Jurassic World

And there's no laws to protect them and the process of getting laws passed to protect them is going to be a molasses crawl.

Yeah, those dinosaurs are going to get et.

In a related note, one of the problems I had with Fallen Kingdom was just how cheap the dinosaurs were sold at. Mills sold them with a starting bid of a dozen million. It should've started at least a couple hundred million and there would've been still people willing to buy them.

I just find hilarious that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom costed approximately four Indoraptors to make and made more than 30 Indoraptors at the box office.

Actually, now I'm curious. Let's check the other films!

• Jurassic Park (1993): Just more than one Indoraptor to make, and 24 Indoraptors in profit.
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Almost two Indoraptors to make, and 14 Indoraptors in profit.
• Jurassic Park III: More than two Indoraptors to make, and eight Indoraptors in profit.
• Jurassic World: More than three Indoraptors to make, and 38 Indoraptors in profit.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Sep 20th 2019 at 12:54:19 PM

Oh God. That's...that's an awesome way to measure box office.

When I saw the movie, I almost felt like laughing at the Indoraptor attacking the rich antagonistic idiots trying to buy him. Why? Two reasons:

1. I grew up with the film franchise (haven't read the book yet) and given each movie had people eaten by dinosaurs (except III, which I'll explain later), I should have laughed when the Indoraptor escaped and attacked the rich antagonistic idiots.

2. The people buying the Indoraptor are rich antagonistic idiots. While some escaped with the dinosaurs they purchased, those who stayed to buy the Indoraptor, including Mills who gave a far less serious price to buy him, deserved to be eaten when the Indoraptor escaped (the one who let him out wasn't rich but an antagonistic idiot who deserved it) because they were buying creatures that shouldn't have been sold that way.

I read both Crichton books and they are so different from the movies that the latter might as well be an adaption In Name Only. With that said, those books are also very good on their own. I remember getting utter chills at some of the passages.

As for the rich idiots dying, I would've laughed if only I wasn't frustrated by just how stupid they were. Even if they weren't evil, the sheer stupidity they displayed made them not deserve to live in my eyes.

One always wonders how people too dumb to live lived long enough to die in too dumb to live ways

The books are very good and I highly recommend them.

The first book shines a spotlight on some of the problems at the park that are only hinted at in the film. For instance, the film briefly alludes to Hammond's cost-cutting; an argument between Nedry and Hammond implies that Hammond hired Nedry because he came cheap. But it doesn't dwell on it; the film's central thesis is a condemnation of man's arrogance in the face of nature's power. The book spends, meanwhile, about an equal amount of time condemning corporate short-sighted greed. It's the other part of that message.

Film Hammond is a well-meaning idiot who didn't truly grasp the uncontrollable nature of his "flea circus". Book Hammond is a rich, privileged asshole who thinks that he can solve any problem by just throwing enough money about it, and also wants to have an hours-long discussion to hammer out precisely how much money is enough money. He can buy you, but he'd rather buy your dimwit cousin. "Skilled" labor? What's that?

The film focuses almost exclusively on the "nature" part of the thesis, talking about chaos theory and the raw power of nature, but pinning the entire human responsibility for the failure on Nedry. Everything bad happened because Nedry turned off the park systems.

The book spends an equal amount of time talking about the "human" end of the equation. It still waxes poetic about chaos and the power of nature, but it also explores the question of the kind of person who would think they could just buy the prehistoric world. It makes clear that Nedry is only one of several people who probably shouldn't have been involved in this project, but was affordable.

And it showcases the human arrogance involved in the myriad mistakes made with the park. For instance, the film brings up the fact that the dinosaurs are breeding, but doesn't do anything with it beyond that. It's kind of a dead-end plot point. That's because it's a holdover from the book.

In the book, there's a plot point about velociraptors escaping to the mainland. Park staff insists that this is impossible because they have a computer system set up that counts the number of animals in each pen. Their system has never reported an animal going missing. However, the team never accounted for the possibility that the all-female population may be breeding; the system stops counting when it reaches its expected number. Once they remove that criteria, it's discovered that they have about 3-4x the number of velociraptors that they should have, and that's how they failed to notice escapes.

The film is essentially a cliff's notes version of the story. The book is not only better, but it honestly made me appreciate the film a bit more by providing context that the film just didn't have time to go into.

EDIT: Oh! Also, the second book! It has basically nothing to do with the second movie and is a good sequel. The end.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 21st 2019 at 9:20:45 AM

Maybe human society in JP universe is so much safer that even idiots can survive. It's only when people encounter dinosaurs, they realize too late that being Too Dumb to Live around those creatures will kill you quickly.

It’s amazing how bad the second movie is because Spielberg asked Chricton to write a sequel so he could make a sequel film and then largely ignored most of it. Took the most basic of the concept and plugged it in with bits from the first book that didn’t make it into the film

Pretty much. They borrowed two of the main characters from the book: Ian Malcolm and Eddie Carr. They did a Composite Character of Kelly Malcolm and her friend Arby Benton. They exiled Thorne and Levine from canon and replaced them with Sarah Harding and Nick Van Owen, who are the worst. And then they took everything else from the book, dropped it in a fire, and wholesale made up their own plot with a bunch of completely unrelated characters.

The third book, meanwhile, does not exist. Not, like, "It's so bad that IT DOES NOT EXIST". It doesn't exist. There is no third book. After ignoring 99% of the book for The Lost World, they didn't even bother trying to convince Crichton to write a third book. They just glued together a patchwork film from yet more unused Jurassic Park scenes and added in a new uber-scary turbo-dino for Serial Escalation.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 21st 2019 at 12:57:09 PM

Eddie is a Composite Character of Book Eddie and Thorne.

In fact, there exists an earlier version of TLW script where the heroic actions Movie Eddie performs are done by Thorne. And yes, Thorne gets eaten by the rexes.

That's why the Eddie Carr in TLW toyline looks nothing like movie Eddie and seems based to be based off Alan molds from JP.

The toy is meant to be Thorne.

And Movie Sarah got merged with Levine, which is where she gets all the questionable field expertise from.

That was a stupid merge, because her character actions make sense for Levine as presented in the book, but not for Sarah with her backstory.

Truthfully, the second movie (and the fifth, for that matter) draw more heavily from the second SNES game than the books. Right down to the Nublar volcano exploding in the latter.

Amusingly, while the first SNES game is very faithful to the book (assuming Alan Grant is an Action Hero who does everything important), the second SNES game picks up a plot thread from the first book that appears nowhere else-tagging a juvenile raptor with a radio tag, so it can be followed through the jungle back to the nest.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Sep 21st 2019 at 3:14:33 PM

On a sidenote, the book explains the T. Rex's inability to see you if you don't move as being a side effect of the Frog DNA inside of them. The T. Rexes actually have frog-like eyes, and the protagonist takes a gamble that they had the same visual weaknesses as frogs as a result.

Kind of. In the first book, Grant assumes it's the frog DNA that's causing the T. rex to not see him, but when Wu checks what dinos have received frog DNA the T. rex is not among them. In the second book a poacher tries to hold still in front of a T. rex and it just eats him, and Levine theorizes the T. rex in the first book ignored Grant because it wasn't hungry.

Yeah, the book made it clear that it wasn't just the T. rex that had this whole vision based on motion problem; the hadrosaurs also had that this vision problem as well. It was treated as a side-effect of the whole chimera solution to make dinosaurs. But it seems Crichton took the movie into account of his sequel, The Lost World, since he dedicated pages of the book debunking the whole "T. rex can't see you if you don't move" theory despite the fact the novel made it clear it was a genetic defect and not based on some actual paleotologist theory. And there's the fact that Isla Nublar in the novel had no hatching scene where the dinosaurs pop out of their eggs like movie magic. Just incubating eggs and one already hatched raptor. But The Lost World had Ian Malcolm act as if his tour acted like the tour in the film.

Honestly, I'm more surprised that Critchton didn't take the Indominus Rex route for his sequel. I mean, it's the logical conclusion to his themes in the novel. The people at Jurassic Park didn't create real dinosaurs, only monsters that resemble what they think dinosaurs looked and behaved like. Henry Wu was already going to replace all the dinosaurs with version 4.0, which are dinosaurs that behave exactly like they were in old books before the Dinosaur Renaissance (big, slow and stupid). And if you can recreate a dinosaur like that, what's stopping other companies from making super predators for audiences that want something bigger and badder than the T. rex or for arms dealers who want to weaponize anything that's trending in the market?

Edited by Shadao on Sep 21st 2019 at 12:35:08 PM

Like I said before, the World trilogy, particularly Fallen Kingdom, take A LOT from concepts Crichton wrote about in the novels.

That's why I've always liked the iRex. It's not a "real dinosaur", but that's fine. It works perfectly well within the themes that the story is meant to be about.

One of the few good parts of Jurassic Park III is this line from Dr. Grant: "What John Hammond and InGen did at Jurassic Park was to create genetically-engineered theme park monsters. Nothing more and nothing less." I think Crichton'd be proud of that line, and the World films follow up on it in a way that Lost World and JPIII failed to do.

Strangely, I suspect part of that is that Jurassic World actually has a much more nuanced opinion on genetic engineering and de-extinction than the Jurassic Park movies/novel did.

Jurassic Park essentially argues it shouldn't be done at all. Jurassic World argues it should be done carefully.

Basically, Jurassic World has a need for an example of irresponsible genetic engineering to contrast with the protagonists, who actually are broadly in favor of "playing God". Jurassic Park has the position that they're Not So Different.

Actually, this is part of why I'm a little sad Ian Malcom character's character didn't have a larger role in the movie. I would have had him come back as an antagonist attempting to sabotage the hero's efforts to save the dinosaurs.

In Jurassic World's setting the park actually ran fine for years. Stuff like Owen training a pack of raptors would've been unthinkable in the book's setting. There apparently haven't been the prior problems of regulating the population and making sure nothing escapes off the island. In Crichton and Malcolm's view, life has too many unpredictable factors to keep it contained without any possible errors.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 21st 2019 at 1:36:59 AM

Well, in the book Lex bonds pretty quickly with the juvenile raptor, handling it with her bare hands and even picking it up and carrying it. It is possible they could have tamed and trained them to some degree; but that was right out the window with the prion infected hatchlings they imported from Sorna.

The fact that there were dozens of wild raptors on Nublar for a period of at least a year, scrounging for whatever they could get; and yet not a single incident with the (admittedly small) JP staff who were out and about the park every day speaks volumes about raptor behavior when they are not being driven insane by prion infection and isolation during development.

Well, baby chimps can be nice, but when they get bigger they get meaner. Domestication is a tricky thing. We still haven't been able to fully tame zebras. Though even Jurassic World's raptors still had a wild side, and weren't above snapping at Owen a few times.

We had a conversation a while back about why Masrani's park was so successful while Hammond's didn't even get off the ground. I think Tobias had the best explanation, the gist of being Masrani actually did what Hammond said about sparing no expense. Having very well trained staff, state of the art tech management systems, etc.

Above all, treating the dinosaurs like living beings rather that just attractions.

Malcolm's line about nature "selecting them for extinction" always irritated me, the dinosaurs died out because of a random space rock, nature didn't select shit!

Not all the dinosaurs died from the K-T meteor. Just the large ones from the Cretaceous generation. Hundreds of thousands of prior species had already gone extinct throughout the Mesozoic, and those that escaped the meteor had to have their generations evolve into new forms to survive. Brachiosaurs had been dead by the time the T. rex arrived for even longer than the T. rex has been dead apart from humans.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 21st 2019 at 7:45:09 AM