My Problems with Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park has aged so confusingly. Undoubtedly awe-inspiring visually—not just for its action set pieces but also its sweeping vistas where dinosaurs populate lush, verdant landscapes with the same abundant density of life that characterises Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The circumstances under which I rewatched this once-upon-a-time childhood favourite of mine shall not be divulged. But the hilariously cringey dialogue and flat characters—no more complex than the dinosaurs—exposed just how much my premium mediocre taste in movies traces back to early exposure to this Spielbergian extravaganza. After my first viewing nearly 30 years ago (yes, I’m now as old as the dinosaurs), I couldn’t yet tell it was actually pretty bad cinema. I would go on to read the damn books and love them despite understanding little of its technical bitsMuch like I loved Timeline, too. Shoot me! . But, damn, even I know better than to go back and read Crichton now. Such movies suck you into their gravitational pull; escaping their orbits is like breaking a doomscrolling cycle. It’s just way too easy to keep watching this stuff! That said, I’ll admit: the altered state of consciousness definitely sharpened my observations this time around.
Despite the hamming of John Hammond, the movie felt prescient in its portrayal of scientific funding; the dangling of his philanthropic carrot to convince a palaeontologist pair to vet his Jurassic Park feels relevant today as we see a revival of patronage in the sciences. But such momentary maturity is overshadowed by the portrayal of scientists as a thoughtless bunch or as self-serving rock stars throughout. The unsubtle use of Newman as the caricature character, a bumbling agent of chaos, is another fundamentally unrealistic variant of engineer. That a place as ambitious as JP would have just one (underpaid) admin managing its security seems ludicrous; that he’d choose sabotage over a more lucrative job elsewhere made me wonder how the film expects to be taken seriously as sci-fi.
Also, Hollywood has a strange grasp of taste—why cast David Attenborough’s brother as the hubristic Hammond? A misdemeanour compared to the careless characterisation of geneticists. I was baffled that these probably best-in-class scientists hadn’t evaluated the potential for sex reversal in dinosaursFor future self-ed, I should skim this paper. . InGen made all the dinosaurs female to prevent breeding and maintain population control. But then—surprise!—some dinosaurs have been changing from female to male and reproducing anyway. All because they used frog DNA to fill gaps in their dinosaur genome but some frog species change their sex when environmental conditions favor it (like when there aren’t enough males around). Any competent geneticist would have researched this basic biological premise before using frog DNA. If your entire business model depends on preventing dinosaur reproduction by controlling sex ratios, and you’re supplementing with frog genes, you’d definitely want to know “hey, can frogs change sex?” It feels like the kind of fundamental biological fact that should be factored into any sane risk assessment by experts, not dismissed as some outlier scientific factoid. But moments like this prey on the audience’s ignorance and stupidity more than anything else.
To consistently paint humans—especially those in science whose technical judgment is central to their livelihood—so poorly while utilising ingenious engineers to deliver a first-of-its-kind movie is egregious on Spielberg’s part. And it doesn’t get papered over by a child hacker saving team humans from team raptors in the conclusion. Also why are these dinos portrayed as smarter/more adaptive than humans? I mean, come on! They were only born yesterday, in a lab, but somehow can adapt to modern human surroundings intelligently to undo millions of years of ignorance?
While I was mostly disappointed as I live-tweeted this movie watching experience, I’m newly thankful to the internet for this magical Jeff Goldblum gif.
Now I have been wise to not see anything beyond Jurassic Park…3? But as a film series, it is somewhat responsible for spinning out the universe of Marvel Cinematic Garbage (MCG)- an assault on the senses I enjoy just as much as the next person enjoys the T-Rex introduction or chase sequence! But, with many thanks to my renewed clarity since this viewing, it is easy to see how Jurassic Park symbolised the beginning of the great sloppification of Hollywood and Crichton’s role in making it happen. For a moment, I even wondered if he might be responsible for the current sloppification of science itself, for example, with dubious claims of lab-grown direwolves?
Once I noticed it I couldn’t unsee it but this franchise is also how we got the endless supply of movies from the MCGPerhaps this should be stylised to McG to sit alongside the unhealthy supply of McD. . A series comparable to the Jurassics with marginally better dialogue peppered with punchlines and even more spectacular scenes. Boy, have I enjoyed these films, with one action set piece after another. But, unlike Jurassic Park, there is so much of this stashed into one movie that my memory is numbed by the end. I remember as much from these movies as the last pizza I ate.
Much like the MCG, the sequels have not stopped with the Jurassic dino-verse, exemplifying that Hollywood will give us pretty much exactly more of what markets enjoy, sadly. They could make us want shiny new things but why do that when we can recycle dusty old trinkets stripped of any novelty and personality. It is hard to not see the movie industry as one of the most truly sustainable ones!
I think what really vexed me into frustratedly live-tweeting my thoughts was that, for a movie that could’ve been so much more, it ends up as yet another trophy in cabinet of dystopian sci-fi. Besides being unoriginal, the deeply problematic tropes of insensitive billionaire philanthropist and thoughtless scientists gets under my skin. In nearly 16 years of life in science and technology, I’m yet to see such truly hollow humans with such shallow decision-making. These things could change but I do hope the (philanthropically-funded) research community proves to be better as they progress technology.
Right after finishing this, I soldiered on to rewatch The Lost World to ensure the total annihilation of my childhood memories. Unwilling to write another review, I just texted my friend, “In the WWE, he’d definitely go by Steven ‘The Spectacle’ Spielberg”. While I now feel done with such cinematic opulence, I can only wonder about the many productive child-hours I lost to the Jurassic Park movies. But, in the long term, I may have been cured of my hunger for the sloppified Hollywood/Marvel menagerie.