These are pre-movie thoughts.
Here’s a question that I’ve been asked.
Will I see Jurassic World?
Yeah, I will.
I’ve seen there a few complaints of this. They’re rehashing the old movie. Why revisit a classic that should be left alone?
Why doesn’t anyone listen to the lesson of the first movie?
Building this new park is a spit in John Hammond’s face and it shouldn’t have been made and…blah, blah…blah…
I’ve seen this from one ranter who pretty much got every point wrong.
The old park, failed, right? It failed, so it shouldn’t happen again. Because it failed and we have learned a lesson. Don’t clone dinosaurs to put them in an amusement park because well…we've seen Jurassic Park and that was with a small handful of people. Ten times worse if it were with a whole crowd right?
You know, I think we need to discuss Jurassic Park and why it failed.
I was one of those who read the book before it became a movie. Hell, I read the book before I heard they were going to make a movie of it.
This was back in 1991. I was in the 7th grade and my friend Erin had a book with her called Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. He wrote the Andromeda Strain and Congo and Sphere. So, she suggested Jurassic Park to me and I went to the bookstore and bought it.
The original paperback, white cover of the book.
Yup, that.
I read it in seventh grade. All the way through. And I loved it.
It was actually the first piece of adult literature that I had ever read besides Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. Both of those were bought by my mother.
Yeah, I was reading books about murder and rape when I was 12, go figure.
I was also listening to New Kids on the Block, so I was crazy.
That was the in thing in the early 90s, pre-teens reading adult literature rather than literature for our age group. Probably why now we 30-somethings are reading young adult because we skipped that when we were the proper age group.
Anyway, I read it, loved it.
Then a year later, 8th grade, Erin met me in the hall between social study class and algebra, said they were making a movie of Jurassic Park.
And well, I knew that well…being the book was plenty gory, there was no way I was gonna see the movie. Not if it was gonna be rated R. Which we both suspected. But I was skeptical. I didn’t think the movie technology was even at a level to create something like Jurassic Park. Oh, yeah, we had stop-motion. And we had animatronics, and yeah, we had CGI…really…really bad CGI. Cuz, it was the 90s. The early 90s. We were still just getting over hot pink and big hair from the 80s.
Grunge hadn’t even set in yet. Won’t set in until 4 years later.
I mean, the most I’ve seen of CGI was Money for Nothing back in the 80s.
How the fuck are they gonna make a movie with that?
So, already I was writing it off as a bad movie. Not faithful to the book. It was gonna suck.
Then a few weeks later, after gym, Erin came over and said the movie was gonna be PG:13.
Oh, god, now they’re just messin’ with us Jurassic Park book fans.
It’s gonna be this watered down trash with bad CGI effects and jerky animatronics. And even rougher Ray Harryhausen puked up stop-motion.
That is until I saw the trailer. And I was blown outta my mind.
Then I begged my grandma to take me to see the movie during the summer of 1993. And granted, yeah, the characters were a bit of a cardboard cutout, half the book was missing, however, the general story was there.
And the dinosaurs looked gorgeous. I loved the T-rex animatronic. The pacing, the set up, the CGI with it.
And it holds up even today. I can still watch this and it looks gorgeous. And the sound. The roar off of Rexy. Just awesome.
But then now, I realized what changed, and why. And why the park failed.
It’s still all there. Faithful to the book. The park failed.
And here is why.
In the book, as well as the movie, Jurassic Park was a fully automated park. Everything was running off of computers.
Well, in the book, there’s a bit more detailing as to why this was the big thing that caused the park to fail. And the movie glossed over the whole Chaos Theory Malcolm was spouting.
It has to do with unpredictability. You can’t have a park that’s fully automated and expect it to be flawless. Especially when dealing with living creatures. The computers back then weren’t capable of factoring in the more fluid and ever changing motion of a living organism.
And that’s why it failed.
The other was, and again, this was only touched briefly in the movie, but more in the book…Jurassic Park was a park that was badly designed and done by people who were cutting too many corners and rushing the project out before all the bugs could be worked out.
And this came across in two factors. The staff and the dinosaurs themselves.
One that was very noteworthy among the staff was Denis Nedry. He says it in the movie, he says it big time in the book.
He wasn’t paid enough. He wasn’t paid enough, given the proper budget he needed or even the time he needed to write a stable OS for the park.
That’s why the system failed as it did.
Hammond was a big factor. More so in the book than in the movie. He was a cheep and unlikeable, money grubbing asshole.
In the movie, he was more likeable, and whimsical. But still, he cut a lot of corners. And that cost him the park.
It could have worked. If it was done right, as with anything, it could have worked. If Hammond had listen to his peers, Jurassic Park would be open for visitation. But, he didn’t, and it wasn’t.
The other was cutting corners in the dinosaurs’ creation. Mostly the dino DNA being spliced with amphibian DNA.
And it’s more elaborated on in the book, than in the movie, why this was a big deal and why it led to the failure of the park.
Henry Wu was ordered to cut corners by Hammond (no duh), and to rush the dinosaurs out before he had actually mapped the genome. And he could have done it. The dinosaurs originally were going to be made without mutating the code to fill in those gaps. But Hammond, being impatient and realizing such an endeavor would have been more costly, ordered Wu to do the rush job of splicing the dino DNA with frogs and well…there you go.
So the statement in the movie of going on all about doing what you think you could without stopping to think you should wasn’t about creating the dinosaurs themselves and building a park around them…it was to stop and think about the rush jobs of making said dinosaurs with all the problems the park had because of cheep labor and many people in charge not really wanting to do their job right…
And that’s why it failed. But John Hammond in the movie was remorseful about leaving the park, leaving the dinosaurs. He still wanted to make it happen.
So in Jurassic World we get to see what happens when you see the mistakes Hammond and InGen did with Jurassic Park…and learn from those mistakes. And we could have something successful.
That is until some idiot thought about splicing human DNA with all the nasty theropods to create this Indominus Rex thing.
And not allowing it to grow up in a structured environment of learning and understanding.
“You’re making all new ones…” - Ian Malcolm
Yeah.
But don’t write off this movie just yet. I’ll go see it and then I’ll place my judgement.
