They spared no expense.

Well... As they point out in the World movies the creatures were never dinosaurs. They were generic chimeras that looked like dinosaurs.

I never understood the whole "They're making a weapon" plotline though. Unless the weapon makers are either nihilists or libertarians. Oh!

Edit: caveat, I've only seen one of the world movies and then a trailer for one of the others.

if you build a perpetual motion machine and it eats the postman from seinfeld... you still made a perpetual motipn machine

The new movies suck ass because they try to make science the bad guy, but not only is that a shit story we all see through, but it still reads as capitalistic greed and hubris, but now the movie feels like it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

So... in the actual book(s), the problem is a bit of both.

The 'science' goes wrong because... well, they do not have complete dinosaur genome sequences.

And they fill in the gaps with a lot of DNA from a certain kind of frog.

A frog, that is later discovered to change its sex, transform from female into male, in environments/situations that are not sufficiently male/female balanced.

The explanation as to why the dinosaurs will not be a problem is that they only make female ones, so the population will remain exactly as they engineer.

... this does not work, because some of the dinos transform their sex, and begin breeding, which they essentially entirely did not account for.

Also in the book(s)... Hammond is much, much more clearly an unscrupulous capitalist... think roughly somebody that would have their accounts managed by Patrick Bateman, or maybe like a modern techbro, but his tech isn't crypto or ai or hyperscaling whatever bs app... its genetic engineering.

The original movie makes him into... much more of a genuinely enthusiastic, but more innocently naive, and sympathetic character... he is much more straightforwardly a thinly veiled corpo asshole in the book.

...

Its been a while since I've seen the original movie, fhe first sequel... and then yeah, never saw anything after that, because they just look immensely, increasingly stupid and nonsensical, not even having internal logic that is coherent or consistent... so I can't well comment on how the movie universe has evolved.

A cautionary tale about Tech-bros. Should have listenend to it.

Yeah, that's what the line about could vs. should was about.

I've long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like "science/genetic engineering is bad" or "you can't control nature" to be a bit silly, given that, well, it's a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It's a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn't do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that "these animals are special and can't be safely contained" rather than "letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea".

Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it'd be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it's a monster movie.

there may be anti capital elements but it is a man vs nature plot with a suçon of trying to control something you dont understand or respect

gloriously right

Not really. The dinos were half-baked imitations, not exact replicas. And they evolved in ways the scientists didn’t anticipate, because their reach exceeded their grasp.

There’s definitely an anti-capitalist message, but don’t dismiss the warning about prematurely greenlighting high-stakes scientific initiatives. That’s relevant to the modern world, no matter what our economic model is.

LLMs come to mind. There’s a section of the AI-skeptic folks that say the only problem with AI is the profit motive. I’m not so sure. People will use tech to do all kinds of horrible shit even if they don’t stand to materially benefit. Just look at 4chan.

It's much more clear, especially if you read the book, that JP is about accountability. All throughout the book, as shit's going sideways and people are dying, everyone's playing hot potato with accountability. At the end, Grant forces Genero into investigating a wild raptor nest with him, in spite of Genero's protests that he's "just the lawyer" because somebody has to take some accountability.

Even the capitalist hubris is done wrong.

They knew how to activate the dwarfism gene. They could have been selling pygmy raptors and rexes as pets to everyone. At the right size they'd be no more dangerous than dogs or cats.

But no; we need a theme park that eats people.

Science only views the world through the Cartesian division of subjects and objects and makes the world a calculable resource of objects that capitalism can exploit. The two work together. If we still saw the mystery and divine in nature, maybe we wouldn’t disrespect it so much.

Ingen went all "move fast, break things" but with genetically engineered apex predators. Pretty much worked out exactly as expected.

No no no, it's all about paying your IT people well and being nice to them. If John had been nice to Needry, then Needry wouldn't have needed to betray him. Pay your IT people, be nice to them and everything would have been fine.

Hammond literally goes around gaslighting the entire group by saying “spared no expense” when in reality he cheaped out and cut every corner. His undoing was Dennis, who was the lowest bidder in a security contract. Instead of picking the absolute best, Hammond went with the lowest bidders. Even the T. rex fence should not have been so easy to break down, power or not. The entire park was built cheap and fast. Hammond was a capitalist playing conservationist.