Jurassic World

[Shuckle]

I just went to see this movie and holy balls was it awesome. I went in hoping for a good movie and I came out going "DINOSAURS".

I've learned my lesson from Frozen, where raving about a great movie sets impossibly high expectations, so I'm not going to be as outspokenly excitable about it as I was for that movie. However, I do want you to know that even if you find the movie to be an uninspired bore, the CGI dinosaurs deliver a great experience and you definitely won't leave disappointed. If you go for nothing else, at least go to watch the dinosaurs running around roaring and doing dinosaur things.

[Doppleganger]

They're not exactly dinosaurs anymore, though. Since they don't have feathers, they're pretty much in the realm of theme-park monsters.

[Emi]

From what I know, isn't it only really the therapods who have feathers? I haven't actually seen anything to suggest that many of the herbivores had anything more than typical reptile skin.

[Doppleganger]

The majority of the carnivores featured in JP (or that audiences ever care about) are theropods. Most people aren't interested in the sea monsters, which is a shame as I've moved onto them with the sobering reality that theropods were just big chickens.

[Emi]

Well yeah, that's what I asked. XD

Also dammit I knew I spelled it wrong.

[Mercutio]

They address that issue with a line in the movie actually and I have to say I agree. Dinosaurs really had feathers, eh? Who the fuck cares we lie to people every day about poverty, about what's really going on in Africa and Asia, about just how doomed the planet is.

[Doppleganger]

That reminds me of the director of 300 telling audiences in 2007 that his movie was 100% authentic to Greek history.

It's pretty clear to me that modern audiences don't give a darn about anything. Otherwise they wouldn't be turning out record numbers for a franchise movie.

[Emi]

To be fair, I think that if the movie had made a sudden shift to feathered theropods, it wouldn't have gone over well with audiences. This isn't really a scientific documentary, its a movie that intends to make money by milking off of the very successful Jurassic Park franchise, which did not have feathered dinosaurs, and I don't think that most people know that some dinosaurs had feathers. Out of some of the people who did, I think there are those who feel the same way you do, that they are just over-sized chickens.

I would love to see feathered dinosaurs myself, particularly because in my opinion it actually makes the giant carnivores scarier to me. For quite a few reasons: feathers can make for more intricate camouflage patterns, it traps heat in meaning a dinosaur can hunt in more adverse conditions, and there is also a shock factor sometimes. Think like a cross between a lizard's frill and a bird of paradise's display. It can easily make a dinosaur look bigger than it actually is. It's just difficult, at least in my eyes, to make people see these and go against what we've known for decades.

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Emi

To be fair, I think that if the movie had made a sudden shift to feathered theropods, it wouldn't have gone over well with audiences. This isn't really a scientific documentary, its a movie that intends to make money by milking off of the very successful Jurassic Park franchise, which did not have feathered dinosaurs, and I don't think that most people know that some dinosaurs had feathers. Out of some of the people who did, I think there are those who feel the same way you do, that they are just over-sized chickens.

I'm not exactly clamouring for realism here myself, but I really detest the "lizards are badass, chickens are pussy" crowd that drove this step back. Because this is the same crowd that struggles with ideas like morality isn't black and white, poor people are still people and homosexuality is not a choice. It's the same crowd that tore apart Galileo, Turing, and Michael Jackson. People who don't want truth to challenge their preconceived notions of how the world works.

[Shuckle]

Actually the "dinosaurs with leathery reptilian skin" was a pretty crucial plot point. In order to understand it fully, you have to back up and take a look at the central point of Jurassic Park (The novel). Mild spoilers ahead, although if you're reading this thread it might already be too late for you to not get spoiled about Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park is all about how business/government and science interact. It's a pretty common theme with Chrichton - Next, Andromeda Strain, Airframe, Timeline...the list goes on. In Jurassic Park, business is a force to speed up research and development. InGen (a pun - "Ingens" is the latin word for "huge") sponsors research to clone dinosaurs and plans to offset the costs by using a theme park to draw in funds. This goes badly for a number of reasons, the primary one being that the idea behind the production of dinosaurs was results-oriented rather than research-oriented. Hammond wanted dinosaurs he could show people, not dinosaurs he could have exhaustively studied for 200+ years for what he deemed as ultimately no purpose.

Jurassic World expands on this theme extremely well. Within the first 20 minutes we see a number of different approaches towards dinosaurs. Hoskins is looking for military applications. Claire sees the dinosaurs as assets and uses them to successfully manage and run a theme park. Masrani sees the park as an oversized petting zoo. So you have all these different attitudes towards the animals, and none of them are treating them correctly by Chrichton's original standards.

So back to the leathery skin. In reality, Jurassic Park was written and produced before we really understood that dinosaurs had feathers, but in order to understand why they had no feathers in Jurassic World we have to take Jurassic Park as canon. The dinosaurs originally did not have feathers because Hammond's processes involved DNA from reptilians and amphibians. DNA degrades over time, which means that Dr. Wu had to splice in DNA from other animals. In fact, in novel!JP, Wu mentions that if dinosaurs had not been birds, the cloning would have been impossible. Birds have different kinds of blood cells which allowed DNA sequencing from blood rather than requiring some other (impossible to obtain) form of organic matter. (Some dinosaurs ended up with feathers, as well, and I believe the frilled dinos that spit acid were the ones who were explicitly mentioned to be feathered). The results-oriented style that InGen took towards making those dinosaurs made it so that they were incomplete specimens and could not accurately represent dinosaurs as they were.

In Jurassic World, scientists have a much stronger handle on genetic engineering, but Jurassic Park instilled an idea of what dinosaurs looked like into the public (Plus, that DNA is still incomplete and the gaps need to be filled SOMEHOW). Ultimately, Jurassic World is about appearances, not substance, and it's a motif that shows up multiple times over the course of the film.

Spoilers regarding the plot of the film:

Spoiler: show

Even when Hoskins was taking over the park to put the Indominus Rex down by force, he wanted to do it with the raptors instead of with tried and true methods like bullets. It almost failed because he wanted to do what was "cool" rather than what was effective or right. That is the best "hidden" example of what I'm talking about when I say it's about appearance vs. substance.

I really, really, REALLY loved Jurassic Park as both a novel and a movie, and I loved Jurassic World for all the same reasons. Both Park and World are highly nuanced films and were just a treat to pick through and find 1.) the references, both subtle and not-so-subtle, to Jurassic Park, 2.) the ways in which Jurassic World expanded on the ideas in Jurassic Park, and 3.) the ways in which Jurassic World introduced new ideas that were only slightly touched on in Jurassic Park. If anything in this world was considered a "spiritual sequel" to anything else, it would be Jurassic World to Jurassic Park.

[Shuckle]

The soundtrack was composed by Michael Giacchino, who was also responsible for the beauty that was Up's award-winning score.

I have to say I was highly impressed by the score but not surprised to learn that it wasn't Williams. Just not his style, man. However, Giacchino's ability to take a melody and run with it proved to be what the film really needed in order to evoke nostalgic images of the old films. I'm overall pleased with the result, even though the purist in me balks at the idea that Williams wasn't directly involved beyond the melodic inspiration.

[Loki]

Spoiler: show

lulz

[Doppleganger]

Evolution in action!

[Loki]

Reason why dinosaurs don't have feathers in JP series: the 'dinosaurs' aren't dinosaurs. They kind of bring this up in the third film, but InGen didn't really make dinosaurs. They used parts of dinosaur DNA and filled gaps with the DNA of other species. This effectively means they're no longer dinosaurs. They're something completely new and different. Just like how Domino's claims they sell pizza, it might seem like pizza, but really, we all know it's not.

Now my own personal review- mediocre. The entire film is pretty flat. Doesn't matter if you watch the film in 3D or not when everything in the story is two dimensional.

Strong Points:
-Simple themes that come through quite well.
-Film has a self mocking commentary about modern films/media (kinda like RoboCop reboot).
-Chris Pratt.
-Dinosaurs fighting.

Weak Points:
-Suspensions of disbelief is really not possible. Everything is ridiculous but the film takes itself quite seriously.
-Characters are boring and feel like caricatures of movie characters. Also bad child acting.
-Inconsistency in Indominus Rex and it's apparent superpowers.
-Dinosaurs fighting.

[DaveTheFishGuy]

Loki I love you it's so nice to see someone with an actual brain discussing the lack of feathers.

[Shuckle]

Originally Posted by Loki

Weak Points:
-Dinosaurs fighting.

fite me

[Emi]

Reason why dinosaurs don't have feathers in JP series: the 'dinosaurs' aren't dinosaurs. They kind of bring this up in the third film, but InGen didn't really make dinosaurs. They used parts of dinosaur DNA and filled gaps with the DNA of other species. This effectively means they're no longer dinosaurs.

...or the more likely scenario being that at the time of Jurassic Park's writing the idea that dinosaurs could have had feathers would have been laughed out and hence Crichton had no reason to put it in. Yes, they used Frog DNA (???? Why Frog?), but Hammond wanted the dinosaurs and the environment to look as accurate as possible which at that time, no one would have had the idea. I find it much more likely that the lack of feathers was a business motivated decision both in-world and out.

If we knew, the dinosaurs likely would have had feathers. Crichton was not sparse with his associated of theropods with birds (at one point in the book the velociraptors are noted as having migrational behaviors similar to a bird).

[Doppleganger]

There's a weeaboo on a certain Giants blog who thinks in-universe explanations make up for real-world gaffes. That guy annoys me (for more reasons than just that).

[Shuckle]

Chrichton gave individual species feathers because that was the thinking at the time - dinosaurs were like birds, but they were like lizardbirds not like BIRD birds. Archaeopteryx was seen as the link between lizards and birds, not the intermediary step between dinosaurs and birds. However, nobody in that time could possibly have guessed that they were ALL feathered, especially to the level that current thinking suggests they were!

In-universe it is explicitly a business decision though.

[DaveTheFishGuy]

Yeah I mean in the original film it can be handwaved by the frog DNA but in JW there is a line explicitly stating that the dinosaurs look the way they do because that's what people expect dinosaurs to look like.

[Mercutio]

Yeah, JW directly deals with it and makes a compelling argument for not having feathers. Though the self mocking bird thing at the very beginning is funny.

[Talon87]

Maybe I'm just an old fart who is very comfortable with his perception of dinosaurs as "terrible lizards," but ... can someone please explain to me why all of the children on UPN are so adamant that 99.99% of all dinosaurs had feathers? I have no problems adopting a view of Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus as feathered, but I balk at this notion that we got all of dinosauria wrong, that we have fossil evidence which proves, indisputably, that all terrestrial dinosaurs (and maybe even most or all of the aquatic ones too!) had feathers. Where's the proof? What rock have I been sleeping under to have missed out on the greatest archaeological dig of all time, a dig which uncovered a mass extinction of at least one member of every single dinosaur known to man? Because unless there was such a miraculous find, I have to ask how it can be that we know, without room for debate, that all dinosaurs had feathers. Why should Triceratops have had feathers? Why Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus? Why Stegalosaurus? Unless we've found fossils with grooves in them that correspond to feathers' shafts, why should we believe that we got all of it wrong?

Consider this: birds aren't the only class to trace their origins back to reptiles. Where do you think mammals came from? For the same reason that birds <-- reptiles made people suspect that some dinosaurs could've had feathers, should not also mammals <-- reptiles make people suspect that some dinosaurs could've had fur, hair, or been bare?

Consider also this: the birds we have today are descendants of a select group of proto-birds (or even just plain already-evolved birds; I'm willing to entertain either headcanon on this one) that survived the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous. Our birds' ancestors did not represent all offshoots of dinosaurs present at that time. We know that the first mammals likely came from reptiles. What about all of the other offshoots that didn't make it? How many of them were feathered? I would think that just as feathers are a uniquely "bird-lineage" thing, so too would "not feathers" be a broad default, given reptiles' obvious lack of feathers. Crocodilians existed alongside dinosaurs and had no feathers, for example. Why are we so confident that the evolution of feathers predates the split between ordinary "reptiles" and the first of the "dinosaurs"?

[Doppleganger]

Dimetrodon was no dinosaur, it was a mammal-like reptile.

Still, it looks more like my idea of a dino than the real-life theropods do.

[Emi]

We are talking about theropods, not all dinosaurs.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Emi

We are talking about theropods, not all dinosaurs.

Well then be clearer about it next time! Because this ...

Originally Posted by Emi

...or the more likely scenario being that at the time of Jurassic Park's writing the idea that dinosaurs could have had feathers would have been laughed out and hence Crichton had no reason to put it in. Yes, they used Frog DNA (???? Why Frog?), but Hammond wanted the dinosaurs and the environment to look as accurate as possible which at that time, no one would have had the idea. I find it much more likely that the lack of feathers was a business motivated decision both in-world and out.

Originally Posted by Shuckle

Chrichton gave individual species feathers because that was the thinking at the time - dinosaurs were like birds, but they were like lizardbirds not like BIRD birds. Archaeopteryx was seen as the link between lizards and birds, not the intermediary step between dinosaurs and birds. However, nobody in that time could possibly have guessed that they were ALL feathered, especially to the level that current thinking suggests they were!

... doesn't match your claim! You two both talk about all dinosaurs and use that language rather than saying "some dinosaurs" and using the language of theropods and such. (You did bring up theropods later in your post but it was unrelated to your claim about Hammond's wants and all dinosaurs which I've quoted above for relevance. I.e. one can easily read your post thinking you fault Crichton/Hammond for a featherless Triceratops.)

EDIT: In short, don't be a "REAL DINOSAURS HAD FEATHERS!" kid if what you mean to say is "REAL THEROPODS HAD FEATHERS!" People, particularly the younger generation, are getting way too obnoxicited with this idea that paleotonology got it wrong until a decade or two ago. Sorry. -.-; [/rant]