Reviews Franchise / Jurassic Park

This movie never struck me as anti-progress. It seemed more that cloning animals from millions of years ago, way out of their natural habitats, with generally insufficient security, all to make money, is a terrible idea. It's not anti-science, just against using science in incredibly stupid and short-sighted ways.

You have to realize that this movie is from 1993 and computer effects age extremely quickly. At the time, they were breathtaking. And I believe the theory that dinosaurs had feathers was either a minority position or didn't exist at all.

For some reason, I find your final score to be really childish.

For better or worse, you can't really redesign the T. rex or raptors' body structure because that's actually what they look like. Complaining that the Rex's head looks like a box can't be directed at the movie, because that's what its head is actually shaped like and no amount of complaining is going to change that.

And Gallimimus looks better than the T. rex? Gallimimus looks like a featherless ostrich. A T. rex looks like a forty foot long muscular beast of death. You can't get a much cooler look than that.

"or raptors' body structure because that's actually what they look like."

Well it's definitely not true for the raptors, because they're not tiny little chicken-esque scavenger things =D

IF you think of them as Velociraptor Mongoliensis, rather than Velociraptor Antirrhopus, aka what was eventually found to Deinonychus.

But actually, I meant in terms of shape. Shape-wise, there's not much you can change.

The first movie was not anti progress, it was anti exploitation/sensationalism. Hammond has this great breakthrough, but it's not finished. He decides to skip forward, constantly comparing his breakthroughs to disney world or a flea circus. He'd rather exploit his breakthrough than follow through. Sattler gives an entire rant about how he doesn't even realize he put poisonous plants on the island because the just thought they looked nice.

As for the dinosaurs the only one that was actually against the current prevailing theory at the time was the Dilophosaurus, where no evidence points to a frill or poison. Everything else was fact checked by Dr. Jack Horner, one of the preeminent paleontologists of the time.

Aaaand the raptors and T rex actually had mechanical armatures with textured skin used with cgi to make them look real. The brachios were huge hand puppets in their close ups. I would never call a glorified Big bird head a better aesthetic choice than what Stan Winston did with the raptors and Tyrannosaurs...unless it actually was big bird (because why not?).

@Tucker: Tyrannosaurus did not look like that. The skull is completly wrong; see Darren Naish's comments on WWD's T. rex, which has the same problems.

Also, Deinoncyhus wasn't like that either: for starters, it was much smaller, around the size of a wolf, didn't had puppy hands and even ignoring the lack of feathers the body is a horrendous rendition.

See the following:

http://tomozaurus.deviantart.com/art/Common-errors-for-Velociraptor-178827028

@Fenrisulfur Malcom's dialogue was perhaps a touch anti-progress. I'm pretty sure he out and out says they shouldn't be messing with life like that at some point. But the two palaeontologists balance it out a bit by bringing the wonder of scientific achievement to the table

@Tom Forgot about him, okay yeah you're right about Malcom.

The raptor design was from a Deinonychus article in National Geographic (which is how Horner found out about the film in the first place). At the time, this is how people thought the animals moved and looked. They design we have now is from the mid 1990s (after the movie). The feathered theory was proposed in 1975 by Dr. Rob Bakker, but it never gained evidence until the 1990s.

If we were to disucss inaccuracies, the Brachiosaurus was very inaccurate with an impossible posture, ability to get on its hind legs, chewing teeth, and no feathers/spines. This was known at the time, unlike the feathers.

I can't find Naish's comments on T. Rex in Walking with Dinosaurs, just his book that was a tie in. That said, we also currently doubt that T. Rex was a predator as its skeletal structure lends itself more to walking than running, and its olfactory system is far more developed than any other sense.

In truth, this doesn't bother me as, in the words of Bakker, "the great thing about Paleontology is that you'll be wrong in ten years anyway". I don't think that this movie about theme park monsters intended to be scientifically accurate.

we also currently doubt that T. Rex was a predator as its skeletal structure lends itself more to walking than running, and its olfactory system is far more developed than any other sense

Not really. The general consensus nowadays is that T. rex was both a predator and a scavenger, and even Jack Horner, the lead proponent on the "T. rex was a scavenger" claim, now claims he never meant it seriously but was trying to educate about misinformation. And not being able to move above trotting speed isn't really a problem if your prey won't be going any faster. I can't see a Triceratops galloping.

In addition, the film still made some major strides in dinosaur perception to the public. For instance, it was one of the first to accurately show T. rex in a horizontal posture, rather than the vertical posture with a dragging tail.

You don't think much to the special effects? I think they still stand up to scrutiny to this day. The early 90s was truly the high water mark for "special effects" (before they became just "effects") - a time where CGI was a brilliant new invention to achieve spectacular results, but still too primitive to be used exclusively/without clever cheats to obscure the limitations. In the case of Jurassic park, they are careful to reserve CGI for distant models, and switch to robots/suits for up close.

EDIT: wait, I misread that section. Never mind

CGI? They built physical puppets of the creatures that could move. Your review is henceforth deemed a pathetic joke.