MovieChat Forums > Jurassic Park (1993) Discussion > TOTALLY STUPID sci-fi : Dino-sized plot ...

TOTALLY STUPID sci-fi : Dino-sized plot hole!


This movie plot has a giant, brachiosaurus-sized gaping hole in it.
Ok, Spielberg is not the brightest one in matters of sci-fi (or action, or directing in general). But WTF. Nobody else noticed this when they greenlit this turd?

They invented a cloning procedure to recover million years old dna, fix it with frogs, and re-create a dinosaur egg. Ok, I can go with this.
Now, from those eggs, they grow dinosaurs. ADULT dinosaurs. That look like they range from at least 30 years old, to 80/100 years old.
But this park in the nineties is filled with them.

So, what's supposed to fill this gap? They developed this dna tachniques in 1920 and secretly started growing dinos up to have them ready by 1993? Or did they also invented a bunch of dino-vitamins to magically grow them that big in less than a year?
Nobody stopped to think about this for one minute and realized how the whole premise doesn't gel in this idiotic production???

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I think there are two reasons why nobody questioned what you (fairly in my opinion) point out.

1) Too busy being overawed by the special effects.
2) It's science FICTION, so they just go with your dino vitamins theory.

There is a possible third reason...they don't really care.

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Yes but if you think about it, it's incredibly stupid in every of the 3 cases!
It's written by Crichton, so I would expect something that at least makes sense in its science fiction, and that sells how what's impossible becomes possible. Otherwise it's just magic, not science.
And also, they try to make its science plausible with the little presentation with Attenborough, so it could at least make sense, no? Instead, it doesn't.

I'm thinking that presentation was there to distract us from this glaring impossibility that I'm pointing out, so that we are fed a version of facts that does indeed make sense, but doesn't cover all the problems. But since that presentation does make sense, we don't think about what's not explained.

This reminds me of the underpants elves explaining their economy to Cartman in South Park: there is a whole step missing in their logic of how their economy is based on underpants.
But they think it totally makes sense, and they even explains it proudly with the missing step included in their logic!

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Not as unfeasible as you make it sound. Muldoon said the Raptors reached maturity in nine months. Also I believe that paleontologists estimate the average lifespan of a real dinosaur was only something like 10 - 15 years not 80/100 years old.

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What the hell are you talking about?
It's estimated that a T-rex reached its adult full size at about 30 years.
Not only that, reptiles keep growing during their hole lifespan, so from half a meter to 20 meters would probably take a way longer time than it does to reach maturity.
Even humans don't fully develop in 10-15 years...

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What's your source of information, Heisenberg?

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Books + internet, look around, you'll see what's the consensus.

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sorry but you are wrong, T-Rex didnt even live for 30 years, the oldest one ever found was only 28, and they grew to full size by 18

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From what I studied T rex lived over 30 years, and they took about that time to achieve full size. Anyway, I'm quite sure that nobody is certain on the exact age.
What is certain is that it took more than what's exposed in this movie, waaaay longer (talkin about decades) to see a full sized T rex and even longer for triceratops and brachiosaurus.

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cool, although most cloning movies do kind of skip over the whole accelerated growth thing

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I know even Judge Dredd spent time showing how the clones were gonna grow. Star Wars had the same cooking facilities.
What cloning movie are you thinking of?

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almost all feature accelerated growth, including judge dredd

it was only going to take a short time to grow the new "evil" adults

even in SW they had adult clonetroopers only 10 years after the order was placed

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Yes but they explain what's the sci fi behind it: they have incubators to grow these clones quickly. Not only that, in these movies they are grown adult right away: they are "true clones" as duplicates of the individual in its current state, so there's no ageing required.

In JP instead they create EGGS, from which it would require years to develope an adult.
BTW, even eggs take time to be created in an animal, for a dinosaur I would think at least a few months.
And then they would take some more months to hatch.
So add another 6 months just to get to a newborn...

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"Ok, Spielberg is not the brightest one in matters of sci fi (or action, or directing in general). But WTF. Nobody else noticed this when they greenlit this turd?"

You're right. If that idiot had been "bright", this turd might have been successful and made some money.

Have you been to a theater lately? Was it full of Mensa members? Sorry, but scientifically astute individuals, such as your self are not their target demographic.

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Chilone nobody is arguing the commercial capabilities of such a product.
JP is not one of my favorite movies, but it's enjoyable for a casual viewing. Still, that doesn't justify shitty writing, especially considering how they try to sell the idea as something "believable".

Also, I expect more from the top director of fantastic stories (and that is mr Spielbergo).

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You don't have to dumb down a movie to appeal to "dumb" audiences. That is the problem with this movie. Maybe "scientifically astute" people and Mensa members weren't this movie's target audience, but the movie is so dumbed down in terms of common sense that it's intellectually insulting in some ways.

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Yes, right on. What is the opposite of Mensa?
That's who made JP and the target audience for it.

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What are these smart science fiction movies you keep failing to name? I know it’s not 2001: a space odyssey or Blade Runner or Alien or Terminator 2 or Solaris.

Kubrick and Tarkovsky don’t even understand how things like “plot” or “story structure” even work. Hopefully those aren’t the idiots who “get it”.

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Plot and story have 0 to do with solid science.
They are important for narrative.
This being science fiction, you can pick what is more important for you.
I'd pick 2001 over JP every day.

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So your basis for what makes a movie great is whether the science checks out? Excuse me? Superman baby? No plot, no engagement with the audience, 2 1/2 hours of cold pretentiousness that would make even a nihilist like Christopher Nolan blush? A director who abuses female actors and makes them do 50 takes like a misogynistic piece of shit is good science fiction? Yeah I bet you would choose that overrated and bloated mess of boring excrement if only to give off a hipster vibe and stroke your own pathetic ego.

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Who said ANYTHING of that sort (other than the little voices you hear in your head)?
Time for your medications, Dorian.

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Bite off more than you can chew? Run along kiddo.

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Really? I thought you would've picked Last Action Hero over JP, seeing as how the two were in competition with each other that year.

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Interesting point. I’ve seen the original 3 or 4 times, and several of the sequels. I never thought about that.

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Thanks! I also think it's interesting, and it's interesting that they overlooked such a glaring mistake.

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JP is the dumbest sci-fi ever made, and I can't stand it for that very reason. This is the movie that brought back the type of moronic sci-fi that used to be made in the 1930s-1960s but could be forgiven for all the mistakes because science was still pretty much in its infancy.

You bring up a good point, OP, but here's another huge problem with that particular plot point you raised. Cloning is a highly specialized field, like microbiology and quantum physics. Only people with extensive knowledge in DNA, cloning, etc. can do it. To clone living tissue is hard enough; to resurrect long dead DNA, it would take people of Einsteinian intelligence to pull it off.

So, how is it that the same scientists who were brilliant enough to clone dinosaur DNA by using frog DNA couldn't have anticipated that using a species that can change sex wouldn't be a problem? And a paleontologist--whose background has absolutely nothing to do with genetics, DNA, or cloning--figures this out inside of a day?

This is mind-numbingly stupid bad writing. It's like having a scientist discovering the cure for cancer, but not realizing that an ingredient that he uses slowly poisons a person over time so that the patient winds up dying of liver disease, anyway, inside of three years.

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Yeah that's also stupid writing, I hate it when they do that in movies: something incredible is developed, but our protagonist, arrived at the last minute, is the only one who can figure out what's wrong with it. Like, all the other geniuses were sleeping in the years it took them to do that? JP is an example of this shit but there's plenty others.
BTW, stupid on another level of stupidity about this point: why the fuck did they even need this in the movie? "They are reproducing by changing gender!" ? What did that do for the story? It's not like they went "we need to nuke this island since the experiment is out of control!". They just make this idiotic point and then forget about it, the whole movie is afterall these bunch of unlikable assholes trying to escape being trapped in a facility with lose dinosaurs.
More stupid writing is the velociraptors acting like geniuses, etc. I mean the list is long and distinguished, this is not a specimen of well written sci fi.
I think the OP is the worse offender because it makes everything impossible but nobody noticed it shooting it.

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BTW, stupid on another level of stupidity about this point: why the fuck did they even need this in the movie? "They are reproducing by changing gender!" ? What did that do for the story?


I haven't seen the movie in ages, but here's what I vaguely remember:

The scientists had decided to only "clone" dinos of one gender so they wouldn't reproduce and overrun the park. Then the opposite happened. The dinos changed gender because of the frog DNA.

The plot point about the dinosaurs changing gender was for the sake of the message of, "There! Ya see how arrogant and stupid these scientists are? They thought they could just restrict the gender of the dinosaurs. They thought they could play God. Well God/Life found a way to make them reproduce, anyway."

The problem with that, "God/Life finds a way," message is that life got the upper hand because of a simple human oversight. Not because the scientists came up with the perfect way to control reproduction and God came up with this mystical, magical solution to thwart them.

In a nutshell, that plot point was a dumb way to make the writers' point that scientists who want to clone and mess around with genetics are arrogant assholes who are trying to play God and can never succeed at it because God will always have the upper hand.

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Spot on analysis.
I think that maybe 9 year old boys, who were the target for this movie (and god forbid hollywood ever tries to aim at the intelligent 9 year olds) found that point (life finds a way.....) to be interesting and revelatory, while indeed it is dumbly exposed and insufficiently implemented.
Anybody else above that target just sees it as shit writing, like we do.

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Have you read the book by Michael Crichton? It’s full of plot holes and logical inconsistencies, far more than the film.

In the film it’s easy to overlook some of these contrivances, as you put it, to focus on the thematic elements and overall experience. It’s also not far fetched to believe that the scientists would overlook that some of the chromosomes in the dinosaurs would not be adequately suppressed and that they would start breeding. The whole point was that the Park was a rush job, and they were on a deadline to open it on time to appease their investors.

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Events happen exactly as you described. Which is also what we are complaining about with atomcgirl: greedy scientists rush n dino start breeding, yet the movie pushes the moral that life finds away as a higher source of this (shitty writing).

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I don’t really think the movie is pushing any big moral, it’s all a part of Malcolm’s view that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It just so happened to do so disastrously on that night.

The scientists would have figured out they were breeding eventually anyway, but it goes into more detail in the book that Wu kept an all female population and was sterilizing them with radiation. But a freak oversight had caused some junk amphibian DNA to enter the gene sequence of compys and raptors, which escaped the island.

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“It’s like having a scientist discovering the cure for cancer, but not realizing that an ingredient that he uses slowly poisons a person over time”

A bit like I Am Legend then?

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This, along with other stupid crap, are sometimes just things you have to accept in movies for the movie to actually happen. I mean, look at the scene with the T Rex and the flashlight. Is the girl really that stupid that she doesn't get the flashlight is a bad idea? Or that the other guy who decides using the other light to distract him is a good idea? No. The whole time you're thinking, "These people are idiots"... but they have to be idiots to advance the plot and for there to be some excitement in the movie. Much like the idiots who choose the dead end route when running from the killer with a chainsaw in horror movies and such. You kind of accept that stupidity and unreal aspects of it are necessary for it to fully work.

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Idiots make the bulk of horrors and suspance movies, that's accepted and almost expected, like you said that makes the movie possible.

Impossible to explain plot gaps, like full sized dinos developing in months, are a totally different matter: they are unacceptable, ignorant, lazy and only belong to bad writing.

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They didn't start out big. They all were bred with those cloning techniques where they become fertilized eggs that hatch. Just like we saw with the baby raptor towards the beginning.

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No shit!

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I really don't get what you're getting at. Your OP makes it sound like you think they actually cloned a giant dinosaur the size of a building without it growing in the process.

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OP's point is that it would have taken a long time for the dinosaurs to grow to the size seen in the film, so we would have to accept that they had started cloning them decades before the movie starts. Since the 50s or 60s, maybe?

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In the book, they had been cloning them for at least 5 years. Plus some dinosaurs are large even when they are born. A baby brachiosaurus is going to be larger than a baby raptor. Also we don't know how long it took dinosaurs to grow so them growing big within a year or 2 isn't that unbelievable.

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Eh... do you remember the size of some of the dinosaurs in the movie? In a year or two, you say?

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Well, we don't know how fast they grew, do we? Everything in regard to that is theoretical.

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I thought the book said they had been at it for 10-12 years.

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