The could have changed the name to Demonicus!
The gratuitous death scene that was undeserved is just more evidence of a mishmash of scripts. It was probably pulled from a different script where a real villain died that way and shoehorned into the final one to kill the assistant because the director thought it was a cool Dino Death Scene.
I think it’s just part of the trend to kill off “good” people. It’s become a staple of TV. Frankly, that was one of my favorite parts of the movie-- the way the pterodactyl(s) kept dropping her and then finally the sea “dinosaur” steps up and nabs them both.
Did anyone care when the chubby guard got munched on by Indominus? He wasn’t really a bad guy.
That particular T-Rex had eaten one, and only one, human before - the lawyer on the toilet. Maybe it had a bad flavor association.
IIRC they actually explained this, although very quickly, when the owner of the park says they give the people the type of dinosaurs they want to see, not what they are actually like. It’s also the reason they created the Indominus. Because people want bad-ass dinosaurs, not realistic ones.
Yeah, but the raptors have been part of the park since Day One when Dr Hammond had more noble intentions for his park/preserve. After all, Hammond had invited Dr. Grant to get his paleontologist seal of approval on the park. There’s no indication that they were trying to fancy up the dinosaurs from the start; that came when people were getting bored with “real” dinosaurs.
Ironically, the truth is that Crichton (then Spielberg) thought the name was more bad-ass and so started messing with the actual dinosaur for the sake of cool in a series of movies about the wrongs of messing with nature for the sake of cool 
Per Wiki:
Of course, even from a tongue-in-cheek “They messed with nature!” standpoint, it was far from their worst liberty, i.e. the frilled and venom spitting Dilophosaurus.
Doesn’t answer any of the OP’s questions, but it’s damn funny: Honest Trailer, Jurassic World.
Regarding the size, Velociraptor, which was at most wolf-size, is known only from Mongolia. The fossils Grant found in the western US would have been Utahraptor,which was even bigger than the raptors shown in the movies. The species wasn’t named until 1993, the year Jurassic Park came out, but large specimens had been found in 1991, and could have been known to the moviemakers. On the other hand, they could have just made the raptors big because they were cooler that way. (The raptors as portrayed were somewhat larger than Deinonychus.)
Actually, Velociraptor was being illustrated with feathers by Gregory S. Paul by at least 1986. The original movie was well behind the science of the time. They also missed an opportunity to make the raptors more colorful by giving them tiger stripes or leopard spots. I was especially disappointed when *Jurassic Park II * didn’t show the baby T. rex as being feathered, as it likely was even if the adult was not. (I like the idea of showing T. rex with fuzzy yellow down like a giant baby chick.:))
I’ll take your word on that but the Wiki I cited states that they were entirely modeled off of Deinonychus. So my point was that since Deinonychus wasn’t figured to be feathered, they didn’t feather the pseudo-Velociraptors. What the actual Velociraptor looked like was irrelevant since they were just stealing its name.
I, too, thought that Utahraptor would have been more accurate although (like you said) those were actually larger than in the film and also suffer from a dumb name for cinematic purposes 
Yeah, I was hoping to see lots of feathers this time around. Big miss on their part.
And let’s not get started on the “aviary”…
I can see why they wouldn’t have wanted to change the existing dinosaurs from the previous films but they could have added some new dinos with feathers. Or even hand-waved something about the raptors not being feathered because of the frog DNA thing but the newer dinos are bred through advanced processes that make them even more genetically correct.
Back in the 90’s, Jurassic Park was notable in part because it changed the way a lot of people thought about dinosaurs (upright Tyrannosaurs, tail dragging, sauropods sitting in deep swamps with their heads poking out, etc) and modernized it. Bit of a shame that they’ve stayed locked into the “revolutionary” 90’s model when we know so much more now.
Although every model I’ve seen of a feathered Tyrannosaur looks dorky as hell so maybe it’s no great cinematic loss.
I guess I should have been clearer. By the mid-1980s leading dinosaur restorationists like Paul were depicting all small therapods as having feathers. Since Deinonychus and Velociraptor were very closely related, if one had feathers it would be expected that the other had feathers as well. This would have been cutting edge in the 1980s but has now been extensively supported, as well as the fact that even large therapods like tyrannosaurs had feathers. Jurassic Park’s depiction of raptors was out of date in 1993 regardless of whether they were Deinonychus or Velociraptor or any related genus.
The movie is all kinds of bad- but even the original was so filled with ridiculous plot holes that I can’t say it doesn’t continue a tradition.
Still, I feel like trying to fanwank your questions. Sounds like fun.
1. What was the nephew’s parents plan? Send them to an amusement park, get a quick divorce and act as if everything was normal when the kids got back?
Why shouldn’t it be? One of them is probably moving out of the house, and they are bound to argue a lot- why make the kids suffer through all the arguments and fights? This way, the kids would have had a swell time and wouldn’t have been there for the most traumatic part of the divorce.
That’s kinda good parenting, there.
2. What happened to the pterodactyls? They were flying around attacking people and then they weren’t.
They realize they’re free, so their first instinct is to cruise the skies looking for some easy prey- and when the novelty wears off, they band together, leave the area and try to find a higher ground to claim as territory. Perfectly standard behavior for all genetically-engineered animals loosely based on flying dinosaur-like creatures.
*3. Why didn’t T-Rex eat Chris Pratt, the nephews and Ron Howard’s daughter at the end? I say it’s Mighty Joe Young Syndrome. *
Because the T-Rex is a chill dude! Since he’s mostly a scavenger, he’s not that interested in chasing those pesky mammals moving around. His behavior is consistent with the first movie- he only attacks anything that resembles a large enough creature invading his turf, whether it’s a jeep with its unfamiliar lights, a raptor trying to eat some mammals, or Imperious Rex. He wasn’t even that interested on the mammal carrying a light, who he could have chased and eaten in milliseconds. That’s why it looks like Bryce Dallas outruns him.
Sure, Sam Neill should have known all that, but Sam Neill was a terrible paleontologist.
4. Did Ron Howard’s daughter’s assistant deserve her terrible death? I’m wondering why the movie punished her so.
Yes, from the perspective of the film makers. Keep in mind that this is a movie created by Hollywood types. Their worst nightmare is a surly assistant who won’t devote her full attention to bringing them their vegan hybrid dry cleaning on time. From their point of view, an uppity assistant is worse than Hitler.
Honestly, I find the entire premise of all the Jurassic films stupid. They are just big dumb animals. Not Godzilla monsters. You mean to tell me that the “finest structural engineers in the world” can’t design a dino-paddock that is strong enough to contain a dinosaur? Or that they can’t design the park to be “fail-safe” instead of “fail-fucked” so that a power loss or rebooting the computers doesn’t open every damn door on the island? Or that the animal control teams would have .50 cal Barrett or AS50 anti-material rifles as the SMALLEST firearms for chasing down a 30 foot dinosaur?
They specifically mention this in the film. They genetically design the dinos to look how people expect dinos to look rather than how they actually looked. - like big lizards, not big chickens.
Checking Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, I see that he merges the genera Deinonychus and Velociraptor under the latter name, so the illustrations I was referring to were actually Deinonychus (which Paul calls Velociraptor antirrhopus).
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The Jeep Wrangler still had a good battery? Or a good replacement lying around after 20 years? And the gas was OK?
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What caused the open gate in the restricted area that Zach and Gray entered to the original Jurassic Park visitor center? What kind of “restricted area” dino could destroy the gate? It looked kind of small. Don’t think the Indominus rex did it.
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When they shut down the gyrospheres, why didn’t they have an automatic return for the spheres instead of telling everyone to return to the start of the gyrosphere ride?
All I know is, I want a Jurassic Park movie where the velociraptors look like this.
I think you’re on to something, there. But even more importantly, the assistant had to be sacrificed for the Bryce Dallas Howard character’s sins.
The assistant was shown to be, like Ms. Howard’s character, insufficiently nurturing–she was on the phone to her boyfriend instead of watching the kids. But Ms. Howard’s character was shown to be insufficiently nurturing in scene after scene after scene. It was her defining trait: she’s a hard businesswoman who doesn’t even know the ages of her nephews! She doesn’t put aside her business matters to be with them! She doesn’t know what time kids go to sleep! She FAILS to be a nurturing person!!!1!!!
And yet…she is not punished for this. All that happens to her is that she gets a little muddy.
But the audience needs to see this failure to be nurturing properly punished; and given our capacity to transfer emotional needs from one character to another, seeing the assistant die horribly was, more or less, enough. Balance was restored; transgression had met its just rebuke.
(Damn, there’s a lot of product placement in that movie. I’m surprised they didn’t have a logo painted on the side of the mosasaurus. It could have brought in a pretty penny, given the emotional impact of that moment.)
FWIW, according to the DVD extras, the actor who played the assistant did all her own high wire and dunk-the-intern stunts, so maybe the answer is ‘because they could.’
I don’t agree… exactly. This scene, as with a great deal of JW, was metatextual. It was commenting on the tropes of movies in general, and the genre and series in particular, not trying to say something in itself.