I've long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like "science/genetic engineering is bad" or "you can't control nature" to be a bit silly, given that, well, it's a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It's a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn't do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that "these animals are special and can't be safely contained" rather than "letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea".
Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it'd be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it's a monster movie.
Hard agree. My takeaway is the moral of the story is always do quality engineering. There have been like 10 movies and they still don't know how to construct an enclosure.
Wasn't the issue with Indominus rex that the dinosaur tricked them into thinking it was gone and they left the door open, like idiots? Definitely some things in those movies are engineering issues, but it mostly was a problem because there were multiple points of failure in the system. This is the point I make about my work. My department catches behavior problems from reports, discussions, interviews, and providing technical assistance. We do tons of work regularly and there are overlapping ways to catch the same problem. When my department is given more work and no new staff, they can't stay on top of everything. They still catch things because the work they are able to do usual catches one of the multiple opportunities. With enough workload added on eventually you end up missing something. When the stakes are life and death, you have multiple layers of protection programmed into the system.
If you put high voltage electric fences around humans they're pretty well contained. The intelligence level of the dinosaurs was never relevant but the movie did kind of try and suggest that somehow the velociraptors were special simply because they were mildly more intelligent than the rest.
They made a big thing about how raptors can open doors, my cats can open doors.
And your cats would eat you if they could. I've had cats gnaw on my fingers and toes, like they were seeing if that would work. Cats are actually worse than dinosaurs, and modern birds, and reptiles, because they usually stop killing when they're full.
I've just realised - Hammond was such a cheapskate that even the seatbelts in the helicopters didn't work properly.
That was the thing that always broke the immersion for me. Our ancestors hunted the mammoths with just spears and a hole in the ground. And you're telling me that modern technology can't come up with a way to properly neutralize or contain a dinosaur?
But it’s not a zoo, like even in the slightest. It’s a theme park.
They don’t have a full dinosaur genome so they literally make stuff up. Not only that, but just like with the Colossal Bioscience stuff that’s literally happening right now, there’s no learning for these brought-back-to-life creatures so they will not behave anything like their actual prehistoric counterparts. It is bad science because there’s no reason to be doing the science at all. It won’t replicate anything from the past (for so so so many reasons) and it has so many unethical things to get past before it’s even slightly in -eh- territory.
It is bad science because there’s no reason to be doing the science at all
This just rounds itself back to capitalism being the problem because the science was being done for a reason: to generate profit for Hammond.
Bad science is usually always conducted to suit the ends of someone trying to use the results for manipulative/exploitative purposes.
If anything Jurassic park is basically a lesson in properly vetting your staff.
Everything that happened happened because Dennis was the only IT guy and basically could do whatever he wanted with zero oversight. It's not like the dinosaurs were going to break out on their own, even the raptors only got out because the fences were turned off.
He was getting paid peanuts for designing and building an essential system for the running of the park all on his own, working for a guy that constantly bragged about sparing no expense.
IIRC the only interaction between Hammond and Nerdy went something like "you should have negotiated a better contract! Stfu gbtw", which can pretty much sum up the whole wealth divide between the owners who gain most of the benefit and the workers who actually do the things under capitalism. Except if they aren't getting the better of everyone on average, they just shut the whole thing down or find others that they do get the better of.
It still comes down to Hammond not paying Nedry enough although he claimed he "spared no expenses".
Spared no expense on HR, contact lawyers, and icecream.
I mean, it's about both, but... do people really not catch the whole angle about capitalism and greed? Newman straight up gets everyone killed for a pay day, and doesn't even make it out himself. The only way it could be more obvious is if it had giant flash red text.
Majority of people rarely engage with any media beyond the surface to actually analyze it and come to those conclusions about the deeper themes. Most just think "well, that's just people being people" and fail to see the social commentary.
More a reflection of people's attention spans these days compared to when the movie is released. Read any online discussion about media and it seems like people are on their phones for 40% of the show at minimum.
Hell the original film would probably not do well if released today because it doesn't have the obvious shoehorned plot points that the new movies have to cut through the morons.
There were plenty of morons in the 80s and 90s. Half the population suffered from severe lead poisoning. The other half were hopped up on neo liberal propaganda.
So... in the actual book(s), the problem is a bit of both.
The 'science' goes wrong because... well, they do not have complete dinosaur genome sequences.
And they fill in the gaps with a lot of DNA from a certain kind of frog.
A frog, that is later discovered to change its sex, transform from female into male, in environments/situations that are not sufficiently male/female balanced.
The explanation as to why the dinosaurs will not be a problem is that they only make female ones, so the population will remain exactly as they engineer.
... this does not work, because some of the dinos transform their sex, and begin breeding, which they essentially entirely did not account for.
So... 'the science' absolutely fucked up there.
...
Also in the book(s)... Hammond is much, much more clearly an unscrupulous capitalist... think roughly somebody that would have their accounts managed by Patrick Bateman, or maybe like a modern techbro, but his tech isn't crypto or ai or hyperscaling whatever bs app... its genetic engineering.
(cough 23andMe cough)
The original movie makes him into... much more of a genuinely enthusiastic, but more innocently naive, and sympathetic character... he is much more straightforwardly a thinly veiled corpo asshole in the book.
And because of this, the book punishes him, where the movie basically does not.
In the book, near the end, as it looks like the surviving cast have escaped imminent danger, and is reasonably safe and secure, awaiting rescue...
... Hammond is very directly killed by his own hubris.
He decides he has some better idea about what to do, wanders off from the group, gets lost, and is torn to shreds by a pack of compies, compthagnasus, basically 10 or 20 or so of fairly small, maybe 1.5 foot ish tall tiny versions of velociraptors.
He makes a final, direct, hubristic act, and is literally torn to shreds by thousands of tiny cuts, but all at one time, the figurative recompense for his lifetime of shitty, reckless, self serving decisions.
Critchton was a damn good writer, RIP.
Anyway, the second movie, Lost World... is very, very loosely based on the second book, but it features a compy attack event as an inciting incident, the initial event...
...but they swap it to occuring to basically a completely innocent family who is vacationing on a nearby island, just a totally different and made up set of characters, where its now just some random assholeish wealthy corpo father who is being hubristic, and iirc, a little girl is seriously injured, but not killed...
Its much less hubristic of a bad decision from the father, as he legitimately had no idea this random island was infested with fucking dinosaurs.
Also, iirc, the Lost World movie just throws away these characters, this family, after this gets the plot rolling, I don't think they are ever on screen again.
Its not a well written intro.
...
So the books feature capitalism, capitalists, as another majorly bad thing that fucks up.
The idea as I see is that... these two things, when both unrestrained and pursued recklessly, well one of them would be bad enough on their own, but when you combine both of them, shit gets real bad, real fast, high likelihood of catastrophic co sequences.
Its the 'tech is not inherently good nor evil, it all depends on how a society uses it' line of thinking.
It just says hey, here's a worst case scenario for you to chew on, how seriously you should consider this.
Like maybe a modern version of this would be LLMs.
Theoretically, an LLM on its own, used reasonably, responsibly, can be a tool for arguably mostly good. You could theoretically power one of these things with wind, solar, geothermal, have a societal structure where its provided as a controlled and regulated public good, not a private for profit business.
But when you couple this with the ravenous nature of capitalism, well, a whole fuckton of shit starts cascading out of control into negative consequences... vital processes and info get fucked up by LLMs hallucinating shit and make heuristic decisions en masse that lead to say, millions of people being denied or charged out the ass for healthcare...
Major corporations massively downsize their work forces and replace them with 'good enough' (but not really, actually) LLMs... which then craters demand in a consumption based economy, so now we have a Great Depression 2.0...
And the widespread usage of these things to answer anyones questions and do everyone's home or coursework, means that now humans are net stupifying themselves, as they no longer need to learn how to do critical analysis, research and source verification, etc.
...
Its been a while since I've seen the original movie, fhe first sequel... and then yeah, never saw anything after that, because they just look immensely, increasingly stupid and nonsensical, not even having internal logic that is coherent or consistent... so I can't well comment on how the movie universe has evolved.
Well shit, I didn't think the Jurassic park books would ever end up on my reading list but here we are
They're very, very good. I reread them for probably the fourth time just last week.
Yeah, if you didn't know, the whole movie franchise is ultimately based on the book, Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton, who I honestly feel does not get enough credit as a genuinely compelling sci-fi thriller style of author... all the way back in 1969 he wrote Andromeda Strain, he's written a lot of ... yeah, sort of gritty, dense, thriller sci-fi novels.
The original series of movies... well, the first one is a pretty good, pretty faithful adaptation if you're going for a wider, more family friendly audience... some characters are kind of merged together to keep the plot simpler to follow... its a reasonably faithful adaptation in terms of sticking to the exact contents of the novel, and of course, just a wildly succesful and beloved movie.
Crichton wrote Lost World, a sequel to his book... but the movie sequel Lost World... is basically an entire alternate timeline, a totally different story, only vaguely sharing some similarities with the book Lost World.
Then, every movie after that is just fan fiction, utterly diverged from the actual way the characters are portrayed in the books, plot is completely different, only really just keeping a few characters from the older movies around, but they're no longer anything like they are in the books, and of course you've got all the new characters just shoved into this completely divergent timeline... bleck.
I would strongly encourage you to read at least the first book.
Either every, or nearly every chapter begins with a sort of... disembodied, tangentially relevant thought from Malcolm, who is often relating whatever is roughly going to go on in that chapter to the actual mathematical principles and formulae of chaos theory.
The book functionally gives you an actual 'Intro to Chaos Theory 101' lesson as you read through it, with many of the chapters serving as an example, in at least some analagous way, of the concepts in these sort of disembodied, psuedo narration blurbs from Malcolm.
Its some of the best ludonarrative, or maybe... meta, self referential at another scale, consistency, and depth that I can remeber reading in something that is also paced so well that I again call it a 'thriller'.
Top comment! Only thing I feel not mentioned, even the science problems can ultimately be attributed to capitalism, as a lack of regulation.
Actually... "science" is a process of discovery about the natural world. To then use that knowledge gained would be engineering.
No no no, it's all about paying your IT people well and being nice to them. If John had been nice to Needry, then Needry wouldn't have needed to betray him. Pay your IT people, be nice to them and everything would have been fine.
Worst I can do if my boss pisses me off it's change his password on a Friday, and then go home.
Jurassic Park is about capitalist hubris.
Jurassic World is about why we should not allow BD Wong to create the reptilian equivalent of the torment nexus.
I saw one of the more recent-ish movies. One of the dinosaurs removed its subdermal tracking device and the humans find it because it has a big blinking light bulb on it. A big blinking light bulb on a subdermal tracker. Are these movies self aware? Was that supposed to be a joke?
The tracker must have been made by the same manufacturer that makes all those bombs you see in movies, too. You can tell because they have beepers, digital countdown displays, and sometimes also blinking lights.
ACME™
if you build a perpetual motion machine and it eats the postman from seinfeld... you still made a perpetual motion machine
But you'll have also made an employee of the Big Giant Head angry.
Newman!
I mean, the science did go wrong too. They tried making dinosaurs all one gender but used DNA from an animal that can spontaneously switch genders. Sounds like they fucked up to me.
Anyone that thinks that dinosaurs are amphibians shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a DNA sequencer.
None of it was because the scientists thought that dinosaurs were amphibians. In the lore of the books, DNA from reptiles, avians, and amphibians were used to fill in gaps in the dino DNA.
The book explains that the DNA used to fill those gap was chosen specifically for certain traits that would make for more attractive or durable creatures for the theme park, highlighting how what was being done "in the name of science" actually had nothing to do with any real scientific progress or discovery.
Without capitalism, maybe they wouldn't have continued when they found out there wasn't enough DNA for complete dinosaurs.
Or maybe they would have had enough time to think things through, and use safer/more appropriate replacement DNA.
Just spit balling.
Yeah, "good enough to keep making money" is a very capitalist mindset.
The new movies suck ass because they try to make science the bad guy, but not only is that a shit story we all see through, but it still reads as capitalistic greed and hubris, but now the movie feels like it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
I mean, even the first movie reads that way.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Meanwhile, the only reason the entire movie happened is because you idiots opened a money generating theme park.
Would be nice to have an pet velociraptor. Never shown correctly in the Jurasic Park movies. They are not bigger than a turkey
Then we just need them to have a social structure compatible with human preferences and 10'000 years of haphazard breeding.
gloriously right
Not really. The dinos were half-baked imitations, not exact replicas. And they evolved in ways the scientists didn’t anticipate, because their reach exceeded their grasp.
There’s definitely an anti-capitalist message, but don’t dismiss the warning about prematurely greenlighting high-stakes scientific initiatives. That’s relevant to the modern world, no matter what our economic model is.
LLMs come to mind. There’s a section of the AI-skeptic folks that say the only problem with AI is the profit motive. I’m not so sure. People will use tech to do all kinds of horrible shit even if they don’t stand to materially benefit. Just look at 4chan.
A cautionary tale about Tech-bros. Should have listenend to it.
Every single Crichton book was a cautionary tale about tech bros.
It's much more clear, especially if you read the book, that JP is about accountability. All throughout the book, as shit's going sideways and people are dying, everyone's playing hot potato with accountability. At the end, Grant forces Genero into investigating a wild raptor nest with him, in spite of Genero's protests that he's "just the lawyer" because somebody has to take some accountability.
Well... As they point out in the World movies the creatures were never dinosaurs. They were generic chimeras that looked like dinosaurs.
I never understood the whole "They're making a weapon" plotline though. Unless the weapon makers are either nihilists or libertarians. Oh!
Edit: caveat, I've only seen one of the world movies and then a trailer for one of the others.
I read somewhere that if we could bring back a dinosaur, it wouldn’t survive long, because of the oxygen concentration in our atmosphere. Is it true?
I may have heard a similar thing on a video that compared an elephant sized mouse with a mouse sized elephant.
Neither could survive because evolution designed their bodies for the relative pressure they exist in. This is also related to how fast their hearth beats go.
Human sized bugs could not exist for the same pressure reason also.
Disclaimer: i am as much an expert on this as are you. Source is the internet. Possibility Kurtzgesagt.
Depends. Something from 125 to 200 millions years ago would probably struggle. Maybe you can put them on a mountain? But that's probably too cold. But again, Jurassic Park dinosaurs are a mix of animal DNA, contemporary and older.
It's funny though, reading those books it seems that Michael Crichton has deep disdain for scientists.
Even the capitalist hubris is done wrong.
They knew how to activate the dwarfism gene. They could have been selling pygmy raptors and rexes as pets to everyone. At the right size they'd be no more dangerous than dogs or cats.
But no; we need a theme park that eats people.
The bio science was averaging success. Not their fault that the IT dept fumbled the ball.
They spared no expense.
Came here for this comment 😄
Science only views the world through the Cartesian division of subjects and objects and makes the world a calculable resource of objects that capitalism can exploit. The two work together. If we still saw the mystery and divine in nature, maybe we wouldn’t disrespect it so much.
There are different types of wonder and beauty. Mostly for scientists though, they find things interesting and that’s fine. But, it’s different than the way an artist would portray it, or a poet.
You're getting downvoted but indigenous people in, say, Canada and Australia tend to be the staunchest pro-environment advocates so there's merit to this idea.
Ingen went all "move fast, break things" but with genetically engineered apex predators. Pretty much worked out exactly as expected.
there may be anti capital elements but it is a man vs nature plot with a suçon of trying to control something you dont understand or respect
Comrade Lysenko would never have permitted this
Hard no.
"Hold hands and say it like me
The most shady, Frankie baby, fantastic
Graphic, tryin to make dough, like Jurassic
Park did quick to spark kids who start shit"
-Biggie
