Brittan Kennedy

BIOL 1610-26
October 24, 2015
Film Critique
22 years after Jurassic Park closed, Jurassic World is now open
and ready for business. This movie starts out with two brothers who go
to the Jurassic World theme park to visit their aunt, Claire, who
manages the place. However, Claire is too busy working so she sends
the boys off with her assistant to go explore the park. You then see her
walk through the genetics lab with some sponsors as she explains to
them how they create the dinosaurs and how people arent really
impressed by them anymore. She states, Consumers want them
bigger, louder, and with more teeth. That is why they came up with
the idea to create a genetically modified dinosaur, the Indominous Rex.
The movie then jumps to Owen, a trainer, feeding his Velociraptors and
teaching them to obey orders. Claire then meets up with Owen and
takes him to the Indominous Rex enclosure to show him the new
dinosaur, only to find out it has escaped. The Indominous Rex goes on
a killing spree and begins to kill other dinosaurs for sport, not just for
food. The park tries to keep this hidden from the visitors but once the
Indominous Rex crashes into the aviary, freeing the dangerous animals
inside, the guests turn frantic. Owen then decides to set the
Velociraptors loose to find and kill the Indominus but things take a turn

when it starts to communicate with the raptors and they turn on the
team and start attacking them. They are able to run away, and after a
lot of chaos in the park, Owen gets the attention of the raptors and
sends them off to attack the Indominous. Claire lets the Tyrannosaurus
Rex loose and together with the raptors, they are able to fight the
Indominous. In the end, everyone gets evacuated from the island and
you are left with seeing the rest of the dinosaurs run back into the
jungle.
Throughout watching this movie, I saw things that were correct
and incorrect about this film. First off, I didnt quite understand how
they could get the DNA of these dinosaurs from the fossils of
mosquitoes. I did some research and found that DNA over time
degrades upon death. It has a half-life. Only in pristine conditions could
DNA last, and with these conditions it could only last for up to 6 million
years. In the movie, they extract the DNA from 80-million-year-old
mosquitoes trapped in amber, scientifically that couldnt happen (Ch.
14, 17). Another thing that I noticed was wrong was that the majority
of these dinosaurs didnt have feathers in the movie. Over 30 species
of non-avian dinosaurs have been proven, through direct fossilized
evidence, to have feathers, one of them being the Velocirapter.
According to evolution, dinosaurs began as birds and studies have
shown that they inherited feathers from them (Ch. 12, 21). I think in
the movie they wanted to make these dinosaurs seem as scary as

possible so they left out the feathers. I think this was a missed
opportunity to show the public their new findings on dinosaurs.
Although I saw some things that werent correct about this film,
there were also a lot of things they did right. In the movie there were
scenes where the Velocirapers were communicating with the
Indominous Rex and since they descended from birds, which are very
vocal creatures, it isnt too surprising that dinosaurs are able to talk to
each other also (Ch. 12, 21). Another thing they got right in this film is
the fact that dinosaur experts are working with genetics to learn more
about these species (Ch. 14). Of course, they arent trying to recreate
these dinosaurs and bring them to life but they are trying to
understand the genetic basis to these evolutionary transitions that
they are finding in fossil records.
I think this movie made an impact on how the world sees
dinosaurs. A lot of people think they are these huge, terrifying
creatures who just want to hunt and kill. In reality, dinosaurs are a lot
smaller than the ones we saw in the film and a lot less scary. Like I
stated earlier, studies have shown that the majority of them have
feathers and looked more like large turkeys. They also didnt move
quite as fast. Dinosaurs wouldnt be able to outrun a Jeep. In the
Jurassic Park saga, there were many times that the T. Rex would chase
the people down in their cars and this made it frightening for the
people watching it in the audience. Jurassic World was made to be a

thrilling movie, and overall I thought it was fun to watch, but it also had
the power to shape peoples ideas about these prehistoric animals and
it did it in the wrong way.

Work Cited
Buxton, Ryan. Dinosaur Experts Fact-Check Jurassic World The
Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 25 Oct.
2015.
Conway, John. Scientists Disappinted Jurassic World Dinosaurs
Dont
Look like Dinosaurs. The Guardian. N.p., 4 Dec. 2014. Web.
25 Oct.
2015.
Raven, Johnson, Mason, Losos, and Singer. Biology. 10th ed. N.p.:
McGraw
Hill, n.d. Print.