Jurassic World

The idea of using dinosaurs in a combat zone is so stupid to begin with that it's gotta be a scam towards idiots for it to make sense. Some might it would be useful in guerrilla warfare, but I'm pretty sure investing millions in cloning and training a dinosaur hybrid with unpredictable behaviour isn't worth the effort or the bad press in creating living weapons.

The entire Jurassic Park franchise is a compound of Didn't Think This Through that only gets worse with each new installment.

If I may be frank, one should note that the raptors (as depicted in JP, at least) are at their most threatening when they're in packs; sure, the JP 3 crew were legitimately threatened by just one raptor in their first encounter with said species, but they did manage to trap the dino within a fairly short amount of time using the surrounding environment. It was when the rest of the pack ganged up on them that they started losing people very quickly and forced to seek safety in the treetops. I don't see why the same couldn't be true of the Indoraptor — an Indominus works well as a solitary animal because it's huge and largely based on Tyrannosaurus rex, which itself is a largely solitary predator (at most, it might have occasionally hunted in pairs or, if the prey is one of the more massive sauropods, very small packs), whereas the more Velociraptor is much smaller and is more Velociraptor-based. Whether it's capable of socializing with others of its kind, however, is a different story.

The increased raptor traits were there to make it more manageable than Indominus (Hoskins even alluded to it in World).

A deleted scene would've had Indoraptor killing its sibling just like Indominus, showing that just more raptor in the mix wasn't the answer to making it manageable/sociable.

Enter Blue into the plot.

Blue's role was weird. Like a lot of things in the movie, really. This film was enjoyable but Jesus Christ was this a cavalcade of stupid.

The plan with Blue was that the test-tube clones they were making would be based off her DNA and thus they needed her there because something something children are genetically coded to recognize their biological parents by instinct even if they've never seen them before.

The whole thing is premised not only on the idea that only biological parents are truly capable of raising a child, but that children automatically know from the moment of birth which parents are their biological ones and which are not.

That. That's not how child-rearing works.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 20th 2018 at 9:54:56 AM

That's not quite what I got from it, but I'm looking at this from the lenses of the raptor behavior in the books (which, considering how many nods in Fallen Kingdom are, I think it was probably on the mind of the writers).

Blue was wanted as the genetic makeup of the next iteration of Indoraptors because she was the first cloned subject to display empathy to humans naturally. Whatever Wu added to her DNA cocktail, it worked towards their future plans of dinosaurs that can take orders from humans.

This is something that is seen in the videos of Owen's training and in the raptor behaviors of Jurassic World.

The pack is actually kinda rowdy and unpredictable, and Delta in particular shows a tendency towards attacking the caretakers. But this behavior is partially subdued/controlled by the pack leader Blue, who in turns takes her cues from Owen.

The idea is then to have more naturally empathic Indoraptors learn their pack behaviors from Blue, which they think will lead to the next batch being able to follow human commands.

The HUGE flaw in their plans, which I think is deliberate, is that they don't have Owen. They think anybody can go into the cage, assert themselves onto the raptors to have them behave, and then take orders.

But Owen worked his ass off to have the rapror pack accept him as one of their kind, to which his personal bond with Blue was instrumental.

These are the same idiots who believe that getting the I-raptor to attack someone that they point a gun's laser-sights at is somehow easier/more efficient than just SHOOTING THE PERSON!! So nothing they do surprises me with how dumb it is.

Maybe Jurassic Park should do smaller spinoff movies because a movie just about Owen and the raptor park without any fate of the park stuff would have been great

Edited by Bocaj on Sep 20th 2018 at 1:31:29 PM

Wu literally says outright that they need Blue because of her genetic link to the clones.

"All your money will have been wasted if I don't get Blue here in good health. To get the next iteration under control, it needs to form a familial bond with a closely related genetic link. ... It needs a mother! Blue's DNA will be part of the next Indoraptor's make up. So it will be genetically coded to recognize her authority and assume her traits. Empathy. Obedience. Everything the prototype you have now is missing."

He's literally saying that they need to have Blue because the Indoraptor can only grow up the way they want it to if Blue raises it herself. It's "genetically coded to recognize her authority" and can only learn from her.

Which is not at all how parenting works.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 20th 2018 at 12:33:22 PM

Man after all the strong female protagonist of Rexy, here they are trying to reduce Blue to a mother

Tsk tsk

The biggest plot hole of Fallen Kingdom was they really shouldn't have any need for the I-Rex DNA sample, as it was a crafted creature and not some sort of anomaly, and they should have had all records of the I-Rex DNA makeup.

I think the biggest issue is not so much the story itself as much as it swerves the franchise into supervillain territory. Once word comes out that dinosaurs are being used in warfare it doesn't take much effort to track down who could have created them. It's like trying to figure out who put a series of satellites in orbit, it requires so much money and infrastructure the evidence trail is rather narrow.

All that said, the idea of dinosaurs as weapons is interesting in its own right. The struggles of domesticating raptors to become valuable in police and military operations can be a fascinating thing to explore. Indeed, the scenes of Owen working with Blue and the other raptors as babies expands on that subplot of the previous film. The Indoraptor was clearly said to be a work-in-progress. The talk of the inability to develop social skills was an established problem with the I-Rex and this was a method to try and solve that.

Specially considering they spent so much effort to get Wu and his samples off Nublar. Why wouldn't he have the Indominus template with him right then?

Then again, when Claire and Owen cross Hoskins, they were still in the process of clearing the genetics lab. Perhaps they lost the Indominus sample in-between after Delta started wrecking havoc.

But why not establish that within the movie?

They just needed an excuse to set the Mossasaur free me thinks.

Is it? Coz like, dogs exist.

They'll operate in packs, are already domesticated, already trainable, and literally a fraction of the price.

And that's even accounting for that the price they are asking of Indoraptor makes no sense. Like, there's no way this designer dinosaur was only 22 million.

What's the niche or scenario where a dog, a guy with a gun, or a drone won't do, but a raptor that needs a guy with a gun to operate will work fine? Or heck, even a trained raptor in general

Edited by Ghilz on Sep 21st 2018 at 4:37:51 AM

Also Raptors also hunt in packs. That's what made them menacing in the first film, they worked together and were also very smart. Quite frankly the I-Raptor comes across like a bit of an inept bumbler in comparison to the Raptors from the first film.

Like I said, it changes the franchise into a supervillian category. It's not about a real world military scenario. Would YOU want to be Storming the Castle and get an Indoraptor turned on you? Even still, the gun simply points the thing in a direction, not necessarily giving it a solitary target. Point it at a bunker and let it be the most terrifying surprise a militia could receive.

While designing the Indorapter certainly cost a lot of money, that is primarily in developing the science to create it. It definitely did not cost 22 million just to inseminate it into an egg and raise it to adulthood. It's the same reason the pharmaceutical industry is so pricey, actually making the pills is easy once you developed the formula.

Which is an awful lot of trouble to go through just for the sake of having one cool shot in the epilogue that's totally unrelated to the entire rest of the film.

Somewhere on the planet Earth, there exists a mosasaur. And if it is ever in the same place as our protagonists again, it'll be pretty f*cking contrived, given that qualifier of "on the planet Earth".

Well, it was repeatedly thwarted and ultimately taken out by two dipshit humans and a child. So.

The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are horror movie monsters. They're meant to threaten hapless civilians caught up in a bad situation. Take them out of that context and put them up against conventional military forces, and there's no way in hell that they come out looking remotely threatening.

The Indoraptor couldn't kill a little girl. It's not going to last five seconds against a Special Forces squad armed to the teeth with military firepower.

Also, do you know what's great about bullets? What makes them better for search-and-destroy missions than live animals? You don't have to retrieve a bullet after you fire it. Take out a dude through your scope and you can just leave. There is no expectation that the bullet will come with you. No exit strategy required for getting the bullet out of the enemy's skull. You just go.

Do you know how hard it would be to retrieve an animal the size of a bus from a live combat zone?

That's the thing. Trevorrow wants us to hear about militarizing dinosaurs and go, "That's a terrible idea. It's completely inhumane! They'd be terrifyingly brutal and effective, doing to people what we've watched them do throughout this franchise! And they might go wild and kill even more people! NOTHING COULD EVER STOP THEM!!! THIS IS THE DOOM OF MANKIND!!!"

But that's not what we're saying. We're saying, "That's a terrible idea because it's logistically f*ckstupid and there's no reason to ever do it. It's a pointless waste of money for a subpar military asset. Dinosaurs are completely worthless in combat and could never threaten a conventional military."

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 21st 2018 at 6:23:32 AM

Although in the Spielberg and so far in the World films too guns are dumb and pointless

Dinosaur vs Jurassic franchise military? Dinosaurs would win hands down

Considering the overall competence of humans in the franchise, weaponized dinosaurs would be terrifyingly effective. Both the Indominus Rex and Indorapter appeared Immune to Bullets, while the velociraptors have been proven ambush predators in a jungle setting through every film. Could they go up against tanks in an open desert setting? Probably not. But the sonic gun was explicitly emulating use of military lasers to coordinate targets and pair with heavier munitions. If all they cared about was a sniper bullet to the head those would be useless too.

Like I keep saying, in a supervillain setting it makes sense. In a real world setting it is impractical in every way. But the JP franchise has always been straddling that line to begin with. Do you really think humanity's first reveal of cloned dinosaurs would be a massive off-shore amusement park?

Pretty sure the first reveal of dinosaurs would be telling the world that this just happened, the person who did it gets a Nobel prize, studying it and applying that tech on other extinct species. Said dinosaur would be kept in a man-made habitat and be studied intensely. Nobody in the right mind after seeing such a breakthrough in genetics and bio-engineering would their first thought be using it as a weapon. The millions of dollars invested in reviving an extinct animal that nobody knows how it would behave certainly wouldn't be motivated by warfare.

I'd have liked it better if upon being freed Indoraptor terrorizes everyone in the mansion. But for some reason, it's almost as if it's at multiple places simultaneously. Then it turns out that there were more than one Indoraptors all along and have been coordinating with each other all along.

Again, that's the real world.

In the world of Jurassic Park, thought 1 is to build a park in an island. Thought 2 is to build a zoo in the continent. Thought 3 is declare quarantine and let the UN decide if scientists should get access. Thought 4 is to build a new park and transport all the wild animals to be monitored by the Megacorp that purchased the islands. Thought 5 is to just let the dinosaurs die, who the fuck cares about the science.

In the meantime, a bunch of greedy bastards want to get paid top dollars to make a bunch of trained dinosaurs and possibly fancy sport for rich assholes with a murder boner.

I'm with KJMackley here. At some point, you just got to accept that the world of Jurassic Park runs on entirely different rules than the real world. And that line was crossed all the way back in The Lost World.

Edited by MrSeyker on Sep 21st 2018 at 7:46:03 AM

I was under the assumption that KJ Mackley meant that real life humanity's reaction to successfully cloned dinosaurs would be to weaponize them instead of building a amusement park, but on a second read I believe it was supposed to be that JP's humans are dumb enough that their first reaction to cloned dinosaurs was to built a theme park, so why won't they try turning them into weapons, so my mistake.

Either way, weaponizing dinosaurs is still a shark jumping concept that almost everyone mocked it for being dumb, whereas a dinosaur theme park seems like a logical progression after cloning dinosaurs becomes easy.

Edited by Ikedatakeshi on Sep 21st 2018 at 11:10:44 PM

In the book I believe Hammond settled on the theme park because he decided it was maximum profit to minimum regulations

Somewhat off-topic nitpick, but it bugs me that the JP movies, including Fallen Kingdom, treat the dino islands as if they're perfectly balanced ecosystems that would be fine if left to their own devices (minus the volcano.) The dinos on the islands come from different eras, different habitats from around the planet, and may have insufficient or oversized population sizes considering they were originally bred for a theme park prioritizing entertainment and usable area.

A self-sustaining dinosaur island wouldn't happen. The Jurassic World park having only a single T. rex, Velociraptor, and Mosasaur means the herbivore population would grow unchecked and likely kill those lone apex predators if it came down to a fight. All those herbivores filling the same ecosystem niches would then compete for limited resources, and the Triassic and Jurassic species are sure to die out first because their designs are more obsolete when pitted against Cretaceous species, i.e. the exact same reason they went extinct in the first place.

The dinos didn't need to compete with humans in order to wreck ecosystem havoc. They were already well on their way to destroying their own.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 21st 2018 at 8:29:47 AM

You know what would've made the whole dinosaur business far more profitable?

Make minature, docile dinosaurs and sell them as pets for rich children (and adults).