Jurassic World [Jurassic Park IV]

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Now I want see mega-titanic vs sentient iceberg. Sounds like to would fit alongside mega-shark vs super octopus or whatever those weird movies are called.

The empathy via children thingy though, I really didn't care to much about or read into when I saw the movie. You seen the exact same thing in other movies with both male and female characters, but apparently it's terrible when it happens to females or something. Whatever, I didn't really care that much about that.

[FlareKnight]

I keep seeing the complaint that the movie was telling Claire to have kids...but I don't agree. I think it was a pretty common workaholic storyline. Don't get so caught up in what you are doing that you don't have a life outside of work and lose contact with your family. I mean she hadn't seen the one brother in 7 years....that's a long time to stay out of contact. I mean there was like one line where her sister talked about her having a family someday....crazy I know. I mean siblings would never say that kind of thing to each other....nope, impossible conversation. People talk about others not understanding their feelings until they are in their position all the time and in various contexts. This kind of stuff happens all the time, even in the first movie in respects. Doctor Grant's (girlfriend/fiance/friend/whatever their relationship in that movie) basically sicks two kids on him because it'd be good for him. Swap genders and people would rip up Jurassic Park for being insensitive or something.

The whole spoiler FAQ was pretty poor criticism. I too would love to see Mega-Titanic vs Sentient Iceberg....but the comparison doesn't fit. People bored of seeing the same old thing in a zoo and wanting to create something more exciting isn't the same as creating an iceberg designed to attack a ship. It'd be better to say they slapped insanely powerful rockets onto the Mega-Titanic that makes it exceptionally more dangerous, but also faster and thus more convenient.

It sounds like a complaint that treats Jurassic World as something far removed from a zoo, which it basically is. Zoos have dangerous animals, you let the lions out of their exhibit and a few people are going to die.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Originally Posted by FlareKnight

I keep seeing the complaint that the movie was telling Claire to have kids...but I don't agree.
*snip*

It’s probably the case of some feminists and unmarried/un-family people who wants to be left alone by their relatives/extended/family over-analyzing the movie. I too see the movie’s massage for Claire is that being such a workaholic girl and ignoring your family is not really a good manner even though you're already a grown up.

Originally Posted by FlareKnight

The whole spoiler FAQ was pretty poor criticism. I too would love to see Mega-Titanic vs Sentient Iceberg....but the comparison doesn't fit. *snip*

Yeah, that’s why I said it’s somewhat fair. Some of the criticism are spot on (eg. the poor decisions made by the humans in charge), but some of them are not (eg. the Claire-complaints).

[DerGilga]

It's a movie about dinosaurs (look-a-likes) eating people. The fact that people would complain about the characters being flat or stereotypical is beyond me. Heck, I would say the characters in the first Jurassic Park were not better than in Jurassic World.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Hey when I was.. 11 years old or whatever when that came out, Lex was a babe.

Also humans acting like morons is an expected trope in monster or disaster movies.

[MrTerrorist]

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

lols, love it. That was pretty much me.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Originally Posted by Mr Hat and Clogs

lols, love it. That was pretty much me.

There’s something nagging me about the second pic though: are those the same mother and son, or is it the grown-up boy with his girlfriend?

Looking at the wrinkle in the woman’s face, I suspect it’s the same mother. Which might indicate that the boy still lives with her despite being all grown up and apparently he’s still a bit childish . If it’s true, then poor mother.

[Renegade334]

And so? I, too, still live with my mother, despite being 29. I certainly can get my own place (actually, I'm about to buy an apartment for both of us under my own name), but we're close enough to decide to still stick together (not to mention, she has an old shoulder injury that requires my help almost every day).

Aside from that, it looks like Prattkeeping is taking off. Not all pics are as good as the first few (the one with walruses, rhinos and ostriches), though.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

And so? I, too, still live with my mother, despite being 29. I certainly can get my own place (actually, I'm about to buy an apartment for both of us under my own name), but we're close enough to decide to still stick together (not to mention, she has an old shoulder injury that requires my help almost every day).

Of course I’m not talking about the grown ups who are independent and choose to live with their parents. I’m talking about the “immature guy who is dependent and still lives under his parents and being nothing but a burden”-archetype when looking at the pic (the mother carrying all the shopping-bags might also be a hint for that).

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

I live with my folks still too, much cheaper than being on my own - although I've been tempted to a few times. Besides I like this house, and I couldn't leave the dog, I love that little guy. Besides the folks get their pound of flesh out of me and it lets them do things with me being around here as well (they can go do their grey nomad thingy and I get the house to myself anyway ).

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Petition on Hasbro’s controversial action of gender-swapping JW’s dino-toys from female to male actually works

The toy descriptions have now been changed from male dinosaurs:
“Clever as ever, Jurassic World's velociraptors are masterful hunters. And this awesome figure looks just like Velociraptor "Blue"! He's ready to team up with his fellow Velociraptors (other figures sold separately) to hunt the ultimate predator! His slashing claws and growling attack will destroy anything in his way. Let the hunt begin with your Velociraptor "Blue" figure!”

To female dinosaurs:
“Clever as ever, Jurassic World’s velociraptors are masterful hunters. And this awesome figure looks just like Velociraptor “Blue”! She’s ready to team up with her fellow Velociraptors (other figures sold separately) to hunt the ultimate predator! Her slashing claws and growling attack will destroy anything in her way. Let the hunt begin with your Velociraptor “Blue” figure!”

Images

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Hasbro’s spokesperson for the company said the switch “was an oversight” and that Hasbro is “in the process of updating the language with the correct information.” The company said the copy on the website would be updated to reflect the change.

Well that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

[MrTerrorist]

^I wonder if the people at Hasbro forgot, didn't know or didn't watch the trailers that the Raptors were female.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

^I wonder if the people at Hasbro forgot, didn't know or didn't watch the trailers that the Raptors were female.

I'd rather go with: They didn't care (until angry parents and activists noticed it and made the petition that is).

[james0246]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

^I wonder if the people at Hasbro forgot, didn't know or didn't watch the trailers that the Raptors were female.

It's kind of a willful ignorance then, since the series has "starred" female dinosaurs for over 20 years (albeit futanari dinosaurs at time ).

Whatever the case, the issue is fixed. Now we just have to figure out why Hasbro felt the need to assign gender to a dinosaur toy to begin with.

[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

I just want to put this here coz we simply need some opinions from actual palaeontologist(s) on the recent Jurassic World:


First is their overall view of the JP franchise:

Spoiler for interview:

Originally Posted by Washington Post

Why paleontologists love the noisy, featherless, inaccurate dinosaurs of ‘Jurassic Park’

You might expect watching "Jurassic Park" (or "Jurassic World," the latest installment of the franchise) with a bunch of dinosaur experts to be kind of a drag. We all realize that the dinosaurs onscreen are lifelike, but not realistic. They look the way movie watchers want dinosaurs to look, not the way scientists truly believe they looked.

But in reality, paleontologists seem to have a soft spot for the books and movies. Why? Because the love of dinosaurs they inspired back in the early '90s arguably changed the research field forever.

"There was a wonderful explosion in interest after that first movie," Matthew Mossbrucker, director and chief curator of the Morrison Natural History Museum, told The Post. "I really think it's partially responsible for giving me a career."

After screening "Jurassic World" with a Post reporter, two paleontologists from The Smithsonian had similar thoughts. Even if they think a lot of it is basically just dino porn.

Kirk Johnson: What's not to love about a great dinosaur film? They spend so much money on making the dinosaurs [pause] plausible.

In many ways, paleontologists are always thinking about what those things look like, how they function, what they do, and I think, in one of the "Jurassic Park" movies, I actually preferred the herbivores. Because they're actually kind of behind the scenes, before the mayhem starts.

The theropod stuff is all pretty much money shot. It's all porn, basically. It's all like raaaaaaaar, you know? It's all just so stereotyped.

Matthew Carrano: Dinosaurs are popular in other movies, but none of those movies have ever been any good. I mean, what's the second-best dinosaur movie set over the past 20 years? You quickly drop down to garbage, right?

KJ: It's totally true. And all the documentaries can't afford the decent CGI. They end up making these things that are obviously really bad CGI dinosaurs.

MC: You can go online now and there's like 50 paleontologists and paleontology fans nitpicking the trailers for little bits of whatever, but fundamentally, why would you feel bad about this series of movies?

If you're a young paleontologist, and you have a job, the movies have some part in that, frankly. It's the reason why grownups like dinosaurs now. Instead of just kids up to the age of 8. And one of the reasons I think museums have reinvested in dinosaurs is that adults and children come to see them. Therefore, I have a job. None of these museums had a dinosaur paleontologist in 1985. And now they all do.

Mossbrucker — who can't credit the original film with his love of dinosaurs, since he was lecturing middle school students on them by the time he was 6 — remembers taking his first volunteer position at a natural history museum just after the film's release.

"Visitors would ask, you know, would a T. Rex really not see you if you stood perfectly still? And other things pertaining to the movie," he said. "It was wonderful. These films bridge the gap between dusty fossils in a museum drawer and the public, who are hungry to know more."

Now 36, Mossbrucker has been in the museum game ever since. Popular culture icebreakers are priceless, he said. In fact, he recently participated in the staged "autopsy" of a man-made T. Rex carcass for a National Geographic special. But he still thinks "Jurassic Park" is one of the best cultural outreaches paleontology has.

"A lot of my colleagues would complain about the dinosaurs not being very accurate, but it was just really putting dinosaurs in the zeitgeist," he said.

Of course, knowing how good the franchise has been to their ilk doesn't stop paleontologists from casting a critical eye on the blockbusters. For the Smithsonian's Carrano and Johnson, the biggest issues came down to the beasts being noisy and featherless:

KJ: Another big pet peeve is when a dinosaur arrives and it's like "BOOOOOOOOM."

MC: They're all way too noisy. That's the other thing. The loudest animals in the world in these movies are the predators. In real life, they're usually the quietest animals. It's a good way to starve, running around screaming your head off.

KJ: Hey! I'm killing! Hey! Hey!

MC: They get there and they see their prey and the first thing they do is open their mouth and yell at it, and the thing turns around and runs. It's a terrible strategy!

KJ: But that's the money shot. Everybody who makes really big dinosaurs uses the standard pose: stop, look, roar, give you a chance to respond and get away. It's something that happens in the movies because it's something movies before it did.

MC: It's like a moment of drama. It's like the point in a musical where someone stops and has a solo. It won't happen in real life, but you sort of expect it's gonna happen, it means something in the context of the storytelling.

KJ: The theropod solo.

WP: So the "Jurassic Park" series is basically a musical.

MC: That's the next thing!

Washington Post: Will feathers on dinosaurs ever catch on?

KJ: Oh boy. They look so ugly. It's really ruined the whole dinosaur thing. They looked pretty cool but now it's like, "really, that's what dinosaurs look like? Some sort of weird punk rocker." It's pretty awful.

MC: There's a group of people for whom they've really caught on. But I would say that people at large, it's still a common question. Probably many dinosaurs were just fuzzy. In the way that big mammals kind of have hair, but you don't think of an elephant as hairy.

Big dinosaurs probably had that kind of stuff growing on it. I don't think that T-Rex looked like a giant eagle. Maybe as a baby.

Lots of dinosaurs — even things related to the Stegosaurus — had stuff, other stuff. Quill-looking kind of things and whatnot coming out of them. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. It's just weird. They're all weird.

And at the end of the day, paleontologists — at least the ones we've talked to — seem to understand that "weird" looking dinosaurs just don't pack the same cinematic punch. And if people hadn't been in awe of the things they saw on screen back in '93, museums probably wouldn't have gotten the boost they did.

"It's true that from what I've seen, the dinosaurs in 'Jurassic World' are not the most accurate," Mossbrucker said, "But these are opportunities to have people ask great questions and to educate them — not excuses to throw popcorn at the screen."

And now the meat of the interview where they talk about Jurassic World:

Spoiler for interview:

Originally Posted by Washington Post

‘I enjoyed the whole absurdity of it': Paleontologists review ‘Jurassic World.’

Explaining the concept of this review is like explaining a dream. "I went to go see 'Jurassic World' before the film was in theaters, but instead of my friends, I brought two top paleontologists."

Based on a small sample size, the "Jurassic Park" film franchise has a special place in the heart of paleontologists. This is probably why I was able to convince the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History Director Kirk Johnson and Curator of Dinosauria Matthew Carrano, both paleontologists, to come to a screening of "Jurassic World."

The tl;dr of their reaction? "Jurassic World" is super entertaining — but it could have used more herbivores.

Here is the paleontologists' review, in the form of a condensed and edited conversation. There are, as you would imagine, mild — but not devastating — spoilers.

You two seemed to really enjoy watching this film. What did you like about it

Kirk Johnson: Ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm a big kid. Running a museum is a big kid's job. To do a good job with this museum, you have to be curious about all sorts of things, which means I love a kid's movie. I enjoyed the whole absurdity of it. I tend to fall asleep in movies when they're not interesting or exciting. This was funny. It had a nice pace to it.

Matthew Carrano: Especially in a franchise like this, where it's not the first movie. In the first movie, you don't know what you're gonna get yet. So there's the build up and there's like little reveals and then there's the T. Rex scene, and then there's a pause, and then there's raptors. As soon as you're done with that movie, you can't do that anymore. Everybody wants to know "where are the dinosaurs?" from the moment the movie starts. So they acknowledge it.

In the other two sequels, there are long stretches of boring conversation about things you don't care about it. In "Jurassic World," the conversations are almost telegraphic. There's probably about 5 1/2 minutes of conversation between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the entire movie.

KJ: I did enjoy the addition of the pterosaurs and the mosasaur.
MC: Right, a few non-dinosaurs. That's true, having more than just [a] peripheral role.

KJ: They definitely supercharged the mosasaur and made the pterosaurs way stronger than they would have been in real life.

MC: Yeah. pterosaurs could do you damage, but it's hard to believe a pterosaur could lift a person. They're not that strong. Their bones are like paper. It's hard to imagine not being able to get away from a pterosaur. You could crush one, probably.

KJ: And their claws aren't like that.

MC: They're not eagles. That's the other thing, too. They're not actually animals that run around and grab things with their claws the way raptors do today. They're mouth predators. If they can't pick you up with their mouth, they're not going to eat you. And a lot of pterosaurs, their neck bones are not thick. They probably can't pick up a person. Their feet are not — I wouldn't imagine it to be the equivalent of an eagle. They basically are flat footed.

KJ: They're fishing.

MC: Bug eating. The average pterosaur is much smaller. It's the same thing as the velociraptor. And the mosasaur [in the movie] is substantially larger than most mosasaur.

KJ: Twice-ish.

MC: Nice to see some marine things. Although I'd love to know how you get [a mosasaur's DNA] out of a mosquito. How do you get the blood of a sea creature out of a mosquito?

What's changed in dinosaur science between "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World"?

KJ: The number of dinosaurs we know has just, like, skyrocketed.

MC: Every six or seven weeks, you get a new dinosaur. And that pace has been going up for 20 years.

KJ: If you drive a direct connection between places putting value in dinosaurs and hiring dinosaur scientists, and then dinosaur science finding new dinosaurs, there's almost something like a direct cause and effect between something like "Jurassic Park" and this incredible number of new dinosaurs.

Of all those newly discovered dinosaurs since the last installment of the series, which one should have been in "Jurassic World"?

KJ: Deinocheirus. A gigantic clawed duck thing. A lot of the cool weird ones are herbivores.



MC: Every single kind of carnivore is in there, right? With the herbivores, it's "we've got our horns one, we have our armor one, we have our long-neck one, and we don't really care how many."

We've probably discovered about 4 percent of all the dinosaurs that ever existed. They should be just making these dinosaurs like "holy cow, what's that?" And they would all be dinosaurs you've never heard of. They could say, "Well it's kind of like a stegosaurus, but it's got all this other junk on it. I guess it's a ... " And they could just start naming new dinosaurs.

On the Indominus Rex, the made-up hybrid villain "dinosaur."

KJ: It basically looks like a supercharged allosaurus. But it had bird raptor claws. Did you notice that? Those are eagle claws; they weren't dinosaur claws.

MC: And then it had sort of like a bellusaur head with all these knobs on it.

KJ: It looks like a dinosaur, basically. It looked like you could easily find that.

MC: In the technical details no, but there are giant long-armed predatory dinosaurs. So you don't even need to get that weird about it. Interestingly, the color changing, that was in the book, the first book. There's a dinosaur in the first book called carnotaurus. Which of course we don't know what color it was. But in the first "Jurassic Park" book, it was a color-changing dinosaur, which they only found out after they made it. It just turned out to be a camouflaged dinosaur. They got rid of it in the first movie originally, but they brought the concept back now.

On the film's choice to explain away the accuracy of "Jurassic World's" dinosaurs by saying that none of the park's creatures are "natural":

MC: I loved that, right? It was the "scientist, shut up" moment. B.D. Wong's character says something like: "You always wanted more teeth and more this, if we did it the way they were supposed to be they would look completely different." So the idea is, they don't have feathers on purpose. At least he provides an answer, right?

On the portrayal of scientists in the film:

KJ: This was the first one with no paleontologists in it?

MC: Yeah.

KJ: In the first [movie], there's the famous line, "I need the opinion of a paleobotanist." Which is the first and only time the word "paleobotany" has ever been uttered in a movie. As a paleobotanist I was —

MC: It was a high watermark.

KJ: This one, there was, like, the tough guy who was the dinosaur trainer.

MC: But he was like an ex-Navy dude.

KJ: So that might be the big thing, is that they've matured past needing us.


Kirk Johnson, pictured through the cast of a T. Rex head in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's dinosaur hall, before it closed for a major renovation project. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

What about the Jurassic plants?

KJ: My big pet peeve is, of course, everybody short-shrifts the vegetation in the landscape. Everybody puts dinosaurs in modern landscapes. It's even worse if you call it "Jurassic World." All the implications are that you're going to build this entire world. But really it's not; it's Hawaii with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn't really live in the rain forest, because there weren't really rain forests to live in when dinosaurs were around.

MC: And actually, if you had an island like that, if you assume that the dinosaurs could have adjusted to eating these things they've never eaten before, etc., it would have taken no time at all for those dinosaurs to totally have remade that landscape, like elephants today. Elephants hate trees; they just start pulling them down. Elephants are engineering the landscape, and the big dinosaurs certainly would have done that. It wouldn't have been a dense rain forest for very long. They would have trashed the place.

What did you think about Chris Pratt's trained velociraptors?

MC: Deeply unlikely, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of dinosaurs live in groups, it seems like. I'm sure there are ways of communicating; crocodiles do that today. But the raptors are engaging in wolf-like behavior. Even in mammals, that stuff shows up late. It's a pretty new thing.

We want our predators to be as dramatic as possible, right? That whole notion actually came out of science, that they were pack hunters. That's not a movie invention. And it's based on the fact that [in] the very first examples of these raptors that were found, there were several of them that were found together, and a plant eater that was much bigger. The idea was that it was a pack scenario. But that has not really held up in later years for a variety of reasons. But it's been a very catchy thing. The more likely thing is that they were running around eating lizards.


Matthew Carrano crouches near the foot of a wooly mammoth skeleton being deconstructed in 2014. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Correction: An earlier version of this post quoted the paleontologists as discussing "mesasaur," a small species of reptile, instead of "mosasaur," the large sea creature featured in the film.

[MrTerrorist]

YouTube

https://youtu.be/TXGCyjJh48I

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[Renegade334]

Buy it. Buy it right now.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/_RZi6NCuLbQ

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[Obelisk ze Tormentor]

Concept Art for the Long-Shelved 90s Jurassic Park Animated Series is Revealed

Too bad coz Universal Studio made sure that the series would be high-quality in terms of both visual and writing, and they only needed Spielberg's nod of approval. Oh well, at least we get to see the Mosasaur in the concept art realized in Jurassic World.

[FlareKnight]

Well, did enjoy rewatching this on BluRay. Feelings pretty well remain the same. The second best Jurassic Park film and a pretty good movie overall. Certainly some flaws in there, but overall I enjoyed it.

Deleted scenes are always interesting. I think some of them would have been nice to keep, maybe one of the scenes with the brothers. But some make sense why they were left out. I kind of wish they kept half of the 'covering up scent' scene, just because it did give some extra focus to Owen and Claire. A bit of focus on being the Aunt that has basically not been a part of the lives of her family would have been ok. Perfectly ok with skipping the last part of the scene though....probably not needed. Would have liked keeping the second part of the scene where Owen talks to the kids and then Claire about the whole Raptor plan. But can see them shaving off time wherever they could.