Why I Hate Jurassic World
Prompt 7 — An Unpopular Opinion
What is an unpopular opinion you have? In about 500 words, write a journalistic or blog style article describing your opinion. Try to choose something that isn’t too subjective. Form an objective argument against the thing in question, and present better alternatives where applicable. (Please don’t make it political).
“Try to have an open mind. Try to have an open mind…”
I was saying as I sat in the theater. I knew that I was going to hate Jurassic World. I knew it, my girlfriend knew it, and my friends knew it too, but bless them, they asked me about it anyway as we walked out of the theater. After going around the circle, everyone showering praises about the effects, the cool new dinosaurs, the reimagined park, my friend asks, “So Zack…what did YOU think?” Well, what I think is that Jurassic World represents the worst of movies today.
It’s been five years since that viewing, and after much internal brooding and unwanted ranting to my friends, I think I have finally been able to articulate why I’ve felt so strongly about it all these years. I could talk about how it makes no sense that a team of scientists would engineer a dinosaur to be as dangerous and out of control as possible. I could talk about how the military would not be interested in dinosaurs as a new kind of soldier because we have flying combat drones that cost far less (and don’t want to eat you). There’s really nothing interesting about any of the characters. The kids are dull and lifeless. Chris Pratt is being Chris Pratt, but also trying to pull off this Harrison Ford sort of complex. The corporate product placement is completely out of control. The movie also seems to be (either intentionally or ignorantly) an analogy for itself.
These are small things that together ruin the movie for me, but there is one big problem in my mind that overshadows the rest. That is the decision to not have dinosaurs with feathers.
I know this seems like a strange thing to get worked up about, but this leads to several larger points. Jurassic Park was about forging a connection with the deep, unfathomable past. Mankind in his ignorance tampered with nature, and it bit him. Jurassic Park tried to stay on the edge of dinosaur research back in the 90s. Dr. Grant hinted in the beginning of the movie that birds are descended from dinosaurs. Well, they didn’t know what we know now, which is that the connection goes a lot deeper than that. Scientists are relatively certain that large groups of dinosaur species had feathers. Velociraptor almost certainly did, and Tyrannosaurus very likely had feathers also. At this time, not showing them with feathers means not staying on the edge of science, and so this has perpetuated a dated public imagination of dinosaurs. For a movie of this scale to do this, it is a disservice to the scientific community and the public. For now, dinosaurs will remain as frightening, scaly monsters in the public eye.
This brings up the reason dinosaurs weren’t given feathers in Jurassic World. It was said that executive producer Steven Spielberg made the decision because he thought feathered dinosaurs wouldn’t be scary. To that I say if movies can make dolls, clowns, and little girls scary, then a movie with just a little creativity can make feathered dinosaurs scary. In this way the movie was mortally uninspired, having no spine and choosing to take no risks whatsoever. The one thing that distinguishes this movie from the others in the Jurassic Park franchise is the choice to have an engineered hybrid dinosaur, but not only is this not very scary, but this really does more harm for the movie than good.
Choosing to have a hybrid dinosaur and not display any dinosaurs with feathers distances ourselves from the animals and makes them appear alien to us. It could have forged a stronger connection with our natural world to display feathered dinosaurs because birds are obviously still around today. Go outside and spot a bird — you are looking at an animal in the taxonomic group Dinosauria. And oddly enough, by stepping away from the TV for a minute to go outside you may experience a connection to the deep past in an unnerving way that Jurassic World could never possibly convey.
