Sometimes, when volunteering at the local theater, one must sometimes suffer through terrible (but popular) movies. This week was my turn to carry out my obligations. The movie: Jurassic Park. I’ve hated this movie for decades. It brings in money, though, so I sold out my principles.
That doesn’t mean I won’t complain about it, though!
But it does feature a lawyer getting eaten.
Movies like this, actually, most science-fiction movies, require you to ‘suspend disbelief’ to grant them credibility in your mind. I agree with PZ I could not make the extreme stretch to ‘suspend disbelief’ regarding a lot of the silliness of jurassic park.
Have you seen this remake of the famous “raptors in the kitchen” scene with up-to-date Deinonychus? (There’s also a version with a realistic Velociraptor.)
nevillepark @ 3
Back when Stephen Jay Gould was alive, I read a lot and learned the difference between Deinonychus and velociraptor. And the likelihood that at least the smaller theropods had feathers.
Unfortunately, this has made a lot of Gary Larson cartoons obsolete. A great cultural tragedy!
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Btw back in the nineties most books on the time period did not bother to feature much about the reptiles the proto-mammals evolved from, even though that was the dominant branch of reptiles for a long period.
People know “amphibians, reptiles, something something dinosaurs mammals”.
I would rather watch Jurassic Park than Close Encounters of the Third Kind or even worse: (barf!) E.T.
Christ, I hate E.T.
It is infantile shite and the fact that it did it was so popular just makes me want to resign from the human race.
Can you please find some good, weird Japanese film for the theater?
Or… Fred Dekker’s “Night Of The Creeps”, a great 1980s horror comedy with all the eighties vibes.
“-The good news is, your dates are here.
-What’s the bad news?
-They are all dead!”
Brandon’s Cult Movie Reviews: Night Of The Creeps
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ughRVMgYks
birgerjohansson @ 6
I can’t say at this point if it’s good, but I’ll be seeing Exit 8 this weekend at the local repertory movie theatre, admission free so, good or bad, all I’ve wasted is time.
Both Jurassic Park and The Matrix had bad premises but you can forgive that if the film drags you in with wilful suspention of disbelief.
For the same reason, I like Lucy and Inception.
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Weird, good action films:
From Dusk Till Dawn.
Shoot Them Up
In The Mouth of Madness: Sam Neill meets Lovecraft.
Repo Man
Runaway.
Richard Smith @ 7
Under The Skin is creepy alien conflict, from the alien’s perspective. This role helped launch Scarlet Johansson ‘s career.
(Yes, she has a Swedish surname, but I think she is 100% Merican)
If you would rather have reality:
Dueling Dinosaurs
At the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
See the skeletons of a nanotyrannus and a Triceratops excavated together from the Hell Creek Formation. While it appears the two animals may have fought and died together (thus the name of the exhibit) information provided clarifies that the two specimens were found in an ancient sand bar, putting into question whether they even died in the same place or were moved by flood waters.
Anyway, you get lots of information, a view of the prep lab, located in an excellent natural science museum covering numerous types of life from various habitats, and…
admission is free!
I liked the novel as a teen, and thought the movie was okay… in hindsight I think both were bad.
The novel did introduce me to chaos theory (albeit a horribly distorted version of it), so that’s a “good” thing.
I remember when it came out.
The hype was all about the CGI and the remarkable realism of the critters*.
The cinema (I actually went!) featured one of those autostereograms (‘magic eye’) which I could see.
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* This was before the feathers and colours thing was widely-known.
Shorter PZ reviews – why do fantasy movies take so much liberty with scientific truth and unrealistic premises and why do they not accurately depict scientists and the scientific process – especially the ones that everyone seems to like?
Answer : In the question itself.
Weren’t there the exciting permafrost squirrel droppings containing so much DNA recently? It may not have been the dinosaurs, but I think this brings us worlds closer to getting an actual mammoth.
It coincidentally also confirms the conjecture of Gimli the Dwarf about what trees have to talk about: The consistency of squirrel droppings (his guess) apparently is a really exciting topic!
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks97dIzAFBA
Deepak, the story is not the science, so you have misunderstood PZ’s claim by conflating them.
From the transcript:
Allright, it appears as though I should have to qualify that statement somewhat: The newly deciphered DNA came from other creatures (hares and horses, for instance), but at least, they DID apparently obtain information on the composition of ecosystems in terms of participants (ie. which species were at least present, ie. a subset of the present species). See https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/9348?utm_source=chatgpt.com
@John Morales
Did I claim it was ?
Yes – that is what the people who watched Jurassic park got out of it – If science is allowed to run amok Dinosaurs will walk the world!. Its a cautionary tale is it ? What next Biology students will be misled by the cloning accuracy ?
[meta]
re: https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/9348?utm_source=chatgpt.com
You don’t need the tracking parameter at the end.
(Well, we now know how you found the link)
Yes, implicitly.
“Shorter PZ reviews – why do fantasy movies take so much liberty with scientific truth and unrealistic premises and why do they not accurately depict scientists and the scientific process – especially the ones that everyone seems to like?”
is not a good description of what I quoted:
The science bit was ancillary. You thought it was primary.
Nope. It’s pure escapism. Entertainment. Spectacle.
I entirely concur about the silliness of the plot, and the handwavy cargo cult science claims.
Plot-wise, other than the ridiculous alleged safety features, my biggest prob was that the scientists at InGen were capable of cloning extinct species and rewriting complex genomic sequences, but failed to get that the specific amphibian DNA they selected allowed for sequential hermaphroditism
Right? Any competent geneticist would’ve known that trait exists in that donor species.
The plot twist/surprise is thereby vitiated.
You have every right to hate the film, of course, based primarily on what you judge to be a lack of scientific plausibility. I get it, it falls short of the kind of scientific rigor that you feel a good sci-fi movie should have.
But, respectfully, I think your criteria are a little severe in a way that prioritizes scientific accuracy over satisfying dramatization. I don’t think you have much sense for what would make a good story (given your pitch for what the film should have been). And at the end of the day, I think you’re mischaracterizing what the film is trying to say.
You claim the movie is, “A devious anti-science fable,” and that it “completely misunderstands what scientists are like,” but I disagree. The film isn’t anti-science, it’s anti-irresponsibility. It shows how the corporate misuse of science and cutting corners to maximize profit can lead to unforeseen circumstances. And I think it did a great job of popularizing scientific concepts and paleontology itself, and inspired a lot of kids who saw it to go into the field. You may roll your eyes at it, but a film need not be perfectly scientifically accurate to accomplish this.
I think the film does a better than average job of conveying to a lay audience what scientists are like and what they think and how they problem solve. And it humanizes them. The heroes of the film are all scientists who are awestruck at first, yes, but ultimately vehemently against the park, how it’s being run, and what the billionaire who is behind it all it is doing with it, and why.
They criticize it at every possible level, just as you are in your review. They are voicing some of your complaints. But, even so, they are not monolithic in thought either, even among themselves. They argue with each other about the particulars. Just like real scientists would.
Here is the pivotal philosophical scene from the first act of the film between the billionaire and one of the scientists:
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.
Donald Gennaro: It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations…
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may… Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now
[bangs on the table]
Dr. Ian Malcolm: you’re selling it, you wanna sell it. Well…
John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before…
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
John Hammond: Condors. Condors are on the verge of extinction…
Dr. Ian Malcolm: [shaking his head] No…
John Hammond: If I was to create a flock of condors on this island, you wouldn’t have anything to say.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, hold on. This isn’t some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
That’s good dialogue! Most sci-fi films wouldn’t even bother to debate these issues, let alone devote an entire scene to them, especially not in an intelligent way. Even if you don’t entirely agree with the Malcolm character, you have to at least acknowledge that the film isn’t “stupid.”
This isn’t some Roland Emmerich nonsense like Godzilla or 2012. Steven Spielberg is a much more talented, insightful filmmaker who has made more good films than bad, and David Koepp is actually doing good work here and improving on Michael Crichton’s novel.
Regardless, the inciting incident of the film happens, not because of the actions of any scientist, but due to the greed of a computer tech who is upset he isn’t getting paid enough money. He steals embryos to give to a rival company and disables the park’s electrified fences during a major hurricane and gets himself killed, thereby endangering everyone’s lives.
Ultimately it’s the scientists who step up and come to the rescue of everyone. Their methodological and philosophical positions are vindicated, and the selfish billionaire is shown as inept and way in over his head. His own grandchildren cling to the scientist who had to save them in the final scene of the film.
This is a good movie and doesn’t deserve your scorn. I think you should sit down and watch it again and give it another shot.
I didn’t get “the hubris of scientists” out of Jurassic Park, but rather “the hubris of capitalists”. The most unbelieveable part for me was the capitalist deciding this was a bad idea and to close it down rather than thinking he should cover the disaster up because it will be such a money maker. But maybe I’m weird that way…
Ian Malcolm ranting at John Hammond in the book:
Untrained people can kill. Unethical elites exist. Trained mercenaries are a thing. Vulture capitalist buyouts. Nepotism. Academia != get rich quick. Etc.
Frog DNA?? Did these scientists know nothing about phylogeny? Well, I guess there are plenty of molecular biologists these days who don’t.
But PZ, you must know that you see live dinosaurs every day. Not an extinct clade.
Not ‘the capitalist’, davebot. The entrepeneur. The tech bro billionaire.
Who was not evil, BTW, thus the closing-down — his grandchildren were at risk and it forced him to acknowledge the reality his project was hazardous and not controllable.
(Also, the geneticists being surprised by the dino’s breeding when they were so very sure they could not, what is that again?)
@20 davebot You have just said the plot of the rest of the JPiverse. And they go downhill quickly.
But the original was great. Just the score alone is incredible. The SFX were ground breaking and still hold up for mine. Ok, the story wasn’t great, but the characters developed and acted in character, The bad guys died in cool ways. The car chase down the tree was awesome, the car chase with the T Rex was awesome. The gags were funny.
All a matter of taste of course, but saying JP was bad is about as close as taste can get to being objectively wrong!
I’ve read the book and seen the movie, and both are not great. As PZ says, the movie felt like it had to give details that were unnecessary. The exposition didn’t move the plot forward and the science was obviously wrong even 30 years ago. I felt like the book’s handwaving and glossing over the science was actually better–at least it wasn’t wrong.
[BTW, not a new topic here]
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/03/06/but-weve-already-got-wooly-mice/
#8: Lucy?
LUCY?
The “we only use 10% of our brain” LUCY?
No. No way. You’re just trying to trigger me now.
Meh on this one. I watched Jurasslick Park when it first came out. It was ok, but I mostly remember Goldblum for whatever reason. Attitude? Clothing?
I did watch a bunch of spoiler stuff about Backrooms trying to figure that out before I ever get around to watching it. Trying not to trigger a certain someone into the obligatory correction dis that I will ignore this go around.
Hopefully PZ has a more interesting or recent movie next time. Or Phantasm if we are getting into oldies. Or Ghost Dog.
I cannot generate enough hate or love for JP. A college friend dragged me to one of the sequels (ca. 1997-98ish) and bleh whatever that was. Then we had the whole guy who was a loser on Ann Perkins’ couch with a no longer broken leg on Parks and Rec to marrying Arnold’s daughter and becoming a Jurasslick action hero arc who I don’t care about enough to watch. Yawn.
Not like Limitless where the NZT‑48 pill unlocks “full cognitive capacity.”
Supercharges the brain, but one becomes dependent on it and needs it to function at all after a bit.
Seems to me that there’s some sort of allegory there, beneath the action and conceit.
(Anyway, enjoyed both the movie and the series, FWTW. At home, of course)
[dammit, Hemidactylus! I should have addressed mine, but was complacent]
@27 PZ
I heard the percent of our brain thing and refused to watch. Also is there a rule Morgan Freeman must star in like almost a third if not half of movies made? I loved him in Unforgiven and several other movies, but wasn’t it him who uttered the percentage of our brain comment in Lucy?
Jurassic Park is a classic and I love it even if the science is now outdated and was always silly. Saw it in the cinema and love it and still enjoy the replays on telly these days. Its just fun and iconic.
It also inspired people to do science especially palaeontology and has had a pretty big cultural impact.
Is it just that it lacks spiders, PZ?
70s: Let’s impugn sharks resulting in many of their deaths. Justify outright shark slaughter.
90s: Let’s scare people about extinct dinosaurs coming back despite the actual mockingbirds ready to dive bomb your ass merely trying to make it to your vehicle without a skull injury.
Spielberg.
Well, it did until the current regime got their hands on it. Aside from the chaos and corruption of science at the CDC and NIH, they’re now busy removing all the guardrails (not to mention the guards) on nuclear plants and raising limits on radiation leakage (adequate shielding is just too expensive!) so AI data centers can suck up all the juice they want. The formerly independent NRC as well as the DOE are now nearly wholly-owned subsidiaries of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists, Peter Thiel, & Trump Kickbacks Inc.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-nuclear-power-nrc-safety-doge-vought
I enjoyed cE3K, Jurassic Park, ET, Lucy because they are well-made films. I enjoy them as fiction. not science documentaries. I can suspend my disbelief. I understand the “10% if tje brain” thing is nonsense like the science in the rest of them but so what? 2001 depended on mysterious aliens with vast powers and that’s regarded as hardcore hard SF.
I understand how these inaccuracies cam bug you. I like war films but I know the character of Private Hook in Zulu is almost a complete reversal of the man in real life and Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of General Browning in A Bridge Too Far was a caricature of the officer in real life but I can still enjoy the films for what they are, well-made fictionalized accounts not documentaries,
If you’re going to throw out all these movies because of their scientific inaccuracies then, of course, you can but if they are intended only as well-made (and profitable) entertainment then they succeed for me,
I agree that those are well-made movies. My problem is that they are built on premises that would have evaporated in a 5 minute conversation with a relevant scientist, which wouldn’t have prevented making a good movie — it would just be a good movie that wasn’t built around obvious bullshit.
I very much liked Ghost Dog. Even better was Dead Man. Jarmusch makes very interesting movies.
PZ @ 28
Sorry, did not mean to trigger you. I am so used to poor film “science” that I have become partially numb.
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In The Matrix human cells/bodies produce energy from nothing, powering the AI civilization. I am more into physics than biology so that is a big obstacle for me when enjoying the film. But it was so well-made I eventually got carried away.
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An annoying thing in almost all SF films is that the script writers could easily come up with more plausible-sounding explanations, if they invested a bit of thinking. Or hired a team of teenage nerds, paying them off with free tickets.
Idea: Next April 1st, I must post a long piece about the brilliance of “Lucy” (Evil laughter).
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And the part in Jurassic Park where they stitch together badly fragmented DNA was obviously done with quantum computing, so everything in the plot is totally legit. (sark)
@13 Actually, I think and even shorter version is, “old man syndrome”. My father developed it too, though with music, and in his case I think it had a lot to do with hearing loss, which led to him eventually saying, “All music that I can’t still vaguely recognize from my youth is horrible noise!”
Kidding PZ. Well, mostly… I am, kind of, starting to wonder if you like “any” movies though at this point. lol
The important thing to remember about The Matrix is that it’s actually a movie about a trans person’s journey to self-acceptance and all the garbage about VR worlds and AIs powered by human batteries was added because that’s what it took to tell a mainstream story about a trans person in the 90s.
The sequels were just a metaphor for how corporate greed ruins everything.
I had the same problem with The Matrix as I did with Thunderdome. The sheer inefficiency of their methods of producing energy just stopped me in my tracks. I still very much enjoy both movies, but those parts always make me grind my teeth.
Ridana @ 43
In the Thunderdome, the method of energy production was at least plausible (but smelly). Having grown up on a farm, i winced.
Birger @39,
As so often, because of studio meddling; the Wachowskis’ early drafts had humans used as neural processors as part of its distributed computing network. The “battery” idea was inserted because the studio thought “human CPU farm” was too abstract for audiences.
@45 Was going to say, I always took this as, “Are the machines even telling the truth about why they need humans?”
I enjoyed the dinosaur CGI in Jurassic Park, even though the Velociraptors weren’t scientifically accurate.
It was a fun Dino movie that my children and I both found entertaining.
I got a good laugh at the premise of recreating them from Dino blood DNA from a mosquito fossilized in Amber.
The thing is, if we stick rigorously to the science w know, there is no space fiction. Even The Martian had to assume a destructive dust storm that wouldn’t happen in the thin atmosphere of Mars. Without that, there was no story. Plus there was the old side-stepping the question of the hideous cost of building and launching the spaceship. It was the same in 2001. Imagine the cost of the rotating space station or that huge Moonbase with the segmented retractable dome.
The only TV show that made a valiant effort to stick to credible science was the BBC’s Doomwatch years ago but that was hampered by a limited budget and risible special effects.
seversky, sure, literally.
But then, there is also space science fiction.
Traditionally, even the ‘hard’ version refers to paribus ceteris for extant stuff (i.e. same universe, same rules) but allow for one or two technomagical developments that allow spacefaring among other things.
For example, I classify Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg as hard SF.
#17 Deepak Shetty Well Michael Crichton had authored or directed at least 3 other movies , based on his books, with exactly the same theme, so he was trying to tell the world something. As a child of the Nuclear Age I’m going to take a punt and say its “ don’t trust scientists look at the mess they go us into “ which is slightly naive on his part as scientists did not fund the cold war political leaders did.
The movie also has the worst designed outdoor zoo on the planet. Seriously where do they take the mega fauna for health checks ? Or follow me here I know its unlikely, somewhere to shelter these incredibly fragile creatures in case of inclement weather in the Caribbean. It’s a wonder the genetically engineered animals have survived the 25 or 30 years to maturity. All of it out doors. Likewise the lack of staff accommodation would seem to require helicopter flights for everyone every day. It’s almost as if the entire design of the island was to colapse in on itself in a few hours. Lucky there were some main characters around when it did.