Jurassic Park

This is one of the cruelest movies that I have ever seen. Not because it was bad. Not because it was gory. Not because (spoiler alert...) the obnoxious mathematician lived and the big game hunter died. (Look, I know us mad scientists gotta stick together, but a) he's a mathematician, not a scientist, and b) he was really obnoxious.)

No, this was an exceedingly cruel movie because everyone who is human is, in some part of their heart, Hammond. Everyone who had a healthy childhood has fantasized at least once about bringing the dinosaurs back to life. And, let's be honest, some of us still do.

Jurassic Park indulges those fantasies. The first part of the movie, where you are just seeing dinosaurs brought back to life on a beautiful, almost prehistoric island, is amazing. The explanation is sort-of-kind-of-plausible-ish if you squint, and it's good enough, because you buy it, because you want to, because inside each of us is a ten year old who desperately wants to see a [insert your favorite kind of dinosaur here, and don't pretend like you don't have one!]. And for a moment, Jurassic Park makes you believe that you can.

And then...they eat you. It's the only possible scenario. How did you want it to end? Dinosaurs in cages? Dinosaurs conquered by man? Tame dinosaurs? Those would not really be dinosaurs. The reason we love dinosaurs is precisely because they would eat us. We don't think of it in those terms, of course, but what we love when we love dinosaurs is the size, the power, the wildness, the mystery. Tame dinosaurs would not really be dinosaurs--they'd be overgrown dogs. Caged dinosaurs would not be dinosaurs--they'd be scaly lions. [Or feathery lions, but I refuse to get into that discussion here. The movie shows them scaly.] Dinosaurs are not dinosaurs unless they are free and fierce. Put a puny human in the mix, and there is only one outcome.

There is a small irony here that the mathematician was absolutely wrong about chaos theory applying. This system is actually remarkably robust. Perhaps there is an alternate universe out there where Hammond didn't hire a scumbag and put him in charge of all the park computer systems. Maybe there's one where the storm did dissipate, or where someone thought to have the system require two people to turn off the electric fences. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe a thousand possible permutations of the security measures, but the dinosaurs will always win. It won't always happen the same way. There may be some alternate universes where the park does open. There may even be some where it functions well for years. But the dinosaurs always win in the end. No system created by humans is ever perfect, so it's only a matter of time before something goes wrong. Dinosaurs, by definition, are fierce and free, and so, at the first mistake we make, they win.

And so Jurassic Park has done about the cruelest thing that can be done to many childhood fantasies: It indulged the fantasy, only to see it through to its logical conclusion.