The bigger goof on the velociraptors is their being 10 feet tall. The damn thing’s the size of a turkey. And don’t tell me Deinonychus is a velociraptor, 'cause it’s not V. mongoliensis, which is the name mentioned in the book. Fucking Michael Chrichton, hiring a fucking illustrator as his dinosaur expert.
And BigT, what? What guy’s research? A character in the movie, or what?
ETA: Dammit!
This was the thing that stuck out to me. Where in the hell did they get the DNA for the plants?
That and the fact that Ellie is so mesmerized by a leaf that she fails to notice the jeep she’s in stops, and there is a 100+ foot brontosaurus about 100 feet from her.
Maybe they got the plant DNA from, uh, vegisaurus poo.
Nope. that doesn’t do it.
vegetarian mosquitos. That has to be it.
Male mosquitoes drink nectar and sap, if I remember rightly - only female mozzies drink blood, and only when they are carrying eggs.
Don’t forget it also delivers, “You *are *going to remember to wash your hands before you eat?!”
In addition to separating the groups, I think the scene is nicely atmospheric. The storm is starting to blow up, and I think it does evoke that foreboding pre-storm feeling well.
Besides, no gaffe outdoes, “It’s a Unix system!” cue weird, unbelievably user-unfriendly, 3D GUI
But it was Unix, that was a real program made by SGI called fsn. Of course they made it mainly to show off, but it was not a Hollywood invention.
The single biggest problem I had with the movie is the ending. It remarkably altered the meaning of the book.
I’m not going to spoiler things here so avert thing eyes if necessary.
Grant is trapped. He has eggs. He knows velociraptors eat eggs. He injects poison in the eggs gets the raptors to eat them. BANG, brains and knowledge win out.
The book summed up that we have advantages over our opponents. The movie made us into scream-queens suitable for kidnapping and being rescued.
Feh. Pointless.
The first dromaeosaur (the group to which Velociraptor belongs) fossil that was found with feathers - Sinornithosaurus - was reported in 1999.
The first dinosaur fossil to be found with feathers was, of course, Archaeopteryx. Avimimus was the first non-avian dinosaur fossil reported to have possesed feathers, back in 1987. Pretty much the rest of the finds came from the mid-'90s on.
In the book, Crichton at least gave a cursory explanation for why this might be the case (of course, the in-book explanation was still stupid… The only good part of the sequel book was that they retracted that bit). In the movie, they didn’t even try to explain it away!
Robert Bakker’s Dinosaur Heresies came out in 1988, and Gregory S Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World came out shortly after, and both as far as I remember proposed the idea of feathered raptors, and the ideas were floating around for a while…JP was released in 1993; granted, it was in production for a longer period of time, but it’s really no excuse for the raptors being unfeathered in the sequels; they even added some protofeathers on them in JP3 as a kind of compromise.
Actually, more maddening than that is the idea of using frog DNA to complete the gene sequences for the dinos; why?? A crocodile or bird would have been much more appropriate. Using a frog makes very little sense.
Well, I’ll be damned. Ignorance fought.
(It still looks like a stupid interface though!)
Frogs were used because frogs can change their sex.
I had heard that originally the movie ended like the book, but test audiences were unsatisfied, and wanted to see more of the T Rex.
I could easily imagine Nedry using an interface like that, just to fuck with all the other programmers.
Not a very good reason, seeing as how InGen wanted them all to be female (to prevent that whole “breeding” thing…), and not to change sex. The sex-changing was another unintended side-effect of using frog DNA (which is still stupid).
And not locking his workstation, nor adding any password protection at all. Ahem.
(That scene would’ve been ten times better had she started to use it, then suddenly got “Ah ah ah! You didn’t use the magic word!”)
I think Maus Magill meant *Crichton’s *reason for choosing frog DNA, not Hammond’s. IOW, the plot Crichton created demanded that InGen make a stupid and illogical decision, and he was not a sufficiently talented writer to come up with either a solid explanation nor a good alternative.
Regardless whether the decision was the author’s or one or more of the characters’, it was stupid 
Especially since crocodiles still make a more reasonable option. He gets his sex changing dinos, and the readers don’t get lame movement-based vision for T. rex.
In the 2nd book, Malcolm says the T-Rex doesn’t attack then because it wasn’t hungry. It had just eaten the goat.
The difference between the ending of the movie and the book. I like them both. I like the movie ending because with the T-Rex saving them, it shows how the power of the animals is so much greater than man’s, and they can’t control it, or something like that.
Also in the book, it wasn’t a trike. It was a stegosaurus.
Or, as the movie calls them, “STEGASAURUS”
My favorite scene is when Lex is on the computer, Dr. Grant and Ellie are trying to keep the velociraptor out, the gun just inches too far, and Tim is doing NOTHING. A little help maybe??:smack:
