I don’t know about the book but in the movie they use both. Whats worse is they use Harrier Jets which are insanely hard to fly…but the cavemen mastered it in a week on simulators that still worked after 1000 years of sitting around.
Well, it kinda ended with puppies…
Technically, don’t biologists do that kind of thing all the time? I know I wouldn’t study lions out in the field. If you want to nominate something from JP2, though, might I suggest the perky pre-teen girl taking out the raptors with her roxorz gymnist skilz OMG!!11!!!1!?
It’s been a long time since I read the book, and I have no intention of re-reading it, but I seem to recall that in the book there were no thousand-year-old Harriers. The only aircraft used were Psychlo. Instead, there was an elaborate scheme in which the cavemen found working thousand-year-old nukes and smuggled them into the lead-lined coffins which the evil alien guy was planning to use to smuggle gold back in. Said nukes then caused the alien homeworld to explode. No, really.
I don’t know if 2-3 weeks qualifies this thread as a zombie, but braving the wrath of the moderati, I’m gonna post in it anyway…
How did we get through this thread without mentioning the Stupidosity of the final moments in Poltergeist?
… I just rescued my daughter from the nether-regions of the Afterlife - time to color my hair!
… We’re moving from this house which kidnapped my daughter and tormented my family - tomorrow. Tonight we’ll have one final sleepover in the Home of Horrors.
… Hey, remember how we almost lost Carol Ann? I’ve got a great idea - let’s put her to bed in the same bedroom from where she was originally kidnapped! Not only am I convinced nothing will happen, I’m sure the kid can fall right asleep after all the hell she’s been through.
It was as if the Poltergeist infected the family with the Dumb.
Sometimes during idle moments, I contemplate what I would do if trapped in a mall as in Dawn of the Dead. I figure the mall has at least one grocery store, a hardware store, a sporting goods store, etc. And there’s Andy, the gun-store owner, trapped 1000 feet away and starving.
Okay, first up, there should be enough canned food in any good-sized supermarket to keep a dozen people fed for years. If the hardware store has generators, drag one up to the roof. Make runs into the parking garage to siphon fuel from the various abandoned cars. Light up the outdoor parking area (portrayed as being filled with meandering zombies) with dozens of low-voltage fluorescent bulbs.
To get to Andy, see if there’s a hobby store in the mall. Get the biggest toy remote-controlled helicopter or airplane and tie a fishing line to it, the thinnest lightest line you can find. Send the copter to Andy with the fishing line. Once he has the line, tie a slightly heavier line to it and have him pull it to him. Replace that line with something heavier still, perhaps telephone wire. Once a sturdy physical link is established, small “care packages” can be sent to Andy, consisting of meal-substitution energy shakes, bottles of vitamins, beef jerky, etc. Run the line through pulleys and such to make its movement as easy as possible. If the mall as an auto-parts store, maybe a vehicle winch could be used, powered by the generator and a series of 12-volt car batteries. If at all possible, have Andy pass back boxes of ammo to resupply the mall residents.
With Andy fed and the parking lot lit up, have Andy start a systematic nighttime culling of the zombie throng. This is so Andy can stay indoors during the day, out of the sunlight. It was established that Andy was a good shot, so if he picks off one zombie a minute, then over a 12-hour night he should be able to dispatch roughly 1000 zombies.
Meantime, all the mall residents practice shooting zombies. No exceptions. They also practice running, sprinting the length of the mall roof, jogging around its perimeter, etc. The signs posted to attract the attention of possible aircraft are frequently updated.
We prepare a reinforced, armored bus in case we have to evacuate. Under no circumstances do we casually leave the mall just because we (and the audience) are getting bored, because that’s just stupid.
I have no problem with this. Do you really think people would give up the chance to see Real Live Dinosaurs it if were an option? Think about how many people die attempting to climb up Mt. Everest each year, and there aren’t even Dinosaurs!!!11! up there.
I guess you could say that people are stupid, but the premise of the movie isn’t stupid.
The original novel was pretty stupid in that regard, actually, with a buried nuke in case the dinos got out of hand, which I assumed Crichton just copied from his own Andromeda Strain.
Big deal if dinos get loose in South America. Just make a worldwide announcement: “Hey! There are dinos loose in South America!” and every big-game hunter in the world will converge on the place with TOW missiles and night vision and helicopters and God knows what. It would actually be hard to keep the dinos from going extinct again. They’d end up needing protections comparable to what elephants and rhinos now have, and there’d still be poaching. And if a few dozen human hunters get killed in the effort, that just makes the whole thing even more irresistible.