Jurassic World

There's the whole thing about what could happen if the dinosaurs got out of the park, got a proper foothold somewhere and started breeding, which isn't entirely unreasonable. But what the movie (and Michael Crichton, because Michael Crichton always harps on about this) is really saying isn't so much that dinosaurs are inherently uncontrollable— *humans* are uncontrollable. And by creating said dinosaurs, building an amusement park around a bunch of enormous wild animals, and then employing Dennis Nedry, it formed a chain of events no one ever accounted for. Sub out dinosaurs for nanite swarms, nuclear power, pesticides, thalidomides, building a better zombie, or rabbits in Australia, it's all the same basic moral— people are messing with things they don't understand, and the consequences are unpredictable. Humans are the real monsters, not dinosaurs, surprise surprise.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:14:16 PM by Unsung

Eh, power in general always makes a monster, accidental or otherwise. Crichton was a thriller writer first and foremost, and while he did write thought evoking work, it always came down on the anti-corporate, anti-tech side of things. Not sure that the man was a Luddite, but he wrote like one.

I'm not saying this is profound stuff— it's pretty boilerplate. And I think Crichton had that strain of that nihilism that was common throughout the the 20th Century. What with two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the whole threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over everyone's heads, I suppose.

It's part of why the overtly environmental theme in TLJ stood out for me, and not in a good way. OK ignoring the simple fact that the "heroes" were massive hypocrites, the first movie wasn't really about conservation specifically No one was criticizing John Hammond for building an animal-themed park/zoo. They were criticizing him for messing with things that he didn't understand fully and being overconfident that he could control them.

I think what you’re referring to is modernism.

Mistype or accidental The Last Jedi spoiler?

...I don't think I am? I'm referring to that unspoken assumption that human hubris contains the seeds for our own destruction, ie. humanity locked in the same self-destructive patterns and inevitably doomed to repeat them for all time. It's not specific or limited to Michael Crichton, or anything.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:05:56 PM by Unsung

No I mean that sense of nihilism born out of the world wars was the basis for the modernist movement in art in the 20th century.

edited 13th Dec '17 10:29:52 AM by thatindiantroper

It was, but Michael Crichton wasn't an especially modernist writer. He wrote airport potboilers. Edit: Though I suppose it's not an either/or situation and the attitude of 'it's all been done' is modernist in and of itself.

edited 13th Dec '17 9:22:38 PM by Unsung

Quite. Many people seem to take Jurassic Park's moral to be, "Dinosaurs and humans cannot coexist in any form! Dinosaurs are an uncontrollable and uncontainable force that will annihilate everything they come into contact with! John Hammond's fatal mistake must be destroyed before it's too late, lest the dinosaurs doom us all! WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!?!?!"

When it's actually a condemnation of lazy, cost-cutting business practices. The dinosaurs are the spectacle that puts asses in seats; they aren't the point. The fact that every single decision John Hammond made in designing his park was reprehensibly irresponsible is the point.

EDIT: I should note that this is why I loved Owen's raptor training in Jurassic World. Due to their role in the JP films, it's become fairly common to see raptors depicted as unstoppable super-genius killing masters who are smarter than humans and can outthink or outmaneuver anything you put in their way.

Jurassic World depicts them as pack animals. Because although they are clever, that just makes them clever pack animals. Although they play the role of horror monsters in these films, dinosaurs are just animals.

edited 13th Dec '17 11:40:29 AM by TobiasDrake

I don't really think you can really blame anyone for that when the movies are all about resurrecting a bunch of prehistoric abominations of science that go haywire and kill everyone.

To be blunt, dinosaurs had their chance. They should be wiped out.

Actually, their chances were taken away by a Diabolus ex Machina.

The fact a meteor wiped them out still counts as "they had their chance".

If a meteor wipes us out, I'll pretty much be "eh, fair enough."

Sure, but nobody involved with the park is really saying, "Let's bring back dinosaurs and then let them roam free in the world's ecosystems as invasive species and try to reintegrate them naturally."

I mean, the stupid conservationist theme in the second film sorta suggests that would be a good idea, but that was just arguing for, "The animals already have been cloned back into existence now, so let's leave them alone on their island and just let nature take its course. If they survive, cool, and if they can't adapt, eh, that's life."

But the point of Jurassic Park and, subsequently, Jurassic World was never to have dinosaurs trying to coexist with man. It was to put them in a zoo where they'd be taken care of by - and subsequently completely dependent on - humans, while other people paid money to come see them.

By the park's intentions, Rexie's not supposed to be roaming free on the African Savannah, munching on lions. She's supposed to be in a cage chomping on three goats personally delivered to her by park employees while she stomps around being cool.

edited 13th Dec '17 11:55:58 AM by TobiasDrake

Those are noble intentions

Although, if the point wasn't yarrrgh humans and dinosaurs must never coexist or dooooom maybe stop making super persistent predators as the threat in these movie books

Or at least made them less Super-Persistent Predator. T-Rex should not waste their energy chasing puny humans unless they are threatened.

edited 13th Dec '17 12:12:45 PM by RAlexa21th

The movies work against their own message. If the idea is, as Tobias proposes, to have dinosaurs in domesticated and shut off environments where they can't harm humans and exist as a isolated species in captivity effectively, that'd be one thing. But after, what, three separate bloodbaths involving dinosaurs? It's about time to just nuke them from orbit and cut the costs.

Also if you want to push the "animals/nature" idea, then WRITE THEM AS ANIMALS!! Don't write them as slasher movie villains essentially.

Stuff like having the Pterodactyl's, after escaping their pen, immediately make a bee-line for the nearest group of humans (which seemed like it was miles away) and start randomly attacking people (as opposed to you know, just flying away like normal animals probably would). Or having the T-Rex continuously stalk the humans in TLW even though where specifically told that they wouldn't need to feed for awhile, etc.

You cannot have it both ways. Either their movie monsters, in which case your message falls apart, or they're just animals doing what animals do (in which case write them like that).

It’s funny, because despite this franchise’s message, the real life public’s interest in searching for ways to clone dinosaurs INCREASED rather than decreased.

Another thing that bugs me about these films is the near-total uselessness of firearms. Like IDK if the people who make these films feel like their audience will get upset if they see dinosaurs getting shot or something. But we've had FOUR movies full of people with high-powered firearms or various kinds, who we're told know how to use them, and yet no one can manage to shoot one of these things? It's getting ridiculous, especially in JW where they're firing a mini-gun from a freaking helicopter, and they STILL cannot seem to hit the I-rex.

I think it mostly stems from Spielberg's personal feelings about guns

In the book, Muldoon blew up a few raptors with a rocket launcher and the rocket syringes were eventually effective on the T Rex

Oh I know, and it was far more satisfying there imo.

"Or having the T-Rex continuously stalk the humans in TLW even though where specifically told that they wouldn't need to feed for awhile, etc."

Pretty sure the stalking was justified and had nothing to do with food while they were on the island. Someone found the injured Rex baby, took it in to heal it. Parents were not pleased. They got baby Rex back, decided that humans were a threat to little one's continued existence, and dealt with the threat by hunting it down and killing it.

Before the baby was snatched, I'm pretty sure the rexes were perfectly fine not killing everything.

The dinosaurs are very rarely played as a Super Persistent Predators. The narrative benefit of having so many dinosaurs is that it lets the protagonists escape one set of murder teeth and then run afoul of a completely different set of murder teeth.

The first Jurassic Park has the big altercation with Rexie, followed by her still being in the area when more people show up. After that, Grant's group briefly encounters her when she's hunting some gallimimus, but she doesn't even notice them. She was just there for delicious prey animals. We're told it's her paddock, so she has every right to be there. And then she pops up at the end for the Big Damn Heroes moment...somehow.

The Lost World features the two tyrannosaurs hunting the group after the infant rex encounter, but this is explained in the film: by absconding with the infant, the idiot conservationists have changed their perceived territory. They aren't trying to eat the humans, necessarily, but instead establishing themselves as the region's dominant predator and driving out competition.

The third Jurassic Park has two sets of persistent predators, the spinosaurus and the raptors. The raptors are deliberately and consciously after the humans because of stolen raptor eggs; literally the exact same reason the tyrannosaurs attacked the trailers in the second, just at a different life state. The spinosaurus, meanwihle, seems as surprised as the humans every time it runs into them; as presented in the movie, that just happens by pure coincidence.

Which leaves Jurassic World, in which the majority of altercations with the iRex occur because we're hunting her, rather than the other way around.

Every single one of those is caused by us. The Jurassic Park incident was caused by Hammond's business practices. The San Diego incident was caused by humans abducting a live, fully-grown tyrannosaur and shipping it to a metropolitan city. The second Isla Sorna incident was caused by a handful of people engaging in flagrant disobedience of international laws forbidding travel to the island. And then the Jurassic World incident was caused by people trying to use dinosaurs as bioweapons.

The dinosaurs haven't done anything wrong. People keep getting killed by them because people keep f*cking with them. Even the zoos actually work when they aren't being sabotaged by incompetent executives and sinister ulterior motives.

It's about having respect for the power of nature. The problem isn't that the tyrannosaur must be destroyed for the good of mankind. It's that the tyrannosaur is not a toy, and needs to be handled with care. Replace the tyrannosaur with a grizzly bear and she'd still be mauling the faces off of idiots who should have known better.

edited 13th Dec '17 2:45:02 PM by TobiasDrake

Eh, I prefer it. Too many action films and video games that treat firearms like the ultimate put down, including ones with dinos. It feels like it would take away from the wonder of the setting if the film consists of just firing into a quasi-zombie horde.

edited 13th Dec '17 2:46:22 PM by Tuckerscreator