which are rarer). Also, the frog connection was never meant to be about a close relation between frogs and dinosaurs - they just used anything to "fix" the genetic material, it's just meant to further illustrate what a lazy job they did with the dino dna, and by extension, with the park as a whole.


Aka you picked the wrong Amino Acid to put in your Book, Mr. Crichton :smalltongue:

That, also, was an in-universe mistake of the park creators. Because the book ends with escaped dinosaurs searching out lysin-rich food. So Crichton was clearly aware that you can get it through your diet.

[dps]

Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.

Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?

Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?

Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

"And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

What do you guys think?

I pretty much agree. Another thing that bothered me is that the movies present an essentially binary either/or choice that doesn't make sense--either you exhibit the dinos for profit as the centerpiece of a zoo park, or you just leave them alone on the island. The possibility of using the island as a research center not open to the public is never really seriously addressed, at least in the first 3 movies (I haven't seen any of the movies in a long time and haven't seen the latest one at all; in the first 3 IIRC it's mentioned in a couple of throw-away lines, but not really dealt with).

[Strigon]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.

[Peelee]

He also has an only half right understanding of chaos theory. Chricton is good at writing books, not at writing science.

Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.
Seconded wholeheartedly. I don't have a problem turning my brain off when it's at least fairly well-written.



Presumably, the reason why the Dinosaurs don't have feathers there is because some of them are reused from the original park(Rexey is explicitly the same T-Rex from Jurassic Park 1) and because the new ones have to at least convincingly pass as being the same animals as the old ones for consistency's sake.

I mean, I don't think it's ever been stated conclusively that the Park is meant to be scientifically accurate in-universe and the animals are explicitly said to not be "real" Dinosaurs at least once.


Yep! Wu has a throwaway line in Jurassic World about how nothing in the park is real, everything is altered to look like what the public expected. Which is their way or explaining away the "no feathers back when we didn't know about feathers."

Nothing in Jurassic World is natural, we have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different. But you didn't ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.



In even more fairness, the novel clearly states that dinosaurs are more like birds than like reptiles. Wu contemplates about this, because it made his job harder (because birds, like mammals, don't have DNA in their red blood cells, so they needed white ones, which are rarer). Also, the frog connection was never meant to be about a close relation between frogs and dinosaurs - they just used anything to "fix" the genetic material, it's just meant to further illustrate what a lazy job they did with the dino dna, and by extension, with the park as a whole.

Bolding mine, because I cannot agree with this hard enough. Again, Hammond was a con-man. He was a very very good one, and he used his skills to actually accomplish things - he totally was able to innovate genetic cloning, for instance. On the surface, everything was polished and impeccable - Richard Kiley narrating the tour, electric vehicles, King Kong-esque gates, five-star chefs, lots and lots of grandeur - but underneath the surface, it was a festering pot of ugly. He grabbed the most brilliant geneticists he could find, which was great, and got them right out of school so he could get them as cheap as possible and with little real-world experience. He strong-armed his computer expert, he tried to strong-arm his animal control expert, he threw tantrums when things didn't go the way he thought they should... The guy was Steve Jobs, except a lot more shady.

[LaZodiac]

In fairness, the original novel was published in 1990, using popular science understanding of Dinosaur paleontology from the 1980s. The 'birds are dinosaurs' (and it needs to be written that way, clade Aves is nested within the Theropods) understanding was still controversial at that time and the cladistics analysis underpinning it was both recent and not yet widely accepted - because the cladistics revolution was still in the early stages. For instance, Wonderful Life by Stephen J Gould, was published in 1989 and completely fails to incorporate cladistics. So Crichton - and Jack Horner who was consulting on the first film - can be forgiven for their more traditionally saurian approach to the material, the absence of feathers, and other mistakes. In a strange way the Jurassic Park franchise is an amusing time capsule about our knowledge of dinosaurs from the 1980s (now the failure to update the franchise for the reboot, that was just willful absurdity). That's not to say there aren't piles of scientific errors in the initial book, or that frog DNA ever made sense as an option - even if you posit the bird connection as being false, you'd then go to the next nearest living relative, the crocodiles.

To be honest, a small part of me actually likes Jurassic World's decision to make them scaly. They mention in universe that yeah no dinosaurs don't look like that they had feathers, but people still refuse to believe that and it's just way more marketable as terrible lizards. I like that because it feeds into the themes of the movies and books.

I very much wish they did feathered dinosaurs though because we need more people to understand that bird and dinosaur is the same. I want parents to tell their budding children who are just growing that they're eating dinosaurs when being fed chicken nuggets so that they can grow up knowing that the world, while it looks mundane, has a lot of amazing stuff in it just below the surface. Which is what Sci Fi basically is, when you get down to it. I want people to accept that birds are dinosaurs so we can point at them and go "dinosaurs still exist" and when people doubt it show them pictures of a butcher bird's nest and go "imagine this but you sized".

That's way more frightening than taking a raptor claw and teasingly rubbing it on some fat kids tummy.


Personally, I've always thought he had a gift for talking complete nonsense and sounding like an authority.

When I first read his books, I was frankly blown away by his attention to detail with the science compared to other authors (and especially Hollywood).
It wasn't until after I had finished, and thought more critically, that I realized how ridiculous he had been.

Still a really good entry into sci fi though!

[Ramza00]

That, also, was an in-universe mistake of the park creators. Because the book ends with escaped dinosaurs searching out lysin-rich food. So Crichton was clearly aware that you can get it through your diet.

You are not getting why this is weird. No animal, literally none has an ability to process Lyseine so how was Wu and the other researchers supposed to knock out a gene that isn't there. It is like trying to remove the ability to see when an animal does not have eyes.

And then the researchers, Hammond, etc are shocked that animals which always required in Nature to eat Lysine so that they can use Lysine, decided to eat Lysine in order to use it. So to continue the metaphor of removing the ability of sight for an eyeless animal imagine this animal to have some other way to hunt such as echolocation or smell. Of course these animals would have ways to acquire Lysine for all animals need it. It is a fundamental for life on this planet as much as oxygen is necessary for life and thus creatures have ways such as lungs (and other methods) so they can acquire oxygen but also get rid of too much oxygen.

Yes the book explained the animals ate Lysine rich foods, but all animals need to eat Lysine rich foods.

----

Nods with LaZodiac and her opinion that we need parents to teach kids that Dinosaurs in the movies are not the same as real life and birds are like Dinosaurs.

Based off some 2014 research which mapped over 200 different types of Birds DNA wise we now know there are 4 common ancestors of current Birds from the Dinosaurs. (Depends on how you count and put the cut off point with species you can argue 5 common ancestors of birds.)

http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/x_large/nprshared/201805/370096403.jpg

The Water Fowl, the Land Fowl, the Ostriches, the 5th Type (Tinamou order of birds which has 47 species which are native to South America, Central America, and Mexico) and the Neoaves with the Neoaves being the common grouping and thus a common ancestor for almost all modern birds..

But since Neoaves is so huge we have to further subdivide this classification of birds into smaller parts. This 2014 genetic study revealed many interesting tidbits. For example Peregrine Falcons are more closely related to Parrots even though one eats fruit and the other eats meat, where previously people thought Falcons were more closely related to Eagles, Hawks, Owls, etc. (in the picture above the Falcons and Parrots are in the upper right corner, while the Eagles / Hawks are in the middle right and are both Accipitriformes and Owls are nearby and are Strigiformes)

----

But yeah many Dinosaurs have feathers but not all Dinosaurs have feathers. Furthermore many dinosaurs had feathers on some parts of their bodies but not other parts of their bodies. Lastly Dinosaurs are the ancestors of modern birds. I agree with LaZodiac that parents / teachers need to teach these generalities to their children and you can't expect a movie to do this for you. You have to have active participation with education, and education never ends for this stuff I mentioned is new stuff from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

[Mightymosy]

To be honest, a small part of me actually likes Jurassic World's decision to make them scaly. They mention in universe that yeah no dinosaurs don't look like that they had feathers, but people still refuse to believe that and it's just way more marketable as terrible lizards. I like that because it feeds into the themes of the movies and books.

I very much wish they did feathered dinosaurs though because we need more people to understand that bird and dinosaur is the same. I want parents to tell their budding children who are just growing that they're eating dinosaurs when being fed chicken nuggets so that they can grow up knowing that the world, while it looks mundane, has a lot of amazing stuff in it just below the surface. Which is what Sci Fi basically is, when you get down to it. I want people to accept that birds are dinosaurs so we can point at them and go "dinosaurs still exist" and when people doubt it show them pictures of a butcher bird's nest and go "imagine this but you sized".

That's way more frightening than taking a raptor claw and teasingly rubbing it on some fat kids tummy.



Still a really good entry into sci fi though!

This is something Magic the Gathering has actually done reasonably well:
https://magiccards.info/query?q=t%3A%22dinosaur%22+e%3Axln%2Fde&v=card&s=cname

They made a dinosaur expansion, they made them have feathers, and they look awesome and colorful! Really into it.:smallsmile:

ETA:


You are not getting why this is weird. No animal, literally none has an ability to process Lyseine so how was Wu and the other researchers supposed to knock out a gene that isn't there. It is like trying to remove the ability to see when an animal does not have eyes.

And then the researchers, Hammond, etc are shocked that animals which always required in Nature to eat Lysine so that they can use Lysine, decided to eat Lysine in order to use it. So to continue the metaphor of removing the ability of sight for an eyeless animal imagine this animal to have some other way to hunt such as echolocation or smell. Of course these animals would have ways to acquire Lysine for all animals need it. It is a fundamental for life on this planet as much as oxygen is necessary for life and thus creatures have ways such as lungs (and other methods) so they can acquire oxygen but also get rid of too much oxygen.

Yes the book explained the animals ate Lysine rich foods, but all animals need to eat Lysine rich foods.


Here's the thing: Movies - Hollywood in particular - just CAN'T get biochemistry right. More specifically, genetics. I can't think of a single movie that has a reasonable grip of genetics. EXCEPT for Jurassic Park the original. Yes, there are flaws. But all being said and done, Jurassic Park is the most realistic movie about genetic engineering that I am aware of. So I'm willing to forgive some mistakes like the Lysine stuff.

[Ramza00]

Here's the thing: Movies - Hollywood in particular - just CAN'T get biochemistry right. More specifically, genetics. I can't think of a single movie that has a reasonable grip of genetics. EXCEPT for Jurassic Park the original. Yes, there are flaws. But all being said and done, Jurassic Park is the most realistic movie about genetic engineering that I am aware of. So I'm willing to forgive some mistakes like the Lysine stuff.

I agree, but it is so frustrated for they picked one of the 9 amino acids that this stuff does not apply to, but if they picked one of the 5 non essential amino acids and said they removed the gene to allow you to process this stuff then it would make so much sense.

I am complaining for they got so close but obviously they did not understand what they were talking about for they were so far. It is like picking a name of an element by looking at the periodic table of elements, but then saying Argon has properties of a metal and not a noble gas. It is so weird and makes me do a double take.

I am fine with movies not being scientifically accurate (see my above stuff where I talked about birds and dinosaurs and how our understanding of science is changing so much and thus I am fine with feathers vs no feathers.) But to get it so close but so wrong just seems so weird.

[Jeivar]

Sorry, but why do threads around here so often get taken over by lengthy discussions about something different from the main point? Can't you guys just create a separate thread for dinosaur science?

[Peelee]

Sorry, but why do threads around here so often get taken over by lengthy discussions about something different from the main point? Can't you guys just create a separate thread for dinosaur science?

Conversations flow. This one happened to flow in the direction of dinosaur science and biology, while still being directly related to Jurassic Park. If you want to pull it back to the original topic specifically, feel free to try to pull it back in that direction.

[Dodom]

I've read the book too long ago to remember if that would be compatible with what the text describes, but an amino acid deficiency could be manufactured by disabling its reabsorption by renal tubules. There is a genetic condition where this happens with cystine, but since it's not essential it doesn't result in a deficiency. The target could also be in its absorption, if it's not efficiently transported through the intestinal wall, it'll take more of it to cover the body's need.


About the dinosaurs chasing egg thiefs, it's not an unrealistic behaviour. Lots of birds will do exactly that. Humans are exempt from the worst of it because we're too big to realisticly fight, but against smaller predators, it's a lot more persistent and violent.
Brief explanation of mobbing (https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/birdwatching/bird-behaviour/what-is-mobbing/)

[Gnoman]

Yep! Wu has a throwaway line in Jurassic World about how nothing in the park is real, everything is altered to look like what the public expected. Which is their way or explaining away the "no feathers back when we didn't know about feathers."


The original book had a discussion about this point. Wu wanted to redesign the dinos to fit then-common cultural misconceptions instead of the early-90s picture of how dinos really are, as well as eliminate inconvenient things not in the fossil record that the park discovered. Hammond absolutely refused to make any deliberate changes, because he wanted his dinos to be as authentic as possible.



The guy was Steve Jobs, except a lot more shady.

I don't know about that. Both the book and film versions of Hammond (moreso in the film version, of course) seemed to have a genuine passion for the field that Jobs lacked. Sure, he might have gotten more people killed, and he was openly in it for the money, but I don't remember either version expressing the sort of contempt Jobs often did for his customers.

[Darth Ultron]

Let me ask the question:

Could there ever be a Jurassic Park movie without dinosaurs eating people?

If not, why have we never seen one? If yes, then why is it so important?

When the filmmakers sit down to make a Jurassic Park movie, do they have anything on thier mind other then A) Making Money and B) Making the movie about Dinosaurs eating people TO make that money.

Now, it's not like they are in any way wrong: Make a Dino Eating Movie and you will make money. It's a basic fact that kidz love Dinosaurs, and even more so love the ''monster dino eats people Num Num Num!". And it's not just the kidz, as plenty of adults like to turn off their brains and watch the ''Num, Num, Num" too.

[Peelee]

The original book had a discussion about this point. Wu wanted to redesign the dinos to fit then-common cultural misconceptions instead of the early-90s picture of how dinos really are, as well as eliminate inconvenient things not in the fossil record that the park discovered. Hammond absolutely refused to make any deliberate changes, because he wanted his dinos to be as authentic as possible.
True, but this is also the same guy who got by on a mechanized flea circus and funded his company with a dwarf pygmy elephant. He built his career on selling people what they wanted to see. Maybe the dinosaurs were a "finally I can do something real" moment, but the way he still came across as a total jackass in the book, I'm disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The movie version I would buy that though, mostly because you can't cast an Attenborough and have them not be lovable.

I don't know about that. Both the book and film versions of Hammond (moreso in the film version, of course) seemed to have a genuine passion for the field that Jobs lacked. Sure, he might have gotten more people killed, and he was openly in it for the money, but I don't remember either version expressing the sort of contempt Jobs often did for his customers.
I more meant along the lines of how he treated his employees and how he built his company; you're absolutely right that he was in some ways better than Jobs.

[Forum Explorer]

True, but this is also the same guy who got by on a mechanized flea circus and funded his company with a dwarf pygmy elephant. He built his career on selling people what they wanted to see. Maybe the dinosaurs were a "finally I can do something real" moment, but the way he still came across as a total jackass in the book, I'm disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.


IIRC in the books in was also one part 'we aren't scrapping what we have and starting over this late in the project.' And one part 'Your part is done geneticist. Things work, and I don't have to listen to you anymore.'

The guy went from being the main villain in the books, to be a well meaning entrepreneur in the movie.


Anyways, I never really saw Chriton as a Technophobe, so much as having a consistent theme that the world is not in our control. Basically dissing human arrogance in thinking their systems will work or handle the problem, and then they fail. Like in the Andromedea Strain.

[Traab]

I got into a discussion on the stupidity of jurassic park awhile back after watching a youtube video. I didnt even TOUCH the scientific stupidity like the lysene contingency, I just pointed out that Hammond had actual, real, effective, solid cloning tech, and instead of using that to solve like 2/3 of the medical issues the world has today, (Cloned blood means never having to say there is a shortage, cloned organs means the same plus no rejection,etc etc etc) Or doing things like, I dunno, bringing back extinct animals or creating slightly genetically different "clones" of endangered ones, and collecting literally all of the money that ever did, does, or will exist in the world, at which point he could fund a dino park with his pocket change rather than waste time dealing with investors. He went right for the park and dealing with investors. Seriously, the dude had the tech to recreate dinosaurs, either as they actually were or through such a mastery of genetic manipulation that he could create whatever totally viable versions of them he wanted. Thats such a quantum leap forward in technology that it boggles the mind he went for "dino park" as his first choice of how to use it. I want to lie in a world where jurassic park is possible. Not because I want to see dinosaurs, but because I have to believe in a real world where that tech exists, its getting used for something other than ZOO EXHIBITS!!!

[Mightymosy]

Let me ask the question:

Could there ever be a Jurassic Park movie without dinosaurs eating people?

If not, why have we never seen one? If yes, then why is it so important?

When the filmmakers sit down to make a Jurassic Park movie, do they have anything on thier mind other then A) Making Money and B) Making the movie about Dinosaurs eating people TO make that money.

Now, it's not like they are in any way wrong: Make a Dino Eating Movie and you will make money. It's a basic fact that kidz love Dinosaurs, and even more so love the ''monster dino eats people Num Num Num!". And it's not just the kidz, as plenty of adults like to turn off their brains and watch the ''Num, Num, Num" too.

You made me laugh :-)
Num num num :-) :-)

But you're right.
It's not only Dino movies, it's most movies.

Watched Interstellar? I was really stoked about that movie, until about halfway in. FINALLY we get a space/Sci Fi movie that is about mankind's exploration of the final frontier, without the usual hollywood ending (MUUUUST have a fistfight finale!!)....and then, well, of COURSE there needs to be a villainous traitor after all.........well, another one for the trash can.

I so hope for some movie that goes without this num num business.

For example, we have been wondering whether "The Swarm" will get a movie some day...Ok, maybe not the perfect example, since part of the tension is Tsunami's num-num-ing people, but still...:smallwink:

[Strigon]

The original book had a discussion about this point. Wu wanted to redesign the dinos to fit then-common cultural misconceptions instead of the early-90s picture of how dinos really are, as well as eliminate inconvenient things not in the fossil record that the park discovered. Hammond absolutely refused to make any deliberate changes, because he wanted his dinos to be as authentic as possible.
Not only that, but he explicitly forbade them from making the dinosaurs less hostile or cunning. Which is sort of out of character, considering how much of a charlatan he was about everything else.


Let me ask the question:

Could there ever be a Jurassic Park movie without dinosaurs eating people?

If not, why have we never seen one? If yes, then why is it so important?
Absolutely. It would require going back to the original material, though - not that that's bad.
I felt that Jurassic Park was a book on philosophy, masquerading as a book on mathematics that was masquerading as a sci-fi action-adventure.
You'd have to deal more directly with the philosophy of bringing them back, and the reason it hasn't been done is because Hollywood rarely makes movies like that, and when they do, they don't think of dinosaurs.



Still a really good entry into sci fi though!

Oh, I didn't mean to disparage his work; I think he's a great author!
That's probably what makes his books so good; being limited to 100% scientific plausibility is quite... limiting. His ability to make things work that are really impossible, without resorting to meaningless technobabble, is what I would consider the perfect balance between plausibility and entertainment.

[Aedilred]

The films do make some curious decisions about who gets to live and die. A travelling companion of mine once summarised it as "as an audience, we want to see people get what they deserve". At least, in this sort of blockbuster monster movie that isn't meant to challenge our moral philosophy or unduly depress us.

As a general rule, this means that good, sensible people die early in the film, and bad, or stupid, people, get their comeuppance later. By the time you're into the final act, any good guys who die tend to die meaningfully.

In JP1, Nedry gets eaten early and completely deserves it. Gennaro is kind of a stock loser character and also gets chomped early on. In the middle of the film we lose Arnold and Muldoon. While both of them take risks for the greater good, neither of them really "deserves" to die. The film no longer has a human antagonist around, so the raptors fill in and are killed at the end. Hammond, who next to Nedry is probably the most to blame for everything that happens, makes it out completely unscathed.

In JP2, things are played a little straighter. In the first act, people who are broadly speaking innocent get eaten. The overtly sadistic character is killed later on, along with a bunch of generic mooks. Pete Postlethwaite is permitted to live after learning an important lesson. The corporate head honcho who made a mess of it all gets eaten right at the end. The good guys all survive, notwithstanding that (as noted upthread) Vince Vaughan is merely standing on the same side as the good guys.

With that said, JP1 is almost unquestionably the superior film. Removing Nedry in the middle of the film leaves the raptors to fill centre stage as much more threatening antagonists in the final act, which allows for a consistent projection of threat. In JP2 there's a lack of focus from about halfway through onwards, with the dinosaurs and the raptors in particular feeling like incidental concerns for the characters. The T.Rex rampage at the end is not only silly but also tonally inconsistent: the feeling that we are to an extent meant to be rooting for the dinosaur even as it trashes San Diego and eats people's dogs doesn't really work.

In JP3 the characters are all, apart from Grant, idiots. Some of them are unpleasant or profiteering idiots to boot. Yet most of them make it out alive presumably because otherwise it'd be too much of a downer ending with some of the family being eaten. The film is terrible anyway for all sorts of reasons but the way that characters' fates appear almost entirely unconnected to their own decisions certainly doesn't make it any better.

Jurassic World has been talked over extensively and notwithstanding the obvious sequel hook of allowing Dr. Wu to survive the film tends to play things more in the same vein as JP2, that is relatively conventionally in terms of what the film is telling us ought to happen to characters. Some of the film's implied morals are controversial and some of the innocent deaths unnecessarily cruel, which can strike a sour note but otherwise it plays out roughly as one would expect.


That Rexie is the true hero of Jurassic Park is an interesting approach and while I think there are major flaws in it (not least her absence for so much of the running time) as an antihero she hits many of the right beats. We're clearly meant to be rooting for her in the fight with the raptors and, whether or not it's the same dinosaur in JP2 (unconfirmed I think) again she's a sympathetic character there. This was one of the many areas where JP3 dropped the ball completely: watching the spinosaurus kill a T.Rex felt oddly upsetting, not to mention implausible. It was clearly meant to be an establishing moment to show how badass the Spinosaurus is relative to former monsters in the series, but it disregards the emotional relationship with the T.Rex they've spent two films building up.

And then Jurassic World, of course, which just full-on embraces the heroic role of Rexie and introduces her specifically to save the day at the end. This moment in particular I think is one of the reasons JW, while seriously flawed in many respects, is something of a guilty pleasure. It's not as good as JP1 but it seems as if, unlike JP2 and JP3, it understood a lot of what made JP1 good.

Having said that, there are persuasive arguments that the Indominus is the real protagonist of JW and the character we should be cheering on. I wonder if making her almost unnecessarily cruel was a conscious decision to try to prevent the audience realising this and switching sides.

[Rater202]

(Cloned blood means never having to say there is a shortage, cloned organs means the same plus no rejection,etc etc etc)

This isn't actually an option... Or at least, it's not a good one.

The cloning technology works by creating a dinosaur embryo and putting it in an ostrich egg.

Doing the same to get blood and organs would necessitate implanting an embryo into a surrogate mother, birthing, and actual living, breathing human being, and then waiting till they're old enough to donate blood and organs.

Not only is it impractical, as honestly, but the time the clone is old enough for their blood or organs to be transplantable, the person tey were cloned from is either dead or will have already found a good enough match, but it's also unethical as you've made a living, breathing human being with thoughts and feelings of their own but instead of letting them have a life, you're treating them as a disposable sack or organs and bodily fluids.

(Not to mention that in the case of things like hearts and livers, you'd have to kill them to get the organ.)

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to have a child specifically so they can be an organ donor, and this is a step beyond that.

[Traab]

This isn't actually an option... Or at least, it's not a good one.

The cloning technology works by creating a dinosaur embryo and putting it in an ostrich egg.

Doing the same to get blood and organs would necessitate implanting an embryo into a surrogate mother, birthing, and actual living, breathing human being, and then waiting till they're old enough to donate blood and organs.

Not only is it impractical, as honestly, but the time the clone is old enough for their blood or organs to be transplantable, the person tey were cloned from is either dead or will have already found a good enough match, but it's also unethical as you've made a living, breathing human being with thoughts and feelings of their own but instead of letting them have a life, you're treating them as a disposable sack or organs and bodily fluids.

(Not to mention that in the case of things like hearts and livers, you'd have to kill them to get the organ.)

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to have a child specifically so they can be an organ donor, and this is a step beyond that.

You really think they cant vat grow organs if they can frankenstien the heck out of dna from multiple species to create a viable dinosaur? Its no less scientifically plausible. Growing an entire person to get blood is so ludicrously inefficient I can only assume thats exactly what these idiots would do given the job, but with tech on that level it wouldnt actually be needed. Clone some generic healthy marrow from the various blood types and stimulate it to produce blood through whatever hocus pocus they used to preserve dna from 50 million years ago and extract it.

[Rater202]

You really think they cant vat grow organs if they can frankenstien the heck out of dna from multiple species to create a viable dinosaur? Its no less scientifically plausible. Growing an entire person to get blood is so ludicrously inefficient I can only assume thats exactly what these idiots would do given the job, but with tech on that level it wouldnt actually be needed. Clone some generic healthy marrow from the various blood types and stimulate it to produce blood through whatever hocus pocus they used to preserve dna from 50 million years ago and extract it.

There is absolutly no indication that the technology that Ingen demonstrates can be used for anything other than growing entire organisms via the creation of embryos implanted in surogates.

[dps]

In JP3 the characters are all, apart from Grant, idiots. Some of them are unpleasant or profiteering idiots to boot. Yet most of them make it out alive presumably because otherwise it'd be too much of a downer ending with some of the family being eaten. The film is terrible anyway for all sorts of reasons but the way that characters' fates appear almost entirely unconnected to their own decisions certainly doesn't make it any

The kid wasn't an idiot, either. Though his parents definitely were.

[Peelee]

The films do make some curious decisions about who gets to live and die. A travelling companion of mine once summarised it as "as an audience, we want to see people get what they deserve". At least, in this sort of blockbuster monster movie that isn't meant to challenge our moral philosophy or unduly depress us.

The novel was deliberately overcrowded with characters specifically so Crichton could have a pretty good body count. Also, the people who live and die are nothing at all like in the movie.

[Knaight]

Oh, I didn't mean to disparage his work; I think he's a great author!
That's probably what makes his books so good; being limited to 100% scientific plausibility is quite... limiting. His ability to make things work that are really impossible, without resorting to meaningless technobabble, is what I would consider the perfect balance between plausibility and entertainment.

I've liked some of his work (Timeline, Andromeda Strain), but 100% scientific plausibility is a stretch. The meaningless technobabble is still there, it's just a little more subtle than you'd get from the likes of Star Trek.

[hamishspence]

Even as a kid back then, I knew the modern atmosphere was too low a concentration of O2 for dinos (it was 33-35% oxygen back then, and it looks like the carbon dioxide level was half what it is now). They should have been slowly suffocating.


Apparently the oxygen level was a bit lower than now, not higher:

https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4963/20131119/dinosaurs-lived-in-a-low-oxygen-world-study-suggests.htm

which is fairly consistent with what was written in the 2018 The Rise & Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World book by the paleontologist Steve Brusatte - that higher oxygen levels are not the explanation for sauropod gigantism - oxygen levels weren't in fact higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_L._Brusatte

[Knaight]

Apparently the oxygen level was a bit lower than now, not higher:

https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4963/20131119/dinosaurs-lived-in-a-low-oxygen-world-study-suggests.htm

The opening quote from the article is this: "Dinosaurs lived in a low-oxygen world, according to a new discovery that challenges a number of theories about the evolution of the Earth's climate and life."

Bolding mine. The article is a somewhat overdramatized version of "we have one study that contradicts a lot of established research, and we're assuming it's correct". It also explicitly says there is one team behind the study.

That's not nearly strong enough to be offering as a source for a correction. If anything I'd take it as a sign that the high oxygen hypothesis is likely correct, but to be considered a little less reliable.

[hamishspence]

If you dig around a bit, you can find lots of other examples. When I google it, the Carboniferous is consistently portrayed as high-oxygen, but not the Jurassic.

About 5 years have gone by since that article. What's the most modern iteration of "oxygen levels throughout prehistory"?

[Forum Explorer]

I've liked some of his work (Timeline, Andromeda Strain), but 100% scientific plausibility is a stretch. The meaningless technobabble is still there, it's just a little more subtle than you'd get from the likes of Star Trek.

I think his point is that he doesn't stick to 100% scientific plausibility, and his stories are better for it.

[Mightymosy]

Funny stuff. As it happens, this weekend has Jurassic Park and Jaws on TV, maybe in anticipation of the upcoming Jurassic World.

So we just got a refresher on how things were portrayed. And I must say, the movies, in terms of the protagonist, habe a really negative view towards genetic engineering - as is expected by a Hollywood movie.

Back then when I was a kid, I hadn't realised just how radical the "hero" actually is.

[Peelee]

Funny stuff. As it happens, this weekend has Jurassic Park and Jaws on TV, maybe in anticipation of the upcoming Jurassic World.

So we just got a refresher on how things were portrayed. And I must say, the movies, in terms of the protagonist, habe a really negative view towards genetic engineering - as is expected by a Hollywood movie.

Back then when I was a kid, I hadn't realised just how radical the "hero" actually is.

There not Hollywood, there Crichton. Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm are about the same in the movie as they are in the novel.

[Strigon]

I think his point is that he doesn't stick to 100% scientific plausibility, and his stories are better for it.

Quite so. More specifically, that I appreciate his ability to play with impossible things, and not just say it's magic/the rear deflector dish/reversing the polarity.

[Darth Ultron]

The films do make some curious decisions about who gets to live and die.

Well, Hollwood does follow a set formula.

Like, Kidz, are totally off limits. You will never see little Bliiy get eaten by a Dinosaur, even in weak pg-13. And you can't even show Kidz getting hurt, other then silly things like 'spraining an ankle'. You will never see a Dino bite off Billys hand, and even something like giving Billy a black eye would freak people out. The 'worst' you can do to Kidz is the classic ''mess up their hair and put some ketchup on their face".

The Good, Innocent people are mostly not targets. Though true, they are often also the Main Stars/heroes, so they have plot armor too.

The Traditionally Feminine Women, especially if they are very attractive, are mostly not targets. Though true, they are often also the Main Stars/Hero companions, so they have plot armor too.

Evil Guys, are automatic targets. You see a guy doing Evil, there is a good chance he will die by the end of the movie.

Any evil Corporate Guy, or more generally anyone that cares about 'evil money', is sure to die. Even more so if they care more about money then peoples lives.

Security Guard Guys: The Job of Death.

Worker Guys: Not as bad a Security, but they will mostly die.

The Dark Skinned Guy: Won't make it past the middle of the movie: often after they sprout there 'street common sense': Chomp!

Side Kicks/Partners to the hero, even more so if they are of any darker skin type, will die about half the time.

Overweight People: 100% acceptable targets, Num Num Num!

[The New Bruceski]

I got into a discussion on the stupidity of jurassic park awhile back after watching a youtube video. I didnt even TOUCH the scientific stupidity like the lysene contingency, I just pointed out that Hammond had actual, real, effective, solid cloning tech, and instead of using that to solve like 2/3 of the medical issues the world has today, (Cloned blood means never having to say there is a shortage, cloned organs means the same plus no rejection,etc etc etc) Or doing things like, I dunno, bringing back extinct animals or creating slightly genetically different "clones" of endangered ones, and collecting literally all of the money that ever did, does, or will exist in the world, at which point he could fund a dino park with his pocket change rather than waste time dealing with investors. He went right for the park and dealing with investors. Seriously, the dude had the tech to recreate dinosaurs, either as they actually were or through such a mastery of genetic manipulation that he could create whatever totally viable versions of them he wanted. Thats such a quantum leap forward in technology that it boggles the mind he went for "dino park" as his first choice of how to use it. I want to lie in a world where jurassic park is possible. Not because I want to see dinosaurs, but because I have to believe in a real world where that tech exists, its getting used for something other than ZOO EXHIBITS!!!

http://i.imgur.com/1kRIvC9.jpg

[Kantaki]

For example, we have been wondering whether "The Swarm" will get a movie some day...Ok, maybe not the perfect example, since part of the tension is Tsunami's num-num-ing people, but still...:smallwink:

Don't forget the mind controlled sea food. Those crabs...:smalleek:

Eh, considering the USA and, more importantly, the military are kinda presented as the bad guys I doubt there will ever be a recognizable movie version.
I mean, not solving things by blowing the other guy into oblivion? Resolving things with diplomacy? Not going to happen.
Even the bad guys' solution seems a bit boring for the big screen.
I think the Hollywood version would have them heroically nuking the oceans.

[Mightymosy]

Well, Hollwood does follow a set formula.

Like, Kidz, are totally off limits. You will never see little Bliiy get eaten by a Dinosaur, even in weak pg-13. And you can't even show Kidz getting hurt, other then silly things like 'spraining an ankle'. You will never see a Dino bite off Billys hand, and even something like giving Billy a black eye would freak people out. The 'worst' you can do to Kidz is the classic ''mess up their hair and put some ketchup on their face".

The Good, Innocent people are mostly not targets. Though true, they are often also the Main Stars/heroes, so they have plot armor too.

The Traditionally Feminine Women, especially if they are very attractive, are mostly not targets. Though true, they are often also the Main Stars/Hero companions, so they have plot armor too.

Evil Guys, are automatic targets. You see a guy doing Evil, there is a good chance he will die by the end of the movie.

Any evil Corporate Guy, or more generally anyone that cares about 'evil money', is sure to die. Even more so if they care more about money then peoples lives.

Security Guard Guys: The Job of Death.

Worker Guys: Not as bad a Security, but they will mostly die.

The Dark Skinned Guy: Won't make it past the middle of the movie: often after they sprout there 'street common sense': Chomp!

Side Kicks/Partners to the hero, even more so if they are of any darker skin type, will die about half the time.

Overweight People: 100% acceptable targets, Num Num Num!

Num num num :-)

Forgot one:

Promiscous woman: num num num.

We watched a shark movie yesterday. Typically cast of a group of college kids.
The two girls have a bathroom talk. One talks about sex and fun, one is talking about she is "waiting for the right one."
Gues which one is gonna get murdered and eaten?

Next shark movie: two girls, one sensible and careful and waiting for the next guy to be the right one, the other one enjoying life. Which one is gonna get eaten by the sharks? Right you are, Belkon.

I'm yet waiting for someone to come up with a counterexample. So far, it's the perfect formula for calculating survival in horror movies - well, actually any movie.

If there's only one woman, that one survives.
If there are more, the least promiscuous survives.



Don't forget the mind controlled sea food. Those crabs...:smalleek:

Eh, considering the USA and, more importantly, the military are kinda presented as the bad guys I doubt there will ever be a recognizable movie version.
I mean, not solving things by blowing the other guy into oblivion? Resolving things with diplomacy? Not going to happen.
Even the bad guys' solution seems a bit boring for the big screen.
I think the Hollywood version would have them heroically nuking the oceans.

Leider wahr...;-)

There is some hope, though. For example, Matrix Revolutions everyone thought they would blow up the machines, or kill all the humans, but in the end it ended with a truce! I think that was really revolutionary ;-)

[Reddish Mage]

Seriously, the dude had the tech to recreate dinosaurs, either as they actually were or through such a mastery of genetic manipulation that he could create whatever totally viable versions of them he wanted. Thats such a quantum leap forward in technology that it boggles the mind he went for "dino park" as his first choice of how to use it. I want to lie in a world where jurassic park is possible. Not because I want to see dinosaurs, but because I have to believe in a real world where that tech exists, its getting used for something other than ZOO EXHIBITS!!!

You realize you are criticizing the very premise of the movie just noting how underused the tech is being. That criticism applies pretty much to every science fiction story.


Num num num :-)

Forgot one:

Promiscous woman: num num num.

If there's only one woman, that one survives.
If there are more, the least promiscuous survives.


There's Stranger Things, where the innocent virgin chaperon gets killed while the main character has sex ...oh wait Netflix series don't count.

[Rater202]

http://i.imgur.com/1kRIvC9.jpg

Bit of Trivia, a few issues later, Spide-Man and his Students got into a "Science off" with Hank "The Beast" Mcoy and his Students and actually salvaged Sauron's technology and repurposed it for cancer treatment.

Hank's class, meanwhile, invented yet another way to teleport.

This just about sums up the differences between Peter Parker's approach to science and that of Marvel's better recognized super geniuses.

[Mightymosy]

You realize you are criticizing the very premise of the movie just noting how underused the tech is being. That criticism applies pretty much to every science fiction story.



There's Stranger Things, where the innocent virgin chaperon gets killed while the main character has sex ...oh wait Netflix series don't count.

Why wouldn't Netflix count? Because it's not Hollywood? At this point I'm happy for ANY example ;-)

That being said, is your character in Stranger Things promiscuous?
My observation is not that having sex per se dooms the female characters, but it's those that have it with different men, and god forbid, having fun.
Usually the "winner" in most movies is the girl who "saves" herself for just "that one guy" - but she will have sex with that one. In other words, the virgin and the promicuous one get eaten by the monster, but the role model for monogame relationship (with marriage and kids) is left.

Which I just find ridiculous - and offending - in a horror/monster movie. Why would a shark or a dino eat these first?!? Always?
It's just as offending as them eating the fat guy, the dark skin guy, and whatever else was mentioned first - but I admit I have more interest in that particular disadvantaged group :smallcool:

[Rogar Demonblud]

Well, the fat guy at least is easy to chase down.

That might be a good campaign to push physical fitness. Just note all the people in the movies who die because they aren't healthy enough to move fast when the time comes.

[dps]

Well, the fat guy at least is easy to chase down.


And provides a bigger meal.

[The New Bruceski]

Bit of Trivia, a few issues later, Spide-Man and his Students got into a "Science off" with Hank "The Beast" Mcoy and his Students and actually salvaged Sauron's technology and repurposed it for cancer treatment.

Hank's class, meanwhile, invented yet another way to teleport.

This just about sums up the differences between Peter Parker's approach to science and that of Marvel's better recognized super geniuses.

"Yes! Still haven't killed any of my students!"

That comic was great.

[Traab]

You realize you are criticizing the very premise of the movie just noting how underused the tech is being. That criticism applies pretty much to every science fiction story.





Not so much, at least in most sci fi stories its set in a world of sci fi, meaning star wars or star trek, that sort of thing. Its one thing to theory craft on already utilized tech things it should ALSO be able to do. This is like if nasa developed warp drives fully capable of intergalactic travel.... and used them to get coffee for the boss faster at cape kennedy. The very idea of using it to travel space never even occurred to them. It never even gets brought up at any point in the movie by anyone in the cast. Its just a handy way to get coffee from the break room to the bosses office instantly. They even explicitly say things like, "These engines let us go thousands of times the speed of light. So our coffee is always hot when we get back to our seats!" The logical disconnect is so massive its one of those things you cant unsee one you realize it.

[Lethologica]

Not so much, at least in most sci fi stories its set in a world of sci fi, meaning star wars or star trek, that sort of thing. Its one thing to theory craft on already utilized tech things it should ALSO be able to do. This is like if nasa developed warp drives fully capable of intergalactic travel.... and used them to get coffee for the boss faster at cape kennedy. The very idea of using it to travel space never even occurred to them. It never even gets brought up at any point in the movie by anyone in the cast. Its just a handy way to get coffee from the break room to the bosses office instantly. They even explicitly say things like, "These engines let us go thousands of times the speed of light. So our coffee is always hot when we get back to our seats!" The logical disconnect is so massive its one of those things you cant unsee one you realize it.
The premise of the movie is not Hammond's mastery of genetic manipulation. The premise of the movie is Dino Park. It's literally the name of the movie.

For all we know, blood transfusions and organ transplants are already solved problems in that world. It's not important. What's important is that someone's making a park with dinos in it and it's not going to work.

[Rater202]

And again, this cloning works by splicing DNA into a blank egg-cell and using that to grow an embryo into a living creature the old fashioned way.

Which is to say, it's how actual, real-life cloning works. Just more advanced.

That's not gonna help with blood and organ issues, because you'd have to grow a full person and growing an entire brand new person for blood and organs is both highly unethical, if not fully immoral(it's basically Slavery and sometimes murder depending on what organs are being harvested,) and also ridiculously impractical.

[snowblizz]

The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?
It's not and that's why we hate lawyers. Duh! Every good sci-fi utopia starts by killing all the lawyers.

It's not a wierdly negative light. The lawyer damns himself by words and by action. Everyone else is filled with childfull glee at these marvelous things, except one guy who can only see money. (Yes a lot of those should have been less filled with wonder and more filled with wondering about the things that might go bad, but different convo)

So the lawyer represents the investors who are concerned by security after an accident. He is part of the process to bring in experts to assess it. Does he ever do anything else than go "ka-CHING!" when he realises the power of the Park to incite our minds. He expresses this in the talk about being able to charge anything for attendence, and he is probably right. I can't help but root for Hammond here who wants to make it available to all. So we go on tour. What does the lawyer do, he admonishes the kid for using the binoculars (they look expensive!) which is kinda dumb because that's what they are there for after all (both kids and binoculars, to be tested and used respectively). Cue T-Rex escape. What does lawyer do? Heroically leaves two dumb children alone with a monster. What a great guy. If this is the standard for corporate lawyers, and I have no problem seeing it is, all I want to know is: Where are all the T-Rexes and can I have one?

Everything the lawyer says and does is egoistic in the extreme, and he gets eaten for it. You may not care for that morality but I think most here do.



There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?
That's not quite the message. Playing god is not how we get medicine. Careful and rational science which consider what happens is how we get medicine that doesn't eat us alive. "Playing God" is when you use science and damn the consequences. Like creating dinosaurs and just throwing people out there, having beings separated 65 million yers jsut collide to paraphrase the movie. So it's not so weird, it's arguing for a responsible take on science. Notwithstanding that some of the persons in there and the whole thing definitely can be taken as a warning of science, but IMO of science unchecked and not considering the consequences. The whole you did it becasue you could not because you should. Though Malcolm's criticism at times comes over as wildly overbearing. I don't get his whole spiel about "standing on the shoulder of giants" rant. That's is exactly how science goes. By Malcolm's standards noone ever could earn the responsibility to use scientific knowledge.


The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "eroes are complete morons who object strongly to the bad guys rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.
That's exactly the point. It's wrong to use/abuse other living beings just because. And "you can't own them". This is exactly a moral point, legal right doens't equal moral right.


But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.
Two wrongs don't make a right. The idiot ball is strong though. You could also say wanting to do good causes the problems. Though frankly the bad guys you don't think are bad are the ones that injured the baby t-rex in the first place it seemed to me. I guess you could say the theme of the movie is "mixing humans and dinos was bad, aw man don't go pillaging the thing that finally settled into an equilibriun without your touch".



Later on a T-Rex attacks the bad guys, and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.On this one am with you. This guy has a very big idiot ball he carries with him. Though I know plenty of people like him so the character at least is believable.


I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil stupid but entirely neutral actions by the main heroes. But no.
You can't arrest someone for doing something that's not illegal. He doesn't actually do anything morally wrong. And I already thought VV's character was portrayed as a very unsymphatetic guy. Somewhere around "joined Greenpeace for da chicks" comment the character makes. I've met 1 person who has said that to me IRL actually. They later commited a heinous murder.


Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.Oh there are so many idiots in this movie it hurts. The kids in JP1 deserved to be eaten by a T-Rex alone. They seem smart in comparison to most here, worst may be Tea Leoni's character. She gets over her dead boyfriends carcass kinda quick doesn't she?


A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?
It's not. It's supposed to be a sign of intelligence. These are not just dumb lizards, something driven home by the 4th film. They wanted the eggs and got them back. And as pointed out before me in thread, Grant uses the raptor whistle to confuse them.


Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

Er yea because it kinda is. He wants dinosaurs because then he can go MURICA on everyones asses with no consequences.
Training seals and dolphins to disable/deliver mines and torpedoes and so on got shut down due to moral questions. So did any number of weapons programs involving animals. Check out the pidgeon and cat bombs e.g. And the idea to use bats delivering firebombs wasn't particularly pleasant either. The moral objection here is the use of innocent animals to do your dirty work.



This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

What the hell?
I'm not convinced that's what they are gunning for there. But I can certainly see where the perception comes from. I got similar vibes from watching it.
I will note though that your theory of punishing those not toeing the line doesn't quite hold up on British lady since she is doing exactly that which you posit the movie punishes people for not doing. She was preoccupied planning her wedding after all. The latter is where we are supposed to get the shock from.
I don't know why they decided going with that. Following your line of argument she should have had a minor heroic save the kids moment, declared she now knows she'll be a good mother and told the frigid female dog she works with to stuff it.



What do you guys think?
I recently, as in over weekend, saw the first 3 JP movies. Not subtly "presented by JW:fallen kingdom". All my comemnts are based on movies as I've not read the book(s?) and don't think they are germaine to the discussion of movies as they are rather different. Just gonan note though, the problem of discussing what's moral is that morals are subjective which kinda means there's not a lot of points of agreement.

Just something I noticed is that isn't it odd how often Hammond says "spared no expense" when clearly they seem to have been. Nedry clearly got the gig for lowballing the contract (and is suffering for it, his fault not Hammonds, but man is that a dumb descision to go with the lowest bid in case like this). Security guy mentions locks on vehicles they don't have, which should be like first on the list.

Money plays a vital part in severla movies though so it's not just criticism towards technology but also where just looking at money takes us. in JW had they bene willing to terminate their 40 million dollar "asset" with prejudice they'd not had dozens of people killed and the whole edifice torn down. The Indian (?) successor guy should be proud, he really did honor Hammond's legacy to creatively destroy what he built on the illusion of having control.

Also it's interesting that resident mad-scientist Wu seems to get away everytime. Near as I can tell the only one so far gotten scot fre eout of these debacles. Am really hoping to see him eaten by a T-Rex in the next movie.

Idiot people aren't getting comeuppence nearly as much as they should.

[hamishspence]

He doesn't actually do anything morally wrong.

He committed theft (of bullets) - a theft that one could reasonably predict would get people killed - so possibly qualifying as voluntary manslaughter.

[Strigon]

That's not quite the message. Playing god is not how we get medicine. Careful and rational science which consider what happens is how we get medicine that doesn't eat us alive. "Playing God" is when you use science and damn the consequences. Like creating dinosaurs and just throwing people out there, having beings separated 65 million yers jsut collide to paraphrase the movie. So it's not so weird, it's arguing for a responsible take on science. Notwithstanding that some of the persons in there and the whole thing definitely can be taken as a warning of science, but IMO of science unchecked and not considering the consequences. The whole you did it becasue you could not because you should. Though Malcolm's criticism at times comes over as wildly overbearing. I don't get his whole spiel about "standing on the shoulder of giants" rant. That's is exactly how science goes. By Malcolm's standards noone ever could earn the responsibility to use scientific knowledge.

In the book - and, to a lesser degree, the movie - Malcolm was explicitly anti-science. He went on rants about its destructive power over nature, its ability to grow faster than we can compensate for, and the lack of any significant gain in integrity when studying science. He compared it to martial arts, where the very act of studying it teaches the discipline needed not to abuse it. Don't know if I agree, but that was his argument. I believe he may also have argued that people aren't actually happier now than they were as hunter-gatherers, but I can't remember.

His statement about the shoulders of giants, however, does make sense. Science is about steadily building on knowledge. Long before any new products are made, the science behind them is carefully studied in dozens of different ways. What the Jurassic Park people did was simply read that cloning could be done, and they simply started cloning dinosaurs as fast as they could. Proper science would have been to learn the fundamentals of cloning, maybe clone a simple animal, study it, look for defects, rinse, repeat, and in 20 or 30 years maybe you can bring back something like the dodo or mammoth. Science is about learning and discovery; if you go into science with a specific ending in mind, you're probably doing it wrong.

What they did would be akin to a layman downloading software, looking at the source could, and trying changes until he got something new that he liked. It doesn't make him a programmer, and the program will probably be unstable in ways he can't even consider because he knows nothing about computers.

[Jan Mattys]

I'm yet waiting for someone to come up with a counterexample. So far, it's the perfect formula for calculating survival in horror movies - well, actually any movie.

Well, Jaws had a kid killed off in the second shark attack. And it was quite a big deal (unlike Barb in Stranger Things), so much so that I'd say that the scene where the mother confronts the protagonist carries the biggest emotional impact in the whole movie.

[Mightymosy]

Well, Jaws had a kid killed off in the second shark attack. And it was quite a big deal (unlike Barb in Stranger Things), so much so that I'd say that the scene where the mother confronts the protagonist carries the biggest emotional impact in the whole movie.

Yeah, that really was horrifying. Don't get what it has to do with my message, but yeah, horrifying scene.

Come to think of it, Jaws is a classic, maybe also because it does refrain from using the monster to teach moral lessons in the form that it eats the supposedly lesser morally adequate characters!


[...]


That's exactly the point. It's wrong to use/abuse other living beings just because. And "you can't own them". This is exactly a moral point, legal right doens't equal moral right.
[...]

Vegetarian ?

[dps]

It's not and that's why we hate lawyers. Duh! Every good sci-fi utopia starts by killing all the lawyers.

It's not a wierdly negative light. The lawyer damns himself by words and by action. Everyone else is filled with childfull glee at these marvelous things, except one guy who can only see money. (Yes a lot of those should have been less filled with wonder and more filled with wondering about the things that might go bad, but different convo)

So the lawyer represents the investors who are concerned by security after an accident. He is part of the process to bring in experts to assess it. Does he ever do anything else than go "ka-CHING!" when he realises the power of the Park to incite our minds. He expresses this in the talk about being able to charge anything for attendence, and he is probably right. I can't help but root for Hammond here who wants to make it available to all. So we go on tour. What does the lawyer do, he admonishes the kid for using the binoculars (they look expensive!) which is kinda dumb because that's what they are there for after all (both kids and binoculars, to be tested and used respectively). Cue T-Rex escape. What does lawyer do? Heroically leaves two dumb children alone with a monster. What a great guy. If this is the standard for corporate lawyers, and I have no problem seeing it is, all I want to know is: Where are all the T-Rexes and can I have one?

Everything the lawyer says and does is egoistic in the extreme, and he gets eaten for it. You may not care for that morality but I think most here do.



The problem with that POV is that isn't how a corporate lawyer would/should react. Yeah, maybe all a typical corporate lawyer would see would be dollar signs, but they wouldn't be the dollar signs in front of the park's profits, it would be the dollar signs in front of the insurance costs and the potential liabilities. He shouldn't be talking about how they would make a lot of money; he should be talking about how they'd never be able to afford insurance.

[zimmerwald1915]

The problem with that POV is that isn't how a corporate lawyer would/should react. Yeah, maybe all a typical corporate lawyer would see would be dollar signs, but they wouldn't be the dollar signs in front of the park's profits, it would be the dollar signs in front of the insurance costs and the potential liabilities. He shouldn't be talking about how they would make a lot of money; he should be talking about how they'd never be able to afford insurance.
Nah, he should be talking about how to set up a shell company to sell themselves insurance, then have that underwritten by some less than scrupulous government. No large company worth its salt actually buys insurance from an insurance company. That's a sucker's game.

Or alternatively, he's a large shareholder himself, and is scummy and/or powerful enough to not give a damn about the conflict of interest that poses.

[Sapphire Guard]

Given that the premise requires dinosaurs eating people, it's not that surprising the stance is that maybe cloning dinosaurs isn't entirely a great idea.

[snowblizz]

He committed theft (of bullets) - a theft that one could reasonably predict would get people killed - so possibly qualifying as voluntary manslaughter.
I'm sorry. The movies does not bring up the legal codex of Dinosaur Island. I don't think there is one. The value of the bullets probably won't amount to theft anyway.

Supposedly the islands belong to Costa Rica, but they don't seem to be enforcing much of anything there.

If you want to throw a book at someone, illegally importing exotic animals? How do you clear a T-Rex through customs? Most people have to work hard to get a pet cat or dog with them. Where was the Coast Guard? How did the ship arrive with no pilot, not to mention by what I could see, not adhering to any shipping lanes. You don't just run in a straight line at a harbour.



His statement about the shoulders of giants, however, does make sense. Science is about steadily building on knowledge. Long before any new products are made, the science behind them is carefully studied in dozens of different ways. What the Jurassic Park people did was simply read that cloning could be done, and they simply started cloning dinosaurs as fast as they could. Proper science would have been to learn the fundamentals of cloning, maybe clone a simple animal, study it, look for defects, rinse, repeat, and in 20 or 30 years maybe you can bring back something like the dodo or mammoth. Science is about learning and discovery; if you go into science with a specific ending in mind, you're probably doing it wrong. To me it seemed like InGen was "doing science" though, the park wasn't even plan A they seemed to have started out with a smaller vision as the nephew crows about before interruptus triceratopi occurs. Their talk about fixing the genetic code e.g. sounds like they've doing some work.

The thing with Malcolms speach to me was he made it sound as if you had to do all the science yourself. All of it. As you say yourself it's building knowledge, but Malcolm seemed to be expressively saying that's wrong and leads to undisciplined use.



Come to think of it, Jaws is a classic, maybe also because it does refrain from using the monster to teach moral lessons in the form that it eats the supposedly lesser morally adequate characters!And then drop the ball by making the Jaws exhibit vengeful behaviour in later movies.

That mother always bothered me because she entirely unwarranted slaps the sheriff. He was the one trying to prevent what happened but constantly being thwarted by the mayor and local business over the important memorial day (or whatever it was) weekend. You peoepl didn't listen to the sheriff, now a kid is dead, how's it his fault.



Vegetarian ?
What exactly does that have to do with anything? But yes I suspect VV's character is a vegetarian. I can't recall if they said anything either way. The T-Rex on the other hand, clearly not. Or seriously falling off the wagon.

I'm also fully capable of understanding other people's moral arguments without sharing them. Morals are subjective. If it makes you happier pick another instance where law =/= morals, there are many. The first 5 popping into my head aren't forum appropriate though.


The problem with that POV is that isn't how a corporate lawyer would/should react. Yeah, maybe all a typical corporate lawyer would see would be dollar signs, but they wouldn't be the dollar signs in front of the park's profits, it would be the dollar signs in front of the insurance costs and the potential liabilities. He shouldn't be talking about how they would make a lot of money; he should be talking about how they'd never be able to afford insurance.

So he is not even a very good corporate lawyer then? Ofc just as science is inaccurate "the lawyer" isn't an accurate depiction of a specific niche of a profession. He's a destillation of "lawyers are bad" and I can still stand behind that sentiment. Pass me another T-Rex, I hear law-school is out.

[Rater202]

To be fair to he layer, he was actually using the toilet he made a break for. (He was sitting on the toilet with his pants down when Rexy at him.)

So he didn't abandon the kids purely out of cowardice. It was partially so he wouldn't crap himself.

[Sinewmire]

I got into a discussion on the stupidity of jurassic park awhile back after watching a youtube video. I didnt even TOUCH the scientific stupidity like the lysene contingency, I just pointed out that Hammond had actual, real, effective, solid cloning tech, and instead of using that to solve like 2/3 of the medical issues the world has today, (Cloned blood means never having to say there is a shortage, cloned organs means the same plus no rejection,etc etc etc) Or doing things like, I dunno, bringing back extinct animals or creating slightly genetically different "clones" of endangered ones, and collecting literally all of the money that ever did, does, or will exist in the world, at which point he could fund a dino park with his pocket change rather than waste time dealing with investors. He went right for the park and dealing with investors. Seriously, the dude had the tech to recreate dinosaurs, either as they actually were or through such a mastery of genetic manipulation that he could create whatever totally viable versions of them he wanted. Thats such a quantum leap forward in technology that it boggles the mind he went for "dino park" as his first choice of how to use it. I want to lie in a world where jurassic park is possible. Not because I want to see dinosaurs, but because I have to believe in a real world where that tech exists, its getting used for something other than ZOO EXHIBITS!!!

The book explicitly counters this. John Hammond gives a little speech about why he, personally, would never ever do anything to help humanity. He posits if he used all this technology to find a cure for cancer then spent the time and money to get it FDA approved, he would not be able to charge whatever he wanted, and instead of being grateful people would be furious that he was charging anything for it at all.

Reminds me of a Mitchell and Webb sketch, where a scientists' work on helping mankind is abandoned, because he works for Laboritoire Garnier, who are only interested in expanding their Fructis range of hair products.

So yeah, real life. You can charge whatever you want for entertainment, you can't realistically charge whatever you like for life-saving medication.

[Wraith]

One thing about Jurassic World that I have struggled to get over, and how many people seem to gloss over, is that Claire Dearing (the park administrator and Chris Pratt's on/off love interest) is a sociopath who is not only an awful human being, but also should go to prison forever on multiple counts of Corporate Manslaughter and Negligence.

On the one hand, she is portrayed as not being interested in children - that's fine, more people should be allowed to be honest about that sort of thing without reprisal or being made to feel guilty.
On the other; If that's the case though, then why did she invite her two nephews to the Park on opening day just so that she could ignore them? The film was pretty clear; she invited them there to spend time with her.... During the single busiest event of her life, so she dumped them on her PA told them to go amuse themselves.
Some people would call that cruel - and not just to the PA.

There's then a scene where she is confronted by Chris Pratt's character about how unsafe the park was.
He is the dinosaur expert that Dr.Grant never was; his experience with some of the biggest and most dangerous creatures that ever walked the face of the planet is entirely practical, and he tells her that the animals are a direct threat to the public and that the park should be closed for the safety of everyone present.

Her response? "If we close now, we'll never reopen."

To clarify; she has just been told by an expert in man-eating predators that there is a clear and present danger to the public, and her primary concern is her company's bottom line. Not even an attempt to compromise or to ask for a second opinion; flat out refusal because it would cost money (and, likely as implied by the previous scenes, to spite him because he's her ex and she's still mad about something). So she overrides her expert, actively rejecting his established, researched and considered opinion, and then people start dying in their hundreds within 10 minutes.

That's heinous. Similar circumstances have happened in other films, and in such a position then an ironic death at the hands of her own folly would be the only thing that the audience should expect. People such as the Mayor (as played by Bill Murray) in City of Ember, or Carter Burke from Aliens both set that precedent.

Instead we're expected to sympathise with her, because she 'saves the day' by releasing another giant, man-eating predator, leading it to an open public area and hoping that it will fight another creature, rather than run away or decide to eat her and her friends anyway.
And then she gets to kiss Chris Pratt (which frankly we should all be jealous of) as a reward for not only ruining the park anyway, but for causing hundreds of deaths enroute.

That's a hell of a moral: Protect your corporation even at the expense of the lives and safety of the public, but it will be okay so long as the handsome protagonist still wants to hook up with you. :smallyuk:

[hamishspence]

I'm sorry. The movies does not bring up the legal codex of Dinosaur Island. I don't think there is one. The value of the bullets probably won't amount to theft anyway.

The point I'm trying to make is that taking bullets, in an extremely hazardous environment, that people need to defend themselves in - is predictable as leading to death. Thus, the guy would be chargable with manslaughter.

He did stuff that was both legally wrong and morally wrong, in short.

[LaZodiac]

One thing about Jurassic World that I have struggled to get over, and how many people seem to gloss over, is that Claire Dearing (the park administrator and Chris Pratt's on/off love interest) is a sociopath who is not only an awful human being, but also should go to prison forever on multiple counts of Corporate Manslaughter and Negligence.

On the one hand, she is portrayed as not being interested in children - that's fine, more people should be allowed to be honest about that sort of thing without reprisal or being made to feel guilty.
On the other; If that's the case though, then why did she invite her two nephews to the Park on opening day just so that she could ignore them? The film was pretty clear; she invited them there to spend time with her.... During the single busiest event of her life, so she dumped them on her PA told them to go amuse themselves.
Some people would call that cruel - and not just to the PA.

There's then a scene where she is confronted by Chris Pratt's character about how unsafe the park was.
He is the dinosaur expert that Dr.Grant never was; his experience with some of the biggest and most dangerous creatures that ever walked the face of the planet is entirely practical, and he tells her that the animals are a direct threat to the public and that the park should be closed for the safety of everyone present.

Her response? "If we close now, we'll never reopen."

To clarify; she has just been told by an expert in man-eating predators that there is a clear and present danger to the public, and her primary concern is her company's bottom line. Not even an attempt to compromise or to ask for a second opinion; flat out refusal because it would cost money (and, likely as implied by the previous scenes, to spite him because he's her ex and she's still mad about something). So she overrides her expert, actively rejecting his established, researched and considered opinion, and then people start dying in their hundreds within 10 minutes.

That's heinous. Similar circumstances have happened in other films, and in such a position then an ironic death at the hands of her own folly would be the only thing that the audience should expect. People such as the Mayor (as played by Bill Murray) in City of Ember, or Carter Burke from Aliens both set that precedent.

Instead we're expected to sympathise with her, because she 'saves the day' by releasing another giant, man-eating predator, leading it to an open public area and hoping that it will fight another creature, rather than run away or decide to eat her and her friends anyway.
And then she gets to kiss Chris Pratt (which frankly we should all be jealous of) as a reward for not only ruining the park anyway, but for causing hundreds of deaths enroute.

That's a hell of a moral: Protect your corporation even at the expense of the lives and safety of the public, but it will be okay so long as the handsome protagonist still wants to hook up with you. :smallyuk:

And yet it's the PA who gets ripped to shreds in a ****ing horrific and unneeded scene by like three dinosaurs, who's only sin is being outsmarted by children and trying to find them.

Yeah, Jurassic World has Problems.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The point I'm trying to make is that taking bullets, in an extremely hazardous environment, that people need to defend themselves in - is predictable as leading to death. Thus, the guy would be chargable with manslaughter.

He did stuff that was both legally wrong and morally wrong, in short.

He did nothing but cause the hunter character the minor inconvenience of reloading the weapon. That is, if he'd bothered with basic firearm safety and checked to verify if the weapon was loaded or not.

[Darth Ultron]

One thing about Jurassic World that I have struggled to get over, and how many people seem to gloss over, is that Claire Dearing (the park administrator and Chris Pratt's on/off love interest) is a sociopath who is not only an awful human being, but also should go to prison forever on multiple counts of Corporate Manslaughter and Negligence.


As the semi famous female co-star of the movie, she does have Plot Armor. She does not even need to be a good person or even a hero.

In a traditional type movie the evil person that cares about money is a Acceptable Target.

But modern moves throw all that out the window, especially for Women. I'm sure the Claire character was written to be (sigh) strong powerful woman....at least by someones view.

[hamishspence]

He did nothing but cause the hunter character the minor inconvenience of reloading the weapon.

I thought the T. rex killed several of Roland's men between firing empty, and reloading?

[Rogar Demonblud]

Like I said, he neglected the basic safety precaution of checking his weapon when he picked it up several minutes or maybe half an hour (time is a bit fluid there) before that. The 'hunter' is not much of a hunter, which is pretty typical for Hollywood.

[Forum Explorer]

Like I said, he neglected the basic safety precaution of checking his weapon when he picked it up several minutes or maybe half an hour (time is a bit fluid there) before that. The 'hunter' is not much of a hunter, which is pretty typical for Hollywood.

That doesn't really matter does it? If you disable my breaks and I hit someone as a result, then you still are responsible for the death, even if I should've checked the brakes before leaving.

Or in other words, the hunter was a little negligent about safety, in a situation where he is leading a large group of people, with people dying all around him, and lots of stuff to organize. But it would've been fine, if the eco-terrorist didn't sabotage him. And people died directly as a result of the eco-terrorist's actions.

And seriously, what did the eco-terroist expect to happen? That the hunter would go to fire, wouldn't be able to, and then nothing bad happens? No, it went exactly as planned, and it was nothing other then murder.

[Aedilred]

If there's only one woman, that one survives.
If there are more, the least promiscuous survives.

The Virgin Suicides!

But yeah, it's a common trope.



On the other; If that's the case though, then why did she invite her two nephews to the Park on opening day just so that she could ignore them? The film was pretty clear; she invited them there to spend time with her.... During the single busiest event of her life, so she dumped them on her PA told them to go amuse themselves.

It's not opening day. It's a regular day. The park's been running for years: so long in fact that people are starting to get bored of dinosaurs: numbers are starting to decline and they need more exciting attractions to maintain ticket sales.

At the start of the day there's very little out of the ordinary going on. Her boss is visiting to check in on the new dinosaur, which is why she ditches the kids for a bit, but that's presumably a semi-regular event. Hoskins is there to check in on the raptor project, similarly. What goes wrong is that the Indominus gets loose, which was the fault of that one guy who opened the main paddock gate to try to save himself (and failed). Everything else follows from there.

[Mightymosy]

And yet it's the PA who gets ripped to shreds in a ****ing horrific and unneeded scene by like three dinosaurs, who's only sin is being outsmarted by children and trying to find them.

Yeah, Jurassic World has Problems.


One thing about Jurassic World that I have struggled to get over, and how many people seem to gloss over, is that Claire Dearing (the park administrator and Chris Pratt's on/off love interest) is a sociopath who is not only an awful human being, but also should go to prison forever on multiple counts of Corporate Manslaughter and Negligence.

On the one hand, she is portrayed as not being interested in children - that's fine, more people should be allowed to be honest about that sort of thing without reprisal or being made to feel guilty.
On the other; If that's the case though, then why did she invite her two nephews to the Park on opening day just so that she could ignore them? The film was pretty clear; she invited them there to spend time with her.... During the single busiest event of her life, so she dumped them on her PA told them to go amuse themselves.
Some people would call that cruel - and not just to the PA.

There's then a scene where she is confronted by Chris Pratt's character about how unsafe the park was.
He is the dinosaur expert that Dr.Grant never was; his experience with some of the biggest and most dangerous creatures that ever walked the face of the planet is entirely practical, and he tells her that the animals are a direct threat to the public and that the park should be closed for the safety of everyone present.

Her response? "If we close now, we'll never reopen."

To clarify; she has just been told by an expert in man-eating predators that there is a clear and present danger to the public, and her primary concern is her company's bottom line. Not even an attempt to compromise or to ask for a second opinion; flat out refusal because it would cost money (and, likely as implied by the previous scenes, to spite him because he's her ex and she's still mad about something). So she overrides her expert, actively rejecting his established, researched and considered opinion, and then people start dying in their hundreds within 10 minutes.

That's heinous. Similar circumstances have happened in other films, and in such a position then an ironic death at the hands of her own folly would be the only thing that the audience should expect. People such as the Mayor (as played by Bill Murray) in City of Ember, or Carter Burke from Aliens both set that precedent.

Instead we're expected to sympathise with her, because she 'saves the day' by releasing another giant, man-eating predator, leading it to an open public area and hoping that it will fight another creature, rather than run away or decide to eat her and her friends anyway.
And then she gets to kiss Chris Pratt (which frankly we should all be jealous of) as a reward for not only ruining the park anyway, but for causing hundreds of deaths enroute.

That's a hell of a moral: Protect your corporation even at the expense of the lives and safety of the public, but it will be okay so long as the handsome protagonist still wants to hook up with you. :smallyuk:

I got a slightly different reading, but one that infuriates me nevertheless.

Let me know if you agree:


The PA show continuous disinterest in the kids, always being more interested in her cell phone - probably texting with some hot boys, or girlie friends.

That's why she gets eaten.

In contrast, Claire is being portrayed as a really egotistical business character. Making money for the corporation and for her is her goal, no matter what else.

BUT she undergoes a character arc - through the guidance of Chris Pratt she learns morale and ethics, and makes a turn toward caring mother. Remember the scene where she rips open her shirt, grabs the shotgun and blasts away the flying dinos to protect the kids? It is only THEN that she has earned Chris Pratt's approval and the right to kiss him. And the universe acknowledges that she is now a caring mother figure with a monogame relation to a strong father, thus the dino apocalypse spares her. The PA didn't have a male protector, and - even worse!!!!!!! - she has no interest in the kids, and does not change, and thus meets a karmic end at the jaws of the big dinosaur.

That's the vibe I got from the movie, and it disgusted me. What ya think? Understandable, or utter garbage logic?

[Peelee]

I got a slightly different reading, but one that infuriates me nevertheless.

Let me know if you agree:


The PA show continuous disinterest in the kids, always being more interested in her cell phone - probably texting with some hot boys, or girlie friends.

That's why she gets eaten.

My reading on the PA was that everything she was doing was her job, and she was just put upon too much by an overbearing boss.

[Mightymosy]

My reading on the PA was that everything she was doing was her job, and she was just put upon too much by an overbearing boss.

Certainly a possibility! Makes her death even crueler if she only lost the kids because she did so much work for Claire.

I obviously don't know, but from her facial expressions it seemed more private texting than business work for me - but I may be biased because I NEVER work on the phone, and can't imagine that working on a cell phone is even remotely practical.

[Misereor]

First of all, this thread has some hillarious observations. Kudos to everyone.

Second...



And then she gets to kiss Chris Pratt (which frankly we should all be jealous of) as a reward for not only ruining the park anyway, but for causing hundreds of deaths enroute.

Disaster movies have always had mass death for emotional contrast for the characters the audience is supposed to care about. Yet, I get the impression that script writers are steadily becoming worse at hiding the fact that NPC's just don't matter; which of course they don't, since they're not real. But for storytelling reasons, there should at least be some attempt to make it seem like the death of a few hundred or thousand people amounts to more than simply a convenient vehicle for whatever direction the writer is trying take his main characters in.

I wonder if it is because it simply doesn't occur to them. Whether it might be some reflection of Generation Me! in action, where other people are simply extras in the life of the solipsistic observer. Like people on Facebook who focus more on the fact that they were present at some tragic event and the emotional impact on them, rather than focusing on the victims themselves, thereby giving us a glimpse of how their personality works. Then again, it might just be an unfortunate side effect of art by committee. I kinda hope so, that being the lesser of two evils.

[Peelee]

Certainly a possibility! Makes her death even crueler if she only lost the kids because she did so much work for Claire.

I obviously don't know, but from her facial expressions it seemed more private texting than business work for me - but I may be biased because I NEVER work on the phone, and can't imagine that working on a cell phone is even remotely practical.

Knowing virtually nothing about being a PA, I could easily see it happening for a PA. Being given work by your boss, while simultaneously having to babysit some kids (no slight intended towards the kids, that's the most accurate way I can describe what Claire wanted her to do)... if any computer work is required, she couldn't very well do that on a laptop. And having to keep track of the boss's appointments, schedules, putting out any fires that may crop up and keep said boss abreast of it, I could see working on a cell phone at times as something that could be necessary. Still not at all practical, but practical doesn't necessarily pay the bills, ya know?

[Rogar Demonblud]

That doesn't really matter does it? If you disable my breaks and I hit someone as a result, then you still are responsible for the death, even if I should've checked the brakes before leaving.

No, that would be you also going to prison for your part. All the more so if you're a professional driver and are legally required to check everything.


Or in other words, the hunter was a little negligent about safety, in a situation where he is leading a large group of people, with people dying all around him, and lots of stuff to organize. But it would've been fine.

No, he was very negligent. Again, it should have been a momentary inconvenience. Hunter guy picks up the weapon, and IMMEDIATELY verifies whether or not it is loaded. It is all the more important to do that if he's the only thing between a bunch of idiots and massive predators. Of course, one person can only cover for about four others (most safaris will go one to three), but that's on the huge idiot who set this up with insufficient security. So everyone past those first few are unprotected anyway.

Really, this isn't hard. Always check the weapon. Always check the safety. Assume nothing. But a supposed professional can't do this even after he knows there's a saboteur around. It's just a pointed reminder of why we have ~2000 accidental shootings each year in this country, over a quarter of which are fatal. Assumption is the mother of all f+++ ups.

[Peelee]

No, that would be you also going to prison for your part.
I have reason to doubt this.

All the more so if you're a professional driver and are legally required to check everything.

Are you saying that hunters are legally required to check and see if their gun is loaded?

[Forum Explorer]

No, that would be you also going to prison for your part. All the more so if you're a professional driver and are legally required to check everything.



No, he was very negligent. Again, it should have been a momentary inconvenience. Hunter guy picks up the weapon, and IMMEDIATELY verifies whether or not it is loaded. It is all the more important to do that if he's the only thing between a bunch of idiots and massive predators. Of course, one person can only cover for about four others (most safaris will go one to three), but that's on the huge idiot who set this up with insufficient security. So everyone past those first few are unprotected anyway.

Really, this isn't hard. Always check the weapon. Always check the safety. Assume nothing. But a supposed professional can't do this even after he knows there's a saboteur around. It's just a pointed reminder of why we have ~2000 accidental shootings each year in this country, over a quarter of which are fatal. Assumption is the mother of all f+++ ups.

Sure, I'd be at fault for that. Particularly if I'm a professional driver. But at worst I'd be charged with accidental manslaughter, and may even get off with a lighter charge. Whoever sabotaged my brakes? They are guilty of First Degree Murder.

And you are right, he should have checked his weapon. He may have been overworked (just because he can't protect more then say three people doesn't mean he isn't going to try), in an unfamiliar location, dealing with unfamiliar and very dangerous animals, but he should have still checked his weapon. However, he simply made a mistake. A mistake that got people killed, sure, but a mistake nonetheless. The other guy? He's a murderer.

And I think that's my point. The hunter may have some responsibility for what happened, but his own part is so minor in comparison to what the eco-terrorist did that it pales in comparison.

[dps]

First of all, this thread has some hillarious observations. Kudos to everyone.

Second...



Disaster movies have always had mass death for emotional contrast for the characters the audience is supposed to care about. Yet, I get the impression that script writers are steadily becoming worse at hiding the fact that NPC's just don't matter; which of course they don't, since they're not real. But for storytelling reasons, there should at least be some attempt to make it seem like the death of a few hundred or thousand people amounts to more than simply a convenient vehicle for whatever direction the writer is trying take his main characters in.

I wonder if it is because it simply doesn't occur to them. Whether it might be some reflection of Generation Me! in action, where other people are simply extras in the life of the solipsistic observer. Like people on Facebook who focus more on the fact that they were present at some tragic event and the emotional impact on them, rather than focusing on the victims themselves, thereby giving us a glimpse of how their personality works. Then again, it might just be an unfortunate side effect of art by committee. I kinda hope so, that being the lesser of two evils.

There was a bit of a subversion in the 2005 TV-movie version of The Poseidon Adventure. In that version, there is some sort of emergency center coordinating rescue efforts, and at the end of the movie, the staff of the center is celebrating that they have managed to rescue half a dozen or so survivors, until a character played by Alex Kingston points out that the fact that they only rescued 6 or so people meant that over a thousand had died.

[Wraith]

As the semi famous female co-star of the movie, she does have Plot Armor. She does not even need to be a good person or even a hero.

You are correct, I think. Jurassic world is just particularly blatant about it, to the point where I found it disconnecting between "Hero", "Protagonist" and "Sympathetic"; because the character is absolutely not at least two of those things no matter how many T.Rex's she unleashes on the 'baddies'.


It's not opening day. It's a regular day. The park's been running for years: so long in fact that people are starting to get bored of dinosaurs: numbers are starting to decline and they need more exciting attractions to maintain ticket sales.

Thank you for the correction, but I have to admit that just makes me dislike her more.

It's a normal day - she's always this busy, and she knows it from years of experience, so why did she invite her nephews to stay with her, knowing perfectly well that she was going to have to ignore them? She didn't even take a half-day off or something, it's as though she brought them in to deliberately inconvenience herself.
Again, she doesn't have to like children at all - she'd have been as equally selfish had she invited her grown-up sister to stay and then snubbed her, too.

Similarly, if it's business as usual, then she's a terrible administrator for not knowing her own safety practises and/or enforcing them. She's been there years and she immediately flounders when "a dinosaur might escape from the dinosaur zoo", which is why I first thought it was the opening event. It's not feasible to be responsible for such a huge operation and not know - or even have, which is potentially more damning - your safety procedures and policies immediately to hand. ESPECIALLY when you ignore the expert who is telling you what they are while you ignore them! :smalltongue:


That's the vibe I got from the movie, and it disgusted me. What ya think? Understandable, or utter garbage logic?

I certainly agree with you that that was the arc that they were going for. I maintain that they did it very, very poorly.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that they did it cynically, going through tropes and set-pieces without thought to broader context and expecting us to swallow it without thought. It's slightly insulting, in fact.


Disaster movies have always had mass death for emotional contrast for the characters the audience is supposed to care about. Yet, I get the impression that script writers are steadily becoming worse at hiding the fact that NPC's just don't matter; which of course they don't, since they're not real. But for storytelling reasons, there should at least be some attempt to make it seem like the death of a few hundred or thousand people amounts to more than simply a convenient vehicle for whatever direction the writer is trying take his main characters in.

While I don't disagree with you, I feel that Jurassic World is a strange example of a disaster movie.

Traditionally, "disasters" are no one person's fault. The volcano erupts, the arctic storm sweeps in, the meteor comes down - they're things that are going to happen regardless of what anyone says or does, and the "bad guy" in such films are usually the petty bureaucrat who causes a panic or obstructs information, but does not actively have a hand in causing the disaster.

Jurassic World isn't that - there were several chances to prevent catastrophe to begin with, and Claire's actions compounded the problems and maximised the loss of human life. She's not the villain, per say, but her actions directly cause hundreds of needless deaths and it's weird to try and think of that as being an unavoidable part of the catastrophe.

I agree with you - it feels like the script writers just didn't think about it. SOMEONE had to die to make the monsters a credible threat, and thus somehow the monsters had to be brought into contact with people.... the logistics of how that happened left a very unpleasant implication about the deus ex machina's agent, though.

[Misereor]

There was a bit of a subversion in the 2005 TV-movie version of The Poseidon Adventure. In that version, there is some sort of emergency center coordinating rescue efforts, and at the end of the movie, the staff of the center is celebrating that they have managed to rescue half a dozen or so survivors, until a character played by Alex Kingston points out that the fact that they only rescued 6 or so people meant that over a thousand had died.

"Can't talk now! Taking selfie with survivors and posting on Twitter!"

[hamishspence]

Certainly a possibility! Makes her death even crueler if she only lost the kids because she did so much work for Claire.

I obviously don't know, but from her facial expressions it seemed more private texting than business work for me - but I may be biased because I NEVER work on the phone, and can't imagine that working on a cell phone is even remotely practical.

Apparently she was talking to her friend about her upcoming wedding - and about the fact that there would be no bachelor party (she disapproves of her husband's friends - calling them "animals").

[Misereor]

While I don't disagree with you, I feel that Jurassic World is a strange example of a disaster movie.

Traditionally, "disasters" are no one person's fault. The volcano erupts, the arctic storm sweeps in, the meteor comes down - they're things that are going to happen regardless of what anyone says or does, and the "bad guy" in such films are usually the petty bureaucrat who causes a panic or obstructs information, but does not actively have a hand in causing the disaster.

Good looking male protagonist in his mid-40's: "There are sharks, aliens, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, meteors, nuclear bombs in hijacked planes, and a Scientology convention all headed for our town"

Mayor: "I doubt it'll be a problem. Certainly no reason to cancel the town fair."

I think it's close enough that the comparison is warranted.
The mayor character unintentionally but negligently causes deaths. He is making a gamble that everything will sort itself out. It' all an excuse so the story can progress with some sense of realism and the hero has something to save the day from.

[snowblizz]

It's a normal day - she's always this busy, and she knows it from years of experience, so why did she invite her nephews to stay with her, knowing perfectly well that she was going to have to ignore them? She didn't even take a half-day off or something, it's as though she brought them in to deliberately inconvenience herself.
Again, she doesn't have to like children at all - she'd have been as equally selfish had she invited her grown-up sister to stay and then snubbed her, too.

Does she? I seem to remember her speaking to her sister at the start where it seems like she is taking the kids on as an obligation. "You've not seen them since they were X years old!" The kids talk about a possible divorce later on. My take on it now before checking again, but the vibe I got was, the sister has probably promised at length she'll do this ("oh they'll totally love my dino park, they should come visit, some day... what now?? but..."), but never has the time (obviously), her hand is now being forced by the sister, since the parents want the kids away for a bit to work stuff out, or something.

And yes she seem to be rather bad manager of the park. Though her character does seem to indicate a certain laissez fair attitude that seems common to the JW park. "We been doing it for so long now we figured out the stuff Hammond couldn't". She talks about the animlas as "assets" that's not how I'd expect a person running a zoo talk about the animals. To me she seems like business person with a business degree running a park at the top level without really knowing the nitty-gritty. Gods knows I've met a lot of that type of CEO in my life. It's not inconceivable stuff like how park security works is beneath her.

The Indominus Rex does seem to be a departure from the normal dino trade though. She acts like they've done it before, "attendence increases when we unveil a new dino" but I think this special secretly weaponized hybrid is something of an departure.

Well the theme of the first movies were, "you can't control stuff" and the problems with technology, it's not surpising that human error steming from hubris is the cause of the problems in JW.

Speaking of not thinking of consequences. JW bring that up. The tech guy with his cool vintage JP t-shirt gets told off, "hey man, you do realise that shirt represents how people died when things went belly up".

This discussion makes me even more keen to go watch the latest one. I need to remember to bring a lawyer to feed to the T. Rex.

[Peelee]

Apparently she was talking to her friend about her upcoming wedding - and about the fact that there would be no bachelor party (she disapproves of her husband's friends - calling them "animals").

Huh..I'd missed that.

[hamishspence]

I was going by TV Tropes's description - it has been maybe a year since I last watched the movie.

[Rodin]

Good looking male protagonist in his mid-40's: "There are sharks, aliens, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, meteors, nuclear bombs in hijacked planes, and a Scientology convention all headed for our town"

Mayor: "I doubt it'll be a problem. Certainly no reason to cancel the town fair."

I think it's close enough that the comparison is warranted.
The mayor character unintentionally but negligently causes deaths. He is making a gamble that everything will sort itself out. It' all an excuse so the story can progress with some sense of realism and the hero has something to save the day from.

I watched the original Westworld last night, and I was quite struck by how reasonable the park's safety discussions were.

Stage 1: The hosts are breaking down at an unusually high rate. Shutting down the park is discussed but ultimately rejected as nobody is in danger. Investigating the cause of the breakdowns is given a high priority.

Stage 2: A rattlesnake forgets its programming and bites a guest. This is minimally dangerous, but the decision is made anyway to close the park to new visitors - once the current crop are out, the park will shut down for an extended period for repairs. The staff are placed on high alert with instructions to shut everything down if anything else goes amiss.

Stage 3: All the robots go bug-nuts simultaneously and ignore the shutdown procedures.

At every stage, the park employees come off as reasonable and concerned about their guests. Things go to hell anyway. It's much truer to real life than most disaster movies, and there isn't really a "villain" causing needless deaths. It just sort of happens.

[Rater202]

Yeah, Claire didn't exactly what the kids then, her hand was being forced.

Basically, the parents chose the exact wrong time to send the kids to their aunt's amusement park to keep them out of the way while working on the divorce.

IIRC, I think one of the kids was afraid of dinosaurs and also being sent there in part to face his fears? Again, at the worst possible time.

If I remember correctly, the park had been running successfully for a couple of years by the time World Takes place. Honestly, if it had only been the Indominus, the park probably wouldn't have had to close permamantly. but it spooked the pterasaurs and then they all got lose which led to a much higher death toll when the startled and agitated predatory flyers all saw a lorge cluster of things that looked like food or toys.

And it was the Indominus itself and the totally botched way that it had been handled that was responsible for the outbreak. If it hadn't been made, or had at least been handled properly so it didn't become as much of a sadistic sociopath, then there would have basically been no movie.

The problems begin and end with the totally inept attempt at genetically engineering a dinosaur based super-soldier.

[hamishspence]

The problems begin and end with the totally inept attempt at genetically engineering a dinosaur based super-soldier.

And wasn't that entirely Hoskins's and Wu's fault - with Masrani being unaware that this was what they were up to with the Indominus - Masrani himself believing it was just going to be another exhibit?

[Rater202]

And wasn't that entirely Hoskins's and Wu's fault - with Masrani being unaware that this was what they were up to with the Indominus - Masrani himself believing it was just going to be another exhibit?

Yeah. They wanted something scary looking to excite the crowds and Wu and Hoskin used it for their own under the table scheme.

Though going by some hidden pages on the Jurassic world website that may or may not still be there since it was overhauled for the sequel(the site presents it as a real place,) Wu at least has been working on weaponized hybrid Dinosaurs for a good, long time.

IT's mentioned that a prototype hybrid was abandoned on Isle Sorna, and it was implicitly the Spinosaurus from 3(Which would explain it's heightened aggression, being able to take a T-Rex, and it's inaccurate even by what we knew at the time body plan. Hell, the damn thing was probably part Tyrannosaur itself.)

And going by stuff for the sequel, they had already made the second phase of the Indominus project, a sturdier, raptor sized one called Indoraptor before the park was shut down.

Rule of thumb: Any plan that's dependant on taking a difficult to control predatory animal and making it bigger, stronger, and more agressive is a stupid plan.

Trivia: While obviously not canon to the movies, there used to be a Jurassic Park Toyline called Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect that made toys of various deliberately engineered mutant dinosaurs. A couple of them, like the Ultimate T-Rex, were just repaints of older toys(claimed to be a genetically optimized T-Rex,) but others like the Ultimasaurus(T-Rex, Raptor, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus DNA in the same animal to make an ultimate predator) were new.

So... Yeah, the idea of this kind of thing predates World by a while.

[Peelee]

Rule of thumb: Any plan that's dependant on taking a difficult to control predatory animal and making it bigger, stronger, and more agressive is a stupid plan.

Difficult to control? They were able to partially train raptors within what, 20 years of them existing again to begin with? That suggests they're very malleable to training, I'd think.

Also, I'd think, knowing nothing about animal training and domestication.

[hamishspence]

Though going by some hidden pages on the Jurassic world website that may or may not still be there since it was overhauled for the sequel(the site presents it as a real place,) Wu at least has been working on weaponized hybrid Dinosaurs for a good, long time.

They're still there - TV Tropes's link on the Nightmare Fuel section of Jurassic World, works just fine.

[Rater202]

Difficult to control? They were able to partially train raptors within what, 20 years of them existing again to begin with? That suggests they're very malleable to training, I'd think.

Also, I'd think, knowing nothing about animal training and domestication.

The Raptors only listened to the first person they saw after hatching and his control is a bit tenuous.

Also, the I Rex seems to be more tyrannosaur than raptor.

[hamishspence]

IT's mentioned that a prototype hybrid was abandoned on Isle Sorna, and it was implicitly the Spinosaurus from 3(Which would explain it's heightened aggression, being able to take a T-Rex, and it's inaccurate even by what we knew at the time body plan.

The biggest inaccuracy was in the length of the sail.

Compare this 2013 Spinosaurus skeletal (shortly before the discovery that it was very short-legged and had a big notch in the sail):

http://www.skeletaldrawing.com/theropods/spinosaurus

with JP-III imagery

http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Spinosaurus

and it's not that different.

The hands and wrists are less of an issue, because every theropod in these movies has inaccurate wrists.

[Wraith]

A couple of them, like the Ultimate T-Rex, were just repaints of older toys(claimed to be a genetically optimized T-Rex,)

If it's not a Tyrannosaur with enormous beefy biceps and a sick tattoo, like a pre-historic homage to Trogdor the Burninator, they definitely did it wrong. :smalltongue:

[Rater202]

If it's not a Tyrannosaur with enormous beefy biceps and a sick tattoo, like a pre-historic homage to Trogdor the Burninator, they definitely did it wrong. :smalltongue:

Nah, it was literally just a repaint of the Bull T-Rex toy from the Lost World Toyline

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/jurassicpark/images/f/f7/Omega_t-rex_productshot.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110118184841

I misremembered the name though: It's called "Omega T-Rex."

There's also an even more brightly colored variant called a Thrasher T-Rex, which was a repaint of the female Lost World T0-Rex Toy(Also called Thrasher for some reason)

[Peelee]

The Raptors only listened to the first person they saw after hatching and his control is a bit tenuous.

Yes, but again, after only two decades experience with an entirely new species to us, that's pretty damned impressive. Plenty of room for improvement, is what I'm saying.

Also, with the raptors level of intelligence and social structure, the I. Rex could easily have grown in a sub-optimal environment for it's social and controllable facets to really turn out as they could have otherwise.

It's not completely unfeasible, is all I'm saying

[Rater202]

The point is that the Raptors at that time could barely be controlled under ideal circumstances and then they made a smarter, stronger, more agressive, giant one that also had the DNA of a much harder to control T-Rex and god knows what else.

The smart thing to do would have been to combine the raptors with something more docile in order to make them easier to domesticate and then train them fo r the same sorts of tasks that the police and military use trained dogs for.

Preferably after the Data on training Raptors came back after the program concluded.

(This is a problem I have with a lot of things real--people trying to make some kind of super soldier and immediately going for a single powerful, difficult to control example isntead of much more reasonable, practical, easily producable, and probably cheaper options. You should see my rant on American Kaiju.)

[Peelee]

The point is that the Raptors at that time could barely be controlled under ideal circumstances and then they made a smarter, stronger, more agressive, giant one that also had the DNA of a much harder to control T-Rex and god knows what else.

The smart thing to do would have been to combine the raptors with something more docile in order to make them easier to domesticate and then train them fo r the same sorts of tasks that the police and military use trained dogs for.

Preferably after the Data on training Raptors came back after the program concluded.

(This is a problem I have with a lot of things real--people trying to make some kind of super soldier and immediately going for a single powerful, difficult to control example isntead of much more reasonable, practical, easily producable, and probably cheaper options. You should see my rant on American Kaiju.)

Oh, I totally agree that at the very least they should have waited to see how well they could train raptors. And ideally, cross-combination with dogs, pigs, dolphins, or other easily-trainable creatures would be a step in the right direction. I kind of feel like that decision mirrors the original Jurassic Park idea; what they're doing is not inherently bad or stupid, but they're going way too fast with it and that is the bad and stupid part.

[Pippa the Pixie]

You are correct, I think. Jurassic world is just particularly blatant about it, to the point where I found it disconnecting between "Hero", "Protagonist" and "Sympathetic"; because the character is absolutely not at least two of those things no matter how many T.Rex's she unleashes on the 'baddies'.

This might be a Hollywood thing.

The first draft script might of had the Evil Scrooge character and Claire was second in command. So then Evil Scrooge would do all the ''bad money stuff'' and Claire could object. And it would be more her talking time off to spend with the boys, and Evil Scrooge will not let her go. And Evil Scrooge gets what is coming to them as a dino eats them!

But at some point they got rid of the Evil Scrooge character, and put everything into the Claire character.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Sorry that I'm a bit behind, but we had primaries yesterday and I was following that. Good News! Both of the guys I despise went down in flames.

Given that stuff is scattered over several pages, I'm going to forgo quotes for a couple notes before dropping out of the thread.

The charge would be vehicular homicide, not negligent manslaughter. Actually, given that the analogy here is less 'driving down the street' and more 'drag racing down the Promenade during a street fair' for the risk factors, the charges would likely be Murder 2. It is not reasonable to expect that to go well even if your vehicle is in perfect working order.

"Hunter" is more a term of reference, as for the life of me I cannot remember the character's name and don't care enough to go Google it. He's apparently hired as a guide, but the movie makes it clear he's only there for a T-Rex head. The book is even more explicit that as far as he's concerned, it's everyone for themselves. Crichton was probably riffing on the Victorian Great White Hunter, which is a character I view with great antipathy.

Note I'm not defending Vaughn's character in this. I'm saying the other guys are complete a++holes as well.

For a man made disaster movie, try The China Syndrome. Older, but Hollywood doesn't really like the idea of admitting executives can be responsible for disasters. The movie will also help you understand why safety inspections are a thing.

[Peelee]

"Hunter" is more a term of reference, as for the life of me I cannot remember the character's name and don't care enough to go Google it. He's apparently hired as a guide, but the movie makes it clear he's only there for a T-Rex head. The book is even more explicit that as far as he's concerned, it's everyone for themselves. Crichton was probably riffing on the Victorian Great White Hunter, which is a character I view with great antipathy.

The novel and the movie are so radically different that I don't think any reasonably good comparisons can be made.

[Forum Explorer]

Sorry that I'm a bit behind, but we had primaries yesterday and I was following that. Good News! Both of the guys I despise went down in flames.

Given that stuff is scattered over several pages, I'm going to forgo quotes for a couple notes before dropping out of the thread.

The charge would be vehicular homicide, not negligent manslaughter. Actually, given that the analogy here is less 'driving down the street' and more 'drag racing down the Promenade during a street fair' for the risk factors, the charges would likely be Murder 2. It is not reasonable to expect that to go well even if your vehicle is in perfect working order.

"Hunter" is more a term of reference, as for the life of me I cannot remember the character's name and don't care enough to go Google it. He's apparently hired as a guide, but the movie makes it clear he's only there for a T-Rex head. The book is even more explicit that as far as he's concerned, it's everyone for themselves. Crichton was probably riffing on the Victorian Great White Hunter, which is a character I view with great antipathy.

Note I'm not defending Vaughn's character in this. I'm saying the other guys are complete a++holes as well.

For a man made disaster movie, try The China Syndrome. Older, but Hollywood doesn't really like the idea of admitting executives can be responsible for disasters. The movie will also help you understand why safety inspections are a thing.

Thinking about it, I doubt he would be charged with anything at all. His job wasn't to protect people, it was to catch dinosaurs. And sure, to try and do so in as safe of a way as possible. But it's a very dangerous thing they are doing, and there is no way everyone there didn't have to sign wavers relieving them from responsibility of being eaten by a dinosaur.

And as was pointed out, even if his gun was loaded, people would've still been eaten. There was no way someone wasn't going to die, and you'd have a hard time proving that it was his fault more people died, even with perfect knowledge of the scenario.

[warty goblin]

Dinosaurs killing people instead of people killing dinosaurs is only morally problematic if humans have greater moral value than dinosaurs. I'd continue to argue that the series is very much built around the dinosaurs being more important than people. It's baked right into the basic concept of the film; we go to see dinosaurs, not people. In this sense it's just another version of movie's usual protagonist-centered morality; person does bad things to protagonist = bad guy. Protagonist does bad thing to bad guy = just fine, even if it's exactly the same thing, because we empathize with the protagonist, and that gets our tribal monkey brains all riled up. Same thing here; keeping somebody from shooting a dino is a good thing, because dinos are good.

We can in fact pretty explicitly codify how humans relate to dinosaurs, because there are exactly three sorts of person in a Jurassic Park movie:
1) People who appreciate and value dinosaurs on as an end unto themselves = acceptable humans, unlikely to be eaten. Dinos will try to eat them, because dinos gonna dino, but they won't actually eat them.
2) People who see dinosaurs as resources = unacceptable humans, must learn the error of their ways or be eaten.
3) Rando NPCS = protein source.
(There's a fourth stealth category of children, who are stupendously unlikely to be eaten, and are gonna learn some sort of lesson or something as well, but whatever. It is borderline acceptable to kill a less important dinosaur to save a child.)

In short, once you realize that the t-rex and velociraptors are jointly God, the movies make total sense. The Indominus Rex was of course a sacrilege, which is why the rex and the raptor teamed up to kill it.

[Tvtyrant]

Thinking about it, I doubt he would be charged with anything at all. His job wasn't to protect people, it was to catch dinosaurs. And sure, to try and do so in as safe of a way as possible. But it's a very dangerous thing they are doing, and there is no way everyone there didn't have to sign wavers relieving them from responsibility of being eaten by a dinosaur.

And as was pointed out, even if his gun was loaded, people would've still been eaten. There was no way someone wasn't going to die, and you'd have a hard time proving that it was his fault more people died, even with perfect knowledge of the scenario.

If someone took the bullets out of my gun and endangered me, if I live I'm not waiting on a court. What he did is equivalent to cutting someone's breaks when they are driving up into the mountains.

[Mightymosy]

Dinosaurs killing people instead of people killing dinosaurs is only morally problematic if humans have greater moral value than dinosaurs. I'd continue to argue that the series is very much built around the dinosaurs being more important than people. It's baked right into the basic concept of the film; we go to see dinosaurs, not people. In this sense it's just another version of movie's usual protagonist-centered morality; person does bad things to protagonist = bad guy. Protagonist does bad thing to bad guy = just fine, even if it's exactly the same thing, because we empathize with the protagonist, and that gets our tribal monkey brains all riled up. Same thing here; keeping somebody from shooting a dino is a good thing, because dinos are good.

We can in fact pretty explicitly codify how humans relate to dinosaurs, because there are exactly three sorts of person in a Jurassic Park movie:
1) People who appreciate and value dinosaurs on as an end unto themselves = acceptable humans, unlikely to be eaten. Dinos will try to eat them, because dinos gonna dino, but they won't actually eat them.
2) People who see dinosaurs as resources = unacceptable humans, must learn the error of their ways or be eaten.
3) Rando NPCS = protein source.
(There's a fourth stealth category of children, who are stupendously unlikely to be eaten, and are gonna learn some sort of lesson or something as well, but whatever. It is borderline acceptable to kill a less important dinosaur to save a child.)

In short, once you realize that the t-rex and velociraptors are jointly God, the movies make total sense. The Indominus Rex was of course a sacrilege, which is why the rex and the raptor teamed up to kill it.

Nice summary of Jurassic Park ethics, bro.

[Forum Explorer]

If someone took the bullets out of my gun and endangered me, if I live I'm not waiting on a court. What he did is equivalent to cutting someone's breaks when they are driving up into the mountains.

Ha, that's almost the same example I used. :smallbiggrin:

[Tvtyrant]

Ha, that's almost the same example I used. :smallbiggrin:

Sorry, shows what I get for skipping a few pages!

But seriously, I camp in Cougar and Bear country. If someone took the bullets out of my revolver I or my hiking partners could get hurt.

[Peelee]

Bear country
revolver

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

I am choosing to read it as the US version of the "good running shoes" method of escaping bears. You don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun your companions.

GW

[warty goblin]

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

Depends on the revolver. At the high end, revolvers tend to be much more powerful than semiautomatic handguns, because a bigger cartridge just requires a bigger cylinder and stronger frame, instead of an ungrippably large grip and beefed up operating mechanism.

[Peelee]

I am choosing to read it as the US version of the "good running shoes" method of escaping bears. You don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun your companions.

GW

Well now I'm imagining the revolver being used to hobble the companions.

[Rater202]

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

Revolvers nnot a hunting gun, it's a self-defense gun.

Revolver bullet to the barrel or shoulder's not gonna do much.

But a high enough caliber to the face will scare it or hurt it enough for you to get away if it attacks you--point blank and you might kill it, specially if you get the open mouth or the eye where there's no thick hide.

In fact, people who hunt in Bear or Cougar country tend to carry a handgun alongside their rifles specifically to defend themselves should a predator attack them.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Well now I'm imagining the revolver being used to hobble the companions.

... yes, that was kinda the intended punchline. I found that stating outright made it a bit too crude, though.

GW

[Peelee]

... yes, that was kinda the intended punchline. I found that stating outright made it a bit too crude, though.

GW

Look, if you talk about the America experience, you should expect some denseness in there somewhere.:smalltongue:

[Tvtyrant]

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

A .357 will, firing into its face as fast as you can.

Fun fact about predators: they all run faster then you, and running away triggers their instincts. The guy who died in Washington died because he ran away and left the cougar to eat his friend.

And different bears act differently. You never play dead for a black bear, it will just start eating you. Never yell at a brown bear, but they will leave you alone if you play dead. Polar bears are murder machines, don't go where they live.

[Wookieetank]

Polar bears are murder machines, don't go where they live.

Gonna be having some words with my local zoo for bringing them where I live! :smalltongue:

[Peelee]

A .357 will, firing into its face as fast as you can.

See, if "fire into its face as fast as you can" is a defense, I'd want more than six shots, is all. Especially since I imagine with a .357, "as fast as I can" is likely not very fast at all.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Gonna be having some words with my local zoo for bringing them where I live! :smalltongue:

If you live in a polar bear enclosure, you've only got yourself to blame, mate.

GW

[tomandtish]

You can't arrest someone for doing something that's not illegal. He doesn't actually do anything morally wrong. And I already thought VV's character was portrayed as a very unsymphatetic guy. Somewhere around "joined Greenpeace for da chicks" comment the character makes. I've met 1 person who has said that to me IRL actually. They later commited a heinous murder.



He committed theft (of bullets) - a theft that one could reasonably predict would get people killed - so possibly qualifying as voluntary manslaughter.


The point I'm trying to make is that taking bullets, in an extremely hazardous environment, that people need to defend themselves in - is predictable as leading to death. Thus, the guy would be chargable with manslaughter.

He did stuff that was both legally wrong and morally wrong, in short.

Depending on some of the other things he might be charged with, could warrant felony murder charges (under US law at least).






That mother always bothered me because she entirely unwarranted slaps the sheriff. He was the one trying to prevent what happened but constantly being thwarted by the mayor and local business over the important memorial day (or whatever it was) weekend. You peoepl didn't listen to the sheriff, now a kid is dead, how's it his fault.


Except in both cases (book and movie) she doesn't know that because the sheriff doesn't throw the others to the wolves. His own comment to her: "Because WE didn't think it would happen again". To anyone who wasn't already in the know, EVERYONE (including the sheriff) decided to keep it quiet.

Note that at no point is Brody going around to the general public saying that he knew it was there but everyone else shot him down. After all, the Mayor is still the Mayor in the next movie....


Rule of thumb: Any plan that's dependant on taking a difficult to control predatory animal and making it bigger, stronger, and more agressive is a stupid plan.


"We made them larger, more aggressive, and carnivorous"
"Why would you do that?"
"...Because I'm a scientist. It's what we do!"

(Bonus points to place the quote).

[Tvtyrant]

See, if "fire into its face as fast as you can" is a defense, I'd want more than six shots, is all. Especially since I imagine with a .357, "as fast as I can" is likely not very fast at all.

Brown bears are rare here, I have never seen one. I saw a black bear last week and a cougar last month, and both are people sized. If I go back up to Alaska I'll take my brothers .44, which can kill just about anything (and weighs a ton).

I use a single action revolver because I prefer to be in complete control of the gun. It can't accidentally discharge (hammer down on an empty chamber), it is manually cocked and it draws less attention then a semi-auto.

[Wookieetank]

If you live in a polar bear enclosure, you've only got yourself to blame, mate.

GW

Hee hee, true. Although my Zoo has re-designed their bear exhibits so that only glass separates you from the critters, so real reassuring there. ><

[Forum Explorer]

I only do target shooting every so often, so i know next to nothing about stopping power. Is a revolver really all that helpful against bears?

Sure. It might not kill the bear, but it's loud, scary, and hurts. That very well be enough to drive the bear away, and that's all you really need to do.



And different bears act differently. You never play dead for a black bear, it will just start eating you. Never yell at a brown bear, but they will leave you alone if you play dead. Polar bears are murder machines, don't go where they live.

Pretty much.

This (https://www.themanual.com/outdoors/how-to-survive-a-bear-attack/) advice for Polar Bears made me laugh though. If you don't have bear spray, it basically says 'fight like a god, aim for the eyes and nose, watch out for it's claws.'

[Peelee]

"We made them larger, more aggressive, and carnivorous"
"Why would you do that?"
"...Because I'm a scientist. It's what we do!"

(Bonus points to place the quote).
I don't know, but my first guess would be Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Brown bears are rare here, I have never seen one. I saw a black bear last week and a cougar last month, and both are people sized. If I go back up to Alaska I'll take my brothers .44, which can kill just about anything (and weighs a ton).

I use a single action revolver because I prefer to be in complete control of the gun. It can't accidentally discharge (hammer down on an empty chamber), it is manually cocked and it draws less attention then a semi-auto.

I was gonna reply here, but ya know what, PM inbound.

[Sapphire Guard]

but Hollywood doesn't really like the idea of admitting executives can be responsible for disasters

Really? I'm hard pressed to think of a film where 'big corporate exec' was in a film but not a villain or treated negatively.

[Mightymosy]

That mother always bothered me because she entirely unwarranted slaps the sheriff. He was the one trying to prevent what happened but constantly being thwarted by the mayor and local business over the important memorial day (or whatever it was) weekend. You peoepl didn't listen to the sheriff, now a kid is dead, how's it his fault.
[...]

At that point, I believe the mother doesn't know.

The mother
- knows the sheriff is the authority to uphold safety for the people
- the sheriff knew a couple days earlier that there was danger
- the sheriff didn't act to protect the people, and thus failed his job.


So, from her point of view, seems alright. He is repsonsible, and he screwed up - willingly.

More interesting is Brody's point of view, though.
He DOES know that he talked to the mayor about this, BUT still feels guilty. Why is that? Because he actually is a good responsible person, at heart. And what happened is that the mayor soft-talked the sheriff into doing nothing, and the sheriff let himself be convinced, despite having concrete evidence that his people were in danger. Basically, he gave in even though he knew better. I can relate, I have had similar cases myself, and I think this was very strong character building, and is another reason this movie earned cult status.

It's quite different in the second movie, when the mayor and his friends fire him, but in the first movie, Brody gives in to sweet persuasion. Sure, the mayor is the boss, but he doesn't give him a direct command (at least as I recall), and so long Brody is in command regarding the saftey of the beaches. It remains his decision.

Real world advice: What the mayor does is a popular technique used by superiors all over the place, in order to keep their hands clean. What I recommend to anyone in situations that are ambigous, when they are unsure and fear that mistakes may have huge consequences (financial or even regarding living beings): ask the boss and force them to make an ultimate decision. A concrete decison what to do, so that they share their part of the responsibility. That's what they get paid for - likely much more than you are being paid. ;-)
If you REALLY disagree with their course of action, that's a different topic. But when things could be done either way: have them make the decision, not sweet talk you into something you feel might be wrong.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Really? I'm hard pressed to think of a film where 'big corporate exec' was in a film but not a villain or treated negatively.

Off the top of my head, Robocop and Die Hard. But both of those did have vice-big corporate executive villains, antagonists or morons.

I'm sure there are other examples, but to be clear, I agree that they do tend to feature prominently as villains in plenty of films.

GW

[Tvtyrant]

I don't know, but my first guess would be Mystery Science Theater 3000.


I was gonna reply here, but ya know what, PM inbound.

I await your PM :)

[Peelee]

Off the top of my head, Robocop and Die Hard.

Wasn't the entire OCP corp basically a villain in Robocop? Imean, they virtually owned Detroit, had privatized the police, and effectively acted as a massive slumlord. Even their cars had names like the SUX, and it seemed like at every level the company was shown in a bad light. Not to mention

It's been a while since I've seen Robocop, but did we even see who was president?

[hamishspence]

Really? I'm hard pressed to think of a film where 'big corporate exec' was in a film but not a villain or treated negatively.

Annie (original and remake)?

[tomandtish]

At that point, I believe the mother doesn't know.

The mother
- knows the sheriff is the authority to uphold safety for the people
- the sheriff knew a couple days earlier that there was danger
- the sheriff didn't act to protect the people, and thus failed his job.


So, from her point of view, seems alright. He is repsonsible, and he screwed up - willingly.

More interesting is Brody's point of view, though.
He DOES know that he talked to the mayor about this, BUT still feels guilty. Why is that? Because he actually is a good responsible person, at heart. And what happened is that the mayor soft-talked the sheriff into doing nothing, and the sheriff let himself be convinced, despite having concrete evidence that his people were in danger. Basically, he gave in even though he knew better. I can relate, I have had similar cases myself, and I think this was very strong character building, and is another reason this movie earned cult status.

It's quite different in the second movie, when the mayor and his friends fire him, but in the first movie, Brody gives in to sweet persuasion. Sure, the mayor is the boss, but he doesn't give him a direct command (at least as I recall), and so long Brody is in command regarding the saftey of the beaches. It remains his decision.

Real world advice: What the mayor does is a popular technique used by superiors all over the place, in order to keep their hands clean. What I recommend to anyone in situations that are ambigous, when they are unsure and fear that mistakes may have huge consequences (financial or even regarding living beings): ask the boss and force them to make an ultimate decision. A concrete decison what to do, so that they share their part of the responsibility. That's what they get paid for - likely much more than you are being paid. ;-)
If you REALLY disagree with their course of action, that's a different topic. But when things could be done either way: have them make the decision, not sweet talk you into something you feel might be wrong.


Very much this. In situations like this, the Chief has the authority to close the beaches. The only way the Mayor could overturn that is to fire him (or the mayor and town council depending on how he's hired). But (esp. in the book) it's handled as if he has the authority to do it over the Mayor if he chooses. But he's persuaded not to even though he really thinks there's a danger.


Off the top of my head, Robocop and Die Hard. But both of those did have vice-big corporate executive villains, antagonists or morons.
I'm sure there are other examples, but to be clear, I agree that they do tend to feature prominently as villains in plenty of films.
GW


Wasn't the entire OCP corp basically a villain in Robocop? Imean, they virtually owned Detroit, had privatized the police, and effectively acted as a massive slumlord. Even their cars had names like the SUX, and it seemed like at every level the company was shown in a bad light. Not to mention

It's been a while since I've seen Robocop, but did we even see who was president?

Depends. In Robocop the corporation certainly seems to control everything and is definitely not popular. The HEAD of that corporation, "The Old Man (and that's all he's actually ever referred to as, you never get his name), actually seems like a decent human being relatively speaking compared to the others. And while OCP is the big name corp, it's also apparently obvious that there are other corporations running various parts of Detroit as well. OCP just managed to get out in front with law enforcement. But he still is something of a jerk. When the Ed 209 malfunctions during testing and kills a man, he's "disappointed'. And he basically is just as slimy as **** Jones in the second movie. So when he seems nice, it is important to consider that he only seems that way in comparison to the absolute jerks surrounding him.

[The New Bruceski]

"We made them larger, more aggressive, and carnivorous"
"Why would you do that?"
"...Because I'm a scientist. It's what we do!"

(Bonus points to place the quote).

Killer Shrews?

[tomandtish]

Killer Shrews?

No one's gotten it so far. I'll offer a clue in a few days.

[Aedilred]

Thank you for the correction, but I have to admit that just makes me dislike her more.

It's a normal day - she's always this busy, and she knows it from years of experience, so why did she invite her nephews to stay with her, knowing perfectly well that she was going to have to ignore them? She didn't even take a half-day off or something, it's as though she brought them in to deliberately inconvenience herself.
Again, she doesn't have to like children at all - she'd have been as equally selfish had she invited her grown-up sister to stay and then snubbed her, too.

Similarly, if it's business as usual, then she's a terrible administrator for not knowing her own safety practises and/or enforcing them. She's been there years and she immediately flounders when "a dinosaur might escape from the dinosaur zoo", which is why I first thought it was the opening event. It's not feasible to be responsible for such a huge operation and not know - or even have, which is potentially more damning - your safety procedures and policies immediately to hand. ESPECIALLY when you ignore the expert who is telling you what they are while you ignore them! :smalltongue:


Some implications and assumptions:

It's not the first time a dinosaur has escaped containment. This is alluded to early on. Previously the dinosaurs have been recaptured without incident. They are trialling some new safety procedures which have teething problems but rogue dinosaurs are a common enough problem that they have reliable strategies in place for dealing with them and they have never before caused an incident.

The problem in this instance is that the Indominus is both more powerful and much more intelligent than anything they have previously dealt with. It is probably also the first time that anyone has been killed by an escaped dinosaur, with two of her colleagues being eaten during the Indominus's escape, which makes the experience more traumatic than other dinosaur escapes. And crucially, she doesn't know all its capabilities because Dr. Wu and his colleagues won't release them. They don't know it can camouflage. They don't know it can reduce its thermal signature. They don't know it is aware of the tracking beacon and can remove it. They don't know it can communicate with the raptors. She deploys the normal dinosaur control systems in what would have been good time to prevent any larger incident - but they prove insufficient.

(And yes, Chris Pratt advises them just to kill it, but he knows less about the Indominus than they do and was only brought in as a consultant on a whim: he's only an expert in the raptors and didn't even know the Indominus existed until about half an hour earlier. Moreover there are financial implications to wiping out such a massive investment if they don't have to, which he doesn't have to consider but which Claire does.)

Secondly, she didn't invite the kids per se. Her sister nagged her into it, because she wanted the kids out from underfoot while she sorted out her divorce. She knows she's going to struggle to accommodate them but she agreed as a favour. She intended to take the day off to spend with them but then her boss called to say he was flying in to see the Indominus, so that took priority. Instead she delegated nephew-management to her PA which is the closest thing she can think of to escorting them herself.

It's also pretty clear that adult escorts around the park are optional, not essential. There are groups of teens visiting the park unaccompanied and nobody questions Zack and Gray. They're allowed in the gyroball on their own without even a raised eyebrow. That Claire can't escort them personally is unfortunate and not particularly great aunt-ing but wouldn't be expected to endanger them. Without the Indominus being loose, they might even have had a better time without her than they would have done with her. And indeed, without Zack being a clichéd idiot and deliberately ignoring all the safety warnings, they would still have been fine even with the Indominus loose.

I do agree that the character was badly portrayed. But I think some of the criticisms of her are overplayed under the circumstances.

[Sapphire Guard]

Off the top of my head, Robocop and Die Hard. But both of those did have vice-big corporate executive villains, antagonists or morons.

I'm sure there are other examples, but to be clear, I agree that they do tend to feature prominently as villains in plenty of films.

GW

Oh, yeah, there's Die Hard. Othewise, I remember being very impressed with Resident Evil: Degeneration when



the senator with ties to big business was

a) a highly unsympathetic person.
b) completely sincere about his work to create a T -Virus vaccine (which actually worked!) with no ulterior motive.

[Jay R]

You can do this with most movies with a plot more complex than "Psychopath kills people until he's stopped".

Batman's a vigilante who beats people up on his own decision, outside the law.
Despite Indiana Jones's statement that "it belongs in a museum", it really belongs to the people he stole it from.
Richelieu is trying to defend France from the power of England's prime minister Buckingham.
Harry Potter is a constant rules-breaker.
Mary Poppins was hired to keep the kids in safe, normal environments, not to have tea parties on the ceiling, and to pop in and out of chalk pavement pictures.
Dorthy has no lawful claim to the ruby slippers.

Most issues are complicated; there is usually some truth on both sides. But it's much easier to film "the good guys" and "the bad guys".

[LaZodiac]

You can do this with most movies with a plot more complex than "Psychopath kills people until he's stopped".

Batman's a vigilante who beats people up on his own decision, outside the law.
Despite Indiana Jones's statement that "it belongs in a museum", it really belongs to the people he stole it from.
Richelieu is trying to defend France from the power of England's prime minister Buckingham.
Harry Potter is a constant rules-breaker.
Mary Poppins was hired to keep the kids in safe, normal environments, not to have tea parties on the ceiling, and to pop in and out of chalk pavement pictures.
Dorthy has no lawful claim to the ruby slippers.

Most issues are complicated; there is usually some truth on both sides. But it's much easier to film "the good guys" and "the bad guys".

The truth is that Oz is in the Necromonger star system. You keep what you kill.

[warty goblin]

The truth is that Oz is in the Necromonger star system. You keep what you kill.

Now that's a crossover I'd be on board for the midnight screening of. Preferably well fortified by something at least 80 proof.

[Talakeal]

And yet it's the PA who gets ripped to shreds in a ****ing horrific and unneeded scene by like three dinosaurs, who's only sin is being outsmarted by children and trying to find them.

Yeah, Jurassic World has Problems.

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric reptiles. On this forum we obey the laws of taxonomy!

[Peelee]

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric reptiles. On this forum we obey the laws of taxonomy!

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric animals.

[warty goblin]

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric animals.

I donno, my view is that if it's eating me, it's not really pre-historic. I mean I'm about to be historic, and since the beast seems set on outliving me...

[Peelee]

I donno, my view is that if it's eating me, it's not really pre-historic. I mean I'm about to be historic, and since the beast seems set on outliving me...

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric animals in a historic event.

[LaZodiac]

Technically they're birds.

[Rater202]

Actually, if they're talking about the scene I think they are, then the creatures in question actually are reptiles and not proper dinosaurs.

[Peelee]

Technically they're birds.

Actually, if they're talking about the scene I think they are, then the creatures in question actually are reptiles and not proper dinosaurs.

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric animals that are technically birds unless the scene in question is about different animals that actually are reptiles and not proper dinosaurs in a historic event.

[Rogar Demonblud]

She was ripped to shreds by three creatures who are clearly stand ins for the director who didn't like that she got along better with his dog that he did.

[SaintRidley]

I think you mean ripped to shreds by like three prehistoric animals that are technically birds unless the scene in question is about different animals that actually are reptiles and not proper dinosaurs in a historic event.

Pterosaurs are definitely not birds, and also not dinosaurs. They are reptiles, though. The Mosasaurus is also a reptile but not a dinosaur (and it's not a fish or anything silly like that).

Zara's (that's her name, guys) death was horrifying. But at least the Mosasaurus ended the torturous part. The Mosasaurus was the real hero of Jurassic World, btw, what with finally eating the I-Rex at the end. Happily, we'll see more Mosasaurus adventures in the next movie, as it goes surfing (and we'll follow more of Rexy's adventures as she roars at a lion and does other less interesting things).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Pterosaurs are definitely not birds, and also not dinosaurs. They are reptiles, though.

Even that's debatable. Reptiles are not a neat cladistic group because birds are excluded, so they make most sense as a descriptive group based on certain traits, like cold bloodedness. And there are some doubts as to which extent most archosaurs even fit that mold. But they are diapsids and they are archosaurs.

(Also: everything in the whole franchise could have been prevented by measures normal zoos have. Moats, walls, people sized doors, and if you absolutely have to run everything not only on electricity but on a computer system rather than using moats and walls, maybe a backup generator. So they had to hand out some failure balls to make any dinosaur attacks possible.)

[The New Bruceski]

Also normal zoos don't tend to intentionally engineer bioweapons under the guise of entertainment. That's really where JW went wrong.

[Peelee]

Also normal zoos don't tend to intentionally engineer bioweapons under the guise of entertainment. That's really where JW went wrong.

You clearly haven't been to zoos recently.

[Aedilred]

Richelieu is trying to defend France from the power of England's prime minister Buckingham.

In the novel, Richelieu is barely even a villain. He's at best a designated antagonist. It starts out with D'Artagnan being told "Cardinal Richelieu's the man; you should do what he tells you" and ends with him appreciating that that advice was basically accurate. But in the middle he gets caught up in stuff he doesn't understand and falls in with a crowd who dislike the Cardinal on the grounds of little more than most football rivalries.

There is a film version which reflects this (the Michael Yorke version, I think). Somewhat surprisingly Dogtanian, of all adaptations, had a reasonable stab at it later in its run. But most films can't cope with that level of complexity and just make the Cardinal an outright villain.

[Rogar Demonblud]

If there's an outright villain in the 3 Musketeers, it's Lady de Winter. It's just that most producers don't have the imagination for a female main villain.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Also normal zoos don't tend to intentionally engineer bioweapons under the guise of entertainment. That's really where JW went wrong.

That's true. But even that one wouldn't have gone anywhere if their response to a dinosaur seemingly missing from its enclosure wouldn't have been to open up the dinosaur sized gate build for the express purpose of letting the dinosaur in and out. Or, you know, if the zookeepers would have been told that the species was designed to camouflage itself. Or even if anyone had payed attention to how intelligent the creature seemed. It's (not counting the Indominus itself, because the cloning science was always the science fiction element of the movies) more believable than the first movie (still a great film, but the message is rubbish because their "inevitable" disaster from messing with life was super preventable) but it's still not a great situation, and I would still super fire the person who designed those protocols.

No, if anything we would all die from ancient viruses preserved in the dino DNA, or even just parts of it that were incorporated by modern viruses. That's at least sort of feasible. We're way too good at dealing with large animals. We've been hunting tyrannosaurus sized creatures to extinction since at least the last ice age.

[Aedilred]

That's true. But even that one wouldn't have gone anywhere if their response to a dinosaur seemingly missing from its enclosure wouldn't have been to open up the dinosaur sized gate build for the express purpose of letting the dinosaur in and out.

That wasn't the "official" response, mind. That only happened because people (somewhat inexplicably, but through a human-sized door) went into the paddock to have a look around and found themselves trapped, then panicked and opened the main door to get out. HQ ordered the door closed almost immediately but by then it was too late.

[comicshorse]

In the novel, Richelieu is barely even a villain. He's at best a designated antagonist. It starts out with D'Artagnan being told "Cardinal Richelieu's the man; you should do what he tells you" and ends with him appreciating that that advice was basically accurate. But in the middle he gets caught up in stuff he doesn't understand and falls in with a crowd who dislike the Cardinal on the grounds of little more than most football rivalries.

There is a film version which reflects this (the Michael Yorke version, I think). Somewhat surprisingly Dogtanian, of all adaptations, had a reasonable stab at it later in its run. But most films can't cope with that level of complexity and just make the Cardinal an outright villain.

In the Michael Yorke version Richelieu, magnificently played by Charlton Heston, is clearly doing his best to defend France while it has an idiot on the throne. The plot to disgrace the Queen will destroy the Queen's influence but considering she's lovers with France's arch-enemy Buckingham this always seemed a good idea to me.
D'artagnan even comments that Buckingham is his natural enemy ( to Buckingham's face to his credit) and he's only doing this at the request of his lover who is one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. But she is Sophia Loren so you can kinda forgive him for working with one of his countries greatest enemies :smallcool:

[Mightymosy]

I donno, my view is that if it's eating me, it's not really pre-historic. I mean I'm about to be historic, and since the beast seems set on outliving me...

Awesome :smallbiggrin:


ETA:

Pterosaurs are definitely not birds, and also not dinosaurs. They are reptiles, though. The Mosasaurus is also a reptile but not a dinosaur (and it's not a fish or anything silly like that).

Zara's (that's her name, guys) death was horrifying. But at least the Mosasaurus ended the torturous part. The Mosasaurus was the real hero of Jurassic World, btw, what with finally eating the I-Rex at the end. Happily, we'll see more Mosasaurus adventures in the next movie, as it goes surfing (and we'll follow more of Rexy's adventures as she roars at a lion and does other less interesting things).

I completely forgot about that one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1XFupQUNJ8&list=PL--PgETgAz5FGoatB9KQzbnpv0bgZqU2l&index=35
It gives a pretty reasonable explanation why poor Zara character had to die.

[tomandtish]

"We made them larger, more aggressive, and carnivorous"
"Why would you do that?"
"...Because I'm a scientist. It's what we do!"

(Bonus points to place the quote).

Clue one: Dina Meyer.

[dps]

D'artagnan even comments that Buckingham is his natural enemy ( to Buckingham's face to his credit) and he's only doing this at the request of his lover who is one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. But she is Sophia Loren so you can kinda forgive him for working with one of his countries greatest enemies :smallcool:

Wrong sex symbol. It was Raquel Welch.

[comicshorse]

Wrong sex symbol. It was Raquel Welch.

Yep. You're right. D'Oh

[Mightymosy]

Wrong sex symbol. It was Raquel Welch.
So, appearantly some ladies had fun wearing the Leia outfit :smallbiggrin:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000079/

[snowblizz]

Zara's (that's her name, guys) death was horrifying. But at least the Mosasaurus ended the torturous part. The Mosasaurus was the real hero of Jurassic World, btw, what with finally eating the I-Rex at the end. Happily, we'll see more Mosasaurus adventures in the next movie, as it goes surfing (and we'll follow more of Rexy's adventures as she roars at a lion and does other less interesting things).


Ah no, no we are not.

[Glorthindel]

Or, you know, if the zookeepers would have been told that the species was designed to camouflage itself.
This was really a grade-A balls-up across the board. Aside from the fact that it might be worthwhile to inform the people watching for escaping dinosaurs, not to panic when the IR seems to suddenly vanish, the ability to fundamentally turn invisible is an absolutely god awful trait to grant to a creature that’s intended to be the next main exhibit.

Granted that the military-grade enhancements of the IR were deliberately being kept quiet from the JW staff, but you would have thought they would have kept one eye on making sure it still fulfilled its role as an exhibit (since otherwise its going to raise questions along the lines of “why did you create a giant invisible monster that none of our patrons can actually see most of the time?” that might flag up to the JW staff that something is going on they aren’t being told about).

[Spacewolf]

To be honest it sounded like the designer was as surprised as anyone else that the I-Rex could do that.

[Rater202]

IIRC, they gave it cuttlefish DNA in an attempt to speed up it's growth to full maturity and were surprised that it came out with camo, let alone camo better than the animal it got it from.

[The New Bruceski]

IIRC, they gave it cuttlefish DNA in an attempt to speed up it's growth to full maturity and were surprised that it came out with camo, let alone camo better than the animal it got it from.

If only they'd read the first book they'd have learned that's exactly how fictional DNA splicing works.

[Mechalich]

IIRC, they gave it cuttlefish DNA in an attempt to speed up it's growth to full maturity and were surprised that it came out with camo, let alone camo better than the animal it got it from.

What's more ridiculous is that they then subsequently did not put the I-Rex down as a hatchling. Cloning is a messy process with a low success rate (in the Dolly the Sheep method commonly used now, it's something like 1-10% viability chance). It's going to spit out all sorts of weirdness. The point was even made explicitly in The Lost World novel.

'Hey, this thing's got chromatophores all over its skin' is something you'd notice very shortly after birth. The natural response to that as an unplanned outcome involves an injection, skinning, and a whole lot of extra DNA analysis, not letting the thing grown to adulthood; a process that, cuttlefish DNA or not, surely took years, which ought to have revealed the animal as a problem specimen to be euthanized much earlier.

[Rater202]

Looking some stuff up and reviewing, apparently, Wu and Hoskins mistreated the Indominus on purpose expecting it to get loose and rampage.

Either as a demonstration of the Indominus' use as a terror weapon or else to demonstrate the effectiveness of trained raptors.

So making the Indominus was still stupid and impractical, but at least it's stupid and impractical in a logical way.

Also, even if they hadn't been deliberately making a monster and releasing it as a terror weapon, people might be hesitant to put down a live animal that they presumably spent millions* at the least to bring into the world, even for completely practical reasons.

*In EU materials, it's mentioned that the Embryos that Nedry stole were worst between 2 and 10 million USD a pop. Adjust for almost two decades of inflation, factor in that a hybrid like the Indominus is going to require multiple fossil samples and more advanced splicing technique... So yeah, Dodgson did cheap out offering him a million to steal a couple, and being underpaid was what made Nedry willing to shut down the park and steal the embryos in the first place, so Irony.

[snowblizz]

people might be hesitant to put down a live animal that they presumably spent millions* at the least to bring into the world, even for completely practical reasons.

40 millions. It's mentioned specifically as to why not bringing out the big guns right at the start.

It would seem the margins of the park are slim enough that tanking 40 million is gonna hurt. Which I guess is also ironic. They are not making money hand over fist as the Lawyer in JP1 predicted.

[Rater202]

Hell.

Even if they could afford iit easily... 40 million is a lot.

40 million is probably several years worth of salary for the highest paid employees of the park. Hell, it's probably several years salary for the combined investors
Even if you can afford it easily...

I don't care if you make several billion dollars a year, you're not gonna flush 40 million down the toilet.

[snowblizz]

Hell.

Even if they could afford iit easily... 40 million is a lot.

40 million is probably several years worth of salary for the highest paid employees of the park. Hell, it's probably several years salary for the combined investors
Even if you can afford it easily...

I don't care if you make several billion dollars a year, you're not gonna flush 40 million down the toilet.

40 million is a lot. To those who do not have 40 million.

Actually the highest paid employee at the park would have been Claire (director or CEO or some such), and I wouldn't be surpised if she earned 40 million a year on her own. Then again she's a woman so I guess would only get 20. Interestingly though they are trying to sell the naming rights to some phonecompany. They also talk about mundanity of a dinopark and falling visitor numbers. So it's not such a smash hit as it once was. Which I thought was an intresting point made in JW1

You aren't an investor in JW if 40 million represents a lot of money. And if you are, get a better financial planner.

However what we should put that 40 million up against is this: How much money is an indemnity lawsuit gonna cost the park?
JP1 tells us it is enough that the first movie happened. And that's just some noname worker.

Obviously they weren't expecting all of this to happen. But they have a point where they could try and kill the I Rex more easily but decide against it cause 40 million. Bad call. Obviously park was doomed anyway we find out later.

[Rater202]

It's my understanding that JW is run by Hammond's vision whenever feasible, most notably having the park open to everyone.

(Movie Hammond was nice but short-sighted, unlike book Hammond,)

So far it to be open to everyone, a trip to and stay at the park has to be relatively affordable, probably not much more than a trip to Disney World. The park is probably not making much of a profit. That would be consistent with all of the Name Brand Products present/advertized in the park and having successful companies sponsor exhibits.

Though, since Wu and Hoskins wanted the Indomitus to escape and rampage, it's entirely possible that they just didn't tell anyone that it had camo.

[Peelee]

What's more ridiculous is that they then subsequently did not put the I-Rex down as a hatchling. Cloning is a messy process with a low success rate (in the Dolly the Sheep method commonly used now, it's something like 1-10% viability chance). It's going to spit out all sorts of weirdness. The point was even made explicitly in The Lost World novel.

Was it? Admittedly, I didn't like it as much as the first one so I haven't reread it nearly as much, but the carnotaur's camoflauge ability was described as a native ability, not a happenstance of cloning. Assuming that's what you were talking about.

[gomipile]

Clue one: Dina Meyer.

Bats?

Extra text, because a one word response is too short.

[Aedilred]

40 million is a lot. To those who do not have 40 million.

Actually the highest paid employee at the park would have been Claire (director or CEO or some such), and I wouldn't be surpised if she earned 40 million a year on her own. Then again she's a woman so I guess would only get 20.

I feel like you have unrealistic ideas of what even high-flying salaried executives earn.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I feel like you have unrealistic ideas of what even high-flying salaried executives earn.

The current CEO of Walmart made $230 million last year. (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/11/highest-paid-ceos-in-america.html) Yes, their salary is not that high on paper, but that's because they get paid in stock options & the like. Although, FTR, the co-CEOs of Oracle, according to this (http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-paid-tech-ceos-2017-5#1-mark-hurd-co-ceo-of-oracle-411-million-30), do have a $40 million salary.

So, for a vaguely-in-the-close-future company to pay a CEO $40 mill? Doesn't seem that unlikely to me.

GW

[Rogar Demonblud]

Look at what those corporations pull down for annual earnings. Then make an estimate for what the park makes.

Also, BDH's character is not a CEO. She's a site manager. I would hazard my Bobcats season tickets that she probably makes less than $500,000.

[Raimun]

Jurassic Park has the classic story:

Don't go genetics, kids, or some of your empoyees might get eaten by dinosaurs. I live by this every day.

[Peelee]

Look at what those corporations pull down for annual earnings. Then make an estimate for what the park makes.

Also, BDH's character is not a CEO. She's a site manager. I would hazard my Bobcats season tickets that she probably makes less than $500,000.

I'd take that bet. Something the size and scope of Jurassic Park, along with all the merchandising they pull from it? 40 mil is way too high, IMO, but I'd certainly peg her at the seven figures.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Merchandising will be a separate department. Ditto licensing, media, anything handling conventions, etc. Actually, the research labs are probably a separate department she has no say over.

The highest paid zoo executive in the U.S. is Jeffrey Bonner at the St Louis Zoo, who makes $550,000. He over sees 2600+ animals and hosts 3.1 million guests each year. Next highest salary is Kevin Bell of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, which with bonuses is $440 to $450 thousand.

Half a million is optimistic.

[Peelee]

Merchandising will be a separate department. Ditto licensing, media, anything handling conventions, etc. Actually, the research labs are probably a separate department she has no say over.

The highest paid zoo executive in the U.S. is Jeffrey Bonner at the St Louis Zoo, who makes $550,000. He over sees 2600+ animals and hosts 3.1 million guests each year. Next highest salary is Kevin Bell of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, which with bonuses is $440 to $450 thousand.

Half a million is optimistic.

Yes, but as John Arnold pointed out in the first book/movie, it's a theme park/amusement park. Everything about Jurassic Park is bigger and grander than any other zoo; they created their own animals, brought back from extinction. They got their own island, so they have to supply lodging, food, etc. It's a full-fledged resort. And all of this is bundled under the singular umbrella of Jurassic Park.

Half a million is pessimistic.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Amusement park people get paid more like a quarter million. And they (and zoo directors) are PhDs in the requisite fields. Clare doesn't show those chops. She also doesn't dress like someone making a mil plus--more like a middle executive. And there's the general pay discrepancies based on gender. And foreign earnings are lower than the U.S. because of the tax code.

And that's without getting into the actually nitty gritty of earnings and profitability, because the only thing we know is that the park is barely turning a profit even with all the sponsorships and tie ins.

You could probably make a better case that she's the designated scapegoat instead of an extremely overpaid executive.

[Peelee]

Amusement park people get paid more like a quarter million. And they (and zoo directors) are PhDs in the requisite fields. Clare doesn't show those chops. She also doesn't dress like someone making a mil plus--more like a middle executive. And there's the general pay discrepancies based on gender. And foreign earnings are lower than the U.S. because of the tax code.

And that's without getting into the actually nitty gritty of earnings and profitability, because the only thing we know is that the park is barely turning a profit even with all the sponsorships and tie ins.

You could probably make a better case that she's the designated scapegoat instead of an extremely overpaid executive.

Those are all really good points. A non-realistic but in-universe counterpoint, though: in-universe, InGen is well established at solving problems by throwing money at them (except for Nedry, who seems to be somewhat unique to have not gotten this treatment). And from all appearances, the new park is no exception. State-of-the-art globe vehicles, new additions like the mosasaur, etc. They could very well not be turning a profit because of how much they throw their money away; they got rid of Hammond, but he certainly wasn't the only one spending money like it was going out of style.

[Rater202]

They didn't get rid of Hammond: He passed away sometime after The Lost World.(His actor's health was failing, so they wrote him out. The actor passed the same year World came out.)

[Peelee]

They didn't get rid of Hammond: He passed away sometime after The Lost World.(His actor's health was failing, so they wrote him out. The actor passed the same year World came out.)

I thought that in The Lost World he was effectively pushed out of InGen. At least, as far as having any power or control in the company went.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Yeah, but that was also predicated on Attenborough's declining health. Apparently that scene took a lot out of him. You have something similar happening in The Shootist, John Wayne's last film. That entire gunfight at the end? John Wayne wasn't there for any of it because of his cancer. They shot each part separately and then spliced it together almost perfectly.

[Peelee]

Yeah, but that was also predicated on Attenborough's declining health. Apparently that scene took a lot out of him. You have something similar happening in The Shootist, John Wayne's last film. That entire gunfight at the end? John Wayne wasn't there for any of it because of his cancer. They shot each part separately and then spliced it together almost perfectly.

Two things, though; the why doesn't matter, it still happened in-universe. And even disregarding that, Hammond's state of influence in the company has little to do with the overall point of InGen using money as a firehose almost as a matter of policy.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Firehouse? A place with great cooking and a lot of calendar models?:smalltongue:

Really, they're just being true to the vision of their founder. Although I think a lot of people would be happier if some other start up had been the one to succeed.

[Peelee]

Firehouse? A place with great cooking and a lot of calendar models?:smalltongue:

Really, they're just being true to the vision of their founder. Although I think a lot of people would be happier if some other start up had been the one to succeed.

Idunno... As bad as InGen was, they were saints compared to BioSyn.

Also, the sandwich shop makes some great hot subs.

[Calemyr]

Two things, though; the why doesn't matter, it still happened in-universe. And even disregarding that, Hammond's state of influence in the company has little to do with the overall point of InGen using money as a firehose almost as a matter of policy.

I believe Hammond's influence was waning because he was acting against the company interest at that point, trying to dissuade the company from pursuing it further. That's kind of the point of Lost World, at least the movie: He hired Malcolm's girlfriend to collect photographic evidence of the dinosaurs in their adopted habitat so that the populace could see them as a real creatures that should be preserved rather than abominations of science that should be exploited. He learned his lesson in JP1, and turned his efforts to fighting the momentum he himself created. So they ousted him, "honoring" his original vision by creating an open park and ignoring his newly found conviction. I suspect Wu played a fairly large role in that, honestly, as he's something of a rockstar for his work in supplying the park with its attractions.

One bit of defense for Geranno, though. He is still representing the investors, I think. He and the investors start the story too isolated from the project to really understand it. This is why they wanted Grant and Sattler - the only thing that really stood out in the investor reports was the word "dinosaur" so they focused on that rather than the zoo, amusement park, and resort aspects of it. Exposed to the reality of the park, though, and with the initial impression meant to be reinforced by the kids, he saw that this was could make so much money that concerns like wrongful deaths and exorbitant insurance were paltry concerns. As far as he'd seen at that point, it was a relatively safe and stable enterprise (outside of animal handlers, which was an established risk) that could handsomely reward the investors. He was doing his job, he was just a bit myopic on it because (as in the reports) the functional concerns of the park took a back seat to having frickin' dinosaurs on site. And Hammon was playing the consummate showman, leading him to focus on that rather than the real risks.

Of course, I can't read this thread without having Weird Al singing in the back of my mind.
A huge Tyranosaurus ate out lawyer.
Well, I suppose that proves
They're really not all bad...

[tomandtish]

Bats?

Extra text, because a one word response is too short.

That would be it.

[2D8HP]

It's one of my fav movies of all times. The characters are all so memorable and some of the visuals they pulled off were phenomenal especially for a 20 year old movie


Special effects are better now than in 1993?

I haven't noticed.

I'm not being sarcastic, I really haven't noticed.

Maybe The Incredibles?

With Game of Thrones television effects seem a little bit better, but I thought Buffy and Deep Space Nine were pretty good back then.

What's being done now that's better than the effects of the'90's?

[Peelee]

Special effects are better now than in 1993?

I haven't noticed.

I'm not being sarcastic, I really haven't noticed.

Maybe The Incredibles?

With Game of Thrones television effects seem a little bit better, but I thought Buffy and Deep Space Nine were pretty good back then.

What's being done now that's better than the effects of the'90's?

Mostly stuff that's done so well you don't even know it's CGI.

ETA: For instance, you've probably seen a bunch of car commercials over the years, but they don't need to actually bother filming the car (https://jalopnik.com/how-they-shoot-a-car-commercial-without-the-actual-car-1782499530).

[Mightymosy]

Special effects are better now than in 1993?

I haven't noticed.

I'm not being sarcastic, I really haven't noticed.

Maybe The Incredibles?

With Game of Thrones television effects seem a little bit better, but I thought Buffy and Deep Space Nine were pretty good back then.

What's being done now that's better than the effects of the'90's?

I also am not a person who is really that much into special effects - I rarely see a difference when other people tell me that graphics are way better than last movie, or something.

I think the main difference that one can easily see is the abundance of special effects these days. Back then, you just had fewer "over the top bombastic special effects" than now. Which tells me, that they are way cheaper and easier to make these days.

Soooo, maybe they have become a little better than in the 90s,but they have become much cheaper?

[Knaight]

With Game of Thrones television effects seem a little bit better, but I thought Buffy and Deep Space Nine were pretty good back then.

Rewatch DS9, and pay attention to how bad the ships usually look - blurry, weird textures, so on and so forth (less for the handful that likely have actual models, and you can tell what these are). Then compare that to something like the new Battlestar Galactica.

As for the specifics of how effects have gotten better - there's a few points in particular that stand out. Water, hair/fur (compare Zootopia to older 3D animation, or look at the hair in Frozen or Rapunzel as compared to earllier animation), fire (in animation, practical effects do this easily), lots of particle effects.

[Tvtyrant]

Rewatch DS9, and pay attention to how bad the ships usually look - blurry, weird textures, so on and so forth (less for the handful that likely have actual models, and you can tell what these are). Then compare that to something like the new Battlestar Galactica.

As for the specifics of how effects have gotten better - there's a few points in particular that stand out. Water, hair/fur (compare Zootopia to older 3D animation, or look at the hair in Frozen or Rapunzel as compared to earllier animation), fire (in animation, practical effects do this easily), lots of particle effects.

Hair and faces have come a long way, but honestly using masks and toy spaceships worked fine. CGI's biggest benefit imo is becoming extremely cheap (by comparison); Ben Hur bankrupted a studio to make one movie and Rome was able to regularly turn out episodes for much less.

[Knaight]

Hair and faces have come a long way, but honestly using masks and toy spaceships worked fine. CGI's biggest benefit imo is becoming extremely cheap (by comparison); Ben Hur bankrupted a studio to make one movie and Rome was able to regularly turn out episodes for much less.

Practical effects have been good for a long while, particularly on the toy spaceships end (small models of things that are constructed in setting usually hold up well) - but if the genre is animation to begin with that doesn't necessarily matter much.

[Aedilred]

Hair and faces have come a long way, but honestly using masks and toy spaceships worked fine. CGI's biggest benefit imo is becoming extremely cheap (by comparison); Ben Hur bankrupted a studio to make one movie and Rome was able to regularly turn out episodes for much less.

Rome was still expensive enough that they cancelled it for costing too much, though.

(Something I simultaneously resent and am secretly grateful for: from what I've heard of the subsequent plans for the series and some of the tendencies in the second season I worry it was in danger of going off the rails anyway).

[Peelee]

Rome was still expensive enough that they cancelled it for costing too much, though.

(Something I simultaneously resent and am secretly grateful for: from what I've heard of the subsequent plans for the series and some of the tendencies in the second season I worry it was in danger of going off the rails anyway).

So they were planning historical accuracy, then? :smalltongue:

[Tvtyrant]

Rome was still expensive enough that they cancelled it for costing too much, though.

(Something I simultaneously resent and am secretly grateful for: from what I've heard of the subsequent plans for the series and some of the tendencies in the second season I worry it was in danger of going off the rails anyway).

It would be fun to just jump forward and back though. I would watch a Hannibal HBO show, or Septimus Severus' destruction of the civil authority.

[Aedilred]

So they were planning historical accuracy, then? :smalltongue:
Well, probably not so much. From what I gather, the plan was to move the bulk of the action to Judea. (With that in mind and on rewatches, I have begun to wonder whether the third protagonist - after Vorenus and Pullo - was always intended to be Timon). There remain some legacies of this in the show as it stands: Vorenus and Pullo talk about heading there when they're on the run in Egypt and Timon and family relocate there after Levi's death.

But I don't know what they actually intended to, well, do there. There's some politics involving Herod, sure, but that's fairly historically obscure compared to what they'd previously been dealing with. And the really interesting stuff that people do know about in Judea of course happened so much later that it wouldn't be reasonable to continue using the same characters for it.

There is of course a long period of "not much" that follows Augustus's rise to power, at least compared with the preceding years of turmoil, and the point at which the show ended made perfect sense, not least because so many of the otherwise central characters have died by then. Even Varus and his lost legions were decades into the future. Which is why it struck me as odd that the plan was apparently always to continue past that point if possible.


It would be fun to just jump forward and back though. I would watch a Hannibal HBO show, or Septimus Severus' destruction of the civil authority.
I would actually do a dance if they were to resurrect Rome to do a series on Marius and Sulla. Of course you couldn't use the same characters - although Vorenus's father could feature.

[Tyndmyr]

Rewatch DS9, and pay attention to how bad the ships usually look - blurry, weird textures, so on and so forth (less for the handful that likely have actual models, and you can tell what these are). Then compare that to something like the new Battlestar Galactica.

As for the specifics of how effects have gotten better - there's a few points in particular that stand out. Water, hair/fur (compare Zootopia to older 3D animation, or look at the hair in Frozen or Rapunzel as compared to earllier animation), fire (in animation, practical effects do this easily), lots of particle effects.

Weirdly enough, the new BSG hasn't aged all that well. Go back and rewatch it, and things that, while perfectly fine for the time, just stick out are everywhere. Modern stuff is way better, despite it really not being all that long ago.