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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    RangerGuy

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    Default The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Certain things about the Jurassic Park movies have bothered me for a long time, and with a new one on the way I feel like getting some opinions.

    These movies seem to exist in a world where the fates have a sense of right and wrong that somehow crosses sappy Disney family flicks with extreme vindictiveness towards anyone who doesn't toe a very particular line. "Crapsaccharine" I believe TVtropes calls it.

    The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

    How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?

    There is also a weird anti-science stand about "Playing God!" Um... playing God is what gets us medication, superior crops, artificial insemination, and a whole lot of other good things. Who gets to decide what we're not allowed to play with?

    Spoiler: The Lost World
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    The Lost World is, to me, downright despicable from any sane moral standpoint. The "heroes" are complete morons who object strongly to the "bad guys" rounding up dinosaurs to put in a zoo. I want to remind everyone that the dinos in question are by rights long-extinct, artificially created, and the property of the companies that bred them back into existence.

    But no, that ecoterrorist guy played by Vince Vaughn opens the dino-cages, sending large, powerful animals stampeding through a camp full of unexpecting people. These idiots then bring an injured baby T-Rex to their trailer, and when the parents come for it the only one to get eaten is the only one who had no part in that. He dies to save their idiot lives.

    The "heroes" are then saved some more by the "bad guys", which I find phenomenally gracious of them, all things considered. They then get attacked by velociraptors and a whole lot of people die, all because the "heroes" caused their vehicles and equipment to be stempeded into junk.

    Later on a T-Rex attacks the "bad guys", and the Great White Hunter guy takes aim... and his gun doesn't go off. We later see Vince Vaughn taking responsibility for this, saying something like "This is one trophy he won't get".

    So yeah. He disabled a dude's gun so he couldn't defend himself or others from extremely dangerous animals... because sport hunting is wrong. SO wrong, in fact, that human life is a secondary concern.

    I would be fine with this if the VV was arrested afterwards, or at least unambiguously portrayed as a villain or at the very, very least called on his evil actions by the main heroes. But no.


    Spoiler: Jurassic Park III
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    Those idiot parents lie to Alan Grant, because they want a dinosaur expert, then land on the giant predator infested island and immediately start screaming into a bullhorn and not listening to a damn thing he says.

    A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

    Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?


    Spoiler: Jurassic World
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    Sheesh. Here the bad guy is bad because he wants to use trained dinosaurs for military operations.

    So? Ill-conceived, maybe, but it's treated as morally wrong.

    The movie treats this as SO bad that Chris Pratt punches the dude while surrounded by the guy's armed men. Genius, Chris. Just genius. Later he just lets the guy get eaten by a raptor, rather than shoot it with his damn gun.

    Speaking of guns, when Pratt's character finds that injured herbivore slowly dying his reaction is NOT to do the humane thing and press his rifle against its head... no, he just does the sappy thing and pets it while it expires in agony.

    This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.

    Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.

    What the hell?


    Animals aren't our magical friends. They aren't evil, it's true. But they aren't good either. To quote Werner Herzog:

    "And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

    What do you guys think?
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    RedWizardGuy

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Jeivar, I agree with you, especially on the sequels. Lost World is especially bad in that nearly every death can be traced directly to the actions of the "heroes". After Lost World I haven;t seen any of them in the theater, and this newest one will be no exception. I'll catch it on cable since all I want to see is unrealistic dinosaur fights.

    However, there's one thing I'd like to address....


    Quote Originally Posted by Jeivar View Post
    The first film is the least extreme about it, but still casts a weirdly negative light on the lawyer guy whose reaction to dinosaurs is to talk about how much money the whole venture will make.

    How is that in any way not a normal reaction for a corporate lawyer?
    The lawyer gets grief not for his money making attitude, but that he changes to it so quickly and abandons his initial position. Remember, he was initially representing the interests that brought Grant, Saddler, and Malcolm (GSM) to the island in the first place. The events (seen and assumed based on scenes).


    1) Worker is killed while setting up the park.
    2) Investors express safety concerns. Gennaro (lawyer who is representing THEIR interests) confronts Hammond to bring in experts. Remember, if the experts aren't satisfied, he's not satisfied.
    3) Hammond brings in GSM, (presumably those three at urging of Gennaro and the investors).
    4) On their way to the park GSM and Gennaro see dinosaurs for the first time.

    At this point Gennaro immediately switches to "We're going to make a fortune". He is no longer paying attention to the experts that HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE PAYING ATTENTION TO. More importantly, he obviously no longer is looking out for the interests of the investors, who are HIS ACTUAL CLIENTS. He simply sees the dollar signs and everything else goes away.

    His attitude would be more understandable if he was Hammond's lawyer, but he isn't. He's there to assess the investment of the park relative to its safety, and he completely abandons it.
    "That's a horrible idea! What time?"

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    As much as I love Jurassic Park, Crichton was somewhat famous technophobe, and many of his books revolved around advanced technologies not working out like we wanted. I think that's the most I'm allowed to say here.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Jeivar View Post

    Spoiler: Jurassic World
    Show

    Then there's the bizarrely sadistic and drawn-out death of that one English lady. We didn't know her enough for it to be a tragic viewer punch. All we really find out about her is that she's not thrilled about being put on babysitting duty, which in the JP universe seems to justify a torture porn sequence.


    Spoiler
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    I have this theory that Katie McGrath ( who plays the PA )is trying for the position of the new Sean Bean from the number of times I've seen her die horribly on screen


    Also I presume the quote is from Herzog's film about the guy who lived among bears for years before being killed by one ?
    Last edited by comicshorse; 2018-05-31 at 11:44 AM.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by tomandtish View Post
    The lawyer gets grief not for his money making attitude, but that he changes to it so quickly and abandons his initial position. Remember, he was initially representing the interests that brought Grant, Saddler, and Malcolm (GSM) to the island in the first place. The events (seen and assumed based on scenes).
    Well, you may have a point. It's been a long time since I saw the movie.

    Quote Originally Posted by comicshorse View Post
    Also I presume the quote is from Herzog's film about the guy who lived among bears for years before being killed by one ?
    Yes. Grizzly Man.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    The Jurassic Park films are generally pretty bad about showing their themes. There's an strong message of 'Thou shalt not tamper in God's domain' in the films that really isn't shown.

    In the first film, everything was going swimmingly until corporate sabotage fouled it all up. There is one confirmed incident at the beginning in which a raptor kills one of the workers, but that's beside the point. It's Nedry that causes the security procedures to fail and allows the dinosaurs to escape. And yet, there is more focus on the failures of the park as opposed to the greed of the people bribing Nedry.

    In Jurassic World, they give a huge pair of idiot balls to Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard that allows the Indominus to escape. And from there, it's a convoluted domino effect that leads to the I. rex smashing into the aviary and releasing the pterosaurs that immediately go after the guests instead of the fresh apatosaurus carrion in the field. And then there's another convoluted twist that allows a formerly isolated and sociopathic animal to become the alpha of the raptor pack and turn them against the humans.

    And yet, the message is supposedly that Jurassic Park can't work and shouldn't be made.

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Berserk Mecha View Post
    The Jurassic Park films are generally pretty bad about showing their themes. There's an strong message of 'Thou shalt not tamper in God's domain' in the films that really isn't shown.

    In the first film, everything was going swimmingly until corporate sabotage fouled it all up. There is one confirmed incident at the beginning in which a raptor kills one of the workers, but that's beside the point. It's Nedry that causes the security procedures to fail and allows the dinosaurs to escape. And yet, there is more focus on the failures of the park as opposed to the greed of the people bribing Nedry.
    Nope, nopenopenope. You're objectively wrong.

    So, only focusing on the movie and not the book, we can still show the island is a colossal failure before Grant and Co. ever set foot on the island.

    Remember, they're only up for the weekend. It's a three-day tour of the island. On the first day, Nedry brings down some security systems, and they reboot the island. On the second day, Grant finds a cracked egg on the island. While not explicitly stated in the movie, the egg is the exact size, color, and texture of the raptor eggs we saw first. So, to start with, dinosaurs are already breeding, which means the park is already out of control; since the egg has already hatched, we know this has been going on for some time. Second, dinosaurs (or, at least, raptors) are now demonstrated to have already escaped their confines, even before Nedry was able to do anything.

    Nedry disabled some security systems, but left all the dino pen systems in place. When he didn't come back, the only way to bypass his lockout was to restart the entire system, which then ran on auxilliary power and thus wasn't powering the fences, so all hell was free to break loose and it was much, much easier to see the failure. But the park had failed well in advance, they just didn't know it yet.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Just because the dinosaurs were breeding in the wild doesn't mean that the park was a colossal failure. In the books, it was shown that compsognathuses and velociraptors had escaped beforehand and that it could become a huge problem. The opening scene of the book is about a clinic receiving a man with a velociraptor bite. But in the film, the dinosaurs breeding had no effect whatsoever on the plot and the failure of the park.

    Are we sure that the egg that Grant and the kids find on the second day was a velociraptor egg? The footprints that lead away from the nest looked more like those of a triceratops or a sauropod. I'd have to watch the scene again to be sure.

    And the raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the entire system. This is something that had never been tested and if circumstances hadn't been so dire, they might have prepared themselves better. And they wouldn't have had to reboot the system in the first place if there hadn't been corporate sabotage. Hence, it's all Nedry's fault.

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Berserk Mecha View Post
    Just because the dinosaurs were breeding in the wild doesn't mean that the park was a colossal failure. In the books, it was shown that compsognathuses and velociraptors had escaped beforehand and that it could become a huge problem. The opening scene of the book is about a clinic receiving a man with a velociraptor bite. But in the film, the dinosaurs breeding had no effect whatsoever on the plot and the failure of the park.

    Are we sure that the egg that Grant and the kids find on the second day was a velociraptor egg? The footprints that lead away from the nest looked more like those of a triceratops or a sauropod. I'd have to watch the scene again to be sure.

    And the raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the entire system. This is something that had never been tested and if circumstances hadn't been so dire, they might have prepared themselves better. And they wouldn't have had to reboot the system in the first place if there hadn't been corporate sabotage. Hence, it's all Nedry's fault.
    The raptor pens were shut off because they rebooted the system, but the raptors had already escaped and bred, or had bred and managed to chuck their eggs out (assuming the egg was a raptor. Book confirms it, movie doesn't, but again it shares the exact charictaristics of the eggs we see hatching in the hatchery). That means that, sans Nedry, the only thing between the island and a bunch of eaten tourists is time. Even if it wasn't raptors, that's free-roaming, untracked dinosaurs on an island specifically designed to not have free-roaming, untracked dinosaurs. Even the gentlest dino walking around free means they have huge problems on their hands.

    Also, if you want to play the backtrack game, Nedry did the sabotage because Hammond was insisting on extra unpaid work not in the contract, hence it's all Hammond's fault. Or, the system only needed to be rebooted because Nedry got lost, which wouldn't have happened if there had been no storm, so it's all the storm's fault. Or, Nedry did the corporate sabotage for the rival corporation at Dodgson's behest, so it's all Dodgson's fault.

    I'm not saying Nedry was a hero or anything; dude absolutely played a part in the isand's downfall. But he didn't cause anything, he just sped it up.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    There should have been a lot more redundancy built into the security system though, especially since they know that they're going to get hit by a few hurricanes every year. The shareholders were right to be concerned, they got talked into sinking masses of money into a kindly old grampa's dream project and apparently let him do whatever he wanted with it for however long it took to get the park to that point (I'm going to guess 10 to 15 years from the first cloned dino proof of concept to the time of the first movie). Hammond is a good face for the company but he never struck me as the kind of guy you'd put in charge of a multi-billion dollar investment and the lives of dozens of people.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by thorgrim29 View Post
    There should have been a lot more redundancy built into the security system though, especially since they know that they're going to get hit by a few hurricanes every year. The shareholders were right to be concerned, they got talked into sinking masses of money into a kindly old grampa's dream project and apparently let him do whatever he wanted with it for however long it took to get the park to that point (I'm going to guess 10 to 15 years from the first cloned dino proof of concept to the time of the first movie). Hammond is a good face for the company but he never struck me as the kind of guy you'd put in charge of a multi-billion dollar investment and the lives of dozens of people.
    Oh absolutely. Hammond, in both book and film, was a complete huckster. He even admits it openly when he talked about the flea circus. He presented to people what they wanted to see, is all.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    The answer is obvious. The dinosaurs are, and always have been, the actual protagonists and heroes. The humans are just the viewpoint characters, and only really matter insofar as they are in the vicinity of dinosaurs. People who do bad things to dinosaurs are punished, doing bad things to people is essentially irrelevant because people don't matter all that much. Of course people who don't do bad things to dinosaurs are also punished, because dinosaurs don't give a crap and, again, humans are irrelevant.

    This is thus the rare series that presents, not so much a nihilistic view, so much as one that is determinedly not anthrocentric. A t-rex eating a person is about as morally problematic as a human eating a bacon cheddar cheeseburger. When viewed from this perspective, I find it philosophically refreshing.


    Of course I'm also on the record as saying that the next movie really should be T-Rex and Velociraptor Kill Stuff.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    A'right, so I found the scene on YouTube:



    The footprints of the hatchlings look like they have two stubby toes. I guess that'd conform to the posture of a raptor if the larger claw were held off of the ground. So, yeah, that's an oversight on my part. But the film could still have shown that the dinosaurs breeding was a danger. The three adult velociraptors in the film all escaped from the confined pen after the system was rebooted. But wouldn't Muldoon and the others have known if one of their raptors had escaped? Especially if they were all kept in that small pen? Is that an oversight on the film's part?

    I do agree that the computer system should have had more redundancies. But wasn't the point of the tour to test if would all work in the first place? Seems rather condescending to condemn the park as a failure when the people in charge are actively trying to fix the kinks. Isn't that why they brought Malcom along? ...Come to think of it, what was his purpose again? (Aside from being Chriton's mouthpiece, of course.)

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    The answer is obvious. The dinosaurs are, and always have been, the actual protagonists and heroes. The humans are just the viewpoint characters, and only really matter insofar as they are in the vicinity of dinosaurs. People who do bad things to dinosaurs are punished, doing bad things to people is essentially irrelevant because people don't matter all that much. Of course people who don't do bad things to dinosaurs are also punished, because dinosaurs don't give a crap and, again, humans are irrelevant.

    This is thus the rare series that presents, not so much a nihilistic view, so much as one that is determinedly not anthrocentric. A t-rex eating a person is about as morally problematic as a human eating a bacon cheddar cheeseburger. When viewed from this perspective, I find it philosophically refreshing.


    Of course I'm also on the record as saying that the next movie really should be T-Rex and Velociraptor Kill Stuff.
    IIRC, Spielberg claimed the T-Rex was the hero of the first movie, since she came up and saved everyone from the raptors at the end, so you've got some good support behind you there.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Jeivar View Post
    Spoiler: Jurassic Park III
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    A character also steals raptor eggs, and the raptors obsessively chase the characters much like humans would, rather than... you know... just lay new eggs. And upon getting the eggs back they just collectively decide to ignore all this fresh food they have surrounded and at their mercy. Because, hey, they gave the eggs back, right?

    Since when do wild predators have some kind of sense of honour, or fairness, or whatever that was meant to be?
    You are completely missing the point, which is that raptors in the film are much smarter than expected and not so different to humans instead of just some dumb wild predators.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Berserk Mecha View Post
    A'right, so I found the scene on YouTube:
    I do agree that the computer system should have had more redundancies. But wasn't the point of the tour to test if would all work in the first place? Seems rather condescending to condemn the park as a failure when the people in charge are actively trying to fix the kinks. Isn't that why they brought Malcom along? ...Come to think of it, what was his purpose again? (Aside from being Chriton's mouthpiece, of course.)
    Yes and no. It is on paper. But what's unclear in the movie is WHO got to pick the experts, and whether they are picking the right experts (they aren't). These are somewhat separate issues.

    First, WHO is picking the experts? Did the investors say "You have to gets some experts in here to evaluate the place. We want Ian Malcolm and some dino people", and Hammond said "OK" and grabbed two people who he thought would be sympathetic to him ("you're supposed to be on my side.")? Or did the investors specifically insist on those three? In the book all three had done some long-distance consulting for the project before (without really knowing the end goal), so they weren't total strangers.

    But more importantly, the experts they bring in are AT BEST supplemental to what they actually need. What they really needed were:

    Experts in containing large animals - zoo keepers, etc.
    Experts in computers to evaluate all this automated software
    Experts in construction to evaluate the man-made barriers.
    Etc. Etc.

    The ones they brought in are a botanist (who can admittedly tell them that they have some poisonous plants), Malcolm (who as someone else stated seems to be the prophet of doom but doesn't actually have any relevant skills), and Grant, who knowledge and experience (when it comes to dino behavior) is all theoretical. These three are extremely limited in determining the viability and especially the safety of the park.

    Now, is this a plot hole? Almost certainly. But if we want to explain in within the context of the movie, it's that the tour is a sop to the investors and isn't actually intended to do anything, since if you were serious then you would have invited people who actually had something useful to offer.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by tomandtish View Post
    Yes and no. It is on paper. But what's unclear in the movie is WHO got to pick the experts, and whether they are picking the right experts (they aren't). These are somewhat separate issues.

    First, WHO is picking the experts? Did the investors say "You have to gets some experts in here to evaluate the place. We want Ian Malcolm and some dino people", and Hammond said "OK" and grabbed two people who he thought would be sympathetic to him ("you're supposed to be on my side.")? Or did the investors specifically insist on those three? In the book all three had done some long-distance consulting for the project before (without really knowing the end goal), so they weren't total strangers.

    But more importantly, the experts they bring in are AT BEST supplemental to what they actually need. What they really needed were:

    Experts in containing large animals - zoo keepers, etc.
    Experts in computers to evaluate all this automated software
    Experts in construction to evaluate the man-made barriers.
    Etc. Etc.

    The ones they brought in are a botanist (who can admittedly tell them that they have some poisonous plants), Malcolm (who as someone else stated seems to be the prophet of doom but doesn't actually have any relevant skills), and Grant, who knowledge and experience (when it comes to dino behavior) is all theoretical. These three are extremely limited in determining the viability and especially the safety of the park.

    Now, is this a plot hole? Almost certainly. But if we want to explain in within the context of the movie, it's that the tour is a sop to the investors and isn't actually intended to do anything, since if you were serious then you would have invited people who actually had something useful to offer.
    First off, Grant was requested by the insurance company; the lawyer says so in the cave mining scene. It's also implied by Hammond that the lawyer also selected Malcolm. ("I bring scientists, you bring a rock star")
    Secondly, Malcolm definitely has relevant skills; as a chaotician, he has enough experience with complex systems to know that Hammond's plan for controlling one is impossible. Whether it's a dino preserve, a weather pattern, or a water droplet sliding off your hand is just window dressing.

    Now, the zoo keeper, computer expert, and construction engineer all sound reasonable, but to the insurance company, the major problem was that these were dinosaurs. As far as they were concerned, the fact that it would be a good zoo was a given; the unknown portion was the prehistoric animals. Was that a mistake on their part? Possibly. But if they had brought all those people in, then when it failed we'd all be screaming at them for not bringing a dinosaur expert.
    That's all I can think of, at any rate.

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Narkis View Post
    You are completely missing the point, which is that raptors in the film are much smarter than expected and not so different to humans instead of just some dumb wild predators.
    They're also leaving because:

    Spoiler: JP3
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    Grant successfully mimics a distress call with that 3d printed raptor sinus cavity thing. It's less 'they gave us the eggs back, let's go' and more 'there's another pack coming, let's get out of here'


    I mean, I'm not sure that's better, it's certainly pretty high up on the implausibility meter.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jeivar
    This movie also falls into the severely outdated trope of treating a woman who doesn't want a family as tragically wrong and unnatural. Speaking on behalf of those who are well aware they aren't cut out for marriage and kids: Stop insisting we all live our lives the same freaking way.
    This was the first thing that started rubbing me the wrong way almost immediately about JW too, and it all went downhill from there.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Strigon View Post
    First off, Grant was requested by the insurance company; the lawyer says so in the cave mining scene. It's also implied by Hammond that the lawyer also selected Malcolm. ("I bring scientists, you bring a rock star")
    Good point. I'd forgotten that scene.


    Quote Originally Posted by Strigon View Post
    Secondly, Malcolm definitely has relevant skills; as a chaotician, he has enough experience with complex systems to know that Hammond's plan for controlling one is impossible. Whether it's a dino preserve, a weather pattern, or a water droplet sliding off your hand is just window dressing.
    Zoos are inherently complex systems. This is just a new one. People try and control complex systems all the time with various degrees of success. Going to the moon involved complex systems and things they didn't know about. When it comes to money, they are going to want reasons. "It's going to fail because X", not "It's going to fail because it's going to fail", which is all Malcolm seems to say. As someone who has had to both support AND attack state-funded projects, you never get away with just saying "because" in real life. And that's all he seems to do. Heck, if I look at what Malcolm says objectively, I have no reason to believe him, because he has no evidence at all.

    (And if him just saying so is enough, then they've decided to shut it down anyway and he's just the excuse).


    Quote Originally Posted by Strigon View Post
    Now, the zoo keeper, computer expert, and construction engineer all sound reasonable, but to the insurance company, the major problem was that these were dinosaurs. As far as they were concerned, the fact that it would be a good zoo was a given; the unknown portion was the prehistoric animals. Was that a mistake on their part? Possibly. But if they had brought all those people in, then when it failed we'd all be screaming at them for not bringing a dinosaur expert.
    Yes, that's why I said supplemental. Because given that things are failing anyway, the families of those who died are going to be screaming at them for not bringing those I listed. Because it obviously WASN'T a good zoo. Too many points of failure that are too easily sabotaged, and oh BTW your non-breeding dinosaurs are breeding.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Even as a kid I wondered why they started with so many different types of dinosaurs. Wouldn't it have been safer to do 1, then use the proceeds of showing it off at existing zoos to work towards more?
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
    Even as a kid I wondered why they started with so many different types of dinosaurs. Wouldn't it have been safer to do 1, then use the proceeds of showing it off at existing zoos to work towards more?
    Safer, yes. More profitable? Not at all.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by tomandtish View Post
    Zoos are inherently complex systems. This is just a new one. People try and control complex systems all the time with various degrees of success. Going to the moon involved complex systems and things they didn't know about. When it comes to money, they are going to want reasons. "It's going to fail because X", not "It's going to fail because it's going to fail", which is all Malcolm seems to say. As someone who has had to both support AND attack state-funded projects, you never get away with just saying "because" in real life. And that's all he seems to do. Heck, if I look at what Malcolm says objectively, I have no reason to believe him, because he has no evidence at all.

    (And if him just saying so is enough, then they've decided to shut it down anyway and he's just the excuse).
    Ah; if you're saying he's not the best choice for explaining why the park would fail, I agree. Not only could he not fully explain, the essence of his field of study was that he couldn't know what would happen. Which is more or less what he said all along. Frustrating if you're looking for ways to fix the park, or legal justification for shutting it down, but if your point was that his expertise wasn't relevant to Jurassic Park, I'd have to disagree.
    And, let's be clear, zoos are complex, but nowhere near as complex as Jurassic Park was. The more complex the system, the less control you can have. Jurassic Park wasn't a bunch of animals in cells. It wasn't a bunch of animals in cells with humans around. It wasn't even a bunch of animals we know nothing about, from many different eras, with humans around.
    If we consider the book as canon, it was hundreds of animals, from many different eras, in an artificially recreated system meant to mimic nature. With humans roving around, and some animals in cells. Hammond encountered problems due to the unpredictability, but every attempt to fix them made things more unstable in the long run.
    If we only consider the movies, it was an unknown number of animals, some in pens, some wandering free, from many eras and with human intervention.
    If he had built the island, let it reach an equilibrium, and then tried to fit in his park within that equilibrium, things might have been different. Instead, he tried to make the natural equilibrium bend to serve his needs, which is far, far more difficult.

    Go to any natural reserve on the planet, and you'll find that the humans are not in charge. They fit in, somewhere, and they can steer events one way or another - eliminating a species growing too quickly, for example - but they look nothing like Hammond's vision for Jurassic Park. And that's with animals who have always existed together, and ones we know well. Once you start throwing in dinos, things only get worse.
    Yes, that's why I said supplemental. Because given that things are failing anyway, the families of those who died are going to be screaming at them for not bringing those I listed. Because it obviously WASN'T a good zoo. Too many points of failure that are too easily sabotaged, and oh BTW your non-breeding dinosaurs are breeding.
    Well, you said supplemental AT BEST. Which sort of implies that you really thought they were even less important. Or that's how I read it, anyway.
    And I'd say it was a fine zoo, mostly. The sabotage was definitely an issue, but mostly an automation one. As far as the non-breeding dinosaurs breeding, that's not much of a zoo issue.
    Zoos don't normally clone and genetically engineer their animals (yet), so the male-to-female thing doesn't really apply. And the raptors escaping (since they're the only ones we know got out) is also somewhat irrelevant, since they're said by Muldoon to be more cunning than anything he's ever seen, plus they're coordinated and startlingly ferocious.
    What I mean to say is, had Jurassic Park been populated by modern animals, I don't think the zoo parts would have failed. Thus, I consider it a perfectly fine zoo.
    That's all I can think of, at any rate.

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Oh absolutely. Hammond, in both book and film, was a complete huckster. He even admits it openly when he talked about the flea circus. He presented to people what they wanted to see, is all.
    The film Disneyfied him a lot though. Superficially, he's presented as this kindly old man who just wants everything to work out for the best. It's only when you stop and think about it that you realise "wait a minute, doesn't nearly everything that goes wrong in this park trace back to this guy one way or another?"

    In the book, Hammond

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    panics, falls down a slope in the darkness, breaks his leg, and gets eaten by compys. By that point, it's pretty clear that he deserves it.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Saph View Post
    The film Disneyfied him a lot though. Superficially, he's presented as this kindly old man who just wants everything to work out for the best. It's only when you stop and think about it that you realise "wait a minute, doesn't nearly everything that goes wrong in this park trace back to this guy one way or another?"

    In the book, Hammond

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    panics, falls down a slope in the darkness, breaks his leg, and gets eaten by compys. By that point, it's pretty clear that he deserves it.
    Spoiler: imean its almost a 30 year old book, but i love it enough i don't want to ruin it for anyone who may be interested in reading it
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    He also largely funded his company by showcasing a pygmy elephant with dwarfism as a normal elephant fully genetically engineered to be the size of a housecat. Just like the flea circus, he didn't really have anything and passed it off as if he did. Helluva character.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    I couldn't even make it through the first act of the first movie before my suspension of disbelief crumbled. Even as a kid back then, I knew the modern atmosphere was too low a concentration of O2 for dinos (it was 33-35% oxygen back then, and it looks like the carbon dioxide level was half what it is now). They should have been slowly suffocating.

    As for the rest, it's just another survival horror series, arguably still with zombies (creatures brought back from the dead).

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    In the novel, one of the characters actually comments on how the sick stegosaurus (rather than sick triceratops as in the movie) is wheezing like a mountaineer on top of a high mountain - for that very reason - the oxygen content of the air is a bit too low for it.

    The "they're hybrids, not pure-bred dinos" theme, can explain away some things though.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    ON Jurassic World...

    The problem with making Dinosaurs for military operations isn't that it's inherently wrong--IIRC, that's kind of the purpose of the raptor pack: To see if raptors could have been trained to work with humans.

    The problem is 1: The Indominus was made for military operations... At the insistence of one ACU commander(the guy who got eaten by a raptor and, IIRC, had no idea what he was talking about when referring to the raptors earlier) and Wu... Without the knowledge or permission of the CEO of either the Park or the Parent companies. They were basically going behind everyone's back to do it.

    2: The Raptor training program wasn't completed yet... and yet they still made a bigger, smarter, more agressive, and more sadistic raptor that could turn invisible. Then they confined it and it's sibling alone in a pen that was far too small for one such animal, let alone two, which resulted in a large, inherently predatory and sadistic creature of near human, if not human*, intelligent becoming a complete and utter sociopath.

    The problem isn't that they made a weaponized dino. The problem is that they took "make something scary" as blanket permission to screw everyone over and make a complete and utter monster for the personal profit of two people and mucked it up every step of the way.

    (Trivia, apparently Wu had been working on weaponized hybrids for longer than just the dominus without getting caught--On the Jurassic World website, there's a hidden page that indicates that there's an agressive prototype-hybrid on the island from 3, with that implicitly being an explanation for the inaccurate even by serious standards Spinosaurus.)

    A smart person who wanted to make weaponized dinosaurs for profit would have waited until the research on training raptors was back, and then hybridized the raptors with something more docile and easily trained.

    *There's a distinctly primate looking nervous system depicted in a lab scene that revealed some of the Indominus' parent species,and while not explicitly stated in film earliar drafts of the film did have the Indominus and it's counterparts in earliar still drafts as explicitly part human.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    Nope, nopenopenope. You're objectively wrong.

    So, only focusing on the movie and not the book, we can still show the island is a colossal failure before Grant and Co. ever set foot on the island.

    Remember, they're only up for the weekend. It's a three-day tour of the island. On the first day, Nedry brings down some security systems, and they reboot the island. On the second day, Grant finds a cracked egg on the island. While not explicitly stated in the movie, the egg is the exact size, color, and texture of the raptor eggs we saw first. So, to start with, dinosaurs are already breeding, which means the park is already out of control; since the egg has already hatched, we know this has been going on for some time. Second, dinosaurs (or, at least, raptors) are now demonstrated to have already escaped their confines, even before Nedry was able to do anything.

    Nedry disabled some security systems, but left all the dino pen systems in place. When he didn't come back, the only way to bypass his lockout was to restart the entire system, which then ran on auxilliary power and thus wasn't powering the fences, so all hell was free to break loose and it was much, much easier to see the failure. But the park had failed well in advance, they just didn't know it yet.
    I haven't seen the movie in years, so I don't quite remember what made it to the film. Did the movie talk about how Hammond banned any weapon that could actually harm one of his expensive dinos, or mention the automated medical systems dispensing unneeded medicine? Those are a couple of really strong points of evidence in favor of the "Hammond's idiocy and penny-pinching is what doomed the park" angle.

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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnoman View Post
    I haven't seen the movie in years, so I don't quite remember what made it to the film. Did the movie talk about how Hammond banned any weapon that could actually harm one of his expensive dinos, or mention the automated medical systems dispensing unneeded medicine? Those are a couple of really strong points of evidence in favor of the "Hammond's idiocy and penny-pinching is what doomed the park" angle.
    You mean the Lysine Contingency? They mentioned it, but never really addressed it afterwards like the book did. It wasn't unneeded at all, the dinos just started to eat lysine-rich foods, but they still needed lysine. Also, even in the book he wasn't about to openly ban all of Muldoon's guns; they compromised on how many he was allowed to have, and how and where to store them. I don't believe it's addressed in the movie at all, though, dive they charge the focus of the primary antagonist to the raptors which didn't need the most specialized gun and neurotoxin they could get.
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    Default Re: The Jurassic Park movies have a bizarre morality

    Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
    You mean the Lysine Contingency? They mentioned it, but never really addressed it afterwards like the book did. It wasn't unneeded at all, the dinos just started to eat lysine-rich foods, but they still needed lysine. Also, even in the book he wasn't about to openly ban all of Muldoon's guns; they compromised on how many he was allowed to have, and how and where to store them. I don't believe it's addressed in the movie at all, though, dive they charge the focus of the primary antagonist to the raptors which didn't need the most specialized gun and neurotoxin they could get.
    Not the Lysine Contingency, there was an earlier part. One of the bugs Nedry was supposed to fix was

    The automated fecal analysis (called Auto Poop), designed to check for parasites in the animal stools, invariably recorded all specimens as having the parasite Phagostomum venulosum, although none did. The program then automatically dispensed medication into the animals' food. If the handlers dumped the medicine out of the hoppers to prevent its being dispensed, an alarm sounded which could not be turned off.
    As for the weapons, Hammond absolutely refused until Muldoon took extreme measures.

    Muldoon wanted guns as well. And he wanted shoulder-mounted TOW-missile launchers. Hunters knew how difficult it was to bring down a four-ton African elephant-and some of the dinosaurs weighed ten times as much. Management was horrified, insisting there be no guns anywhere on the island. When Muldoon threatened to quit, and to take his story to the press, a compromise was reached. In the end, two specially built laser-guided missile launchers were kept in a locked room in the basement. Only Muldoon had keys to the room.

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