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The Hindu
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Back in the flesh: ‘Jurassic Park' and the Dinosaur Renaissance
In the summer of 1993, the world watched spellbound as a towering Brachiosaurus gracefully reared up to nibble treetops, while John Williams' score swelled like God breathing. Steven Spielberg's genre-defining blockbuster rewrote the cultural DNA of dinosaurs forever, transforming them from textbook curiosities into Hollywood royalty. An entire generation developed an unshakable obsession with creatures that had been extinct for 65 million years. All because of a movie. For a film that opens with a mosquito trapped in amber, Jurassic Park has aged with surprising elasticity. It had the makings of a pulpy B-movie, but the magician in Spielberg spun it into something timeless. Ever since, it's been re-spun, rebooted, and rebranded across three decades. The science, even then, was flimsy. Toxorhynchites rutilus, the species of mosquito shown, doesn't even suck blood. And DNA degrades far too quickly to survive millions of years. But that shaky premise has since evolved from science fiction, to 'science eventuality,' to literal modern-day science. While extracting dinosaur DNA from fossilised insects remains a fantasy, the real world has been inching closer to that cinematic magic. Iconic special effects Of course, the magic wasn't all Spielberg. Stan Winston built animatronics with blinking eyes, breathing chests, and skin stretched over robotic bones. Industrial Light and Magic's (ILM) groundbreaking CGI handled the weight and gait of creatures that had never been seen before, using a special 'Dinosaur Input Device' to puppeteer their movements digitally. Just 15 minutes of dinosaur screen time was enough to reshape how a generation imagined prehistoric life. The irony is that while Jurassic Park was hailed for its scientific fidelity, it also got a fair amount of things wrong. The Velociraptors were scaled up to nearly double their actual size. The T. Rex's vision, contrary to Dr. Grant's famous whisper, was not based on movement; it likely had binocular depth perception and could smell you coming a mile away. Most egregiously for modern palaeontologists, the dinosaurs were featherless, greyish reptiles, missing the colourful, bird-like traits we now know many had. But Jack Horner, the real-life palaeontologist who inspired Alan Grant, saw the bigger picture. In his words, the movie wasn't a documentary, but a doorway to suspend all disbelief. Yet, over time, the franchise leaned deeper into American military-industrial fantasies. The recent entries have given us weaponised Velociraptors, genetically-engineered hybrid killing machines, and a Mosasaur the size of a battleship. Behind the scenes, consultants still fought to keep the science honest. Some succeeded (the Pyroraptor from Jurassic World Dominion finally had feathers) but the overarching 'scary sells' mandate remained. Pink-plumed, birdlike dinosaurs, no matter how accurate, just didn't test well. The palaeontological re-awakening In the years following the film's release, palaeontology experienced a renaissance. The so-called 'Jurassic Park Effect' turned casual curiosity into career paths. Children who once saw dinosaurs as static images began imagining them as dynamic, intelligent, and even graceful creatures. Universities saw a spike in students declaring interest in prehistoric life. Museums were packed again. Dinosaurs were, suddenly, the coolest things ever. The once unassuming field relegated to academia now had a face, a soundtrack, and perhaps most importantly, funding. Governments and institutions began investing more seriously in palaeontological research, emboldened by a public that was suddenly into dinosaurs. Before Jurassic Park, new dinosaur species were discovered at a rate of maybe three or four per year. Today, that number hovers around 50. Whether digging in the deserts of Mongolia or scanning fossils with particle accelerators, researchers rode the wave of public fascination the film helped ignite. Which is exactly why the Jurassic World sequels sting a little. They're fine as popcorn films, but they could've done more. The original reimagined how the world saw dinosaurs. The new films played it safe, recycling familiar nostalgic images rather than reflecting what science had since uncovered. Sure, they'll still get some kid to Google 'Indominus Rex vs Spinosaurus', but it's hard not to feel a little let down by what could've been. On the ethics of de-extinction Jurassic Park did something more speculative and slippery by introducing the world to the concept of 'de-extinction.' Today, we live in a time where resurrecting lost species no longer sounds entirely impossible. Ben Lamm, founder of Colossal Biosciences, believes the woolly mammoth will walk again by 2028. His labs are working with ancient DNA, comparative genomics, and somatic cell nuclear transfer — the same science that cloned Dolly the sheep, now turbocharged with robotics and AI. The ostensible goal has been to resurrect extinct species to seed ecosystems with keystone animals. His team is also simultaneously attempting to revive the dodo, the thylacine (the Tasmanian Devil, or Taz from Looney Tunes), and potentially use artificial wombs for reproduction. It's the closest thing we have to a real-life InGen, though unsurprisingly, not everyone is optimistic. Some question the ethics of creating a single living animal just to prove it can be done. Others worry about the unintended consequences of gene editing, including evolutionary whiplash, cellular chaos, and the specter of designer organisms being commodified. There's a certain poetry in how Jurassic Park warned us about the dangers of turning nature into a spectacle while itself becoming the most breathtaking spectacle ever made. A movie that staged a cautionary tale about playing God with prehistoric DNA ended up inspiring decades of scientific fascination, funding, and, ironically, real-world attempts. The franchise that once asked whether we should resurrect extinct animals is now part of a cultural machine that increasingly seems to whisper, 'Why not?' It captured, maybe accidentally, the exact shape of our cultural neurosis: the maniacal desire to control nature, a belief in technological omnipotence, and a tendency to moralise after the fact. Perhaps the cruelest cosmic twist is that the plastic toy dinosaurs clutched by children today — those mass-produced echoes of Spielberg's creations — are, in a very real sense, made of dinosaurs. Fossil fuels, derived from ancient organic matter liquefied over millennia, have been moulded into choking hazards and Happy Meal replicas of the creatures. These great beasts who once walked the Earth now circle in a perfect closed loop of commercial mythmaking. Capitalism, like life, finds a way.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jurassic World Rebirth Chases Summer Movie Nostalgia (opinion)
Before you ask, they keep making Jurassic Park movies because you keep paying to see them. Maybe not you, specifically. But people, who drove the last three films in the franchise to billions in combined box office revenue. Dinosaurs, or at least dinosaur movies, are big business. So the existence of Jurassic World Rebirth—or as I prefer to think of it, Jurassic Park: Another One, because that's all it really is—owes something to market forces. This is just supply responding to demand. But what, exactly, is that demand for? At the most basic level, it's for big-budget cinematic events with dinosaurs created via movie magic, which these days mostly means computer-generated effects. Those dinosaurs should romp around creating general mayhem of some sort, as humans scream and scurry in terror. In genre terms, the Jurassic Park films are monster movies, designed to thrill and instill terror. But I think the demand that props up this series is actually for something deeper, something more expansive. In part, it's for scientific awe—at dinosaurs themselves, at the idea of giant bird-lizards that actually roamed the earth, at the literal smallness of humanity in comparison. But even more than that, it's for cinematic awe, for the sense that through the prestidigitation of Tinseltown, we can resurrect these ancient terrors and set them loose in our world. Science itself may not be able to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, at least not yet, but Industrial Light and Magic can. Steven Spielberg's original wasn't just a tightly paced monster adventure—though it was—it was also a technical marvel, a movie that showed viewers things they'd never seen before. It relied on what were, at the time, advanced and novel computer effects to show dinosaurs running, leaping, and chasing. But what people forget is that most of the dinosaur shots in the film were created using practical effects—a giant T-Rex puppet head, a life-sized animatronic stegosaurus, a poison-spitting menace with painted rubber skin. Jurassic Park arrived at exactly the moment when computer effects became good enough that they could do some things that practical effects couldn't, but when it still made sense to use real, physical effects where possible. Spielberg had practically invented the idea of the summer movie two decades prior with Jaws. And Jurassic Park was in so many ways an evolution of the ideas, story structure, and techniques he pioneered in that film. When the movie came out in the early 90s, he was at the peak of his Hollywood dominance; somehow he released Schindler's List later the same year. The result was not just a nifty technical exercise, or even a superior blockbuster ride. No, Jurassic Park was the best summer movie ever, the ideal of the form, the flawless diamond to which all other summer movies since have aspired. And it's never been surpassed. There's a moment almost exactly one hour into the original Jurassic Park, when the Tyrannosaurus rex finally appears, roaring its signature Dolby roar, and begins terrorizing an unsuspecting group of park preview guests. What follows is the single greatest summer movie set piece of all time, as Spielberg sets his big bad dinosaur loose against a couple of kids in a jeep and their adult overseers. I was 11 during the summer of 1993, and that probably explains some of my fondness for the film, but I cannot stress how effectively this scene played in movie theaters at the time, even weeks after opening weekend. People screamed and gasped, cackling with a mix of fear and surprise. It's a cliche to say that the tension was palpable, but it really was. You could feel it in the air. Every movie makes a promise, some bigger than others. And Jurassic Park had been hyped, advertised, and marketed as a cultural mega-event. Its promises were extravagantly impossible. But here, finally, in the summer of 1993, was a movie that fully delivered on every single one of its enormous promises, a spectacle that actually lived up to the hype. It was awesome. That's what every Jurassic Park movie since has been chasing—that joyous, rapturous, almost silly sense of terror and wonder at some totally imaginary event projected in light on a screen. And that's why every movie since has recycled and remixed bits from the original, with winks and callbacks and nostalgia-tinged 'member berries for all those who remember, or heard the legend, of the one summer movie against which all others are measured. Jurassic Park: Another One—sorry, Jurassic World: Rebirth—goes through the motions, checking off the franchise's boxes while nodding to some of the original's most memorable moments. But it doesn't measure up. At times it even seems to know it. As with 2015's Jurassic World, which pitted genetically engineered super dinosaurs against the old school dinos of the original, nodding to the expansionary demand for bigger and more terrifying beasts, it sometimes acts as a commentary on its own dismal existence. The movie's non-dinosaur villain is a pharma company moneyman who seeks to make trillions off a drug that might mitigate cardiovascular disease, giving people decades of extra life. The heroes reject his grubby profit-seeking, preferring an open-source solution in which no one owns the cure. Setting aside the stupidity of the premise—pharmaceuticals are among the most effective and cost-efficient ways to save and extend lives—it is funny, as always, that this series pretends to hate rank capitalism, even as the endless chain of sequels is a direct product of it. And even this is just a dutiful nod to the original, a parable about the dangers of arrogant science and unchecked technology that was, itself, an exemplar of the benefits of boundary-pushing technological innovation. In this painfully mediocre Jurassic Park franchise placeholder, even the hypocrisy is nostalgic. Rebirth is set in a world in which dinosaurs are commonplace, and most people have become bored with them. As the inevitable snarky but charming scientist character laments early in the film, "Nobody cares about these animals anymore. They deserve better." They surely do. Sadly, in Jurassic Park: Another One, they don't get it. I doubt they will in the next one either. The post Jurassic World Rebirth Chases Summer Movie Nostalgia appeared first on
