He turns off the door security system, and some of the fences go down. The tour program goes down, and I guess some other systems go off. The phones are down. But not all the power goes down. They still have the computers, there are lights inside, and the raptor fences are still up. So some systems go off, but not all the power. All the power does not go off until Mr. Arnold resets the system (the next morning) and trips the circuit breakers.
So that night, Hammond is sitting in the dining room. There are ceiling fans going. And he has gallons of ice cream on the table, which he tells Ellie he has to eat because it is all melting. But I don’t think the freezers are down. They still have power for ceiling fans and computers and some things. The only conclusion I can think of is Hammond just wanted to eat a lot of ice cream, and he lied to Ellie to hide his gluttony.
I thought it was because he secretly made an agreement with the velociraptors that would spare his life if he fattened up the kids with a creamy filling. It goes hand in hand that raptors, being the most intelligent of dinosaurs, also love Twinkies.
Ned turns off non-critical systems, the fence grid and the phone lines. I believe his turning off the non-critical systems has to do with his cover story: He’s fixing bugs in the software and some systems might shut down. The fences go down so that he can leave (remember, only certain fences go down- the Australian hunter guy is glad to hear that the raptor cages are still secure- the only fences that go down are the ones necessary for Ned to make a beeline for the dock). The phone lines go down so that Hammond & Co. can’t find out what Ned’s done and stop him.
Possible scenarios:
1.) There are separate power grids/generators/lines/whatever for different parts of the facility. All the power going to the kitchens, where I’m assuming the ice cream would be stored, is considered non-critical while the power sent to the main building is considered critical. Result? The fans are still going while the freezers shut down.
2.) The fans are specifically marked as critical as part of… atmospheric control or some other important-sounding system.
3.) Hammond is hiding his gluttony.
4.) Oversight in the script.
Edit: Actually, it wouldn’t be an oversight in the script (unless the script specifically mentions fans spinning in the background). It would be an oversight by the guy in charge of the set who didn’t flip the fans off.
Why did they introduce the idea of the trike being sick if they weren’t gonna explain why? It’s explained in the book. If they were gonna leave that part out, they should have left out the part where Ellie spent all that time investigating its sickness. But I guess it was worth it for Jeff Goldblum’s great line"that is one big pile of shit". I can’t think of any better lines in the history of cinema.
Yeah, in the book it was used to illustrate things like just how ignorant the park staff were about dinos and how maladapted the dinos were to our world.
Been forever since I read the book. Remind me again what it was …it was because some of the animals were switching gender and reproducing or the females were reproducing asexually or something like that?
The trike was showing symptoms of poisoning from a certain type of berry, but they weren’t in the stool. They finally realized that the berries, which were like hard little stones, were being stored in the crop, or gizzard, like a bird and then being regurgitated after a while. It showed that some dinos shared qualities with birds more than with reptiles.
Also, it wasn’t eating the berries deliberately. The berries were falling onto the rocks that it was swallowing to store in its crop in order to grind its food.
That’s it right there. I work at a facility around 10% of the size and compexity as a real Jurassic Park would be and we have at least six power busses. At times we’ve lost one or more of them and the effects are exactly as described.
Yeah, instead be nagged by other things, like how Nedry is supposed to be talking live to the guy at the docks, pleading for more time to get the embryos to him, and you can see the Quicktime progress bar on the video window indicating a pre-recorded video.
Or the fact that the raptors are featherless. Or that the orientation of all the theropod forearms is incorrect, or how in JP they go on about “movement-based vision” despite the T.rex’s relatively good setup for binocular vision, or how the T.rex apparently can’t smell Grant and Lex right there in front of her, only to have another character in the sequel talk about how T.rex has one of the most effective olfactory senses in the history of land animals…the list goes on and on, but hell, I still love to watch it!
Was the lack of feathers a goof, though? The movie is from 1990, had anyone found dinosaur fossils with preserved feathers at that point? From what I can tell on Wikipedia, while the relationship between birds and dinosaurs has been suggested based on skeletal structure since the 19th century, we didn’t find any feathers until the early 1990’s.
I know that, even back in 2004, it wasn’t completely accepted that all raptors had feathers. I know my paleontologist friend didn’t seem to think so. What he was mad about in the movie was how the guy’s research they used was often very flimsy, and was based on some rather unethical work–i.e. stealing stuff from legitimate digs, working on private property without permission. And, despite this, most of his theories were crap. A raptor being a bigger threat than a T-rex? Puh-lease.
