Comment by yeahboats
7 days ago
I didn't see any references to Rebirth, and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.
> There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos...
I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.
The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.
In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.
There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.
But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
It's actually an explicit plot point in the original book that the containment is insufficient because Hammond thinks he's a big brain brilliant genius who can do all this stuff from scratch better than any boring old normal zookeepers. The movie lost that in translation as part of the attempt to make him a kindly grandfather making bad decisions instead of a two-faced showman who's completely full of himself.
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What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur. Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.