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It's time we talked about [Jurassic Goddamn Park]
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What is Jurassic Goddamn Park?
Jurassic Goddamn Park (henceforth shortened to 'Jurassic Park' or 'JP') began it's life as a suspense novel written by Michael Crichton. It features a pseudo-science powered dinosaur theme park run by an egocentric billionaire; the theme park is sabotaged by someone looking to steal & resell it's genetic assets, because Crichton does not understand genetics or science in general, and then goes on to kind-of explore the topics of greed, animal testing, genetic modification and chaos theory while people get killed by dinosaurs. It seemed like a cool book when I was a teenager and didn't realize how badly Crichton misrepresented the book's subject matter.
It was turned into a movie and subsequent IP franchise, dropping a lot of the book's dark tones to make it more kid-friendly, because lol toy sales. In spite of itself, it was a landmark film for a lot of people my age: the first time we saw dinosaurs come to life in a well-researched way (albeit with compromise, because Universal couldn't fucking handle the idea that theropods were feathered & felt the audience couldn't handle it either), accompanied with at least a half-decent plot, likeable cast and a brilliant score.
Sequels arrived and predictably sucked (okay, fine, #2 wasn't that bad, I guess), bad video games came out (there was a theme park builder game that was released that was good, but it now sells for like a million dollars a copy because it's 'rare', because the publisher lost the license shortly after it's release and it only had a limited run), toy lines came and went.
People like myself have been waiting for anything that might come close to delivering the impact of first seeing a Sauropod emerge from behind some foliage while the characters and audience both look on in disbelief, and we are still waiting.
The original JP wasn't that good anyway, you know
Yes, I know. I don't agree that it was bad, but it was certainly not Spielberg's finest work. The pacing is rough, the star animals don't look how they're supposed to look, the women in the cast have flat characters and the plot device to turn up the drama is as dumb or even dumber than the one used in the book. But there is solid dialogue, the male cast have more interesting characters and there are immortal cinema moments to be had.
There is not enough exploration of important topics in the film, and the excuse ("It's a kids movie!") is pathetic. Apparently kids don't want to learn about the ins and outs of, say, paleontology, but they do want to be terrified to tears and be given nightmares about theropods tearing people apart in the dark.
What does JP need, then? We keep getting hype sequels but they are all terrible when they come out.
In this age of reboots and reboots of reboots, this shit needs a reboot. Take it back to square one, forget about more movies, and for God's sake, forget about child actors (I'm sorry, but they're bad. Kids don't want to watch other kids anyway unless it's in a cartoon). The future of JP lies in HBO. Set it in a working dinosaur park, create drama with real-world situations between adults, talk about real issues related to things like genetics, teach the audience about dinosaurs and paleontology and maybe even archaeology, tease nerds about who is going to be having the sex with who. Bam! Ship it!
We don't even need any original cast members or characters (at least Jurassic World got that much right).
What do we talk about here?
Fantasy visions of where the JP franchise can go. Rants about how terrible the JP sequels have been. Quotable moments from JP. Dinosaur stuff. Science rants about how inaccurate the dinosaurs in JP are, and how implausible the explanation for building them is. Credible theories that are around for making new dinosaurs. Talk about which dinosaur would win in a fight with which other dinosaur. Debate about the impact of child actors (C'mon, admit it. Be the bad guy / bad girl. You know they are awful. It's fine).
With Love and Courage
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If you want something in that style, you'd be better off just making a new IP for it.
...Okay, maybe a little more boobs. But mostly, I want a more realistic interpretation of what a dinosaur zoo would look like & how it would run. I mean, even the internal politics of normal zoos are pretty interesting, and this would be even more interesting because Holy Shit DINOSAURS!
Also, I guess I'm unaware of the interesting politics of zoos.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
HBO could just adapt The Great Zoo of China and be close enough.
I don't trust american media to do it right. I mean, if you fuck up a show about dinosaurs, timetravel and Stephen Lang you don't deserve a second chance.
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Island. Being on fire.
I love that theory and it doesn't invalidate the movie at all.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
In fact, I think it improves it.
Wow, yeah, that really does make the movie better without contradicting a single thing and requires zero leaps in logic.
I love this!