Jurassic Park questions.

I know the movie has many flaws in it, but I’m wondering if I can start this thread in the hope of getting some of the bigger pet peeves explained to me (to prove I clearly missed something) or have my annoyances confirmed (and prove that I’m not an idiot).

  1. The single biggest annoyance with the movie was when the power went out on the island, and Dr. Grant, and the two kids ended up together, trying to get back to the main park office. They arrive at a large fence. and the power lights are off, indicating no power. To check, however, the brilliant Dr. Grant throws a freakin’ wooden stick at the fence. Hey, Dr. Crackerjack, wood isn’t a conductor! No sparks will fly if the fence is charged or not, you bozo! Where’d that PhD come from, anyway? You don’t have to be an electrician to know that one. IDIOT!

  2. The path from the park office to the power substation. Not only is it on the other side of the compound, but to get to it, you have to go through 5 or 6 trees laying on the path. Now MAYBE the trees fell because of that storm the night before, but if the storm was THAT bad, trees would have been everywhere, including the roads the people used to drive their jeeps on, especially when they were leaving the park. That island should have been covered with downed trees. Small nitpick, but since i hate Laura Dern, it annoyed me even more.

  3. The odd looking sexually confused “Pat” looking kid at the Montana dig. First, what was he/she doing out there anyway? I didn’t see any other kids his/her age, nor did I see a school bus. He/She just shows up and blurts out “That doesn’t look too scary! Looks more like a 6 foot chicken!” This is where Dr. Grant gives him a little speech about how the raptor would eat him alive, making Pat poop his/her pants. But it is a dumb way to get a point across, because the kid has no reason to be out on a dig like that in the middle of Montana.

  4. one of my biggest pet peeves in this movie is a verbal one. When the party gets off the helicopter, and the Attorney is telling Hammond about the weekend, he says to him in the jeep. “Your investors, who’m I represent, are deeply concerned. in 48 hours, if they’re not convinced, I’m not convinced. I’ll shut you down, John.” Wrong! You said it backwards, you dumb bastard. He should have said “If I’m not convinced, They won’t be convinced. We’ll shut you down, John.” See? A simple, but vital change in that sentence makes it actually make sense. How no one caught this is beyond me.

Fuckos!

Any other one you have?

False.

A paleontology course.

Perhaps there’s a path that circumnavigates the wooded area but they wanted to cut directly through to save time.

He was clearly there with a group of tourists, one or two of whom were presumably his parents.

People make verbal missteps all the time. The lawyer isn’t presented as the sharpest apple in the sink.

I’ve never been a big fan of Jurassic Park, so I have no satisfying answers. But I also thought that kid at the start was a weird scene, with a weird kid, who seemed entirely out of place. And in real life he continues to be a very odd looking fellow.

I think it’s a clumsy, poorly paced film, with not enough dinosaur action, and with a really crappy ending. I much prefer JP3.

"Any other one you have? "

Yeah, I highly doubt amber would be preserved buried in rock for more than 60 million years. It would have rotted, disolved, or heated and compressed until it became coal or petroleum.

And…I see they’re re-releasing it in 3-D.
I have NO idea why.

Watch the scene again. The lawyer uses his pen to clearly refer to the experts in the car ahead of him. “If they’re not convinced, I’m not convinced” makes perfect sense. He’s not referring to the investors, he’s referring Grant et al.

Apparently there was a deleted scene that explains why the kid was there:

If the stick was very wet (or maybe it doesn’t even have to be very wet), with high enough voltage you might still see a spark. As a physics guy I certainly wouldn’t test my luck though trusting the stick-throwing method to test for voltage. However, if you just jumped up onto the fence you’d be fine. The boy getting shocked off the fence didn’t make any sense to me: the electricity would NOT go through his body, since he has much higher resistance than the cable going through him. But maybe I’m wrong on that one?

Well, the biggest thing is that the raptors shown weren’t velociraptors, and T-rex was not a scavenger. All of that was made up by their paleontological consultant who was greatly dismissed in paleontological circles. I learned this from my roommate in college, who was studying to be and is now a real paleontologist.

I don’t think the feather thing was certain yet at the time, so that can be forgiven.

Here’s one that always bugged me- Grant & Ellie are at the dig and look up to see a helicopter approaching. They run up the hill amid swirling dust and dirt from the rotor chop, and arrive at the top of the hill just as, or just after, it lands. The pilot points to their trailer. They walk in to see that Hammond is already in there. How the hell did the old guy get out of the chopper and into the trailer so quickly? Dude walks with a cane. It just didn’t make sense.

Well, we’ve already established that he’s a complete technophobe, right? These days to get a paleontology PhD, you’d have to take some physics classes somewhere along the line, but that wasn’t always the case.

I took a few paleontology classes from an older professor who knew his stuff when it came to paleozoic inverterbrates, but seemed to be barely functional otherwise. I wouldn’t be suprised if he didn’t know how electricity worked.

There’s plenty of amber that old with fossil inclusions, and some amber that’s even older: Amber - Wikipedia

I like Jurassic Park but one strange mistake they make that is hard to notice is early on in the movie when they first tour the Park, Ellie pulls a leave off a tree and starts to stunningly say the plant has been extinct for millions of years. She is interrupted by her first look at a living dinosaur. Later we find out how they made the Dinosaurs but not how they resurrected a plant.

I don’t think this is a mistake. Who cares? The overwhelming majority of people they plan on catering to wouldn’t give two shits about a fern. Hell, a the paleontologist didn’t give a fuck after she saw a dinosaur.

One mistake is that the t-rex pen changes from level ground to a massive pit as soon as the t-rex escapes.

You’re assuming the wires are all at the same high voltage. If you alternated high voltage and ground wires, or had AC voltage at different phase on different wires, you could get current flow from touching the wires even without touching the ground. That would make more sense if you’ve got jumping dinosaurs like the velociraptors - you don’t want them to be able to jump onto one of the wires and climb the rest of the way.

Am I the only person who’s ever noticed that when the T-Rex attacks the cars, Dr. Grant and Lex basically leave her brother in the car to die?

As for the stick throwing scene - remember another aspect of it - he’s also trying to get the kids to relax in order to climb the fence -immediately after teh stick throw - he grabs the fence and pretends to get shocked - he’s trying to help them - he’s not actively testing the fence at that point - he’s trusting the lights.

My peeve was when the girl says “It’s a Unix System! I know this!”

Right…even if you discount thae fact that at the time of the movie there were 4 or 5 distros of Unix, the odds that she a) knew the one running the island, and b) knew the login and c) understood the GUI and d) understood the application where laughable.

Of course, I bought the frog DNA into dinosaur thing.

Even if DNA could survive for 65 million years, wouldn’t we need more than just the DNA to actually create a living dinosaur? The state and conditions of the host and it’s womb also have a huge impact on the physical development of a living creature. DNA hasn’t evolved to work in a vacuum, as the host’s body also influences the process.

Dinosaurs don’t have any close relatives we could use. Birds would be one choice, but there’s a long period of time separating them from dinosaurs. We’d probably have a better chance at cloning mammoths.

Actually, what bothered me about that scene is that they introduce a sick triceratops, give us a mystery as to why the triceratops gets sick every 6-8 weeks, and never give us the solution!

The book (not a masterpiece either) did give us the explanation- the triceratops, like many species of birds, swallowed rocks periodically, which they kept down in their gizzards to grind up plants they eat. Even though the triceratops never directly ate the poisonous lilacs, they consumed the poisonous plants inadvertantly when swalloiwng stones.

I just figured that by that point even they wanted the annoying, know-it-all little shit dead.