MovieChat Forums > Jurassic Park (1993) Discussion > isn't this movie kind of anti science?

isn't this movie kind of anti science?


I haven't watch it in a while but the arguments made by some of the characters definitely felt that way

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I think it's anti-hubris. The characters are in awe of the technological achievements that Ingen has made. But they are wary of the company's insistence that they had taken every necessary precaution. Ian Malcolm as a personality is one of the best characters in the movie, but his speechifying is rather polemic if ultimately correct. However Dr. Grant and Sattler take a more nuanced approach to their criticism.
Note the latter points out that Ingen (and John Hammond to a point) emphasized aesthetics over safety but including poisonous plants in a visitor center. Can you imagine if Disney kept poison ivy or hemlock in their stores as decorative plants?

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Not so much anti-science... as anti-mad scientist.

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Cloning Dinosaurs is a stupid idea and these movies and the books show the dangerous things that happen from it. You don't have to have multiple college degrees to see why dinosaurs are dangerous.

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So using science prudently is antiscience? Everything should be considered through a moral lens, be it science, warfare, art, ideologies. Balance isnt anti anything, its a matter of prudence and responsibility. The coronavirus is a perfect example.

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It's not anti-science. Jurassic Park poses the same moral dilemma as Frankenstein.

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It's against recklessness. Rather than cloning as many dinosaurs as fast as possible without studying their behavior, they could have cloned one or two at a time. That would allow researcher and precaution as they movcondemned. The science in this movie wasn't condemned. The rush to produce a product using other people's methods without comprehending the risk was condemned.

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The movie is definitely anti-science. It sees scientists as absent-minded idiot savants who on one hand have the brilliance to achieve wondrous things on a technical level but lack the ability to understand or anticipate even the simplest issues that may arise. For lack of a better word, they're like the "autistic genius" stereotype that is so prevalent now among stupid people--oh, so smart and yet oh, so mentally retarded and therefore should be second guessed at every turn.

A major clue that the movie is anti-science is the plot point in which the scientists who cloned the dinosaurs made a rookie mistake of not realizing that using frog DNA wouldn't have prevented the dinosaurs from reproducing. Cloning is one of the most difficult, specialized fields in science, requiring extensive knowledge in genetics, biology, etc. There is no way scientists smart enough to clone extinct species wouldn't have anticipated this frog DNA issue. This is such a rookie issue that it would've been the first hurdle they would've tried overcoming. But Spielberg has them being such morons that a layman figures out inside of a day why the dinosaurs are reproducing.

The mentality of, "Scientists are smart but so retarded that even the common man can anticipate basic problems they couldn't," is anti-science, because it completely mischaracterizes science in a way designed to instill skepticism in everything it does, in turn emboldening morons into questioning everything that scientists do and say.

This line of thinking is exactly why we have so many anti-science movements right now. Scientists and medical experts are now treated and seen as autistic morons who can create all of these marvels like vaccines, masks and medicines and everything, but are too stupid to not see the connection between vaccines and autism or masks and herd immunity. The person who has zero knowledge, on the other hand, can see what the experts can't--and by way of mystical insight like Sam Neill's character, where it just sort of "comes to them" by sheer epiphany.

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It’s more anti-greed and corporativism.

Ian, Ellie and Allan were all in the Sciences and were skeptical about cloning Dinosaurs. They gave dire warnings of what could happened and were ignored.

The real tragedy of Jurassic was rushing science to make money without evaluating the consequences.

An early sign of that was how the first tour was a failure. Two no shows and one sick Triceratops. If they weren’t so focused on money, they would have studied the creatures better and understood how to make them show up for the the tour. Even Allan, who, again, is a scientist, understood that just bringing a chained goat wouldn’t draw the T-Rex. It wanted to hunt.

And we see this in real life. You have developers ignoring engineers and build faulty buildings, for example.

It is a cautionary tale of what ignoring the experts will cause.

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