This new movie, Jurassic World, is stirring up a fascinating love/hate reaction from paleontologists. We all love to imagine dinosaurs resurrected, and the movies give us an image of what they’d be like, so everyone is happy to see that…and it also inspires new enthusiasm for fossils, so it helps lead to better support for good science. But at the same time, couldn’t they at least get the science right?
Kirkland, the state paleontologist at the Utah Geological Survey who has been involved in the discovery of 20 dinosaurs including the Utahraptor, admits such Hollywood blockbusters could inspire a whole new generation of fossil lovers. Yet, he frets that this movie – much like its three predecessors – will be filled with so many factual errors as to spread misinformation.
It’s a shame, too, because there’s been a kind of dinosaur renaissance lately, and there’s a possibility that some of it is linked to the popularity of dinosaur movies.
If you drive a direct connection between places putting value in dinosaurs and hiring dinosaur scientists, and then dinosaur science finding new dinosaurs, there’s almost something like a direct cause and effect between something like “Jurassic Park” and this incredible number of new dinosaurs.
But even the article that included that praise is packed with concerns about misinformation. There are also worries that the core of the series is Michael Crichton’s ignorant distrust of science — his books and movies are all about foolish or malevolent scientists discovering unintended consequences and destroying people, the old Frankenstein trope. But the major annoyance seems to be that it’s inaccurate, and it didn’t need to be.
“I like a fun movie,” Holtz says. “But fun, interesting, and accurate is even better.”
And this was a real shame, because it’s not as if scientific accuracy would somehow compromise the thrills of the movie — the modern picture of dinosaurs is way cool.
When the trailer for Jurassic World was released, it was obvious to us that this was not the film we were looking for. The dinosaurs are actually a retrograde step from the original Jurassic Park. Far from showing us the current understanding of dinosaur appearance, Jurassic World has decided to stick to what people expect – always a bold artistic move.
In related news, another article about David Peters has been published. Peters, in case you’ve never heard of him, is an extremely talented graphic artist and obsessive autodidact on the subject of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and he’s also very good at self-promotion — he has two sites, Reptile Evolution and Pterosaur Heresies, and they often turn up in google searches. In particular, if you’re looking for an image of a relatively obscure Mesozoic animal, it’ll be there, and it will look damned good.
It will also be wrong.
Wrong in just about every detail. He’s got a procedure that he claims brings up all kinds of details hidden in photographs of fossils (kind of like how Bible Codes reveal new stuff in some people’s favorite source), and he treats these as real and creates elaborate recreations of the animals with all kinds of frills and spikes and peculiar bony structures, and pretends they are diagnostic. Then he uses his imaginary structures to scramble phylogenies.
If you want to know all that’s bogus about Peters’ reptile evolution, Darren Naish has the definitive summary. It’s just bad science.
And that’s the problem with Jurassic World, too. There are going to be a lot of excited kids babbling to their families and peers about these cool facts about dinos — I remember being 12 and reading and reciting names and sizes and behaviors — and unfortunately, they’re not going to be ‘facts’. They’re going to be 40 years out of date.
Yeah, let’s invent a time machine and bring 12 year old me to the present to explain dinosaurs to everyone.
By the way, I will be seeing the movie next week, with a group of our HHMI students. I’ll probably enjoy it, just like I enjoyed Pacific Rim and the original Godzilla. Who doesn’t like big monstrous reptiles? But I should probably let them know that we’re not going to get up-to-date hypotheses about dinosaur appearance and behavior.
Nah, they’re smart, they probably already know.
Having been talking to Peters on and off since at least 2005 (to little or no avail), I love this comparison. :-)
BTW, I recently read a review of Jurassic World that didn’t mention accuracy at all. It said the plot was an exact copy of the original Jurassic Park; if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the other…
” if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the other…”
But c’mon, dinosaurs chasing and eating people?
Never gets old…
It’s not that they are innacurate, it’s that they are so innacurate as to be ridiculous. It’s not just that the real velociraptors were half the size and covered in glorious plumage, i can sort of understand how they are scarier as larger, scaly things, but the arms…seriously now…what do they fucking gain by doing the arms all wrong? The actual anatomy of the hands looks way better than the shit they’ve gone with, particularly when they are running. But no…
Pteranodons grabbing people and flying away with them…why the fuck not, it’s not like there were any awesomely large pterosaurs they could have used that would have been waaaaaaaaaaaaaay cooler and far mor realistic.
And the Ignominious rex…i could have designed something better, and i’m shit at almost everything…
It’s going to be a terrible, terrible movie.
What’s he demanding? That the movie begin with a bold disclaimer: “The movie you are about to see is imagination. No actual facts are presented herein.” To be followed at thend of the credits with, “No actual dinosaurs were harmed in this movie. Don’t try this at home.”
*cough*
It is always amusing at the nerdrage arguments over science errors in science FICTION. The only valid nerdrage is to be upset over inconsistent use of that fictional science; where first the fauxscience lets one thing happen, then disallows it later in the story.
BUT, there is a valid point about how often yungins will accept fiction as documentary, that then has to be unlearned to present the actual facts. Somewhat makes the education process a little more complicated. To require the teacher to keep answering questions about such “facts” with answers like, “Interesting question, BUT this is the reality answer ~~~~~” OTOH, it does inspire the kids to ask such questions and try to catch the teacher’s mistakes, rather than just listening to whatevah, otherwise completely disinterested.
So what are they complaining about?
It’d take a bit of a ret-con, but I thought it would be quite clever if in this movie they revealed that when In-Gen first ‘resurrected’ their dinosaurs, many of them came out feathered. So they had to tweak things a bit in order to get a marketable product to young boys. Even as the evidence for feathers piled up they’ve had to keep this practice going in order to keep the park viable with dads who grew up on 70s paleo-illustrations.
I wish the movie had at least acknowledged the fact that we’ve found feathered dinosaurs in some of the dinosaur lineages, maybe by showing a few among the mix of old-style-looking dinosaurs.
@David Marjanovic
It could work if the characters are good and memorable, the same way that Aliens worked after Alien. But if it’s just a cash-in retread of the original with tons of pandering and extra effects, then maybe not. I’m going to go see it either today or tomorrow, and I’ll try to keep an open mind about it while thinking about this.
I blame Ingen for using frog dna, I mean, really, amphibian dna when bird dna is extremely available? Someone needs to get fired.
Actually, the movie does provide a bit of an “out”, in somewhat of a throwaway comment by a scientist, where they admit that the dinosaurs looked different from the originals due to the DNA patching they had to do. And that the results are always somewhat unpredictable. So I guess that’s their excuse.
I can’t comment on the Motherboard article about David Peters. So, two things: 1) nobody is invited to such conferences, anyone can register and anyone can submit an abstract for a presentation – but, at that particular conference (the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology), the abstracts are reviewed and some (well, many these days) are rejected; 2) Wegener, not “Wegner”.
Um. Well.
Don’t forget to mouse over the picture, too.
Your mind-blowing optimism.
You seriously believe teachers will know better?
Anyway, I recommend this review about Jurassic World as a lost opportunity.
I appear to have borked the second link.
The “it’s fiction” thing doesn’t work for me here…So it’s Interstellar, but if the protagonist had green skin, was 3m tall and only ate armadillos, it’d be a much shitter movie…
Even if the Jurassic Park saga is fiction, it definitely attempts to come off as realistic, and it made a point of incorporating certain aspects that are straight out of plaeontological hypothesis, it consulted experts, it made a strong emphasis on trying to transport the viewer into a reality in which scientists had actually resurrected dinosaurs, not Godzillas or some other completely fictional reptiloid.
The problem is that it uses what it likes and discards what it doesn’t, in favor of pointlessly cattering to the sensationalistic expectation of people who are ignorant about the subject, and in doing os it losses that realism that makes the saga special and has been key, to my mind, in making it so influencial. There’s a reason why Jurassic Park inspired so many so strongly, and other “large reptiloid monster” movies haven’t.
Yeah, like breaking the tail of the same Stegosaurus in two separate places.
@9 David
I fucking love secretary birds…
Word of God regarding the scaly velociraptors is that it was because they used frog DNA when cloning them.
But I called the plot when the first trailer came out last year, and according to people who’ve already seen it my predictions were dead on. It’s not exactly doing anything unexpected, but I’m still going to go see it.
Yeah, because modern amphibians are so well known for their scales…
If you want to make an excuse, say it’s an atavism brought on during the genetic ingeniering, don’t say it’s because of the frogs…
Oh, and the fucking mosasaur…it’s the first time one appears, so they didn’t have to “keep the antiquated stuff”..they could easily made it accurate and they fucking chose not to. This is why it bothers me…it’s not that they have decided to modify certain aspects for sensationalistic effect, it’s that they have got certain things entirely wrong that they have no justification to get wrong other than fucking laziness and doing a bad job. And that, i’m not going to forgive xD
I’m not watching Jurassic World. The dinosaurs are all nothing more than science fiction monsters. That’s what the dinosaurs of JW exactly are.
Really? They got a few quills in JPIII.
This is why I think it’d be smarter if they said straight up “No feathers for marketing reasons” was what they did. It’s cute meta commentary on the whole controversy itself. Plus that’s at least some part of the plot. The Indomitus Rex is a GMO cooked up in part because regular dinosaurs aren’t sexy enough anymore. “We’ve seen T-Rex already. He’s got such goofy little arms. Someone should do something about that” dot dot dot.
But I suspect cleverness is a bit too much to ask.
“It is always amusing at the nerdrage arguments over science errors in science FICTION.”
I can argue with capitalization, too. I get upset when writers are too lazy to do research for SCIENCE fiction. If you don’t give a damn about the science, write fantasy. You can have whatever consistent laws for your new world that you want. But when you’re writing science fiction, at least take a little bit of time to understand the science you’re writing about.
Being gulped down in quickly, even being bitten in half or having your head bitten off is fine. Real death is what Hollywood does not want to deal with and why the dinos are unrealistic.
Hollywood doesn’t want to show a human being brought down by a dino a third a human size, then scrabbling, screaming, crying and bleeding on the ground for four or five minutes while two or three small dinos chew his soft tissues out.
I have to say that the trailer looks just awful. Question: What flying raptors hunt in flocks? Answer: None that I’m aware of. So why in the world would there be pteranodons swooping down on the crowd en masse, then? No reason other than to advance the plot…which would be better served if people were picked off in onsies and twosies…way more terrifying, frankly.
I’m afraid that I’d be constantly carping throughout the movie — feathers or not. Maybe Godzilla will come and save the day — breathing fire.
I agree, the “fiction” part of Science Fiction is not a ‘get-out-free’ card. To include the “science” part, at least be consistent in how the fantasy science operates.
Jurassic World could have addressed the feather issue by just saying “the first Park dinos were too hastily developed and lacked the feathers they should have had iff InGen had been more careful previously.” then go on to show all the World Dinosaurs with feathers…
apologies for so arrogantly rewriting the movie. still not going to go see it, I’ll wait for the DVD at NetFlix, to rent.
Kevin:
Harris hawks?
To me the disappointing thing here is less that Jurassic World chose to use decades-old-dinosaur ideas, as that it’s all anyone uses. The original Jurassic Park has its share of mistakes, but at the time it was a big step toward presenting a modern idea of dinosaurs. The backward lumbering monsters of older films were replaced by agile social animals; they even have some scenes all about them acting like social animals. I think it was key in cementing public knowledge of their relationship to birds.
Many of us would love to see a movie that tries the same for new discoveries, at least as far as some good feathered theropods. Instead it seems anything but the same scaly dinosaurs we grew up with is unwanted, just as the sun still needs to be surrounded by the same nine planets we learned in school. Nostalgia has taken over for science, and any learning that challenges it is unwanted.
Thank you for indulging me in this “grown-ups these days” lament.
@20 colonelzen
And yet, Jurassic Park 2 had exactly that…
slithey tove:
Cheney, Bush, and many other politicians have regularly used fiction to make arguments in favor of political actions. And they did it when they were not young, and they often referred to fiction made long after they grew up.
Fiction affects everyone’s perception of reality. If it didn’t, it would be more boring than PBR.
I know just how Dr. Kirkland feels: I saw San Andreas last weekend and just about the only thing scientifically accurate was the state the move was based in has faults.
One small consolation was at least I understood the science enough to spot how they got everything wrong.
Protip for any future “earthquake” disaster movie screenwriters/directors: Love Waves (perpendicular shearing) travel faster than Rayleigh Waves (rolling). KThxBye
@21 Kevin Kehres
Harris hawks do. Plus pteranosaurs are emphatically NOT raptors…
Indeed, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you are doing a “giant monster” movie, then fine, do whatever the fuck you like, i don’t care, you have all the freedom that fantasy allows you. But if you are pretending to do a movie that is even remotely scientific, ignoring the science and getting the animals horribly wrong is something you fully deserve to be critisized for. It’s not nerdrage, it’s fucking accountability. You are making a movie that draws its uniqueness precisely because of how scientifically accurate it is compared to the rest, you better fucking deliver…
And this movie doesn’t. It gets a ridiculous amount of things horribly, horribly wrong, for no reason whatsoever other than being too fucking lazy to actually do the research, which in this day and age would have taken minutes…
Mm mm… The sweet sweet taste of nerdrage. The juicy succulent anguish. It nourishes me.
I don’t really know that much about dinosaurs, but I do know that Han do NOT shoot first! Anyone that says otherwise is bad and should feel bad.
>:-|
I’m willing to cut the film more slack than I might because of that Dr. Wu line about the dinosaurs not “really” looking like real dinosaurs (and that none of them are really the original, scientifically accurate animals for reasons of both incomplete DNA and marketing.) I wonder if they threw that line in there intentionally as an answer to that ongoing complaint against the film series.
Regardless, I was surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did. I wasn’t expecting it to be very good, but it was a fun flick, certainly better than the previous two sequels..
If I were to write a film about card counters and mention that the odds of getting the Ace of Spades out of a randomly shuffled deck with no jokers was 1/60, people would laugh at me. There’s no reason to miss a simple, easy to look up fact. Even if it never really mattered to the plot, because the plot is all about the pressure to cheat, the interactions between the group, etc., you’d call me a moron for getting a simple fact wrong.
Does it make a difference to the plot whether or not the dinosaurs are depicted as accurately as they can be given current knowledge? No. Was it something easy to look up and get right with no real additional cost? Yes. (They might have needed more computing power and time to render feathers as opposed to scales.) Does it make them look lazy/stupid? Yes.
When the 8 year old kids going to the movie can correct the science, you’ve got problems.
I just saw the first part of the first Jurassic Park on my TV. The first thing we hear from Doctor Grant is a talk about how dinosaurs are like birds.
The thing about Spielberg movies is that he puts on a damn fine show, and doesn’t let facts, or even continuity, and certainly not reality, get in the way of the story. I mean, watch number one where the bait goat is on a little rise beside the vehicle, then the vehicle gets pushed off the side off a damned high support wall, which would never have been built, and lands in an immense tree which would have been destroyed in the construction of the wall. (And at the end of Jaws, when the air tank explodes …)
My personal rage at the trailer is the gyrospheres. They would have little power, no traction, be impossible to steer, and the viewing/rolling surface would get all gunked-up and scratched-up. Maybe there is some hand-waving in the movie, but an ATV with a dome would be so much better.
And yeah, the dinosaurs would be better with some plumage.
I saw Jurassic World last night. It was great. JP1 was better, but for a summer IMAX release, I really enjoyed it.
Also, as an astronomer, I have so little sympathy left for the misrepresentation of other sciences in film, it’s not even funny. Everyone may as well complain about the dino science to a forensic scientist, just to watch them weep.
They address the fact that the dinosaurs in JP and JW don’t look like real dinosaurs. In fact, it’s stated directly by the genetic engineer that they made the dinosaurs look like what people wanted their dinosaurs to look like. They’re theme park dinosaurs, and they’re designed to be theme park dinosaurs. Part of it was due to the missing DNA sequences, that they had to fill in with DNA from modern animals (but that was more focused on the unpredictable and unexpected behaviour of their dinosaurs), and part of it was creating animals (most commonly referred to as “assets” in the film by all top level InGen employees; the underemphasis of the fact that their “attractions” are living creatures, and the influence of corporate interests, is a running theme in the film).
The dinosaurs in Jurassic World are “bigger, louder, and with more teeth” by design. Because it’s what audiences want. They say so explicitly in the film.
Here is the thing…if you make a movie about, i don’t know, a giant crocodile or even zombie beavers, there better be a crocodile or beavers in the movie….because even if it’s fiction…even if it’s BAD fiction…we know what a beaver is, and if it looks nothing like it, it’s going to hurt the movie and make it look even more ridiculous and silly. So if you make a movie with a creature you are calling a Velociraptor, and that thing looks fucking nothing like what we know Velociraptors to look like (or pterosaurs, or large theropods, or mosasaurs…)…expect people to point it out. “Jesus, this Elephant Rampage movie is shite…it’s just a shaved pony with two broomsticks attached to the head terrorising a theme park, WTF?”. Don’t call it a Velociraptor if it’s not a Velociraptor…just like you wouldn’t call a shaved pony with two broomsticks an elephant, because it’s not a fucking elephant.
When creationists attempt to apropriate all the benefits and validity of science as if it’s any part whatsoever of what they are doing, we laugh at them…
@ Kichae
Point taken.
I think it would have much more interesting if part of the premise had been that they had re-engineered the dinosaurs to use bird DNA as a closer match, thus providing the proper feathering AND maybe have a bit about a subsequent increase in intelligence, making them far more interesting/scary.
I’m still seeing it. I’ll still enjoy it. But argh.
For me, not putting feathers on the dinosaurs is a huge opportunity wasted.
Feathers are cool and so flexible, and there would be so much room for speculation in pattern and colour and shape.
Forget the question of scientific accuracy, the filmmakers were handed a huge ARTISTIC opportunity on a platter, and they turned it down.
A failure of imagination all around.
Feathered dinosaurs would be scarier, in my opinion. I’d never look at the lowly chicken or sparrow or pigeon the same way again, after seeing its much larger ancestor chase down and eat humans with ease and gusto.
Never mind trying to ignore those odd side-head side-eyes I keep getting from the local crows and jays.
I can accept the inaccurate dinosaurs, but I could not stomach the scene where the female lead is driving away at at least >30kph and the velociraptor makes a head on, perfectly straight, charge through the driver’s side window. Almost like it had propelled itself to match speed, jumped, then with it’s magical rocket boots, instantaneously adjusted their vector perpendicular.
Granted, that whole scene may just be a product of editing for the trailer in which I’d seen it. In which case, I stand to be corrected.
YOB – Ye Olde Blacksmith @29
That’s just plain silly. Everyone except Spielberg knows that Han shot first.
Not one known pterosaur appears to have been a raptor, ecologically speaking, and not one has powerful grasping feet. Pteranodon is an overgrown albatross, not a raptor.
In that case I warmly recommend Acrocanthosaurus.
Two things – Han most certainly DID shoot first and was rehabilitated only in the reworked version. I am with the good science can still be a good movie group. It is easy enough to get it right and be honest – even at 1/2 the size, raptors would still be damn scary. Think lion or tiger. I’ll grant that there is always a suspension of disbelief necessary for movies but seriously, why require complete mindlessness?
Kichae, I like your comment. They do say the dinos are jiggered to meet expectations, which is a nice meta moment.
But they could have done it so much better, and explained that in the movie. Such a chance to educate, and Spielberg could have made it work.
(The explanation reminds me of some TV cop show where the lead woman was wearing ‘way too little. The in-show explanation was that she used to be a stripper.)
Yeah, Han shot first. It was such a cool moment in the movie.
Speaking of misunderstood cool moments: in Jurassic One, the raptors spring their trap on Muldoon, and he gets eaten. Some folks complain that he should have just started shooting, instead of talking. No, the raptors waited for him to move, then they just plain out-sped him. He could have recited Hamlet until they got tired of waiting. As it was, he knew they had outsmarted him, and he paid them the deserved compliment, with all respect, one hunter to another. Then he gave it a try, and they were faster. I thought it was a great bit of cinema.
I’ve seen the film and enjoyed it. A point made early in the film was that the ‘exhibits’ were made to be large and scary or small and cute (so as to be suited for children’s petting enclosures), and weren’t meant to be copies of preexisting dinosaurs.
Such as the pterosaurs (ok they’re not dinosaurs) which were shown as having prehensile feet capable of tossing heavy weights such as humans from one to another – in play.
Jurassic World had been running for years, and the owners were under constant pressure to introduce new more fearsome animals as public interest in the theme park flagged.
yes, we know it’s brilliant self-satire. However – if people are not told the “dinosaurs” look little like what they probably did, most people will have no idea it’s self-satire of any kind.
In any case – satire is sometimes fun, but most people do not draw lessons from it. If they did, well, the lesson would be: boycott this kind of we-sneer-at-your-puerile-desires-while-we-profit entertainment. And hardly anyone is boycotting. So the lesson is wasted.
ahem
re: Han shot first
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/copy-of-original-star-wars-script-discovered-in-unb-library-1.3104206
I just caught a bit more of the first Jurassic. There are several scenes where they mention the bird/dinosaur relationship.
Why they used frog DNA for splicing makes no sense.
It also makes no sense to have a dinosaur park that doesn’t feature reconstructed actual dinosaurs. The whole point was that they had found DNA and brought the dinos back. Otherwise, they might as well build Truckasaurus and have it blow flames. Building a park of ersatz danger-dinos is just asking for them to be really dangerous. (And yeah, that’s the movie.)
What John Hammond and Ingen did was create genetically engineered theme-park monsters. Nothing more, nothing less.
Menyambal @48:
Why they used an Indian bloke as the cause of The Charge of the Light Brigade makes no sense either. If you expect Hollywood to make sense, you’re wasting your expectations.
History, physics, paleontology; three things, among many, that Hollywood doesn’t give a shit about.
If the movie had somewhat accurate prehistoric animals but was terrible (and terrible it does seem, bland characters and uninspired plot – a very typical summer cash-in) I’d see it.
If the movie was great and interesting but still horrifically inaccurate, I’d see it.
If it was both accurate and great, I’d see it multiple times in theaters.
Since it’s neither, I’m going to pass unless somebody covers my ticket fee and that’s unlikely to happen.
I even made a YT video a few weeks back where I basically whine about the lack of scientific accuracy in JW, and how incorporating science would would make the film more interesting, unique, and fresh:
Well, I saw it. Not a spectacular movie, but a decent matinee attraction for an otherwise dull afternoon. I have two real complaints about it: one, the I-Rex was just too resilient- that thing took more to bring down than Roland Emmerich’s Zilla (this was a far superior movie to that, BTW) and two, Hoskins felt like he’d been shoe-horned into the movie.
Menyambal @48:
The reason for the frog DNA is plot-driven, rather than being sensible science. InGen creates only female dinosaurs so they can’t breed, as a precautionary mechanism. Certain frogs (also many fish) can change sex under the right circumstances–so Crichton used that little factoid as a plot mechanism. Because of that frog DNA, some of the dinosaurs became male, and a breeding population was produced. MAHEM! CHAOS! etc.
No, it makes no sense scientifically. But there was a reason Crichton, and later Spielberg, used it in the plot (even if it’s a bit of a cheap ploy at a plot twist).
Yeah, the frog DNA was cheap. They could have just had a disgruntled employee bootlegging males on the sly, and letting them go to breed, intending to sell the young. Or just have the staff screw up. (Could you reliably tell the gender of a new-hatched dino?)
Island Adolescent, I really liked your vid.
I watched the first Jurasic movie many times, and copied some of the musical score. The second one, I fast-forwarded through on my first viewing. The third, I caught bits on TV. The fourth, I have seen too much already.
Cinema Sins’s _Everything Wrong With Jurassic Park_ http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7KjB-_bjOJs
So where did the DNA for the mosasaur come from? A mosquito that bit that thick-hided marine reptile?
And the frog DNA bit wasn’t really needed. The fact that the dinos were breeding really didn’t affect the plot of Jurassic Park. All the fun and frolic was done with full-sized critters from the hatchery. (In the second, yeah.)
@ Menyambal- there was a throwaway line about how they’d figured out a way to extract DNA directly from fossils instead of mosquitoes that bit dinosaurs.
Muz @ 5
This exact idea is addressed in the movie. Dr. Wu says that the animals aren’t “real” dinosaurs and have been altered from the start for marketing purposes and to better match what the average person expected than what was natural. It would’ve been nice if that had been stated at the beginning of the movie instead of the end and there had been some “our best guess as to what would be accurate” example of how the dinosaurs should have really looked, though.
Still. I enjoyed it. I went for entertainment and received it.
The thing is, they didn’t even need the frog DNA cheat to get the dinos breeding. Parthenogenetic lizards are a thing, after all.
Real movie title: Jurassic Dinosaur Cafeteria 4
It was also gloriously unnecessary and needlessly complicated. They could have just revealed that Dinosaurs, unexpectedly were not chromosomal sex determinant and sex was determined by incubation temperature or some such. The scientists saw a gene that LOOKED like the ZX chromosones for chickens or something and assumed it was a sex gene and edited it out and with no one having actually seen real dinosaurs before, and with them having internal genitalia, no one noticed their girls were developing male sexual dimorphism come puberty.
oddly it would also fit the Chaos theme better, scientists made a mistake due to incomplete unforeseeable data which cascaded into a huge problem.
Also I presumed the Site 3 Dinos had feathers because they were naturally born from escapee specimens rather than clones, ergo their embryo’s weren’t tinkered with and traits that were selected against were starting to re-emerge
I always snort when somebody says that they just have to give the customers what they want. We have entire industries based on convincing people to want stuff, to buy expensive stuff, and to throw good stuff away.
Spielberg could have put feathers on the dinosaurs, and sold it with one shot of a dino raising its crest. The first movie had several references to birds – they could have said “They are even more like birds than we thought”, and cut to one that looked like a parrot and was trying to talk, maybe.
Good point!
@63,
…and by the second hour of the movie, the raptors have graduated from opening doorknobs to hacking the voiceprint ID system. In the end, they charter a boat to the mainland via an elaborate telephone scam.
“You should never have completed their genome using Kea DNA!” says Laura Dern.
Greetings,
I am a lawyer representing the Prince of isla Nublar….
Since I don’t know that much about dinosaurs, I just chalked it all up to “the DNA tinkering made animals that they’re calling ‘dinosaurs’ in order to make money.” After all, the park is called “Jurassic Park” instead of “Cretaceous Park,” so there was no redemption of the actual animals.
Instead, I was baffled by the sheer incoherence of everything else. You’re the controller of a huge park and you’re going to abandon your post to find your two nephews rather than take care of the other 20,000 guests?
What sort of park allows guests to wander among the animals unsupervised? The Human Habitrail that lets the occupant wander on their own is just waiting for some brat to try and play bumper cars with the animals…especially since you said it’s bullet proof.
Speaking of which, if you take tooth enamel and try to bite bullet proof glass? The enamel will shatter. Especially if the glass is round. That’s why eggs are shaped like that: Spherical objects are much stronger to crushing forces from the outside than the inside.
And speaking of wandering around in a Human Habitrail, how did it manage to wander outside the restricted area? No park would allow these things to function outside the controlled area. Yeah, the “electronic fences” were having trouble, but that’s just a simple GPS chip in the ride: You’re outside the zone you’re supposed to be in? You don’t work.
And how on earth did the items in the old park’s main center still work after 22 years? The batteries in those night-vision goggles wouldn’t be working. And the SUV itself would have deteriorated. Yeah, take the battery from the other vehicle…and the tires and spark plugs and cables and fluids and….
And I don’t care how manly Chris Pratt is…riding a motorcycle through the jungle does not have that smooth of a ride.
And if you’re an avian species who has lived its entire life inside a glass dome and thus knows not to fly into the glass, why do you immediately fly into the glass of the main plaza’s buildings as soon as you’re free of the glass dome? For that matter, why is everybody out in the main plaza just sitting around? When the park is shut down, why aren’t most of the guests in their rooms? At the pool? Inside eating?
And how fast does the earth spin where they are such that you can go from midday to pitch black night in less than 10 minutes?
And on and on and on. There was so much bad with this movie that had nothing to do with the dinosaurs.
@rrhain- The Gyrospheres should have had an automatic override that forced them to return to base in the event of an emergency rather than just playing a “please return to the base now” message. It was pretty obvious that the park really didn’t have a serious emergency plan in place.