Headscratchers / Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Indoraptor viability

• Given that the Indoraptor is "defective" and "sickly" due to its unstable genetic structure, isn't it odd how the worst it got from the genetic mishmashing is basically dinosaur asthma? You'd think such a creature would end up with far more serious birth defects like malformed limbs, missing eyes, cancerous growths and all sorts of Body Horror deformities... best case scenario, they end up with a horribly mutated stillborn specimen, worst case scenario, they create something far more nightmarish than even Shin Godzilla...
  • The film never says that the Indoraptor was the product of a first attempt. Wu may have tossed dozens of non-viable hybrids in the trash before he got one that actually survived to adulthood.
  • The Indoraptor we see is a "prototype" Wu explicitly states that it isn't intended for sale and needs more work to be viable, it's why they wanted Blue. Her genetics are stable and she is the most "docile" predator they know of, presumably Blue's genes would be used as a template to "upgrade" the Indoraptor and that one would be discarded.
  • Breathing problems wasn't the only issue the Indoraptor had. He had mental problems, as well- he was probably insane, and most definitely sadistic, enjoying killing his prey and even toying with it beforehand. He also had neurological issues. His movements were erratic and jerky, and he suffered from constant muscle spasms and twitches.

Stiggy's cage

• If Stiggy's hard head could easily smash right through the brick wall, and later smash open the lock, then who the hell thought it was a good idea to even try to contain her there? And why didn't she break out beforehand, without Owen whistling at her?
  • Pachycephalosaurs at the park probably did try to break through walls that way when confined, only they learned not to keep doing so after a collision or two with unyielding concrete gave them a headache. Without a human's whistles to make her hit the same spot repeatedly, Stiggy wouldn't have the smarts to realise that continuing to hit the same wall was accomplishing something.
  • And why does she respond to Owen's whistles, she wasn't raised and bonded to him?
    • Stiggy's species may simply have that kind of reflexive response to annoying sounds, whistling among them. Alternately, all the pachycephalosaurids in the park were trained to do that for use in one of the park's shows, same as the Mosasaurus was trained to breach and grab dangling sharks on cue.

This is no time to be fighting!

• The one biggest issue in the film: why the hell did Rexy stop to fight a Carno when THE ISLAND WAS BLOWING UP? Given that the franchise really took lots of care to make sure that the dinos think and act as much like real animals as possible, this scene sticks out like a sore thumb, as it was basically a Too Dumb to Live moment on Rexy's part! She wasn't territorial, she didn't seem to be hungry, she didn't even finish off the Carno... what was the point of wasting a few precious seconds in a life threatening situation just to pick fights and look cool?
  • Animals fall back on their reflexive natural tendencies when they're frightened, even if it's not what will actually help. A rabbit caught in the middle of a busy road will freeze to avoid the "predator" cars' notice, and get squashed. A wild bird trapped in a cage will batter its wings into ruin trying to take off. Rexy, faced with a danger she can't possibly attack (a volcano), resorts to taking down a threat that she can.
  • I seriously question the idea that the franchise ever really cared that much about making the dinosaurs behave like "real" animals, especially the predators. They've always been depicted as monsters first, animals second. They even outright tried to explain in the previous movie that messing with their genetics to make the predators look fiercer also caused their illogical levels of aggression and prey drive, and in the third JP movie Grant stated he regarded them as genetically engineered monsters rather than actual dinosaurs. Assuming that applies here it would be that the Rex has little capacity to respond to unusual situations with anything except aggression. On the other hand a real one would most likely just keep fleeing the volcano for as long as it was able to. For modern day comparisons one can note that during floods predators often will take shelter side by side with their normal prey on floating logs and such, their desire to survive the disaster taking priority over eating or fighting.
  • Well, as Rexy is a veteran, clearly established as being the one from the first movie in the sextology, perhaps she suffered from "let's do tweaks to make them more like monsters" less so than later discovered species and cloning efforts. Even if they had wanted to do so, the technology would probably not have been advanced enough to allow them to. So the answer above the preceding one probably takes it in her case. Her instinctive behaviours (and those of her prey) may not necessarily match up with those of modern predators/prey.

Stop the auction and then what?

• What was Owen's plan when he interrupted the Indoraptor's auction? He was determined to "not let it leave this building", but after clearing the room, he just left it there waiting for someone to find it.
  • Prevent it from being pulled back into the freight elevator, where it would be shipped out to make god only knows what trouble, and having to deal with the full consequences later. If it can't go to shipping it wasn't going to be going anywhere because the only way to safely move it was disabled. Owen didn't plan on some idiot deciding to open the cage though.

Four legs good, two legs bad?

• Why is the Indoraptor semi-quadrupedal? None of the dinosaurs he's made of are four-legged, and even then, his basic body plan is mostly that of a theropod, which are not designed for walking on all fours. Plus in the games, he looks rather stooped over because of his relatively short forelimbs, which looks like a very awkward and uncomfortable posture.
  • That's the point. Uncanny Valley. It's supposed to look a horrific abomination because that's what he is.
  • He is unnaturally stooped. He's spent his entire life in transport crates and lab cages, with barely enough space to breathe let along stand up tall, and his posture has been stunted accordingly.

A male-order dinosaur?

• The Indoraptor is explicitly the first male dinosaur of the second film trilogy, which brings up the question on why they would make him intentionally male. Were they trying to make him more aggressive? Or rather planning on breeding him with Blue?
  • Probably both.
  • His base DNA may be too modified to successfully breed with Blue.
  • They probably planned to only sell males, to ensure nobody else could start breeding them organically even via the "life finds a way" Gender Bender Ass Pull. Thus, no competition.

Pterosaur ptroubles

• How are there pterosaurs on the island if in the previous film they were gunned down after attacking the visitors when they were released by the I. rex?
  • From what I remember, ACU and the park rangers used tranquiliser rifles against them. Owen and Claire were also shown shooting them with tranqs. Only the InGen soldiers, who arrived later, used lethal force, and even then we only saw them kill one Dimorphodon.
  • You can actually hear, in the background when Owen grabs a gun from an ACU trooper, something about "no live fire" or "no live rounds." Which makes sense, since the pterosaurs were all mixed in with Park guests at the time.

Blue's empathy

• I kinda call bullshit on the whole "Blue empathy" thing. I mean, in the previous film, she straight up tries to kill Owen the first chance she gets, and as soon as he turns his back Blue immediately jumps him as he barely escapes through the gate. And then later, she actively ditches him for the I. rex once she realises she's a stronger alpha, and only fights back once Owen reestablishes his dominance. So the whole scene where Baby Blue is seen being sweet and comforting to Owen just kind of seems contrived just to make her more "sympathetic"?
  • Empathy is there but it doesn't mean it's 100% successful. Owen was learning about this when she was a baby but by the time she's grown up, Owen sees there are a lot of holes in taming raptors. Hence, why he is so hesitant in bringing these animals to the field. When the Indominus rex presents herself to the raptors and actually communicates with them, it was Owen's fears coming true. He did made the raptors empathetic to him, but he didn't count on them being empathetic towards something that was similar to their own species. However, Owen rectifies that by showing his role as pack leader not by dominance but by showing the same empathy as his daughters. When the Indominus rex forces them to attack Owen, the raptors are enraged and switch sides to attack the I. rex.
  • There might be an element of peer pressure there, too. Among her pack, Blue is concerned with being a strong leader who can make the right choices for the group, which forces her to be more ruthless than she would otherwise be.
  • One thing to remember is that Owen raised each of the raptors from birth. He stated as much in the previous film that he "imprinted" on them when they hatched, and worked with them for years after that. He knows these raptors better than almost anyone else for that very reason. It's also one the main flaws that Hoskins didn't see. Like K-9s in Police and Military units the world over, the person training to use the animal would have to train with the animal from the moment it hatched. Hoskins, and by extension, Dr. Wu and Mills, only cared that the animals could be controlled, never bothering to consider what it would take to gain that level of control in the first place. To put it simply, here's what would have to happen:
    • 1. Each raptor egg would have to be issued to their future handler, where the handler would treat it like they would a future pet.
    • 2. Once the raptor hatches, the handler would have to begin teaching the animal basic behaviours (like sit, stay, speak, etc), and associate those with specific words or another language.
    • 3. During the several weeks of these basic commands, the handler would have to expose the animal to different sights and smells in the real world. You'd need to do this to socialise the animal with random people, and to ensure that it doesn't try to attack anyone it's not supposed to.
    • 4. When the raptor has reached a point where the handler feels comfortable, it will then begin its specialised training for either search, or capture. As before, the handler would have to train the animal to obey these commands to specific key words or in another language, and also to only follow them when certain gestures or sounds are used (such as when Owen whistled in JW). This would serve to prevent confusion when the raptor is doing this for real.
    • 5. The handler and their raptor begin training for either police or military work (working with a unit), and expose the animal to simulated environments and scenarios in which the animal will be required to perform their duties.
    • 6. Once all of this has been done, the raptor and their handler will be ready, and assigned. Despite Hoskins stating that the raptors would replace "Thousands of boots on the ground", in reality, they'd be an upgrade to existing K-9 Units.
  • That was when Blue was a baby and Owen was far bigger then her making it easier for her prey-reactionary instincts to allow his presence. As she grew up into the equivalent of a teenager when the Jurassic World incident happened, she went through a moody aggressive phase where her instincts ramped up, making it harder for her to control herself around him, not unlike humans and their hormonal years. Finally, around Fallen Kingdom, the events of the incident and a few years for her biology to stabilise have left her more in control of her predatory urges.
  • The Fridge and Headscratchers for the previous film answer a lot of these questions. Raptors have insanely high prey drive, so if something runs, they have to chase it, it's pure instinct. As for turning on Owen with the Indominus, it's more complicated then it seems at first blush. Basically, the I. rex tells the raptors she's in charge now, the raptors look to Owen, their current Alpha, to see if he'll rise to this challenge or not, but before Owen can do anything, Hoskins' mercs open fire, forcing the raptors into "fight or die" mode, so they start taking out the humans. Notice how none of the raptors directly attack Owen in that scene, Charlie stops when she sees him and even kind of smiles at him, Blue stops going after Barry when he calls her name, and Delta completely ignores Owen, Claire, and the kids in favour of getting Hoskins. It's only when they're pretty much literally the only people left that the raptors actually confront Owen, and when Owen reaches up to take Blue's camera off, the snap she gives him is so halfhearted she needn't have even bothered (her head doesn't move at all and her jaws are feet away from Owen's hand, so it's useless as a threat display). When Owen removes her gear, petting her head softly, he re-establishes that empathic bond, not a dominant one, and the raptors all turn on the I. rex for their daddy. Blue's empathy with Owen isn't in the forefront in the previous film, but it is there, if you read between the right lines.

Tyrannosaur transfusion

• How is a blood transfusion between Rexy and Blue even viable? Even if they're closely related species (actually not that close, even), there is a risk of complications: if even human blood transfusions from the same species (human-to-human) are known to fail, what more could go wrong with an inter-species transfusion?
  • Perhaps the dinosaurs are all engineered to have the same immune system recognition?
  • It's presumed that scientists have learned that Rexy and Blue have a slightly similar genetic make up but Zia mentioned that Rexy is the closest match available in that moment, not the be-all and end-all most compatible.
  • It should be remembered they're not real dinosaurs. Some of the dinosaurs were mentioned as being part frog all the way back to Jurassic Park for instance (whether or not Masrani Corporations used other ways to revive dinosaurs without needing frog DNA is up in the air). As such, they would almost certainly be a lot closer genetically than the real dinosaurs were, because they were working off a template.
  • Xenotransfusions are actually employed with significant success in real life. In places without adequate blood stores, dog blood has even been transfused to cats. Same with birds, which dinosaurs are related to: they can often receive cross-species transfusions because they do not have blood types.
  • Well, Google seems to indicate that scientific understanding of avian blood types is rudimentary, but that they do exist; but also that inter-species transfusions are largely successful for birds.

Deinonychus?

• Why is Deinonychus listed as one of the extinct genera on the Dinosaur Protection Group website? Hasn't it been previously established that the so-called Velociraptors in the movie actually are Deinonychus, albeit misnamed and without feathers? This was made clear as early as the first movie, when a "Velociraptor" skeleton is being unearthed in Montana, where the real Velociraptor never lived but Deinonychus did.
  • It's one of the franchise's original sins, these Artistic License – Paleontology raptors are too closely associated to it and the name still sounds too badass to drop its use. They just run with it.
  • If it really bothers you, you could always Hand Wave it. Just tell yourself that, in the Jurassic Park 'Verse, an extra-large species of Velociraptor was discovered that did live in Montana: one that our Real Life paleontologists simply haven't found fossils of yet.
    • A very similar animal to that description actually has been found; it's called Dakotaraptor, and it very closely resembles the Jurassic'Verse's Velociraptors in terms of size and habitat.

The Strange Incident of the Indominus in the Lagoon

• How is the skeleton of the Indominus rex in relatively good condition if she was eaten by the Mosasaurus? You'd think the best they could hope for was a few stray fragments of ribs or vertebrae that popped out with the Mosasaurus's droppings.
  • Mosasaurus ain't got time for no chewing.
  • The I. rex was a bony freak anyway, not much worth eating and of that most of it would have been organs that the Mosasaurus could have gotten at by ripping open her soft underbelly without having to devour the rest. If you recall she only got the Indominus by the throat when we last saw her meaning she probably just drowned it then pulled out the yummy bits before dropping the rest to the bottom of the tank.
  • If she feeds anything like the monitor lizards which are mosasaurs' closest living relatives, she may have ripped off an arm or two when she found it a bit too big to swallow whole, then come back for more as the carcass decomposed and became more pliable.

Claire's guilt

• Why isn't Claire in a lot more hot water in this film? She's pretty much responsible for all the issues that happened in the last film, you'd think she'd be in jail for the stuff she let happen!
  • Arguments could be made that Masrani was the key figure responsible as he presumably arranged for the Indominus to be created in the first place; it would be easy enough for Claire's defence lawyers to shift the blame to him while Claire (as they claim) was given inadequate information to make her decision.
  • Because Hoskins and Wu's interference with the Indominus creation makes it really hard to pin on her. Like it wasn't her that greenlit the dinosaur being smart enough to remove its tracker and use camouflage, some weird private military did. Hoskins even said he wanted the dinosaur to break loose so they can use the raptors and gain combat data for both.
    • Hoskins never said he wanted the dinosaur to break loose. Claire said "You wanted this to happen" but she's not accusing him of planning the whole breakout; she's accusing him of wanting to take advantage of the situation so he can use the raptors.

"Let 'em die!"

• We see a lot of people protesting for the dinosaurs to be saved, but aside from Ian Malcolm where is the other side of the protest? Those people who lost friends or family at the park and demanding that the dinosaurs be destroyed (or in this case, left to die?) And even if the company paid them off, there's surely a vocal minority somewhere that understands the threat the dinosaurs pose to human life, or perhaps those like Dr. Grant who sees them as nothing more than "genetically-modified theme park monsters".
  • Since the movie caters to the audience, who grew up with Jurassic Park and would in general naturally want to save the dinosaurs, it stands to reason that the movie would only show the pro-dinosaur side of the conflict. Besides, the overall message of the movie can be interpreted as 'Was saving them really the right decision?'. Claire's character arc reflects this, wanting to save them all, but in the end can't bring herself to do it because of the ramifications it would bring.
  • They don't really need to protest when the Congress agrees with them. No one is gonna protest saying "keep it up, good work" unless there is a real chance the protest can stop it.
  • And just like the film caters to an audience who grew up with the Jurassic Park movies, the world of Jurassic Park has had living, breathing dinosaurs in it for decades, and a full ten years of a functioning theme park where you could go visit them, see them, pet them and ride them and feed them. People in this world have grown up with dinosaurs as living breathing facts of life, not just bones on display in museums. Imagine the number of people who's fondest childhood memories are their first visit to Jurassic World and getting to ride a baby Triceratops, hug a baby Apatosaurus, feed a baby Brachiosaurus. How many of these people, now teens or young adults, would react viscerally to the idea that these magical creatures are about to all die out yet again? That number likely pales in comparison to those directly traumatised by previous dinosaur incidents, or even those like Dr. Malcolm who pause to think "Uh, is this really such a good idea?"
  • Presumably not enough to be a significant political force. Someone who went to Jurassic World as a kid the year before it closed probably isn't going to be old enough to vote for a while yet. Had the volcano held off another decade so the victims' anger could cool and nostalgia could kick in, the outcome might've been different.
    • The year before it closed, maybe. But it had been in operation for ten years, and this movie takes place three years after it closed. So the youngest people who are old enough to vote during this movie would have been five when the park itself opened.

Extinction isn’t what it used to be

• Why is there so much emphasis on whether or not saving these particular dinosaurs is so important? They phrase it as if the animals’ dying off is a permanent second extinction - ignoring that they already were extinct. They're clones! You have the ability to bring them back again if you want, newer and better than before because for all his faults Wu never stopped improving the cloning technology. It should just be a question of animal welfare: is it alright to let animals die in a volcano if it's dangerous to attempt a rescue? At least that’s a proper debate!
  • There is no guarantee that any country with the technology to clone the dinosaurs again would actually allow them to be legally cloned if they deliberately let them to go extinct again in the first place, even in Dominion it took a rich private company like Biosyn to clone more dinosaurs. If a person was trapped in a burning building but someone said it doesn’t matter because that person can be cloned, most people would say just because they can be cloned doesn’t make that person expendable and not worth saving. That’s why there is a parallel between Masie and the dinosaurs, just because they are clones doesn’t mean their lives do not have value as unique living creatures or are just easily replaceable. Not to mention it’s unclear if anyone besides Dr. Wu who is in hiding (and may not posses DNA from every species) has the DNA of all the animals on Isla Nublar. If the genetic material to clone many or all of the dinosaurs is lost during the island’s destruction alongside the living specimens then so could the chance to bring them back.

Volcanic real estate

• Why would you build a theme park on a volcanic island that's still geologically active?
  • A ready source of geothermal power.
    • Lending credence to this idea is the fact that there is a geothermal power plant in Jurassic Park: The Game.
  • Cheap property values that is enriched from the volcanic soil.
  • Hammond cut corners everywhere because he actually couldn't afford to build the park the way he wanted to and his investors were barely holding on as it was. Besides, there's not that many islands where you can build a theme park in complete secrecy.
  • Alternatively, the volcano might have gone dormant and was presumed extinct.
  • If people can live on an island that has three active volcanoes, one of which that has been been continuously erupting for over 35 years, vacationing on one is trivial.
  • The BBC news clip from the movie makes it clear that the volcano was believed to be dormant when they built the park.

The Great Escape

• HOW did the Mosasaurus escape to the ocean? There's some kilometers of land between her enclosure and the shore, and the "Cretaceous Cruise" river isn't large (wide) enough for an animal her size.
  • It's shown in the opening scene that there's a gate that leads from its lagoon straight into open water.
  • Except it was never next to open water in the first movie, and why would they even have that gate?
  • Tank maintenance, and to work with the animal in the event it needed medical care. Unlike Orca whales and dolphins, you can't lift the Mosasaurus out of her tank, ergo, any vet work would have to be done on site, and in the tank with the animal. Odds are, to facilitate this, the tank can be drained so that work can be done, but in order to drain the tank, you need a door to keep water out of the tank until work can be completed.
  • Simply put: the creators of this film changed the layout of the park for plot reasons. A map from the first Jurassic World◊ puts the lagoon squarely in the middle of the island, and quite clearly land-locked. This film shifts the lagoon to some coastal location.
  • It's possible that the lagoon was connected to a bay on the edge of the island by some kind of underground river/ tunnel, presumably, aside from other reasons listed above, to allow smaller aquatic creatures to get in to provide extra food, possibly revealing how it survived, allowing it to feed. Either a grate blocked its way that it eventually broke through, or it just stayed in the main lagoon because, like the I. rex before it's escape, the Mosasaurus figured out that while it could get 'snacks' from the bay, the Lagoon gave it meals.
  • The Lagoon itself might not have been the park's only mosasaur tank. Real world aquatic parks like SeaWorld have holding tanks and isolation tanks that the public never get to see, which in the Mosasaurus's case may have been connected by flooded underground channels to avoid posing an obstacle to tourists' and staff's movements.

Dinosaur survival

• Did the volcanic eruption/pyroclastic flow *really* immolate the entire island? The dinosaurs caught in the first flow escaped by falling into the ocean, surely some could have survived that?
  • There's likely a part of the island behind the volcano that was not in the way of the pyroclastic flow.
  • The dinosaurs fell off a large cliff, and falling at a sufficient height (which in turn creates a sufficiently lethal falling velocity) can make it deadly to impact the water. Essentially the water becomes, for all intents and purposes, a solid surface against which bones will break and organs will rupture. This is why, sadly, suicides from large suspension bridges are usually successful (even if the fall itself doesn't kill you, if you break one or more limbs then good luck swimming to safety without someone somehow managing to lifeguard you out). Now, some dinosaur species may be hardier than humans, but not all species, and for those which survived the impact? Their continued survival would depend on a) their swimming skills b) not subsequently getting struck by the volcanic rocks getting launched into the water and c) managing to swim to part of the island which isn't getting swept under the lava flow (or even more unlikely, a neighbouring island either unaffected or less affected by the eruption) and then having sufficient vegetation/prey species to be able to subsist on. So, it's unlikely that any not rescued by the ship managed to survive.

Migrating pterosaurs

• Why didn't the pterosaurs all just fly away after they escaped? Why are they still hanging out on an island that has long threatened to explode?
  • No understanding of the volcano given no experience with such things up to that point and plentiful food still available at viable nesting grounds. Much more dangerous to leave and fly an uncertain distance to another place that may or may not exist.
  • Some of them probably have flown away during the past two years. The movie just didn't address them because the ones that made it to land elsewhere were probably shot as a danger to humans.
  • Apart from if they reached other uninhabited islands, of course. Also, it's likely that as some of the dinosaurs with the most explicit links with birds, they regularly migrated to and from the island as a matter of course.

We all die in a yellow submarine...

• Why does the extraction team in the intro bother with a full-sized submersible when using a ROV would've been easier, safer and cheaper? Not to mention that they're legitimately Too Dumb to Live for going in without checking that the Lagoon is indeed safe.
  • There was a storm there, I bet they didn't want to waste time with a machine that might fail any second in this weather.
  • It's also explicitly stated that they assumed the Mosasaurus was dead of starvation by now.

The incredible Mosasaurus diet plan

• How does the Mosasaurus survive for four years without food? Granted, reptiles can go for months without feeding due to their lower metabolisms, but four years is a bit of a stretch.
  • Maybe she just ate the I. rex really slowly. Or perhaps ambushed pterosaurs that came too close to the water surface.
  • It's in a giant body of water. With the fences banged up it can probably pick off animals that are trying to drink or those that are just wandering close enough.
  • Though if it's salt water, it's unlikely any dinosaurs would drink there. Perhaps some fish can swim through the damaged gates and within chomping range?
  • Simple answer is this: in the previous film, we saw that Mosasaurus was perfectly capable of jumping out of the water to eat low-flying Pteranodons, similar to the way a Great White can leap from the water. That's probably been their main food source.
  • Or just plain seagulls, for that matter. No shortage of them.
  • Predation on large herbivores that flock to the lagoon unaware it was salt water until after the fact, flying dinos hunting fish in its area, the automated feeder until it ran out of food to dispense, and the occasional stray predator that also wandered too close to the water's edge.
  • Word of God states that the beginning portion with the Mosasaurus escape only takes place a few weeks after the last film but that just raises the question on how nobody found the 60ft Sea Monster swimming in open waters until recently, something that large should at least show up on sonar.
  • The intakes for seawater probably allow curious sharks, bony fishes, turtles and seals from the surrounding ocean to enter the Lagoon, not realising it's home to something that can gulp down a Great White whole. There wouldn't have to be many, just a few every month or two.
• Even without the Word of God time skip it's not much of a stretch to say that Jurassic World dinos can hibernate if Jurassic Park dinos can gender bend.
• The fourth Season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous confirms the Mosasaurus escaped around six months after the collapse of the park. Ignoring the possibility of any automated feeders, the campers could have thrown some food into the lagoon occasionally and she had the Indominus remains to keep her going for a while and may have also grabbed the occasional stray pterosaur that got too close. For comparison, Humpback Whales can go 6 months without food and modern Crocodiles can go 1 or 2 years in extreme cases without feeding by going into hibernation, which the Mosasaurus may have done as mentioned above.

Freeing the pterosaurs

• Since Claire could choose which cages she opened, why did she release the pterosaurs as well? The other dinos pose only a minimal threat in a local area, so they could be released somewhat safely, but the pterosaurs flew all the way to Vegas within a few days! And they have a history of killing people, so if would have been more sensible to let the pterosaurs die as they posed the greatest public risk.
  • She wasn't concerned about which specific species should be saved. She was concerned that the dinosaurs are being suffocated by poison gas and they should be released from their confinement.
  • Also note that pterosaurs had been visiting locations far from the islands even before the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Releasing a handful now would not do much more damage.
  • The bigger question is, why didn't she just open the exterior door to vent the gas, rather than open the cages at all? True, the ventilation system ensures this happens faster and more safely, but it likely would've prevented the animals from being fatally poisoned, and still kept confined from populated areas.
    • The gas was drifting very, very slowly, and staying low. Just opening the doors wouldn't have let it all drain away without the fans working.
  • If I recall correctly, Franklin and Zia had to restart the system but they still failed to do something about the ventilation system, so it's possible that part of the system wasn't up, yet. I guess it just boils down to they weren't thinking, if that isn't the case.

Is the Indoraptor worth it?

• What can the Indoraptor do that a human soldier can't for a fraction of the price?
  • Kill without guilt, work for free provided it's fed, exercise far greater physical attributes then a human, and be entirely replaceable if it gets itself killed. Deployed in large numbers they could easily Zerg Rush most human targets that the United States military would end up deploying them against. Unlike human soldiers, you don't have to care for their welfare beyond keeping them alive, or provide compensation of any kind both while they're in service or if they die.
  • Heightened senses plus enhanced strength, speed, and flexibility, but honestly, Dr. Malcolm, Claire, Owen, and Lockwood had came to an agreement and say humans are stupid.
    • Every single one of those advantages is lost by an overall lack of control and vulnerability to firearms (and, if necessary, anti-tank rounds), same as a human. The lack of control is a sign there's no reason ANYONE should EVER come up with this idea again.
    • Dr. Wu noted this himself as a reason why the Indoraptor is a failed experiment. He wanted to fix the control problem, which would indeed leave you with a terrifying military weapon. A controllable Indoraptor is a mostly bullet proof murder machine, and could be further augmented by armour plating and quite possibly it's own long ranged weaponry.
    • Wouldn't it be smarter to try to add those same qualities (heightened senses + enhanced strength, speed and flexibility) into the human genome? Create superior human beings/humanoids, instead of superior dinosaurs that need to be controlled by a human handler. Considering the wonders they can already do with their very advanced genetic science, doing this doesn't sound like being of out their reach.
    • Yes it would be smarter but the bad guys are short-sighted dinosaur obsessed morons.
    • Actually it wouldn't, because it'd take 18 years for an enhanced human to reach the age of military service, and you'd have no guarantee they'd be willing to enlist when they do. This isn't a Verse where you can easily augment existing lifeforms (other than the already-modified ones you have in the form of dinosaurs), you have to start from scratch.
    • Plus there's also the fact that people tend to get rather uppity when you clone humans, that makes a lot of people their enemy just on principle.
  • Perhaps, a better question would be what purpose Indoraptor could serve that can't be done more effectively by well-armed and trained soldiers. If your goal is simply wiping out everything alive in a certain area, Indoraptor's only advantage over bombs seems to be being more ecology-friendly (that is, they don't destroy trees, insects, etc).
    • The reason why armies don't just bomb the crap out of everything is because they don't want excessive collateral damage. A military commander could just sic an Indoraptor on an enemy base so they can kill the soldiers while leaving the enemy supplies intact and without expending his/her own troops.
    • That, and the fact that eyes on the target can confirm if it's a kill or if it survived.
    • What if the Indoraptor just starts biting into non-combatants or wrecking the supplies? Unless they train it to the point where it's a drone with knives it's never gonna be a clean plan to throw in a wild animal and hope for the best. And if it is trained that way just send a drone with knives, it's less likely to qualify as a war crime if caught.
    • That was actually stated in the film - the Indoraptor was genetically flawed and completely untrainable... which was why they needed Blue in the first place, both to use her DNA to stabilise the genome and to give them a parental figure to imprint upon. But I think we’re missing the main point here, the Indoraptor is the most inefficient and rubbish weapon the army has ever come up with. It’s a dinosaur that attacks a target when you shine a laser on it and make a specific sound. To take each objection in turn:
• You need to have the dinosaur within visual range of the target. If it can’t see the laser on the person it won’t attack.
• Following on from that, the dinosaur has to be in close proximity to the target. This is not discreet, a large dinosaur is noticeable. The target will be warned of an attack.
• Even if the target somehow misses the dinosaur, a laser light shone on someone’s chest will definitely be a sign of danger, alerting them.
• The Indoraptor does not understand stealth. Or silent assassination. Everyone in earshot will know something has gone down due to screams. A lot of screams.

So it is utterly useless for sneak assassinations. But what about a regular attack?

• A laser is line of sight. If somebody hides behind a rock, or is in a cave, or even just inside a building and not right next to a window, you cannot mark them with the laser and they are completely safe from Indoraptor.
• Lasers and high pitched noises are not that uncommon. There is a large potential for tragedy here.
• Lasers and high pitched noises are very easy to replicate. Without even owning an Indoraptor, if the enemy builds a laserlight and adds the noise then the raptor will turn against its masters.
• The Indoraptor may be immune to bullets, but it is not immune to explosions. As it is a friggin dinosaur, people will notice it. The enemy could just shoot it from afar or set up some bombs or landmines or send someone to throw a few grenades at it.

But if you decide to use it anyway and get past all those obstacles the Indoraptor is still pretty flawed.

• What happens if the target gets in a helicopter? If the Indoraptor is designed to chase a target until it's dead and the target can move quickly (possibly in those incredibly rare items known as cars) then you’ve lost your raptor. Now it can be shot or captured and turned against you.
• The Indoraptor does not understand the phrase ‘Collateral Damage’ or ‘Hostage’. I foresee a lot of pointless deaths of innocent people simply standing in the way.
• A creature designed for hunting down people in hostile locations has night eyesight comparable to a human and a terrible sense of smell. This seems like a bad choice.
• How does the Indoraptor recognise its target? Does it understand changing clothes? Or colouring your hair? It doesn’t hunt via scent so that’s out, and I don’t think dinosaurs recognise modern fashion.

But in a perfect situation where you have managed to (somehow) sneak your raptor past any guards and security, point your laser at the target without anyone noticing either the light or you pointing a gun shaped object at them all while maintaining close enough distance so the raptor can see the target then there is still one reeeaaaaallllyyy big objection to using a raptor. Why not just use a bloody gun in the first place??? Guns are smaller, quieter, less noticeable, easy to disguise, sneaky, cheap; unlikely to turn on you and can be thrown away. In every possible scenario that an Indoraptor could be useful, a gun would be ten thousand times better.

• We are not shown the end product, just a prototype. Presumably the target would be painted much farther away for instance and as someone else mentioned this setup could potentially replace a military dog and it's handler.
  • So genetically engineer a freakin' killer dog, if that's what you want an upgrade for. Better sense of smell, familiar body language, 1000% more trainable. And it's gotta be a hell of a lot cheaper using mastiff bitches as surrogates than incubating synthetic eggs.
    • First off, given the overall theme in this franchise, that would mean cloning dire wolves, which, on the face of it, would actually make more sense - more easily obtainable DNA (dire wolf DNA has actually been obtained from subfossils), with domestic dogs as a viable "gap-filler" (with the plus that it would lead to increased trainability) and a higher likelihood of success. However, the problem with using giant-breed dogs (e.g. mastiffs) as surrogates isn't obtaining them - it's replacing them. Mastiffs don't live very long (7 years) - and should be stopped breeding at about 5. That basically gives a pretty small time window (2-3 years) to have a viable dire wolf litter - either synthetic eggs or unfertilised crocodile/ostrich eggs are much easier to obtain and replace. As well as this... why obtain subfossil DNA from dire wolves when you have DNA from living (or recently dead) dinosaurs at hand?
  • It seems the Indoraptor wouldn't have been far off being able to stealthily hunt and kill targets, given how it stalked Maisie. Also, if there's a concern about a handler having to be dangerously close to aim the laser, perhaps it could be mounted on the Indoraptor itself (on the head, or somewhere where it couldn't notice or scratch it off) and remotely triggered. Or, just get a small and hard to notice drone, like in the guise of a small bird, to aim the laser.

• AND ALL OF YOU ARE MISSING THE ULTIMATE POINT OF THE WHOLE THING! Didn't ANYONE noticed how DEADLY the Indoraptor was INDOORS? That's the true use of it. Don't waste it outside. Use it inside, where (depending on the building) it's prey has next-to-no-chance of escaping.
  • Nobody is missing the point, the problem is that is a terrible idea. First off, where and how are you going to get it indoors someplace that it would be useful? Real world combat does not usually take place in spacious mansions, it takes place outdoors. Most buildings are far too small and tight for the Indoraptor to be of much use, and to get to any buildings it will have to either run towards them or somehow be dropped off at one. And since most buildings have multiple exit points (especially if you are in a panic) it's easy to escape simply by running out a room. And finally, there is no way that thing is invulnerable to explosions. All it takes is one well placed mine to blow up tens of millions of dollars. In short the Indoraptor is a terrible weapon for any real world combat scenario and it would be more useful (and cheaper) to have well trained soldiers instead. Maybe give them some mutated dogs that could serve as elite K9 units.
    • Actually, raptors would be useful in quite a few situations - say, flushing a large number of hostiles out of a tunnel system or claustrophobic urban environment. Tanks can't travel through that and bullets and explosives are pretty much useless (and the enemy knows this too) - a pack of trained raptors who understand the difference between kill and subdue would actually be quite useful. Basically, any military would rather have bog-standard raptors than the Indoraptor we saw - for the setup we saw in the film, a human sniper could do the job much more efficiently.

  • The Indoraptor was far from a finished product - it was a proof-of-concept that was the best thing Wu had come up with at that point. It was smart enough to be taught a single trick (thus, proving that it could be controlled to an extent), and as we saw, it was legitimately dangerous, taking out multiple armed guards with frightening ease. However, it wasn't intended as anything more than another step on a road that would lead to something bigger and better. It was initially displayed as an advertisement intended to keep a few ears open to hear what would come next, and then Mills got greedy when a few rich, violent assholes decided they liked it as it was.

  • Hoskins pointed out the primary reason to use dinosaurs as a base for their attack animals in the previous movie. They are extinct, which means that they have no rights. Neglect or abuse of animals is a crime in many countries, and they are not considered 'property' in the same way as your boots or your couch. The genetically engineered dinosaurs, in the Jurassic Park/World setting, are.
  • Well, the deliberations of Congress and other national governments in this film and the next might change the dinosaurs' legal status.

"Get the shotgun, Ma, we got dinosaurs in the crops!"

• With a forced Bittersweet Ending, how would the world cope with dinosaurs running amok?
  • With automatic weapons, tanks, and helicopter gunships if it comes to that.
  • Honestly, it's not that big a deal. Only the I. rex and derivatives are immune to large caliber firearms, and most of them are still animals and not all that smart.
  • You guys would be surprised to find out how difficult it can be to get rid of an invasive species once it's established in the wild. Governments worldwide have wasted fortunes in futile attempts to do so. But it depends on the species, really. Some are easier to kill. We got rid of wolves, but coyotes only got smarter and tougher the more we killed them, and even profited from us and spread to the areas we had cleansed of wolves. The larger, slower reproducing species like Tyrannosaurus rex would in fact be by far the easiest to deal with, because they're pretty easy to find and target. But if Blue manages to reproduce asexually — as her genetic makeup foreshadows — and her offspring get a foothold in the North American nature, it will be a tough job trying to eradicate them.
    • Honestly the comparison to invasive species wouldn't apply to any but the smallest dinosaurs. In reality no large animals in history have proven immune to eradication in developed areas (indeed the opposite is true, they tend to be the first to go); it's the small ones like insects and rodents that are fairly futile to get rid of thanks to their ability to hide in so many spaces, reproduce rapidly, benefit from human-made habitats, etc. Even coyotes are not exactly "large" by human standards. Where large animals do survive in suburbs and such, its due to them not being very dangerous/there not being enough desire in the populace to get rid of them.
    • Not to mention that the vast majority of the rescued dinosaurs consist of a single specimen. Unless they're all pregnant already, it's only the Compys and maybe that ceratopsian that had a baby with it which might breed.
  • Blue, it seems, will actively keep her distance from vehicles, but logically most of the released dinosaurs will be fairly easy to gun down or capture if they enter developed areas, even factoring in how the dinosaurs often behave more like monsters than animals.
  • To be fair, they will probably try and hunt down the more "dangerous" species such as the Rex and the Carno, probably won't find Blue as she is small and will probably stick to woodlands, the Mosasaurus will definitly be hunted down if it snacks on some surfers. Some of the more aggressive herbivores will either be hunted or relocated (think about how much a set of horns from a Trike will fetch from a trophy collector) but those that are calmer and gentler (as gentle as a dino can be), things like a Brachy and a para will probably be left alone or again relocated after capture. The dinos are off the island and are now more endangered than ever, public support will probably ramp up to protect the few left, though Roberta (the Rex) might be captured by the government after they find out that Dr. Wu is now essentially creating Hybrid Monster weapons rather than dinos for an amusement park.
  • A lot of the fallout was addressed in the next movie, Dominion.

How can he smirk?

• Played for Laughs, yes, but how does the Indoraptor smirk maliciously? How does he have such a humanlike reaction, almost a sense of humour in fact, and with his bony crocodilian face even manage a facial expression?
  • It's not the raptor DNA? Beyond fan theories of course, is the simple fact that it's sentient and scarily intuitive, and thus would quickly pick up the mannerisms of the creatures it sees the most. If it can physically manage the facial expression, it would use it.
  • Simple. Rule of Cool.
  • Human DNA may have been included in its makeup for greater reasoning skills, socialisation instincts, and better developed tool using hands. As a side effect it developed the basic facial musculature for simple expressions and thanks to the socialisation instincts one hell of a sadist streak that actively enjoyed causing pain.
  • More likely, something like dog DNA was added in an effort to make it more trainable. No need to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's part-human just because it's got mammalian facial muscles: after all, adding "human" to the combo is just as likely to afflict it with human liabilities like blunt nails or flimsy skin if we're talking LEGO Genetics here.
  • Simple anthropomorphism. The characters auctioning off this dinosaur are trying to sell the idea that the Indoraptor is the biggest, baddest, most vicious dinosaur available, and Big Bads tend to have evil smirks.

"They're in the lift, in the lorry, in the bond wizard, and all over the malonga gilderchuck!"

• How are dinosaurs going to take over the planet? There's one specimen per species (with the possible exception of pterodactyls), meaning they won't be able to procreate.
  • Are you sure about that? We've already seen a parent Triceratops with a baby along with a small colony of Compsognathus. Just because we saw one of eleven or more species when they escape on screen, doesn't mean that's the entirety of them. And if the San Diego Incident in The Lost World is anything to go by, it's a Foregone Conclusion that those dinosaurs that were shipped off will lead to their kind spreading.

• Especially as some of the ones that were shipped off are likely to be cloned by various shady groups, as would any that get recaptured. And, much like in the first film, this will likely be done without controls or consideration for the preventative measures Jurassic World had to prevent dinosaur proliferation. Additionally, Wu is still out there with DNA samples, and life will, as always, find a way.
• Dr. Malcolm was probably just jumping to conclusions. They're never shown nor is it even implied that they're causing widespread damage. It'll be answered in the next movie anyway.
• Already in the previous movie's promotional material it was revealed that Blue has in her genes from a specific lizard species. Fans did some research and found out the species in question can reproduce asexually in a single-sex environment. Considering that the first movie was written with the whole trilogy already in mind, it's possible if not likely that this bit was put in as a Chekhov's Gun. Apart from the Velociraptor species, the other escapees could well be mostly symbolic. The most significant breakout isn't the dinosaurs getting out in the world, it's the technology getting out.
• Indeed, it turns out in Dominion that Blue is able to reproduce (as a single parent with no male involved) and have a baby which is essentially a clone of herself, due to those specific species of lizard genes in her own DNA.
• Technically I agree - humans are incredibly good at killing things and bringing things to extinction - look at us wiping out entire species with only a few humans trying to. There's only eleven species and a few of each of them. Those dinosaurs are going to be captured rapidly for various uses - but suggesting they're going to breed and survive is ridiculous.

"The air is different, the solar radiation is different, the land is different..."

• Tying into the above, how will the dinosaurs even survive on their own? The park was set up on a specially selected island intended to mimic the conditions they were adapted to survive in. Those conditions obviously don't exist in Northern California (where Lockwood Manor is). Shouldn't a lot of them die from the cold? It also seems like some of the species are too big or too metabolically-active to find sufficient food for themselves in an environment that wasn't specially prepared for them.
  • They have DNA from other species, they are not pure dinosaurs and, life, uh, finds a way. They have shown the animals to be able to adapt to different conditions in a whim. Artistic License – Biology aside, they should be able to adapt to the climate or able to get to places with better climates for them.
  • Plus Wu has had many years to practice his work and has long since given up any pretension of recreating "real" dinosaurs. He probably makes a few additions or alterations at the conceptual stage to make the new dinos more viable and survivable in modern conditions, enough that they could probably survive in less than ideal circumstances - especially if he's been contemplating auctioning them off for any length of time.
    • No "probably" about it. In Jurassic World he specifically lists certain survival traits that he included in the I-rex.

Hypocritical much, Hammond?

• Why would Hammond get on Lockwood's case about using the cloning technology to revive his daughter when he himself developed the technology and was, in fact, planning on using it to revive extinct species for a theme park?
  • For similar reasons why scientists IRL haven't cloned humans, as the subject opens up a can of interdimensional hyper-mutant fire ants, or, in simpler terms, has more ethical and legal ramifications and concerns, whereas cloning extinct animals doesn't, rather, have as many. To further break it down, since he called cloning Lockwood's daughter an "unholy thing", Hammond took Lockwood's use of the tech to be "playing God" in a way that cloning the dinosaurs isn't.

Prime ribs

• Why is there so much focus on that one chunk of I. rex rib? The rib that got stepped on is possibly still usable. How thoroughly will bone marrow be obliterated by one brief dino stomp? For all we know, the rib just got pressed into the ground and not even particularly damaged. And the rest of the skeleton is still right where they left it.
  • Well, the guy who planned on using it for nefarious purposes got eaten, so that's a plus...
  • And the island the skeleton was on exploded so that is almost certainly destroyed.
  • That rib had a pissed off nine-to-ten ton T. rex stomp on it as she told the Carnotaurus to shove off and find her own kill... there's very little information you can get from powder.
  • More importantly, the casing the rib was housed inside was surely intended to preserve the purity of its marrow's DNA. Given how Wu freaked at the news that Blue's blood had been contaminated by the T. rex blood transfusion, it's very likely that the rib's remaining tissues are hopelessly spoiled by ground-in skin flakes from Rexy's foot. And even if it isn't, it'll have hours to get spoiled by scavenging ants and so forth before anyone comes looking for it.
    • In short, it was meant to be a Red Herring.

The tooth hurts

• Do you think Wheatley took a tooth from Blue...?
  • Why do you think Blue eat those mercenaries' faces after gotten out.
  • Given that Blue's personal vet was with her the entire time, I highly doubt that she'd let the guy anywhere near her for any reason. As for Blue eating the faces of the mercs off... well... do not threaten, intimidate, or look at anyone Blue has respect for negatively.
  • Translation: Blue was thinking "I remember each and every one of your faces and I'm going to chomp them off".

Auction shenanigans

• When crashing the auction, Owen rips some electrical stuff out of the floor. Was he disabling the Indoraptor's cage? Why?
  • He wanted to prevent the Indoraptor from getting out of the mansion. If it was pulled back, the freight elevator could have sent it up to shipping, where it would be sent for delivery to its buyer. He just didn't count on Wheatley grabbing the idiot ball and opening the door to a highly dangerous animal that wasn't properly restrained.
  • He was disabling the mechanism to send the cage back into the elevator, so the Indoraptor would be stuck in the cage in that room until they could come back and deal with it. But again, he didn't count on Wheatley being a Too Dumb to Live Spanner in the Works.

"How does your dinosaur smell?" "Terrible!"

• I thought the Indoraptor tracked by smell. How does turning off the lights help you hide from it? If anything, since it's clearly very stealthy, wouldn't you want enough light to keep it visible, so you know where it is?
  • The Indoraptor tracking by smell seems to be an Informed Ability. Otherwise, how to explain the scene beforehand when the Indoraptor is tricked a la Looney Tunes by just moving alongside it around the Triceratops skull? It seems to rely on hearing and sight.
  • At the point where the lights went off, they were on the other side of plate glass in a diorama of dinosaur behaviour. It isn't like it would have been able to smell them directly nor with its size follow their trail directly. Furthermore, it's likely that with its faulty genes leading to breathing issues the Indoraptor couldn't fully make use of its enhanced sense of smell.
  • From what it looked like, the Indoraptor was more dependent on its sight and hearing (goes after something red and is shrill), thus, while his sense of smell would be good, he's not dependent on it.
  • Alternately, the Indoraptor could smell them the whole time. It knew where they were. It knew what they smelled like. It didn't kill them instantly because he's a sadistic monster that was toying with them the whole time.
  • (This also goes along with three points above) In all the movies I've seen that a dog tracks a person, the dog is given a piece of that person's clothing; presumably this is the human handler telling the dog "look for this" and the dog understanding which smell its looking for. There might have been other smells going on in that room too; Maisie and Iris were in there earlier as were Eli and Eversol. Or more. Maisie's smell is probably all over. The Indoraptor may have to figure out which scents are what, how old, and lead where. Tracking dogs can be tricked and it's also possible that the Indoraptor's sense of smell wasn't trained (well) because this was a prototype and they wanted to show off with the gun to the auctioneers.
  • There is also the possibility that due to the fact that it was a degenerated creature and it seems to have the dino equivalent of asthma, that its much touted sense of smell had degraded too. All the great features the Indo was supposed to have, were in fact what the next generation of Indoraptors would have, seeing as they seemed to think using Blue would sort out all the crap wrong with Indo. Essentially Indo was the showroom model, great to look at but not fully functional, the next generation would look somewhat the same but have all the special features.

Auction shenanigans, cont'd.

• Why did they choose to have the Auction of Evil in Lockwood's house? It seems like they were honestly hoping they could pull it off without the owner noticing, or at least Lockwood's death appears to be something Eli was forced to improvise. Isn't there any other location they could have done it? Why not on the sanctuary island the animals were supposed to be going to in the first place?
  • Well, probably because the mansion is the only place that has the equipment and installations to manage a bunch of dinosaurs. They also transported the dinosaurs in the middle of the night to the mansion, and we don't know how far the sanctuary island is. For all we know, the island doesn't have installations to store the dinosaurs seeing how honest Lockwood appeared to be about the "dinosaurs needing our absence" thing.
  • You also assume the sanctuary island actually exists. Lockwood doesn't seem to have the good health to follow up on everything. That whole part could have been faked to keep him pacified while planning the capture and sale of the dinosaurs.
  • Most importantly, they held the auction at the house so Mills could show off Wu's new Indoraptor that'd been created in the lab underneath the mansion. He hadn't originally intended to sell the thing at the time, but he was certainly determined to advertise it for future sales. And given how vicious and unmanageable the damned "prototype" specimen had turned out to be, Mills probably figured it was safer bringing the other dinosaurs to it than taking it anywhere else.

Dino relocation

• Shouldn't Claire and Owen realise that Lockwood's dinosaur relocation scheme can't possibly work? Eli points out that transporting endangered animals is illegal. So they'd have to do it totally in secret to avoid going to prison, and just sort of hope that nobody ever goes onto Dinosaur Sanctuary Island.
  • What's the world going to do? Ship in soldiers and gun down the last surviving dinosaurs or lock up what amounts to a group of conservationists? Not likely, public support was already shifting in favour of saving the dinosaurs and it's not certain that they count as endangered species given the grey area as to their status. They seem to be falling somewhere between property and animals with rights already.
    • To answer some of this, while the ESA states it's illegal to transport them, there are exceptions to that rule, otherwise, you wouldn't have too many animals in a zoo. In simple enough terms, it's illegal to transport them without proper permits. However, legally, as mentioned here, the dinosaurs and their rescue falls more in the realm of Loophole Abuse.

Manpower

• Apart from a general veterinarian and a computer guy, the only specialist that Lockwood's group calls in is Owen, to track down Blue. Didn't any of the other species in Jurassic World have special trainers or behavioural scientists? Trainers that Lockwood would have wanted to call in?
  • One Riot, One Ranger. Also, apparently Blue is the only successful model of imprinting a human onto a Velociraptor. The other dinosaurs don't matter as much, as seen with how many were left to die on the island.
  • Maybe the other staff you asked about were either killed in the Jurassic World collapse, or refused to intervene if they were traumatised by the event (not to mention wary of the dangers associated with free-roaming dinos, an imminent volcanic eruption and having to work with a mercenary group which you probably can't vet to see if they're trustworthy).

Dinosaur veterinary college is a prestigious institution...

• How does one become a paleo-veterinarian without ever seeing a dinosaur? Wouldn't you need to take a practical exam to earn those credentials?
  • Same way a person becomes a regular veterinarian, textbooks and classes on the biology of your focus. She had an internship all set up at Jurassic World but then the park closed, so she might not even be fully licensed now.
  • The same way Zia was able to work out the position of the circulatory system of a live Velociraptor and a transfusion between two totally different species was possible at all.
  • It's more than a little suspicious that Lockwood didn't bring in any of the dozens of large animal/exotic vets and vet techs that would've been previously employed at Jurassic World. Considering how long Jurassic World was in operation, it wouldn't be surprising if some of them wanted to save the animals they once worked with and grew emotionally attached to. Not bringing on any of these experienced professionals should've immediately been a red flag to anyone involved in the rescue operation.
  • Counter that with the part in the previous folder about how a combination of some of them being dead, some of them suffering PTSD from the Jurassic World collapse, and yet some others being wary of the mission's undeniable risks may limit the chance to recruit previous staff for it. Presumably those they did manage to recruit would be understanding of that, given it was hard enough to drag Owen back, himself.
  • From a logistical standpoint, one inexperienced veterinarian wouldn't be nearly enough to do the job, either. It usually takes a whole veterinary team to work on a single large animal, be it a horse or Stegosaurus.
  • A lot of the "popular" dinosaurs (i.e. Velociraptor and T. rex) are, as that one kid from the first film put it, "Six-foot turkeys". We know that the skeletal systems of theropod dinosaurs weren't too different from modern birds, so the vascular systems may be similar as well — hell, there's a possibility that their circulatory systems and such may have been modified to be closer to modern animals because nobody knew how to treat a sick dinosaur when the park came online.
  • Zia managed to do a sufficiently good job on Blue by using that knowledge of the shared biology between dinos and birds and also having the rest of the team help (by obtaining T-Rex blood and "I need you to apply pressure here", that kind of thing.

Sliding doors

• When did Mills close the sliding door of his van at the end? He opens it, then turns and reacts to the onrushing stampede and hides underneath it. After the stampede is over, he crawls out from under the van and the sliding door is closed. Sliding doors aren't like regular car doors and I think it'd be harder for all the dinosaurs jostling against the vehicle to slide it closed again.
  • Rich man with automated sliding doors, they already exist and often work on a timer.

Other islands

• Why are Isla Sorna and Site B never mentioned once? Especially in the context of a need for alternate refuge for the surviving dinosaurs?
  • The additional material in the Dinosaur Protection Group page reveals that all the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna have died out and the ones that survived were transported to Isla Nublar between movies.
  • Why would that preclude using the island itself, even if only temporarily? And if the above is true, the fact that there are previous dinosaur transport protocols available makes the decision not to move them there even worse.
  • The "sanctuary island" plan that Lockwood thought he was financing wasn't just to move the dinosaurs, it was to move them somewhere nobody would find them until the legal question of their status as worthy of preservation could be settled and saving them would no longer be considered a crime.
    • Mills does mention Sorna once when he takes Claire to Lockwood's private "museum" and tells her the manor was the place where Hammond and Lockwood began their de-extinction experiments, "before Isla Sorna and Jurassic Park/Isla Nublar" IIRC. That said, the Dinosaur Protection Group site claims that the introduction of certain invasive species (namely, the new dinos we saw in Jurassic Park III) caused Sorna's ecosystem to suffer an imbalance, so maybe that's why they decided that moving the dinosaurs to Sorna wasn't a good plan.
  • Sorna was likely taken off the table fairly early as a relocation option by Claire and Lockwood because the only two places on Earth that the dinosaurs are known to be found are on Nublar and, based off the DPG information, formerly on Sorna. It had to be an unknown island and could not be somewhere that anyone with the desire and resources to steal the dinosaurs (as Mills is revealed to be) would think to look.

Kind of defeats the entire purpose of a cage

• Why are the bars in the Indoraptor's cage wide enough for him to stick his arms through?
  • Showmanship and uncertainty of how big it would get, the Indominus after all turned out much larger then expected. They painted a do not cross line on the floor which is consistent with normal safety procedure for dealing with predatory animals.
  • Still, you could always move the beast from that cage to a more appropriately narrow-barred one once you knew the auction was imminent and (obviously) safety would be important.

"Open the lagoon bay doors..."

• Why does closing the gate to the Mosasaurus lagoon require a constant signal? My garage door won't stop closing just because I destroyed the remote, so why should this be any different?
  • It's probably intended for the opening procedure to keep some idiot from flipping a switch that releases a giant ocean predator than being unable to close it before the thing gets out. If you have the system set up so that the procedure requires someone to constantly send the signal to mess with the gate it limits the possibility of accidental release. But someone set it up so the constant signal requirement goes both ways, requiring it both to open AND close the tank, rather than program around the possibility of an interrupted signal at the worst possible time. Once again, in the rush to get things done, Jurassic World got sloppy.

Honest Ed's Used Dinosaurs

• Why are the dinosaurs being auctioned off for such tiny amounts? The Indoraptor sells for only about $25 million, for God's sake! It's a frickin' dinosaur, it should be going for at least 9 figure amounts! Hell, association football players get transferred for more than these extremely rare creatures get auctioned for! For the non-association football fans: Neymar da Silva Santos Jr. has been transferred for a whopping $260 million.
  • Genetics research can be extremely expensive, as any university scientist or graduate student that's even remotely connected to the genetics department can tell you. The winning $25 million bid would barely cover the very first phase of research costs involved in the creation of any dinosaur, let alone a novel hybrid like the Indominus rex or Indoraptor. In Real Life, you'd be looking at a winning bid in the high hundreds of millions, at the very least.
  • Because Eli was looking to make a quick buck from the sale. Many of those looking to turn the dinos into living weapons would likely have hundreds of millions in the bank as it is, and are basically buying low, to sell high. Keep in mind, that as long as Wu is around, they can make more dinos under the nose of the public to sell later, and potentially make them to-order. They're basically not selling an endangered species, they're selling the first batch.
  • Kinda like how illegal drugs can boost in price exponentially as they pass from dealer to dealer going down the supply chain, especially if the early elements in the chain want to get rid of them and fast.
  • Same reason the park was falling off visitors (although it felt more telling than showing), dinosaurs genes are old news. People probably can do some themselves but Wu or Hammond has the Jurassic Park genes patented, so you have to buy that stuff illegally or take a cheap knock-off by a rival genetic engineering team.
  • Alright but does this really mean that these rare creatures are worth way less than football stars? Because that still sounds dopey. Plus, isn't Eli super loaded, anyways — what does he need that money for so desperately? That California mansion was worth more than the dinosaurs combined, I bet.
    • Possibly the auction attendees were bidding low on the less-spectacular animals because they were holding back the big bucks to bid on Rexy.
  • Because if the dinosaurs were to cost 9 or 10 figures each, then the audience is going to think that the total box office revenue for this movie might be weak in comparison to the total payout for all dinosaurs combined. Universal Pictures knows that a Jurassic World movie can only gross around the low 10-figures at best, and they don't want the audience getting a bad impression of their finances.
    • This might be the stupidest take I've ever read.
    • Yeah, like, what does that have to do with anything? Or should we associate all financial figures in any fictional movie with the amount of gross their movie ended up making? What sense does that make, even if it's a joke?
• There's also something to be said for technological progression, the next generation with niftier features would be snapped up by early adopters at wonkier prices.

Carnotaurus aggression

• Why is the Carnotaurus such an asshole? She seems to pick a fight with everything she can see, even when running from a volcano and even a much larger carnivore that already proved it could kick her ass.
  • Dinorabies.
  • Exaggerated predatory features for the park resulting in ramped up aggression just like the Indominous rex. Like Wu said in the first movie you can't just increase the size of teeth and claws without affecting the related hormonal triggers for aggressive behavioru.
  • Because it honestly feels like they took every opportunity they could to rip on Dinosaur and its inaccurate version. Didn't it? Its not just me?
  • Could be she didn't have a bite in days or weeks. Looks like she's struggling to get meat for herself.
  • Right. Rexy telling her "get your own kill" is the equivalent of a lion saying the same to a hyena. The Carno is not an apex predator, and that will be upsetting for her.

Sickly Indoraptor

• What is the respiratory illness that the Indoraptor has? I never noticed anything off about its breathing, so it isn't very obvious, yet it is a fact something is wrong with it.
  • It's not an illness per say but a genetic defect. Wu was working with old samples of Velociraptor DNA and mixed with the modifications, there were side effects that created unexpected problems with a lot of its biology. The plan was to make a second generation using Blue as a genetic source to fill in gaps where the samples he still had degraded to the point of not working properly.
  • The Indoraptor seems to be suffering from a neurological degradation, if you look at when it moves, it is almost constantly having twitches and spasms, as though its nervous system isn't getting the right signals through. That could have affected the lungs' ability to breathe correctly.

Claire's redemption

• Why does Claire suddenly care about dinosaurs so much in this movie? In the previous one, she viewed them as essentially profit numbers, and her experiences through it don't quite explain the change. I can get her becoming more empathetic with herbivores, but predators? 'Now I'm going to dedicate my life to saving these beings, who nearly ate me and my nephews and killed a bunch of people, including some I knew personally' doesn't quite sound like the most natural character evolution.
  • It seemed natural to me. Over the course of the last film, she witnessed the dying moments of an Apatosaurus, and the distinction between Hoskins' cruelty getting him killed by Delta and Owen's kindness towards Blue getting the raptors back on their side. She's come to see what Owen sees: these are living, breathing creatures that deserve respect, and they will be as kind to us as we are to them. Further underlining this is the fact that she herself was partially responsible for the Indominus rex being such a psycho (thinking of it as more an asset than a living creature), something that has likely weighed on her mind for several years. I'll grant that Claire's arc isn't the most smoothly written, but it does at least follow an internal logic.
  • She's also the one who aimed Rexy at the I. rex. The hands-down most fearsome and dangerous predator ever to walk the Earth saved her, her nephews', and her boyfriend's asses when worst came to worst. That's bound to instill some respect and admiration for the dinosaurs as a whole. And if you want to get Fridgey, one of Claire's big personality traits is responsibility. It manifests mostly in the previous film as negatively portrayed workaholicness and dismissiveness to the little things, because she feels it's her responsibility to keep the park open and making money, and she has her eye on that ball. Once she realises her nephews are missing, she takes the responsibility on herself to find them and bring them back safely, refusing to let Owen leave her behind even though she's tromping through the jungle in high heels. Once the park is closed and Masrani (the company, that is) is probably going bankrupt dealing with the fallout, it makes sense that she considers the dinosaurs themselves her responsibility, since nobody else is.

The Trouble with Tranquilisation

• "As far as anyone knows, you died on that island." Right, so why don't you just shoot them? Your military guy who already left Owen for dead once is standing right there. Hell, you personally are willing to murder a dude, Eli.
  • Sadistic tendencies probably, just like how he pulled teeth from dinosaurs to make a macabre necklace as a souvenir. It's not a huge jump from being cruel to animals for kicks to being cruel to humans for kicks.
  • They might have also thought they might still have a use for Owen and Claire, especially Owen, since their whole plan revolves around Blue and that empathic connection. They might have been exhibiting a rare bout of Pragmatic Villainy, keeping those two alive until they were positive they were of no further use.
  • Successfully disposing of two bodies with bullets in their heads is also a lot more effort than explaining away the death by suffocation of someone who was already gravely ill. Mills was likely procrastinating on killing the two of them due to having the auction to deal with and also likely not really having the stomach for that sort of work (he only kills Lockwood as a last resort when backed into a corner and the original plan was to abandon Claire's team and let the volcano take care of them).

Timeline trouble

• The film timeline means that Maisie as presented does not make chronological sense. Jurassic Park took place roughly 20 years before Jurassic World, with John Hammond out of InGen and then dead for most of that period. Fallen Kingdom has another time gap from Jurassic World. Maisie is a prepubescent child so the presented idea that she is a "merely" a clone of Lockwood's dead daughter is not correct. Hammond wouldn't have been around to be appalled at it. Discounting Writers Cannot Do Math, a number of Fridge Horror explanations arise.
  • A simple non-Fridge Horror explanation would be that Lockwood revealed his plan to Hammond before the events of the first film and it just took him 15+ years to adapt a cloning process meant to produce dinosaurs to instead produce a human especially if Lockwood had to work alone or with only a small handful of people.
  • Alternatively, Maisie was NOT Lockwood's first attempt... which brings us right back into Fridge Horror.
  • Do we even know for certain that Lockwood's daughter died before Hammond? The film initially avoided stating precisely what line of research Lockwood had proposed that'd alienated Hammond, presumably to hold back The Reveal about Maisie's origin until later. So it's feasible that Lockwood had simply advocated human cloning in general and Hammond rejected the notion on principle, preferring to stick with dinosaurs. Some years later, Maisie's genetic progenitor died in the car crash and Lockwood revived his old human-cloning program to create his "granddaughter", albeit in secrecy because of how Jurassic Park's failure had stigmatised cloning in general.
  • Perhaps she'll always be Lockwood's little girl?
  • Tossed as of the next movie, where the same actress portrays her and aged just like does. Can't recall if Dominion clarifies any of the other intrigue of this folder.

Just call the cops

• How come Claire and Owen didn't call the police to tell them about the auction? What Mills was doing was obviously illegal and the police would've shown up and stopped him.
  • They were caught without having time to reach a phone.
  • But they weren't trapped the entire time, they got out. What little trouble it would've been to find a phone would've been worth it. They are in a mansion, not to mention everyone who attended the auction most likely had a cell phone (I honestly cannot imagine any of them not having one).
  • The mansion was out in the middle of nowhere, judging by how far Claire had to drive in the opening scenes to get to it. The police probably won't be able to get there fast enough, and would probably be woefully outnumbered and out-gunned if they do.
  • Then they could have said that there was an armed mercenary group there, which would have demanded, at minimum, a SWAT response (no shortage of team members there).
  • "Hi, is this 911? There's a guy in a mansion who has gun-toting mercenaries and is trying to sell dinosaurs to people." "Who is this? Get off the line! This is for emergency calls!"

Ecological collapse

• Shouldn't most of the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar already have been long dead anyway? We see a bunch of predators who have to eat regularly and, after their handlers are gone, don't have a huge population of suitable prey, or much room (I've seen sources that put Nublar's size at about 30 square miles) to avoid stumbling into someone else's hunting grounds. For that matter, how did Blue last so long? Shouldn't a pack hunter be at a huge disadvantage with no pack?
  • Most of the predators by that point were already long dead. While many of the herbivores would be easy pickings for some carnivores, not all of them were. An Ankylosaurus had enough bashing power in its tail to shatter a T. rex femur, and a Stegosaurus could impale a predator with the spikes on its tail, as could a Triceratops, and a Styracosaurus with their horns. As for the carnivores themselves, all but Rexy have zero experience in actually hunting another dinosaur. Ergo, some of the carnivores would have likely thought they could take something down solo that would normally have required a group effort. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.
  • As for Blue, she's small enough to potentially get by just fine on non-dinosaur prey, like deer, wild pigs, stray goats escaped from the feeder-animal pens, or seals on the beaches.
  • Nublar Tuffed Deer, native to the island and plentiful enough to feed a few carnivores.
  • Hey, they said that the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna were flourishing. Why can't they do the same on Nublar? Micro-ecosystems are a thing.

We gotta go back!

• Why'd they need Indominus bones anyway? Jurassic World had Wu escape near the end with a briefcase of embryos, having been specifically ordered by Hoskins to take everything relating to "the project" offsite, because Hoskins didn't want any follow-up crews tumbling on to what they were doing. If Wu had I. rex embryos, or DNA patterns or whatever in storage, why did they need to go get a "fresh" sample from the bottom of the Mosasaur lagoon?
  • It's presumed that the samples taken have made too-unstable hybrids compared to the Indoraptor who is already an unstable prototype.
  • Which could be a result of degradation which the bone sample might not be suffering from.

Bloody confusing

• Why did Blue's blood transfusion ruin Wu's plans? He could have taken a tissue sample from literally any part of her and gotten the DNA he needed.
  • He probably figures he's got a much better chance of getting a viable sample from blood than, say, toenail clippings or scales. And expecting a raptor to tolerate something as invasive as a tissue biopsy when you don't have time to tranquilise it first is just asking for trouble.
  • He initially got her DNA from a preserved mosquito. Sure, the blood was "contaminated", but that shouldn't have been more than a mild inconvenience — some extra work in the lab, a few more hours of computing time. What's even odder is that he doesn't have her DNA sequence anywhere else, and needs to get a sample to sequence.
  • It's not necessarily so odd that he doesn't have a DNA sequence. He was clearly rushing to get whatever physical assets he could out of the lab in the previous movie, that was the priority at the time. Perhaps he was counting on accessing the sequence through InGen's computer systems, but for whatever reason (Hacking by animal rights' groups? Password being updated at the time of the Jurassic World disaster and lost in the confusion? The company excluding his access due to his shady activities with Hoskin? No offsite backups?) he lost that and had to go back to the source.

The world's worst stalker

• What is the deal with the Indoraptor's fascination with Maisie, anyway? In the scene with her backing towards his cage, he reaches out a claw and... inspects her hair...? Instead of, oh I don't know, dragging her closer to the cage so he could eat her? And then later, when he has Claire and Owen, two larger, completely immobilised targets, pinned down and totally helpless, he prioritised chasing Maisie, even climbing around to the outside of the building to find a way to her, and then slowly and carefully opening her balcony door (instead of simply breaking it) to enter her room, and then slowly reaching out to her in her bed instead of immediately going for the kill when he knows that she's there. What's with all the care and precision? And yes, I already have considered the idea of "the filmmakers wanted it to be like a horror movie monster," but in a series that really drills home how bestial and unpredictable dinosaurs are, it seems incredibly odd that they would give this monster a clear fascination with a specific human character and then neglect to explain why.
  • The Indoraptor spends a fair amount of time messing with people. Mostly with Maisie, but he also spends quite some time torturing Wheatley too. If you're asking why the Indoraptor is such a sadistic troll then I'm afraid we're back to the filmmaker's explanation, but if we accept that he's just sadistic we could say that he focuses on Maisie because he enjoys her scared reactions (screaming, running) more than the more subdued ones of Owen and Claire.
  • Maisie is the only human the Indoraptor ever saw that was child-sized. Whatever predatory instincts it feels are probably telling it to go for the smaller, easier target. At the same time, the part of it that makes it smarter than the average animal are sparking its curiosity ("What is this strange thing...? It smells like a human-keeper-trainer but is too little-noisy-fearful...").
  • In the film, the Indoraptor seemed a little hyperactive, probably due to being cooped up in a cage constantly, if you notice when the elevator closed up when it first got out, it instantly lost interest. Also it has a sonic trigger noise to start hunting, which is high pitched, so maybe some wires got crossed when Maisie screamed as she ran away. Note that it doesn't take a lot for it to lose interest, so maybe it just found it fun to hunt the only prey it could smell nearby.
  • She is wearing a red jacket and screams high-pitched every time she is nearby. Both things are triggers for the Indoraptor and his training kicks in.

Dino popularity

• What I don't get is this. In Jurassic World, it was stated that people are no longer interested in dinosaurs but then, why are the people in the auction want to buy them since it won't grab any attention to their other rich friends' eyes?
  • Dinosaurs have more applications than mere entertainment. And it's not just the beasts themselves, but the genetic information within each one which would allow buyers to make more.
  • Also Jurassic World didn't say people were no longer interested. There were still huge crowds considering how expensive it was to go there. The problem was that the park was not making as much money as before (i.e. interest had waned a bit, not vanished), and they wanted to overcome this issue before the problem actually got bad. It was more about how expensive the park was to run rather than how popular the dinosaurs were.
  • The fact that they were so eager to add new animals to their collection, even if they had to splice them together rather than salvage more amber-preserved DNA, suggests that the problem wasn't that people weren't interested in seeing dinosaurs: it's that they weren't interested enough to see the same ones again. They wanted to lure in repeat business, because most people who could afford a visit had already been there once by that point.
  • It is entirely different to watch animals in a zoo and to be able to hunt, eat, or exploit them.

Flooded, or not?

• I didn't quite get the opening scene in terms of the amount of flooding that seemed to be present. I've skimmed some of the other headscratchers and I don't think this has been asked, but I did see someone mentioning that the film makers played loose with the lagoon and its location on the island (they moved it to coastline in this film), so maybe that justifies the problem I'm having. But the problem was, it looked like the gates and a significant portion of the surrounding area (e.g. the visitor centre, it looked like?) was flooded. In fact I was immediately thinking global sea levels must have significantly increased by climate change in-universe, so indeed it would suggest that most of the island (and what about the continents?) was submerged. I thought poor Rexy was confined to higher ground and wouldn't have much access to prey animals, so she must have been starving! But instead, when the movie returns to Nublar in a few years, the threat is volcanic activity rather than flooding. So did anyone else get a flooding vibe from the first scene? And if not, can you try to explain the sense that there were high water levels which didn't seem to carry over to later scenes?
  • It's mud, not water, covering the walkways. Tropical rainstorms tend to turn the ground into a morass pretty quickly — indeed, we saw as much in the stuck-vehicle scenes from both the first two films — so it's likely that the weather has left a coating of mud all over the low-lying park areas. It's also possible that some of the adult brachiosaurs cracked the pavements underfoot and knocked down some flood-prevention barriers while wandering around the abandoned facilities, making the mud problem worse.
  • The opening would have taken place shortly after Hurricane Pali swept through the area, it would have left water everywhere and caused the destruction we see.

Military Attack Raptors, really...?

• Why would a military with access to actual artillery want something like this? Even with every single one of its flaws ironed out, the Indoraptor is still little more than a super-formidable attack dog, right? Granted that does sound kinda like something that private investors might be interested in for security purposes (but even then I don't know how lucrative selling them to such people would even be) but the military? Even taking into account the argument of wanting to use them to improve kill efficiency without substantial property damage, what about stealth? Hell, what about them running into any threat any more dangerous than people armed with firearms - explosives, higher caliber ammunition, vehicles (particularly armoured ones), fire, poison...? As it stands, it seems like quite possibly the only practical use these things could have in any military situation, is to employ them in a Zerg Rush where there's no threat whatsoever that's worse than humans with firearms. And is that really worth all the trouble of buying, developing, raising, training, maintaining, and breeding them?
  • I think you're overestimating just how common explosives, higher caliber ammunition, and armoured vehicles are. Each one is immensely expensive and difficult to produce, far more so than a domesticated animal. Also, deploying said assets is another challenge; explosives need to be handled impeccably or they're liable to do more damage to your own forces, and armoured vehicles can't go everywhere and require constant (and expensive) maintenance.
    • Are they more expensive than genetically engineering dinosaurs, though? Not even just that, but expenses for training, breeding programs, housing & feeding, etc. Because for this sort of tactic to be effective in life-threatening situations, you'll need a lot of raptors in reserve, with all the space and facilities necessary to keep them battle-ready. Animals - especially ones expected to perform well in combat settings - do need constant maintenance. Furthermore, you can't just set them loose either; the raptors would need to be deployed as well, likely requiring an armed escort. So it's likely there'd be vehicles and guns there anyway. Why not just use those? And while they aren't quite as volatile as explosives, they still pose the possible threat of backfiring and attacking the people supervising them. You'd also need to worry about either recapturing them, or just banking on having enough on reserve to not need to, both of which would costly.
    • Maybe you could deploy and activate an invisible fence (established to be existing technology in the previous film) to shepherd them back into their confinement areas. Or, use a signal similar to the laser and sound kill-this-target combination which signals to the raptors "time to go home, eat if we aren't full already and rest" and aim it at such a location. It need not necessarily be so hard (or dangerous) to recapture them using the appropriate technology to facilitate that.
    • You only need to genetically engineer them twice; one male, one female. They're animals, not tanks; you can breed the former.
    • I know that a mid sized dog generally costs about $2,000 - $1,000 a year ^note  https://www.petfinder.com/pet-adoption/dog-adoption/how-much-does-a-dog-cost/ . A cursory search on the web pegs an RPG at about the same price, with each grenade about $100 - $500 (the Syrian civil war has made it a sellers market though). The catch is that each bullet and explosive you fire must eventually be replaced. You can't exactly tell soldiers to hold back from using them while their lives are on the line, all for the sake of being cheap. In a best case scenario, ammo costs should exceed that of the weapon that fires them several dozen times. Conversely, you don't need to reload a raptor.
    • Well, at least, soldiers are always instructed to be conservative with their ammunition if the situation (no imminent resupply for example) calls for it.
    • The K9 Corp doesn't need an armed escort, only handlers.
    • Regarding Raptor Loyalty, this was actually an important plot point in the movie; it's why Dr. Wu was so keen on getting his hands on Blue and the why Owen got roped into the whole mess to begin with. Blue's loyalty towards Owen is exactly the sort of relationship they wanted between with the "Attack Raptors" and their handlers, hence their desire to replicate it. Owen and Blue's loyalty to one another is solid evidence that such an understanding is at least possible.
    • If an animal is loyal enough to follow you into combat on your command, chances are they're loyal enough to return to their "pack" when the dust settles.
  • Combat is also highly varied and situational. Let's say you need to flush a large number of hostiles out of a tunnel system or a claustrophobic urban environment; tanks can't travel through tight alleyways or cave systems, high caliber bullets aren't that much more useful if you're engaging targets just a few meters away, and employing explosives in close quarters is a BAD IDEA. The raptors however excel at melee combat and have much sharper hearing and scent. With greater situational awareness, a propensity for ambush, greater expendability, and being natural melee fighters, a loyal pack of raptors could really prove their worth in both urban and tunnel warfare.
    • Would the expenses of developing, rearing and maintaining the raptors really be worth it for such a specific application? If the aim is to flush people out of a confined area, it seems like chemical or incendiary weapons could do the trick instead. Presumably the goal of doing this would be to apprehend those of interest for something other than just killing them, but if that's the case then either of those options seems about as non-lethal as using a genetically enhanced predator.
    • Regarding their use being overly situational; urban areas are more valuable than wilderness; it's why those areas were developed in the first place. Thus, urban combat is a common reality in war, as such areas are often worth defending. Competent guerrillas exploit tunnels as often as possible precisely because of the reasons stated above. Specific or not, any military worth it's salt is prepared to tackle those two scenarios at all times.
    • If captives are a priority for whatever reason, an animal that can heed a "subdue, don't kill" command is more likely to take prisoners than a blazing inferno or a toxic haze. Also, incendiary and chemical weapons have no capacity to distinguish between friend and foe, and can't chase after a fleeing target. The raptors would be disposable. Sure a human soldier has greater survivability in the long term but if they die you have to pay benefits, back salary, etc. You might need to pay about the same to create and house a pack of raptors as to feed a squad of soldiers once you have a breeding program but they aren't paid, get no benefits, and if they die it isn't a big deal. Plus they're smart enough to fill the combat roles in a way dogs can't and without evoking any of the automatic sympathy dogs do to their handlers.
  • The concept of genetically engineered military dinos may have some legitimacy under the right circumstances, but the way it was done in the movie was absurd. Basically, you have to position the Indoraptor on standby relatively near the target without anybody noticing, and have a soldier with a designator gun paint the target so the Indo goes and kill it. Obviously, a sniper could do the same job much more efficiently at a fraction of the cost.
  • Mentioned elsewhere that a) regular raptors may be more efficient at the task than Indoraptors given their stability and proved handler-raptor relationship and b) the designator could be done by any remote-weapon delivery system, including potentially even having the laser mounted on the body of the raptor itself.

Indoraptor: Instructions Not Included

• You could make an argument that the Russian dude who bought Ol' Yellow is just a rich violent idiot who plans on using it for something stupid, but if he actually did intend to have any long-term use for the Indoraptor, did he not realise he'd quite literally have to just pick up research on it where they left off? He's buying it from the only people in the world who have any information on it whatsoever, and also possibly the only people in the world with substantial information on how to even raise raptors, yet he plans to not only resume development of the species just as it was going, but also fix the problems the freakin' creators themselves were still trying to figure out how to fix? Who was he even going to get to do all of this?
  • It's an arms race. A small advantage is better than being completely outclassed.
  • But as it stood he only had the one Indoraptor - he'd need to make more (and better) in order for it to be a feasible advantage of arms, right? With what resources, is what I'm asking?
  • I think the mentality was "we need every advantage we can get to have a prayer of catching up", not "we're so far behind let's not even bother." Given how fond this franchise is of showcasing the "power of genetics", it's definitely an avenue of research worth investing in (at least in this setting).
  • Perhaps, but the point is that in order to pull this off he'd have to pick up right where the original team started, and go beyond that, so I'm asking how? Who is he that he'd even be able to do something like that? Unless his plan was really to just sell it to someone else, in which case, fair enough.
  • I think that's the point; we're not supposed to know who he is, or why he's so keen on getting the Indoraptor. His interest in the creature could well be sinister foreshadowing that there's more to this man than meets the eye. Since there is bound to be a sequel, this seems to be more of a set-up for a new character than an Open-and-Shut Case.
  • Tossed, there is a sequel but he is not in it.
  • Wu comments that "They'll make more!" so... what do you think the proto-Indoraptor will be used for?

Who 'played' young Iris

• In the photo Maisie finds of her 'mother', revealing that they are identical, the original Maisie is either sat next to or on the lap of a woman. Based on the dialogue between Iris and Mills it's assumed that the woman is Iris, but does anyone know who the model for the photo was? It clearly wasn't present day Iris. To me it resembled Kristin Kreuk but IMDB has no results, so who is it?
  • It's probably a photoshopped picture of Geraldine Chaplin. Geraldine is in her 70s, so it wouldn't be a stretch to guess she lent them a photo of herself in her younger days to make it look more modern or they simply phototoshopped her to look younger.

Humans have to coexist with the dinosaurs now?

• What makes Malcolm think we're being forced to coexist with these dinosaurs? Wouldn't our militaries just shoot down these rampaging beasts? There's not that many dinosaurs compared to humans.
  • Because this movie and all its predecessors have been continually reaffirming Malcolm's old mantra "Life will find a way" and now the dinosaurs are no longer even confined to an island, they are now loose on the North American continent, that gives them plenty of space to evade capture or people aiming to hunt them.
  • See the next movie, Dominion, for stuff on this.

Hammond's never-before-mentioned partner

• What was the purpose of creating Benjamin Lockwood? It was established in the novel that John Hammond founded InGen with the help of a geneticist named Norman Atherton. What was to keep the makers from simply using Norman, and making Maisie Atherton's clone daughter?
  • Atherton was originally Ingen's main geneticist before Wu showed up in the first book, and it would easily lead to premature fan speculation about Maise's true nature if they figured out that he had firsthand experience in genetic engineering, rather than just being a venture capitalist like Hammond.

Just move the dinos to that other island.

• What happened to Isla Sorna? Did everyone forget about it? Was it destroyed? Even if the Sorna dinos were wiped out the infrastructure to keep dinos there might still be in place.
  • I think it sunk, if memory serves.
  • Information from the DPG explains that the dinosaurs on Sorna have either died off or the remaining dinosaurs were moved to Isla Nublar by Masrani to be exhibited in Jurassic World (although the state of Isla Sorna and the dinosaurs that are alive there could be retconned in the future).
    • If we count the books as cannon the dinosaurs probably did die to disease. That doesn't make the island unviable. After that the locals refer to the are as La Cinco Muertes. There are FIVE islands. They must all have similar climate and aside from imported plants similar plant life.

The hypocrisy of Ian Malcom's testimony.

• Why exactly does Ian Malcolm testify at the US Senate hearing against rescuing the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar but in The Lost World he is willing to risk his life to save the Buck Rex and not allow the authorities to simply gun it down after it got loose in San Diego? Is this simply a case of Became Their Own Antithesis or is there something else going on?
  • It's been 21 years. Not to mention, that one example is more a case of taking a quick and clean way of solving that problem. If the problem of a rampaging T-Rex can be solved through simple capture, then it makes total sense to take that route. I see it as more pragmatism than outright sympathy. And that's the thing, that example was one where he was stopping a rampage more than it was saving the life of a dinosaur that is going to and did kill innocent civilians. It's overly complex and just shooting the Rex would have been less risky, but it's still a case of preserving life on all accounts. Malcolm didn't become a lover of dinos in that film, he just became more of a generally heroic and less self-absorbed/distancing guy. I can see the events of Jurassic World affirming his mindset of "these dinosaurs should not exist" too.
  • There's also the fact that his small preservationist group weren't armed (apart from with a tranq rifle which seemed to have both sedative and lethal-neurotoxin darts for dire emergencies) in contrast with the mercenary group who were both armed to kill if they felt threatened and also tooled up to raid and steal the dinosaurs from the island. Two of his comrades saw fit to set the dinos free from their initial captivity, and then one of them opted to remove the rounds from the lead hunter's rifle to prevent him from killing the buck as a trophy. He probably feels "you made this mess, unleashing the buck in a highly populated city due to your own incompetence and now the only way you perceive to fix it is to try to kill it once again, well not on my watch" with some nudging from his girlfriend of course. Whereas, if the volcano is to kill the Jurassic World dinosaurs, then that is nature taking it's course as opposed to humanity slaughtering them.

The Case of the Disappearing Corpse

• Owen, Claire, and Maisie enter Lockwood's display room, and Owen sees a dead guard on the floor partially concealed behind the Agujaceratops display. The corpse disappears behind the display, and the Indoraptor stands up from behind it. When the camera moves to an overhead view, the corpse is nowhere to be found. Where did it go? Did the Indoraptor eat it? So the Indoraptor can not only open its jaws wide enough to swallow an adult male in full clothing whole in 6 seconds without drawing blood, but also show no outward signs of having eaten 8-10% of its weight? And it still has room for that after at least partially eating six other people?

Why didn’t the campers let the DPG know about Mantahcorp Island?

• Why didn’t Darius, Kenji, one of the other campers or Mae, Roxy or Dave who know about Mantahcorp Island’s existence/location contact Claire or the DPG to suggest relocating the Nublar dinosaurs to Mantahcorp Island when the news of Mount Sibo’s imminent eruption reached the public? They don’t even discuss Nublar during their group chat at the end of the final episode which takes place presumably mere hours after the end of Fallen Kingdom since Darius spots a Brachiosaurus outside his house, we clearly see Mantahcorp Island can host a population of dinosaurs and is being overseen by Mae, it has better facilities to manage the animals and has several biomes to separate certain species if needed and only a handful of people on the planet know of its existence so there is no risk of poaching or the dinosaurs being stolen. The campers proved they care about the dinosaurs survival and wellbeing so why didn’t they reach out to the DPG, another group that clearly also cares about protecting the dinosaurs and has members like Zia who would be happy to volunteer assisting Mae look after the dinosaurs, and inform them about a perfect relocation option only a short boat trip away from Nublar?
  • Out-of-universe explanation? Those characters didn't exist at that time. In-universe explanation? Dominion seems to imply that a black market dinosaur trade was in place even before the fall of Isla Nublar.

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