Finally saw Jurassic Park, became confused

[richardthinks]

and the sequel, too. Sometimes I do ludicrously out-of-touch reviews here, but this time I just have one thing to note:

that film really, really wants to mean something, but I don't have the faintest idea what it is. And I don't think it knows, either: it's like a rambling conversation with a drunk undergrad - it clearly feels passionately about a

Comments

[richardthinks]

everything's better without Jeff Goldblum. But you've convinced me - I'll press on and watch the third.

[whswhs]

To expect intellectual coherence from either that novel or that film was probably overoptimistic.

It's a long time since we saw it, but I have two vivid memories of it:

* Seeing the paleontologist tell the children that it's okay to pet the apatosaurus because it's an herbivore. Try that with a hippo and it's likely to bite your arm off.

* Seeing the little boy get zapped by the fence, fall to the ground, and get up unhurt. I remember sitting in the theater estimating the current flow for the given voltage and his likely skin resistance, and deciding that he would have full thickness burns at least on his hands and would be in agony, if it didn't kill him outright. Of course, after the character's obnoxious dialogue through the earlier film I would have been just as happy to have him killed out at that point.

I kind of ignored the philosophizing, which struck me as never having been subjected to even a moment of critical thought.

[richardthinks]

If I'd written a "bad advice in Jurassic Park" post it would've been a lot longer. My son remarked "it's so weird that the T-Rex can't see you if you don't move," so we had a discussion about what makes for tense scenes in a story and what might constitute reliable information. The electric fence bit was particularly bad, though, because you might actually encounter one someday, and grabbing it is The Thing You Don't Do. He'd've probably hung on and fried.

I was also really struck by Spielberg's ticks as a storyteller. Where do the raptors want to eat the kids? In a kitchen. How does the arrogant bully get killed? By the tiny dinosaurs. Where do the paleontologists take refuge from the live dinos? Hanging on the bones of the dead ones. Sigh. And when I wasn't thinking that, I was going "oh look, the repeating threat gag from Jaws."

the philosophizing, which struck me as never having been subjected to even a moment of critical thought. I agree, but I'm still struck by the fact that they put it in, in that incoherent form. People must

[oxfordhacker]

frankly there's no way even smart Velociraptors are going to become the enemy within

Are you sure?

[richardthinks]

Of course, David Icke has warned us that we're all just stooges for the Reptoids.

[mollpeartree]

For my sins, I read the book, and Crichton kepts nattering on about chaos theory in it, which was a newish buzz word at the time. IIRC, a fair amount of that ended up in the movie, though it's been a while since I've seen it, and I may be misremembering. I recall thinking at the time that it was a sort of updated stab at the human hubris expressed through technology theme, like in Frankenstein except with dinosaurs.

My biggest beef with the book and the movie was actually that didn't buy the chaos theory at all. You could totally keep dinosaurs on an island zoo if you wanted to, you just have to have redundant systems, including some that don't run on electricity, like for example the long deep pit they have dug in the ground around the elephant exhibit at my home town zoo.

[richardthinks]

Now you mention it, Goldblum does waffle something about chaos theory, but it seemed like such a poor fit that I didn't even imagine he might be saying "dinosaurs are unpredictable;" I thought he was just establishing himself as a douchebag.

Yup, you could keep your dinosaurs on an island. Even the film didn't know if it was that the dinosaurs were a danger or that the dinosaurs were in danger (and that confusion carries on into 2, so I imagine that might be part of the point?).

...I found myself wondering 18th century type thoughts about what the cutoff point was, actually - they're scary because The Beast, but they're scary because they're smart. But if they were a bit smarter then you could put them to work and sign contracts with them and so on...