Jurassic World

Okay, some points off about this.

Not really. There's an equivalent scene, with Wu instead of Sattler, but the discussion and framing are completely different. Book Hammond is played as completely collected, talking about he would never build anything outside of entertainment because necessities would have their prices reduced. Film Hammond is played like someone scared and trying to convince themselves that this is just another snafu like the rest. He talks instead about how he feels guilty about fooling people in the past and thinks his park makes up for that, but Ellie's appeal snaps him out of it and gets him to acknowledge the greater moral responsibility at present.

The movie doesn't really portray this as a bad thing considering it got so much wrong about paleontology in the same scene, like the diggers uncovering a dinosaur skeleton with all the pieces still in the right place instead of scattered. It's already an unrealistic scene.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:18:41 PM by Tuckerscreator

Hammond in the movies is more of a reckless Walt Disney kind of character rather than a Corrupt Corporate Executive like he was in the novel. He aims for spectacle and wonder, which would explain why he would invest a lot of money in the attractions but less on employees and safety.

Novel Hammond can be explained by one word: Money. That's all he talked about. The very worst of capitalism. He didn't make Jurassic Park to wow kids with dinosaurs. He did it to avoid all the legal and government regulations that would force him to sell his products at a lower price and loss. And this would have been cartoony if it weren't for the fact that they are CEOs that are just like Hammond or even worse.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:26:51 PM by Shadao

You're right, I misremembered that dining room scene in the novel. My bad.

It completely portrays this as a bad thing. The archaeologists fly into a panic over the helicopter, racing to cover up the dig site before it causes too much harm while Grant screams at the pilot to shut it down.

Literally the first words out of Sattler's mouth as she enters the trailer are, "Okay, who's the jerk?!" before she realizes precisely who the jerk is. Hammond is a complete asshole in this scene; he just gets away with it because they need his money.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:31:10 PM by TobiasDrake

It's actually both. The novel has him mention multiple times his dream of seeing kids excited at dinosaurs. Or, as he puts it, "at least the rich ones." So it's still in the book, but increased in the film because Spielberg identified with that part of Hammond and asked for him to be written as more a Tragic Antagonist.

Ah, then I misremembered that.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:31:42 PM by Tuckerscreator

Hammond ruined the dig and helped himself to Grant and Sattler's wine, but not because he's an asshole. It's because he's a low-level Manchild. He has a loose grasp of certain social mores, maybe to the point of having an Ambiguous Disorder. He sees the world like an eight-year-old boy who never had to grow up (Jurassic Park is 100% Rule of Cool to him) and that's where all the problems come from, really.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:43:13 PM by ThriceCharming

Paleontologists, not archaeologists.

edited 23rd Jun '17 5:48:10 PM by Spinosegnosaurus77

I do get the sense the difference is more in intent. It seems like Jurassic Park plays him as a dreamer first and foremost, like he's not primarily focused in the almighty dollar but just in bringing the dream of these dead creatures back to life to amaze people once again. This is best seen in the way the film calls attention to his bird-amber-staff, which the film portrays as a sort of sacred memento of what he wants to achieve rather than a vain trinket. The way he clutches when he takes off the island is played off more as him realizing the death and folly of his dream than a greedy executive seeing the profits go down the drain.

So I think Tobias is correct in they're close characters, but the difference seems intent. The Hammond of the film is played up as a Walt Disney-esque dreamer rather than just a plain greedy executive.

One thing I realized by the quotable line of " John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."

The Pirates Of the Carribean ride didn't open until 1967 a decade after Disneyland opened. A more accurate description is the Jungle Cruise, which was one of the rides on opening day and would fit the more accurate description of the scene due to the fact that originally the ride was going to have live animals until they decided it wasn't going to be practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Cruise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_(attraction)

Well, to be fair, also Disneyland opened in '55.

Certainly, there as well, but he was only off by a year.

Paleontological dig site and paleontologists, not archeological site or archeologists.

In Malcolm's defense, not many people know offhand when specific Disneyland rides opened.

By the way, I'll say it again: they're totally going to kill off Malcolm in Fallen Kingdom. Betcha anything. Everyone was talking about the death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens and I'm sure Universal wants a piece of that action.

No, don't kill him off. Also I wonder what is going to be the top enemy dino in the next movie.

I doubt it, honestly. Han Solo died because Star Wars is an epic fantasy and someone needed to succumb to Death by Origin Story. He was slated for death the moment he stepped onscreen, what with Luke being missing and all.

Jurassic Park is an action thriller. People who survive their first one are generally marked as Veteran Survivors and rendered unkillable if they return in sequels. For Fallen Kingdom, there's not really a place for Malcolm to come Back for the Dead because there's not really a narrative purpose it can serve.

This isn't a franchise where Malcolm will commit a heroic sacrifice blowing himself and the park up and saving the world. It's not one where Malcolm can die so that Owen can scream a Big "NO!" into the sky and gain the motivation to defeat the Big Bad. That's not what death means in Jurassic Park.

In Jurassic Park, people die because f*ck that guy. There are basically two categories of death: good guy deaths and bad guy deaths, and all are narratively equal. If a good guy is getting eaten, it doesn't really matter which; the point is just to establish that this is a bad dino that needs to be defeated. If it's a bad guy getting eaten, it's the inevitable karmic retribution.

As such, there's equal narrative weight to having Murder-Rex devour Ian Malcolm as there is to having it eat Private F*ckstick von Redshirt. The only real difference is that you don't get to have Malcolm in the rest of your movie. Or any more sequels. As such, killing a popular recurring survivor is an objectively bad decision with no positive value, and so action thrillers rarely do it.

Looking back at the Hammond discussion, the part where Hammond talks about how things will be alright once they get control and Sattler calls him out on the fact that they never had control in the first place reminds me of how Masrani tells Claire that accepting that they aren't always in control will make their lives easier.

Got me thinking, Hammond's park fell apart before it even opened. Masrani kept his going for a decade. Both were internally compromised, but what other factors were there that made Masrani's revision so much more successful?

Effort.

Hammond's park was designed to be run by computers. Masrani has a large staff of qualified people.

Hammond's security team was one guy who was forbidden from bringing any weapons that might cause harm to one of his expensive animals if used. Masrani has a team of security personnel trained to handle escaped dinosaurs, weapons capable of harming and/or killing them on-site in an emergency, and security contractors on call if things go south.

A lot more time, money, and effort seems to have gone into making Jurassic World work. Part of that is mindset; Hammond built Jurassic Park to be a theme park. He saw the dinosaurs as live attractions. Like the nonexistent fleas of the flea circus he espouses, he had these animals resurrected to be tools - for profit or, if you accept the more charming version, for entertainment. In either depiction, he has absolutely zero respect for the dinosaurs as living organisms. They are his property first and foremost.

Masrani built Jurassic World to be a zoo. He respects the power and natural ferocity of the animals he's working with. He genuinely appears to care about the extinct species under his charge.

Nowhere is this distinction more evident than the raptors. Hammond shoved them in a pit for people to look down at and called it good. Masrani hired handlers to go in and work with the raptors, to build a bond with them as peers.

edited 2nd Jul '17 10:22:09 AM by TobiasDrake

The advances in technology probably helped

Jurassic Park was predominantly automated, which in a literal sense is how Nedry was able to bypass security so easily and leave the park vulnerable, but it also fell into an overall theme of trying to control nature with technology. Jurassic World seemed to have a much bigger staff, which helps mitigate that over reliance on technology, but there was still a fundamental belief that everything was under control.

Everything was under control.

The movie pins everything on Nedry, but one of the points in the novel was that Jurassic Park was already out of control when they got there. Velociraptors had managed to overpopulate due to a poor programming design in the machine that counts them. The lysine contingency had already been overcome. There were even dinosaurs escaping to the mainland.

And, of course, the dinosaurs were capable of breeding; the one bit that actually made it into the film. Nedry's sabotage was the last nail in the park's coffin but shit was already going south.

In Jurassic World, it's not even sabotage; just one really stupid decision by protagonist Owen Grady that sets the devastation ball rolling, proving that even the best systems can't be idiot-proofed. Outside of that, everything's working great and the only major threat is a human one; a subset of the company that tweaked the iRex to be a biological weapons demo.

edited 2nd Jul '17 10:48:24 AM by TobiasDrake

By "one really stupid decision by protagonist Owen Grady that sets the devastation ball rolling", are you referring to him deciding to go into the Indominus enclosure to check the scratched walls without conclusively confirming that the dino really isn't inside? Because one could hardly blame him for not knowing that the Indominus can camouflage itself or alter its body temperature, thus why he'd assume that "it's not showing up on any of the cameras or thermal scanners despite them covering the entire enclosure, yet the radio tracker says it's inside" means that it somehow escaped and either the tracking system malfunctioned or the dino dug the tracker out; Masrani and Claire, the most invested in knowing everything about the I. rex, didn't know about either of those traits.

edited 2nd Jul '17 11:17:00 AM by MarqFJA

The scratched walls were perfectly visible from inside the control center. Going inside the pen was an unnecessary risk undertaken for literally no reason. It's not like he went out there to get a sample of residue or something.

If the walls were on the far side of the enclosure only visible in part on one of the cameras in a sort of, "What is that? Let me go take a look," fashion, then it might be more defensible. As it stands, Owen Grady entered the pen just so that there would be a way for the iRex to escape, and not for any reason that makes sense for the character.

That's kinda the problem of Owen's character in general. A lot of scenes and choices surrounding the character exist solely because the plot demands it. He's the epitome of characters existing to service the story. A slave to the narrative, who acts and is acted upon only in service to the Almighty Plot God.

edited 2nd Jul '17 11:32:30 AM by TobiasDrake

It was truncated for time, but the next step after assuming an animal escaped the pen would be to examine the pen in detail to understand how they got out. They also didn't know the tracker still read inside the pen because the plot said cell phone reception was spotty in that area, not to mention that later they found the tracker physically scratched out so even that could have been a possibility. Realistically there should have been land lines and local controls to prevent that sort of thing from happening. It's not much better, but inadequate infrastructure and order of events is what lead to the disaster rather than just one person.

This, and let's be honest: If Grady didn't suggest the idea, one of the paddock's other guards would have.

Now that dinosaurs are cool again and Fallen Kingdom is due to come out in a year, I wonder if the Carnosaur franchise will attempt a glorious comeback.

I kinda hope it does.

Honestly the security personal in JW come across as pretty freaking useless/incompetent. Yeah you buy an army, but a very good one. And given that they mention the security fences failing multiple times in the same month, and those chips designed to shock the dinosaurs is they ever got out of the enclosures being conveniently forgotten about by the plot so that we can get a big action set-piece, their other security wasn't all that good either it would seem.

As for Malcolm dying, I kind of doubt it. JW deaths tend to run on karma (which is why Eddie's in TLW and Zara's in JW stand out so much, and NOT in a good way imo). So if anything, Malcolm has a pretty good chance a survival, given that he's probably THE breakout character of the franchise and most of his fears about the part were bore out as correct.