Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time. It’s been twenty years since John Hammond spared no expense and there is a 3D re-release out right now to commemorate the occasion. I didn’t see it in 3D, not because I’m an uppity film snob whose eyes are made out of stained glass and break easily, but because I actually had not seen Jurassic Park on the big screen. I wasn’t even a year old when it came out in 1993, and knowing how horrific infants can be in a theater, I hope to god my parents didn’t take me then. And finally seeing my favorite film of all time on the big screen was a dream come true. All the promos I’ve seen for JP-3D keep insisting it only was available for one day, but since the Fox Theater here in Laramie is showing it this weekend again, that means either the promos are liars or Fox Theater is throwing a little chaos in the system. Kudos to them. That means there’s a still a chance to check it out in 3D, which I highly recommend you do.
I was going to do a different movie this week, but how could I pass up an opportunity to write about the undeniably classic Jurassic Park? I couldn’t do it. Everything about this movie screams classic. The story, the characters, the setting, the effects, and that music… it is all too good to not be counted amongst the pantheon of films. There are even a few things you don’t really notice on a small screen. Like, during my most recent viewing it really struck me how awful Lex and Tim’s situation is. Two kids, whose parents are splitting, trying to get away from all that drama only to nearly be killed by prehistoric monsters. It was very heart-wrenching. I figured this would also be a good opportunity to acknowledge and respond to a lot of the problems people have found within the film. Some of them, I’ll admit are among Jurassic Park’s short list of faults, but others can and will be refuted.
The first thing to tackle is the science. If you don’t remember how they made the dinosaurs, or didn’t understand what the hell Mr. DNA was going on about, let me sum it up for you. Basically, they cloned dinosaurs from blood they found in prehistoric mosquitoes stuck in fossilized amber and they filled in all gaps in their DNA code with frogs. That’s it. It sounds reasonable enough. Except for the fact that mosquitoes weren’t really around back then. Oh sure, they were for a few of the species, but not for all of them. And even if the blood was able to hold up for that long, it would far too diluted by the mosquito’s own blood to make any distinction between the two. Also, it’s really hard to code DNA sequences. They make it sound easy in JP, but it’s incredibly difficult to do without an intact sequence to compare it to. And I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell haven’t seen any Dilophosaurus running around, spitting on fat nerds. And speaking of them, let’s move onto to the dinosaurs themselves.
Recent scientific evidence has revealed that a good chunk, if not all, of dinosaurs had feathers. On a quick note: contrary to what Negative Nancy may say, just because dinosaurs had feathers doesn’t make them any less threatening. You have no idea how badly I want to see the idiot who thinks that, and is then mauled to death by a fabulously-feathered Velociraptor. Besides, dinosaurs have always struck me as being a bit too naked. I’m glad they have feathers now. But this does contrast to what we see in the movie. One way to look at this inconsistency is to remember that these creatures are not really dinosaurs. Remember that they used the DNA of frogs to fill in the sequence information they didn’t have. You can then say that the reason they don’t have feathers is because the frog DNA muddied that part up. Easy fix. Also, maybe the technicians as Jurassic Park noticed they had feathers and decided to genetically get rid of that in order to fit the common perception of dinosaurs so they could make more of a profit. After all, people want to go see dinosaurs how they’ve been shown for decades, not the flamboyant feathered spectacle they’d actually look like.
And then there is a few things wrong with the dinos themselves. The Velociraptors seen in the film are not actually Velociraptors. Real Velociraptors are actually much smaller. This isn’t to say that these types of raptors don’t exist. The raptors seen in this film are actually Utahraptors or the Deinonychus. Michael Crichton, in the original novel, solved this problem by stating that within the reality of the book, the Deinonychus had been added into the Velociraptor family. Spielberg solved this problem by saying “who cares” and doing what he felt was right. Also, the Dilophosaurus isn’t actually proven to be a poison-spitting creature or to possess a frill. That’s just a little something Crichton came up with. At any rate, while there is no fossil to support either of these additions, there isn’t any fossil evidence to disprove it either.
There is also the one about how they accidentally misspell several of the dinosaur names when Newman is stealing the embryos. While I’m sure this is a technical mistake on the crew’s part, you could take a thematic approach to understand why they’re misspelled. This only goes to further the argument that the people in charge of this theme park have no idea what they’re messing with. They don’t really understand these creatures, even down to their names, and they suffer for it. That is the point after all. We don’t know what these creatures where truly like and it is best that we don’t. Otherwise Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten alive. And I’m not willing to take that chance.
Then there are the moments of utter wrongness with some of the sets. Most notably, how the T-Rex paddock is ground level one minute and then there’s a fifty-foot drop the next. There’s only one explanation for that: movie magic. Spielberg has come out and admitted that he knew what he was doing when he broke the laws of reality in the scene, but decided the movie would be a lot more fun with the inaccurate paddock set-up. And he is correct. The movie is a lot better for it. Also, if you say that when you first saw Jurassic Park and you noticed the spontaneous drop into the paddock then you’re either A) a disgusting liar, or B) a very sad person who has no sense of wonder.
And that’s all I’ve got. For me, all these problems can be ignored because of how amazing the final product is. I love this movie and all of its stupid science. If you’re hankering to see dinosaurs tear it up on the big screen, check out it out at the Fox Theater sometime this weekend. Maybe if it makes enough money, we’ll get to see the franchise continue. Hopefully without human-intelligent raptor mercenaries, but that’s a story for another day.
