I watched Jurassic World again, now that it is on HBO.  You always get something more out of a movie or book the second time around.

There is a scene towards the end of the movie where Owen and the mercenaries security forces take the raptors against the Indominus Rex.  The Indominus says something in Dinosaur to the raptors and the raptors turn on the humans.

A bunch of people get eaten, Owen is facing off against one of the raptors, and then some human shoots the raptor with a rocket launcher and kills it.  Owen gets suddenly sad, and you are supposed to feel bad for the raptor getting vaporized.

It suddenly hit me WTF!!!

OK, Vincent D’onofrio’s character Fatty McStupidnbelligerent  may be an asshole, but the rest of these guys are ex-military who have been hired by a theme park to provide security for the guests.  These guys are probably regular working Joes who thought they got a good job in the private sector after getting out of the Army and have wives and kids and such.  Why should I feel bad for the cloned raptor instead of all the human are going to end up as dino shit in a Coasta Rican jungle?

Why the moral dubiousness?

Not, 30 seconds later, one of the other raptors tires to eat Owen’s girlfriend’s nephews.  Am I at this point still supposed to be sympathetic to Owen’s pet “six foot turkey?”  How can I root for Owen to score one with Ms. Orange-Hair PrissyPants if his raptor buddies end her status as an aunt?

Sure, blue comes to Owen’s rescue at the end when fighting the Indominus, but just how many of Owen’s human coworkers did just take out 15 minutes previous?

I’m all confused.  Jurassic Park was much less gray area on this subject: humans good (except Nedry), dinos bad.  Why is that so hard?

Fine, maybe the dinosaurs (except for the Indominus) aren’t malicious.  So what, that doesn’t mean that they are less likely to eat you.  Didn’t Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend learn that the hard way when he went to commune with the bears in Alaska?  Does a bear shit environmentalists in the woods?  Even Roy of Siegfried and Roy got nommed on by his tiger, and they trained together for years.

Don’t try an complicate the morality of the movie for me.  I like animals, but if I have to choose between the last lion on earth and some tourist on photo safari; pass the H&H.   I would love to see dinosaurs in real life.

 

 

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By J. Kb

10 thoughts on “Jurassic World revision”
  1. I took it more as Owen saddened that it came to that, as if he had failed. More of a ‘feel bad for the protagonist who tried to stop it but couldn’t’.

    I might have it wrong, since both times I was more focused on how stupid the ‘lets catch the super dino with non-lethals and no back up’ scene was.

    That and ‘I wonder what he loaded that 1895 with for dino’s…’

    1. As much as I support Marlin as an American firearms manufacturer. For dinosaurs, I just don’t think .45-70 will cut it, even with Buffalo Bore. I’ll take a CZ 550 in .500 Jeffry at a minimum.

      1. Oh, I agree. I figure it was just a way of separating him from Muldoon and Tembo. Head-canon has it as a custom .50 cal of some kind or another just to make it somewhat believable.

        1. The .50 cal conversion for a Marlin 1894 is .50 Alaskan. It is more powerful than the .45-70, throwing a 450 grain bullet at about 2,000 fps with some 4,000 ft-lbs of energy. That sounds great EXCEPT the .458 Win Mag has a reputation of poor performance in Africa against dangerous game, launching a 500 grain bullet at 2,100 fps with 5,000 ft-lbs and it is heaver and more powerful than the .50 Alaskan. Many professional hunters feel that the “magic” velocity for killing thick skin, dangerous game is 2,400 fps. Below that, penetration is iffy. This is why the .375 H&H is so loved down there despite it being relatively light for a big game bullet (about 300 to 350 grains). The higher velocity and smaller frontal area makes it a deep penetrating bullet. The .500 Jeffry launches a 500 grain bullet at 2,400 fps with 6,000 ft-lbs and is a well respected elephant killer. Hence my choice for it as a dino gun.

          Muldoon was carrying a SPAS shotgun. Now, against Raptors, which are about man size (the movie puts them at 250 lbs), a semi-auto shotgun would have the advantage of a higher rate of fire and magazine capacity at close range (sub 50 yds), but ammo selection is critical. Something along the lines of Brenneke Black Magic Magnum or Magnum Crush, which has shown to have good performance on bear would be acceptable. But in Jurassic Park, he is seen loading his gun with Buckshot.

          Tembo was armed with a 600 Nitro double gun. A historical gun for Africa, but perhaps a little outdated as the NE line of cartridges also has a problem hitting the magic 2,400 fps point.

          Yes, I have thought about this way too much.

          1. You’re all waaaaaay over-thinking it. The only thing that matters in make-believe-land (aka Hollyweird) is how cool the gun looks. Performance can be totally ignored, because that can be made-up too!

            Need a gun to take down a dinosaur? Show a man loading a .454 Casull. With shiny FMJ copper plated bullets, or maybe silver if it’s a vampire dino. Need a gun to blow up the Earth? Duct tape some $#!+ to a .50 BMG and call it the EarthF***er and film away, boys. It doesn’t matter what the gun is capable of in real life, because movies aren’t in real life. They’re in fantasy land.

      2. As an owner of a Marlin 1895(I’ve posted a clip of myself firing it on this blog), I made the comment during the movie that I would want something bigger.

  2. Something like a .45-70, loaded with non-expanding solids, would probably be about as good as anything else for something that size(anything an individual could carry and use as a rifle, that is).

    Things I found interesting:
    The mercs came to the island, knowing there are big, aggressive animals around, with M4s?
    The only two actual firearms on the island for the staff to use were a minigun and a lever rifle?

  3. Let me start off by asking you to go easy on the “Orange-haired Ms. Prissypants”. For starters, she was smoking hot. Secondly, what you saw as prissy, I found her to be an over-achieving and results driven professional woman. Thirdly, she slogged through dense tropical jungle, mud and even outran a T-rex all while wearing high heels. At least Hollywood did not portray her as a weak female that needed a man to save her because she did not trip once in the movie. Anyway, I liked her character.

    As far as the scene where Owen was staring down the raptor before someone took it out with the RPG, I had a thought on that scene. Was Owen sad because the thing was killed even though it may have lunged at him? Or, since the raptor was one of the more subservient in the pack and now separated from the Beta and Indominus Rex, the raptor was “Coming back” to Owen? You saw that the raptor stopped and was cocking its head back and forth. Was the raptor’s bond with Owen re-establishing itself only to be interrupted by the rocket thusly killing any future reconnection or was it as you perceived it in the movie?

    With all that said, it was just a movie but the fact that the raptors were killing everyone, well…that’s what raptors do. They hunt and kill. It was not as if the raptors were domesticated and turned on their handlers, they were wild animals always capable of doing so. The whole idea of setting the raptors loose, like bloodhounds, to track down the Indominus Rex while accompanied by a slew of humans (which the raptors were never exposed to in their training before) was a bad idea from the start. Now, if they would have shadowed the raptors from the air, that would have been more believable but the story would have suffered due to it.

    I know you said not to complicate the movie further for you, but I just did because you said not to. Nobody puts me in a box. 🙂

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