Headscratchers / Jurassic Park (1993)

Why didn't they shoot her?

• In the opening the Big One attacks the gatekeeper and Muldoon orders her to be shot. We hear gunfire and than after the opening it appears she is still alive. How is she still alive? It's not like they could have missed at that range or anywhere for her to go afterwards.
  • Who says that's the Big One? It could be any of the park's eight original raptors, or a ninth that Muldoon doesn't count because it never joins the pack. Because they shoot it, as ordered.
  • It's definitely the Big One. In a rare Establishing Character Moment where we don't even see the character.
    • It's definitely NOT the Big One, otherwise why would Muldoon not bring up this incident (and how she figured out how to bounce her transport cage) to Grant and Co. when listing the Big One's deeds and how dangerous she is. You'd think he'd lead with "She killed a man before".
    • Because that's the single worst thing he could say to a bunch of people his boss brought on to endorse the park. Yes, he's cynical, but not actively looking to sabotage the situation.
    • He also could have just meant shoot her with the tranquilizer guns.
    • Actually, Muldoon talks about taser guns/rifles earlier, so they're trying (emphasis on trying) to taser her.
• It can be assumed that they didn't listen. They're shown trying to taser it, and it's never shown what their Tranquilizer guns sound like
• Hammond has instituted strict rules against harming any of the creatures. Presumably none of the guards present are armed with anything more powerful than a stun gun.
  • At least several of them were holding M-16 assault rifles.
  • They tried to work her back with the tasers, but it wasn't working. As Geoffrey's arm is slipping out of Muldoon's grasp, and Muldoon shouts "SHOOT HER!", you can hear loud gunshots as they start shooting, but by then it's too late.
• The simple fact that shooting something fast and trying to avoid being shot isn't easy, even if it's close to you. Add in the fact that it was in a container with very few openings, and that to increase their chances of getting a shot the guards would have had to basically go right up to the container (y'know, the thing that has a big vicious dinosaur in it that's currently eating one of their friends) and stick their barrels through one of the slats. In real life, men with guns have missed large caged predators from a similar distance with much better shooting conditions (specifically, the Tsavo man-eaters).
  • It'd be even trickier if they're trying not to shoot Geoffrey. They can't get close enough to tell if the man is dead or alive inside the crate, so don't want to be the ones to finish the job Big One started.
  • I always assumed they definitely killed the raptor. I don't think it's "the Big One" but a fourth raptor they were trying to introduce into the pen to replace one of the raptors "the Big One" killed. That makes the most sense to me. Besides, why, unless we're to intuit that they shot and killed the raptor, would they have gunshots playing over the shot of Jophrey's hand slipping away? That shot conveys two things: Jophrey dying at the same instant they begin unloading their guns into the dinosaur killing him. They both died. For what it's worth, the comic adaptation has them successfully kill the raptor and save the worker (though it can't be canon for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that it's not Muldoon supervising the transfer in the scene and the worker is a light-skinned guy named Jose).

Sunglasses at night okay, travelling at night not okay.

• Why do the people insist on travelling only in the daytime? The T. Rex is a reptile, and therefore cold-blooded. With the size of its body and the metabolism that it would need to support that, the T. Rex couldn't travel without the Sun's warmth. In fact, at night it should be nearly helpless because there is no energy coming from the Sun to support it. So how did it move around so much? And why did the "dinosaur expert" insist on sleeping at night, robbing them of the inherent advantage of being warm-blooded?
  • At this point of time, it is a matter of debate whether dinosaurs were indeed cold-blooded. In the novel, Alan Grant was of the belief that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and was proven correct.
  • Cold-blooded dinosaur theories hadn't taken seriously since the early 1980s.
  • Currently the bet is on the theory that the dinosaurs were not warm-blooded in the same sense as the mammals and birds today, but in practice their metabolisms along with body-mass kept their temperature relatively stable. So yeah, in practice they had none of the limitations of the modern lizards, as far as temperature goes.
  • In other words, the dinosaurs were endothermic animals that probably could deal pretty well with nighttime temperatures.
  • In short, you fail biology forever.
  • As of 2008, modern biologists are working against the use of the terms 'warm-blooded' and 'cold-blooded' because they are incredibly vague and an increased understanding of how animals maintain body temperatures has revealed a variety of methods. So the moral of the story is that you're never safe from dinosaurs. Ever.
  • And even if some dinosaurs are warm blooded and others are cold, the ones that are most likely to be warm blooded...are raptors and rexes (specifically the dinosaurs known for sure to have feathers). Not to mention that the general palaeontological consensus is now becoming that not only all dinosaurs were warm blooded, but so were their close relatives, the dinosaurimorphs and pterosaurs. Especially the pterosaurs. (And yes, I know about Sordes).
  • And anyway, real world science notwithstanding, it's pretty much canon in Jurassic Park that all dinosaurs are warm blooded.
  • What kind of creatures are humans (by nature)? Diurnal ones. Under what circumstances does human vision work best? By light. Ergo, what would be the best time to travel and be able to SEE WHERE YOU ARE GOING? By. Daylight.
  • Even with a high metabolic rate, eye-socket diameter suggests few dinosaurs were nocturnal. The humans were doing what mammals had always done when dinosaurs were around: lay low until daytime, when the big mammal-eating monsters are sleeping.
  • Notwithstanding: "don't go into the long grass!"
  • Grant in the first movie is travelling in hostile terrain with no map or knowledge of the park, provisions or weapons and with two very scared children in tow. What he trades in safety at night, he gets back in being able to see the ground. Two o'clock in the morning wandering into a raptor nest with two kids would not be fun...
  • Exactly— plus they've already had a long, exhausting, frightening day full of literally unbelievable danger, discomfort and near-death experiences. They would have been stressed, hungry, cold and damp, and bruised and battered at best. And Grant (and presumably the kids too) had only just arrived on the island that day after a long and probably not exactly smooth helicopter flight from the mainland, not to mention travelling to Costa Rica itself shortly beforehand. They would have every excuse for being absolutely out on their feet by this point.
    While pressing on through the night would be useful for avoiding diurnal predators, this wouldn't counter the arguments for stopping when they did: they were no better equipped (as diurnal creatures ourselves) to deal with nocturnal conditions, they were shattered, they were lost in unfamiliar and potentially lethal terrain, they did not know the night-time habits of raptors, etc., there could be further storms that would catch them in the open, etc. Holing up in the relative safety and shelter of the convenient large, climbable tree with practically a bed in its branches was the only sane option.
  • Plus, large dinosaurs might had been quite nocturnal

It's your fault, old man!

• Why did the guys regard the park's failure as the old man's fault? It was the fat guy who shut down the park's systems that ruined it, the systems themselves were flawless.
  • The system was far from flawless - in fact, it was exceptionally poorly designed. It relied wholly on "active" systems requiring constant power (the electrified fences) in a tropical area where hurricanes were not unknown, operated by a centralized, clunky computer system that Nedry was brought in to debug (he complains about this noticeably the first time we see him in the film). To make matters worse, the electrified fences were open to the touch of people who could get out of the cars - can you say "lawsuit" for when some idiot inevitably gets out and touches them? In real life, zoos always, always have a number of "passive" barriers (like concrete walls, raised and/or lowered pens, and the like) so that if the power goes out, the animals don't just get out and run around freely.
  • Hammond tells Gennaro that the concrete moats around the paddocks are in place - this is a line taken from the book. However, it is never explained how in the film that the dinosaurs bypass the moats and get loose from their paddocks. We don't even see any moats surrounding the fences.
  • The park was still under construction when the first film took place. In fact, bringing the lawyer along to tour the place was probably intended so he could point out where safety features needed to be added.
  • As for why Hammond gets blamed, it's because he was the one who cut corners, resulting in the above Disaster-Waiting-To-Happen system.
  • He didn't "cut corners". He spared no expense. He states as much multiple times.
  • He says that, yes. That doesn't mean he actually did it. Case in point: He doesn't "spare no expense" when it comes to paying Nedry. "Sparing no expense" would also mean properly manning the park.
  • The book makes it more clear, that the system had several flaws that made restoring and keeping order impossible after the fat guy's partial system shutdown.
  • Also in the book, it is clear that the system was already failing (dinosaurs were breeding, escaping, etc.) long before Nedry cut the power.
  • The whole story was, to an extent, meant to be an Aesop about arrogance and nature and playing god and so fourth, and from that perspective, it was all Hammond's fault.
  • Also in the book Hammond was an asshole. He had many many opportunities to make the park safer (including advice from his consultants to genetically engineer the Raptors and T. Rex to be slower, more passive, etc so they'd less of a risk in the event of escape) and ignored it.
  • Of course, in the book, Hammond gets his comeuppance when he falls down a hill, breaks his ankle and subsequently gets eaten by compys (a version of the death Peter Stormare gets in the second movie). I was most surprised to see Hammond turn up in the second film, and wondered what went on in the second book that it was allegedly based on, which I had not yet read!
  • And Fridge Logic says that, while he may appear to get off lightly (i.e. alive) at the end of the first film, Hammond faces a laundry list of charges since logically he's liable for the deaths and injuries to everyone associated with the park's failure, ultimately. That he's seen in the second film confined to his bed, as opposed to a cell, implies infirmity may be the only thing that kept him from trial/prison.
  • Also, if you design a system where one guy can unleash hordes of carnivorous dinosaurs by throwing a switch, it's safe to say you screwed up somewhere.
  • The guy who designed the system was the one who threw the switch. He obviously could have, but didn't want to/engineered a backdoor.
  • Who says they ever figured out what Nedry had done? The park was evacuated and abandoned, Nedry was dilophosaur chow, and the rival company that he sold out to was hardly going to ask InGen if anyone had retrieved a can of shaving cream from that debacle. All they know for sure is that Nedry put an unapproved backdoor into the park's computer systems, but that could've just been him being a Jerkass, not a saboteur. The storm could've knocked out the power grid.
  • Actually, the novel specifically mentions him wearing protective gloves to handle the frozen embryos. In the film, however, it apparently only takes a glorified grocery freezer to keep dino embryos fresh.
  • There was no time, in either movie or book, for anyone to check for fingerprints to track down Nedry's activities during the blackout. In the movie, everyone escaped as soon as they could; in the book, Muldoon realizes what Nedry was up to immediately after finding him, so there's no need for further investigation. The lab was also not equipped for forensic analysis anyhow, and it likely got blown up along with the rest of the island.
  • In the novel, Dr. Wu notices the logged entry during the outage, when the techs were at supper, and checks to see if anything was changed (such as missing embryos). He informs Arnold of this, who discovers how Nedry crippled the system (whiterabbit.obj - a code that disabled the security systems). The movie did skim through this, as well as Nedry's reason for the theft.
  • Nedry, who has financial problems, goes missing. Security measures fail. Nedry's got his "Ah-Ah-Ah" virus going. Dinosaur embryos go missing. Doesn't take a genius to work out he's responsible and probably selling out. Nedry never shows up again. Ever. After travelling into a park filled with carnivorous dinosaurs now able to roam about freely. Doesn't take a genius to work out he was eaten.
  • As for the original question, Hammond's the boss. Head honcho. Numero uno. And the buck ultimately stops with him. Yeah, his underlings might have been incompetent or cut corners, but he's the one who hired them and put them to work and signed off on what they did.
  • As much as Hammond mentions "I spared no expense" there is a quick conversation between him and Nedry, it's mentioned that Nedry was the lowest bidder for the position, with Hammond refusing to renegotiate his price, if Hammond had paid Nedry just a little more, maybe he wouldn't have caused the whole debacle, I think when Hammond mentions "I spared no expense," he means he spare no expense on the entertainment side of things, not being much into the whole "system" part, he wanted dinos and rides and attractions and wonder, he didn't care much for the tech specs, and generally figured a semi-decent programmer could do the job without much trouble, unlike Book!Hammond, the issue wasn't that he was irresponsible because he was a Jerkass, he was Irresponsible because he cared too much about the spectacle and didn't care about the little things needed to make the spectacle safe.
  • Hammond says they "spared no expense" but it's clear he's lying. No door locks on the cars, no hard barriers to keep the dinosaurs separated behind moats or concrete, no automatic backup power systems, no armed security response....

When a girl dinosaur and another girl dinosaur love each other very much...wait a minute.

• How come the dinos were able to breed when they were all female? The handwave makes zero sense, frogs do not change gender. Their gender is permanent and determined at birth.
  • If that is the case there are other ways of that being possible, even if the dinos in the movie couldn't have been altered this way. When an organism that reproduces asexually has a child it copies its own DNA, so all the organisms of that type would be genetically identical. Assuming all dinosaurs of each species were made from the same mosquito-butt DNA then they would be genetically identical. Species with little or no genetic variation are vulnerable to disease. Now when an asexually reproducing species is hit by disease, some of their species must change to males in order to reproduce sexually and have genetic reproduction if they want to survive, thus making genetic variation. If the all female dinosaurs were hit by some illness, or if they found they couldn't reproduce, they would change to suit an effective way of reproducing, so perhaps some changed. I dunno, just a theory.
  • Obviously, they adopted.
  • There are some species of frog and other fairly simple lifeforms that can change gender during their life cycle. It is highly unlikely that dinosaurs could adapt this trait, however, even with repairs to the genetics. It just isn't that simple. However, within the story of the movies, that's the official explanation and there's nothing we can do about it.
  • From where?
  • Hyperolius viridiflavus ommatostictus, the common reed frog, common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. It's only been observed in captivity, but if there's an all-female population some of the females will change into males. It was first reported in 1989, while Jurassic Park was being written. Crichton probably heard about it, said "Hey, that sounds cool" and put it into the book as his explanation.
  • Actually, there is something we can do ...
  • My guess? The scientists assumed the dinosaur's gender was decided genetically like it is in mammals and birds when in reality it turned out it's decided by external factors like temperature seen in animals like crocodiles and alligators (not too far fetched since they are sort of related). With internal genitalia and no sexing done to double check they were just releasing specimens of both genders assuming they were all female. Stupid of them...but scientists tend to make stupid mistakes in Crichton's writings. Maybe they presumed the lack of external penis was an indication there were no males?
  • Dinosaurs do have penises. Both crocodilians and the more primitive bird families, ratites, tinamous, chickens, turkeys and other galliformes, and geese, ducks, and other anseriformes all have penises. Its only in the "more advanced" birds that the penis is lost. So the dinosaurs, even if chimeras of croc, bird, and dino, would have had a penis. Apparently the scientists supposed to be checking up on these things should have taken a course in basic biology.
  • Not to mention that they ought to have been maintaining meticulous health records on every single one of their animals, if only because InGen's vets were breaking new ground and every last dinosaur was worth a fortune. Even simple palpation of a tranquillized female's belly could've detected the presence of an unknown abdominal mass, which X-rays would identify as eggs.
  • Should have. Doesn't mean they did. There's a lot of things they should have done that they didn't, and a lot of things they shouldn't have done that they did. That's the whole reason the park collapsed.
  • As mentioned, the novel implied that, since all island surveillance and security was automated, the park administrators simply left the dinos to their own devices without much in the way of check-ups or strenuous medical examination unless one of them ended up sick, and collapsed. Then, the dino's absence of movement registering on sensors would have them sending a team out to see what was wrong. So, apparently, all pregnant female dinos stayed healthy enough to lay their eggs before anyone got to them with a stethoscope. After all, there was one vet, and a maximum of 20-odd operating personnel on the island at all times as a matter of course, and over 250 animals.
  • Ian Malcolm asks if someone goes out and "pulls up the dinosaurs' skirts" to sex them, in response to which Dr Wu airily states that there can't be any males since they engineer their chromosomes to make them all turn out female. As so often is the case in the books/film, they just didn't consider alternative outcomes to their plans, regardless of how slapdash and potentially flawed their procedures may have been.
  • The dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park Series are not true dinosaurs, instead species manufactured through a mix of dino and croco DNA. Thus, it is more than likely the JR dinosaurs have this feature.
  • The thing that always baffled me is why the hell did they use frog DNA anyway? There's no logical explanation except that it 'makes the plot work'.
  • The books explained this one a bit: the lead geneticist (Henry Wu, played by B.D. Wong in the movie) basically realized that, since 90% of DNA is the same in all creatures, he could use anything to patch most of the holes in the DNA. So, he did. Probably a case of Artistic License – Biology, but my genetic chops are not up to the task.
  • Actually it is part of hybrid/chimera science. While there's some science fiction involved, some of it does follow through quite well. In a hybrid you have to have two different animals mating/inseminated to create a new animal. In this the genes mix and what's dominant usually wins. Take for example sheep/goat hybrids, most come out with a goat's coat. However if you make a chimera, you mix and match the embryos and it's basically a cellular free-for-all. (in real science, it would have taken a young dinosaur egg, not just a DNA though). But to use the other example, if you mix and match a sheep/goat, the chimera coat can be part sheep wool and part goat hair depending on which cell coded where. Even more fascinating is the genital area is usually defined by just one cell. Meaning that animal could produce either purebred sheep or goats depending on which cell developed into the genital. In JP, the F1 generation lab made were chimeras, and the ones that got that frog DNA into their genitals switched gender. They essentially bred the hybrid frog/dinosaur (whatever else) right into the population. Depending on which cells made their systems. In real life though it would be unlikely for those hybrids to take, let alone be born, but the actual general process of how you can breed like this, isn't that far-fetched. (Assuming though you could keep getting generations healthy and fertile, which really could be right down to pure dumb luck)
  • Chicken DNA would've made more sense than frog, given birds' close kinship to dinosaurs. We already know a fair bit about the chicken genome because of agricultural research; the novel Carnosaur, a cheesy horror novel that used the same idea as Crichton's, used modified chicken ova to create dinosaur zygotes, implanted into ostriches as surrogate mothers.
  • We do share 90% of our genetic code with rats, who are not even our closest cousins amongst the non-primate mammals (that distinction goes to tree shrews and colugos). Imagine how close birds might be to raptors, especially given that some consider birds arose from within Deinonychosauria. Still doesn't explain why they were butt-naked though.
  • More importantly over 95% of the DNA in any animal is "junk". It codes for nothing. It is just there to leave gaps between genes reducing the rate of mistakes, as mutation fodder, and as a place for viruses to insert their genetic material. They could have (and should have) just filled these gaps with a random assortment of nucleotides, rather than using frog DNA and allowing an unwanted gene to be expressed (not that that could actually happen, there would be completely different pathways to change the gender of a frog and a dinosaur). Also, how the hell, not knowing what functional dinosaur genes look like, did they isolate the functional 5%?
  • Just because overconfident scientists decide every couple of years that we now know everything doesn't make it true. I work on RNA interference, a mechanism which was completely unknown till 1998, but which is fundamental for all multicellular organisms. Think of the whole genome thing as coding both ingredients and recipes: flour and eggs are found in many, many foods; it's the way you cook them that makes each food different.
  • This is tackled a little better in the book where they make it clear that they don't exclusively use frog DNA, but any of numerous DNA patterns they think will fit, but since it's just the magic frog DNA that somehow caused a problem, that's the only they used in the movie.
  • In the book they used DNA from several different animals. It was only four dinosaur species, Velociraptor included, that they used frog DNA for, and they were the only ones that bred.
  • Why use frog DNA and not some reptile DNA? Frogs are amphibians and so much less likely to be compatible with dino-DNA; but then again the whole thing clearly runs off nonsensoleum, so what the heck, why not?
  • Female Komodo Dragons can lay eggs to produce male offspring, with the theory being that this ability is in case they find themselves on an island with no males. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6196225.stm
  • This is possible because komodo dragons (like many reptiles and birds) use ZW chromosomes, rather than the XY chromosomes humans and most mammals use. Basically the ZW is the reverse of XY; the females have two different chromosomes (ZW) and the males have two of the same (ZZ) with Z only-sperm and ova that having either Z or W. However just having ZW chromosomes is not quite enough, female komodo dragons also have the ability to duplicate the chromosomes in their ova if not fertilized normally, thus making some of their offspring Opposite Sex Clones. Which really brings the decision to make the dinosaurs all-female into Head Desk territory (in response to both the author and the fictional scientists) since ZW is so prevalent in the dinosaurs' avian descendants and could have been present in the reptilian ancestors as well! There's absolutely no need to introduce "magical" Gender Bending amphian DNA; if dinosaurs had ZW chromosomes they had an innate potential for creating an entire breeding population from a single unfertilized female!
    • From my limited experience keeping reptiles, it's usually easier to house an all-female population of reptiles together in a confined space rather than an all-male population. Not to say that female-to-female aggression doesn't exist, but males will quite often fight each other to the death. I'd say that this was a sane precaution against your attractions constantly duking it out thunder-dome style. (Actually, that would be pretty sweet, too.)
  • The second movie might help resolve this problem, as Hammond apparently did let the dinosaurs on the free-range island reproduce. Perhaps a lab tech mixed up a batch of male embryos, intended for the other island, with a batch of females for the park? It'd only take one male to inseminate the rest of a given species' population.
  • Grant may have been completely wrong. They could all be female and be reproducing through parthenogenesis.
• Why did they need to make the dinosaurs all female instead of all male? The only explanation I can think of is that Hammond wanted to make the park kid-friendly and not risk the off-chance that any kid would see a dino-erection.
  • The doctor explains this. All the embryos are, by default, female. They need a particular stimulus at a particular stage of development to become male. Making everyone female means just not doing something; making everyone male means being absolutely certain to do something with every single dino. You'd have to do a lot more, and pay much closer attention, to make them all male, and run a much higher risk of something going wrong sooner.
  • They may have hoped to be able to use the adult female dinosaurs as living incubators for future generations of cloned embryos, rather than having to grow them in artificial eggs all the time. Also, male vertebrates are often more territorial than females: a male who can claim an exclusive territory is likely get the chance to mate with additional partners, whereas mating with multiple males isn't all that beneficial to a female's rate of reproduction.

The Dilophosaurus venom

• It's explained on the tour that Dilophosaurus venom, once spat into its prey's eyes, can cause both blindness and eventually paralysis. If the venom is just being spat into the eyes, how exactly can that cause paralysis? Wouldn't the venom need to be transferred into the bloodstream via a bite in order for that to paralyze the dinosaur's prey?
  • Nope. Skin contact is more than sufficient for many toxins, there is absolutely no need for venom to be injected directly into the blood to enter the bloodstream. Especially if it hits somewhere like the eyes. Note how much of the venom (or rather, venom-soaked mucus) there is and how sticky it is... it's clearly meant to be extremely hard to remove, giving it more time to sit in place and do its job. The paralysis would be important since if it attacked something larger than itself, when the prey was blinded, it would probably just go charging off wildly; the Dilophosaurus could follow it and wait for the paralysis to kick in.

The T-Rex pen and the Pit

• After the Tyrannosaurus attacks the vehicles, Grant and Lex start scaling down a large pit. This is the same spot that the Tyrannosaurus walked on top of to leave the enclosure. Where did the pit come from?
  • I'd have to see the movie again to be absolutely sure, but I'm pretty sure the big drop was across the road from the T-Rex pen, not on the same side.
  • As I recall the scene, opposite the T-Rex pen was jungle and the bathroom where the lawyer gets eaten.
  • Yeah, that was just a straightforward goof.
  • Obviously, the T.rex can climb trees and stand on their topmost branches. Why else would the park designers put up a goat at road-level if they didn't think Rexy could get to it?
  • It wasn't a goof. Steven Spielberg deliberately started with a flat surface with a goat chained to it and then switched it to a deep pit. He knew it was inconsistent but thought it made for a more dramatic escape and thought most people wouldn't notice anyway.
  • Incidentally, most zoos do have large pits like that in open enclosures. Although, they are specifically designed so that the animal can't cross it. So if the park designers had done their job, even if the electrical fences had gone down, the T-Rex wouldn't have been able to escape.
  • Fixed link
  • To the best of my memory, the link basically said that the spot where Grant and Lex climbed down was a different spot from where the goats was and where the T-rex climbed over, demonstrated by the position of the cars. Something like that.
  • Basically the Rex pen had a moat that started between the two cars and ran away from the road, the Rex can go out over the ground near the rear car, then when it was attacking the first car pushed it forward and over so it was over the moat when it went over and in.

Automated Cars

• Why the hell didn't the cars have drivers? That would seem to me to be a basic safety precaution, having someone there who could drive the car manually. It would also be preferable from a customer-service perspective, since the drivers could also function as guides. And it would give palaeontology students summer jobs. Everyone wins!
  • Remember Hammond's Catchphrase: "We've spared no expense." Hammond made a fully automated guide and guide vehicle simply because he had the money to do so, and probably because he thought it would be cool.
  • To flaunt his cash, simple enough.
  • It was done in a move to both flaunt the state-of-the-art automation of the park and save money on payroll. Therefore having automated cars with no drivers was a way to kill two birds with one stone.
  • It also cuts down on the number of people who'd know about the park before Hammond was ready to reveal it to the world at large. They were trying to be secretive.
  • Also, an automated car could seat four paying tourists, instead of three and one driver. So Hammond would then also need to buy 25% more cars to transport the guests. "Spared no expense" my ass.
  • I look at it rather as movie-Hammond thinking, "with a set number of cars fitting a fourth park-goer instead of needing a driver, I can show off my dinos to 33% more people per tour!"
  • No, it was about cost-cutting. Hammond made a lot of poor decisions because the park was, overall, a rushed job to maximize profit out of his dinosaurs. He hired the wrong people, he paid no attention to any of the science involved in what he was doing, and one of his recurring failings is that he tried too hard to make everything automated to avoid having to pay any ongoing salaries. Numerous times throughout the film (and even more frequently in the novel), various characters call him out on the remarkably poor design of his park. "Spared no expense" was a pointless piece of hyperbole that made him sound better; a lot of other characters beg to differ with that phrase, and that line begins with Dennis Nedry and ends at Robert Muldoon.
  • "Spared no expense" was also referencing the luxuries of the park. Hammond skimped on the necessities and rolled that cash into the luxuries, to make it as appealing a place as possible to visit. The money he saved not having staff was spent on Richard Kiley voiceovers and gourmet ice cream.
  • Considering that Hammond argues with the lawyer that everybody should enjoy the park, I don't think it was all about profit. One has to remember that the park was expensive. All the money went to making the dinosaurs. That's a lot of money, and it was admittedly the hard part. After that was done, Hammond just thought he could put these creatures on display like in a safari park and be done with it. He was excited about making the park look good to as many visitors as possible - as he says, he plans to charge a reasonable price because he wants everybody to see the dinosaurs - and let's face it, one visitor with $10,000, or 1,000 visitors at $10?
  • That's Movie Hammond. Book Hammond actually has Gennaro's line about "we can charge whatever we want," and goes on to state that a high price tag is actually a draw for most tourists, especially American and Japanese ones. Book Hammond was all about making money, and there's even shades of it in the film, where even though Hammond is a much more likable character, he laughs along with Gennaro's "coupon day" comment. Movie Hammond may want "everyone in the world" to see his dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean he won't bilk them for every red cent he can get.

Tim the Invincible

• In the course of the film he, a small boy, is terrorized by numerous dinosaurs (arguably, enough to put anyone into shock), thrown into a tree inside a car, dropped at least 50 feet inside the same wrecked car, and electrocuted by a fence meant to stop dinosaurs. His injuries by the end of the movie? A forehead bruise and a constant whimper. He's walking and conscious, and no one seems even a little surprised that he's not dead.
  • Every heard of an electric dog fence? It doesn't have to kill, paralyze, or throw the dog to the ground, just has to zap it enough to keep it back. If that sort of fence is just slightly numbing to most humans, it makes sense that a dinosaur fence would knock out a person but not instantly fry them to death.
  • Electrical Engineering student here: It IS possible to take a high-voltage shock and survive (though it will hurt like a motherfucker), because its not the voltage the kills you, it's the CURRENT (or amperage) It only takes 10 milliamps to kill you, because the current runs through your heart and stops it, but if you get an obscenely high current going through you, the current actually dances across your skin without actually going through your body. That could be why Tim was able to take the hit from the fence and keep on ticking, although if I recall, Grant had to give Tim CPR to get him conscious again.
  • A lot of people will cite plot devices, but I'm going to go ahead and chalk it up to in-movie coincidence. Sure, a bunch of grown, trained men and women die and the kid survives, but was there ever a point where the kids defied physical or biological laws for the sake of survival? The electrical fence might qualify, as I'm not sure how powerful it would logically be when reactivated. But that aside, their survival had more to do with them not being placed in the exact same situations that got others killed. Locked in a car with a dilophosaurus, out in the open under a T-rex's nose, trapped in a room with a velociraptor, etc...
  • Three Words: Improbable Infant Survival.
  • There's a little something called Character Shield. That means that, no matter how defenseless he may be, the hero never dies (unless a cynical counter-culture guy is directing). That's why Tim survived: merely because he was a "good guy".
  • That kid was an idiot. I was watching the film again and noticed during the aforementioned electric fence that Tim is small enough to fit through the fence holes. He could have easily gone through one of them and been on the other side long before the other two reached the top of the fence.
  • If I remember, those fences were covered by chicken wire.
  • The gap seemed smaller down low than at the higher levels, makes sense I suppose for that to be the case as if the power goes out not many dinosaurs would be able climb up or reach the upper levels of the fence. Those that ARE large enough to reach the upper level of the fence are big enough to just knock the darn thing over.
  • The chicken wire might've been there to keep terrified goats from breaking their leashes, ducking through the fences, and infesting the island.
  • The fences weren't meant to kill the dinosaurs, merely stun them. They never mention the amperage of the fence, only the voltage— meaning that 50,000 volts (or whatever it was) might not have been enough to kill the kid, if the amperage wasn't particularly high. Of course, the electrified fence was a crappy way of keeping the dinos in their habitats, but it's pretty much established in-universe that they did a terrible job of designing the place. If anything, it's the stupidity of the people who built and designed the place that is difficult to swallow, rather than the resulting damage.
  • Exactly this. This is one of the areas where the film fails to explain plot points from the novel that only make sense with proper explanation. The fences were too weak to properly do their job of keeping the dinosaurs inside. They were meant as a deterrent, but John Hammond cut the voltage to dangerously low levels because he was worried about the safety of his precious dinosaurs. The fences are one of several places where John placed protecting his financial investment in the animals above the lives of the people in his park. So, in short, the answer is yes, a fence too weak to do more than fry little Tim's hands would be completely ineffectual at holding back the dinosaurs, the fence itself is a worthless p.o.s., and shame on John Hammond for thinking a voltage that low was a good idea.
  • Possibly he was more worried about the fences killing the humans on the island. A lot more people have been killed by accidental electrocution than by dinosaurs, even in the JP Verse. In which case, Tim's survival is only to be expected: the fences were set to as high a voltage as they possibly could be without making them instantly lethal to a human.
  • Tim was not "invincible." He's bleeding out of his ears, his hands are heavily wrapped in bandages, and he's reduced to a slow limp. Look at him when he's fleeing from the raptor in the kitchen: he's hopping along at a very slow pace, precisely because he's been battered and beaten to hell and back. He definitely didn't get out unscathed.
  • Humans survive massive shocks from electric fences, and even lightning strikes. Sometimes we die, sometimes we don't. Tim nearly did die - Alan Grant gave him CPR when his heart stopped, remember? Tim survived, difficult to believe but not impossible, since the fence was meant to stun and repel dinosaurs, not kill them. And he was seriously hurting after that shock and that fall.
  • Here's a bit of possible Fridge Horror (I don't have a copy of the movie handy, so someone please fill me in) that ties into this, though - before Grant started performing CPR, did he check for a pulse? Tim may have just been dazed by the shock and fall, and Grant performing (presumably correct in-universe) CPR on him would have broken his ribs and only made him worse off. Kid can't catch a break.
  • I believe from memory that Grant did check for "signs of circulation" ie. breathing and movement, which actually put him way ahead of doctrine at the time, since this was just recently adopted as Red Cross practical first responder protocol (since most people don't actually know how to check for a pulse under emergency conditions anyway, and will mistake the pulse in their own thumb for a pulse in the victim's throat). In fact I think he said the line "He's not breathing!"
    • Alan runs to Tim and kneels by him, presses his fingertips (not his thumb) towards Tim's neck and close to his face, then does indeed say "He's not breathing".
    • Grant is a field paleontologist who works on digs for extended periods in the badlands of Montana, out among the rattlesnakes and rockfalls, and hours from the nearest hospital facilities. It's entirely to be expected that he'd know more first aid than the average couch potato.

Dinosaur Steaks

• Hammond offers his investors to discuss matters over lunch. The only non-dinosaur animals on the island were used to feed the dinosaurs, so...
  • I distinctly remember Hammond mentioning "Chili and Sea Bass" (or Chilean Sea Bass) as a lunch entree.
  • It was Chilean Sea Bass. What, did you entirely forget the possibility that they could have food shipped in?
  • They get food shipped in, clearly. The freezer they trap the raptor in is full of food. That's even how they got it to go in there in the book, with a trail of frozen steaks...
  • Is your friend one of those people going to the special hell?
  • Hammond may have spared no expense, but I think butchering a bronto would be a little bit over-the-top, even for the guy who built a dinosaur theme park.
  • He spared no expense, but he's not a moron. No point in spending a billion dollars to clone an Apatosaurus and then kill it for T. rex food. It is likely, however, that any dead dinosaurs were cut up and fed to the meat eaters. Some zoos do that (after necropsy and research) and it would be even more likely with animals as hard to dispose of as a dinosaur.
  • Maybe by the time of Jurassic World, they'd do that. Before the park actually went public, it'd make more sense to preserve each and every carcass, eggshell, shed scale or lost tooth the dinosaurs produced, because Hammond would expect every museum, university, and dino-crazy billionaire's kid on the planet to be frantic to get a hold of such rarities, at any price, once he reveals what he's created.

How did the Velociraptors get out?

• I understand the T-Rex getting out, all she had to was lean on the wires and they collapse under weight. Granted if they were built to contain a beast of that size, they should be stronger, but that's a different thing. How did the human sized dinosaurs smash their way through metal bars?!
  • As mentioned below, it was shown in the book that they could chew through steel with relative ease, due to their immensely powerful jaws. After making small holes in the middle of each bar, it's not unreasonable to assume that they could ram the bars afterward, bending them outward as shown.
  • Just climbed out, maybe. They're nimble little bastards. Of course, in the book they were only in a chain link enclosure and had a bite force near a hyena's. It's been a long time since I saw the film, but I sort of remember a shot of the cage with what looked like regular fencing essentially blown out. Without any power to the electric fence and the time to work at it, I suppose it isn't out of the question that they managed to gnaw or slash their way out.
  • The book stated that they could bite (well, chew) through steel bars relatively quickly.
  • A major issue in the books is that the raptors have been attacking different points of the fence, systematically checking every area for a sign of vulnerability. This was a way that the author showcased their intellect. I can't remember if they go in depth on this detail in the movie, but I remember them at least mentioning the raptors hitting the fence. The electrification was what prevented the raptors from taking the fence down. Once they discovered it wasn't electrified, they bashed it down with their combined strength.
  • Yes, Muldoon does specify that they never attack the same place twice, and "they remember."
  • What bugs me is just how high off the bottom of the enclosure that gnawed out section was. Where the Raptors somehow hanging from the ceiling while working on that bit?
  • Maybe so. If you're built to clamber up the sides of hadrosaurs and rip their sides open, while the darned things are bucking and kicking and trying to crush you up against the nearest tree, a stationary cage ceiling wouldn't be that much of a challenge.
  • Not to mention the part right near the end where the protagonists are trying to escape a raptor by crawling through the duct work and the raptor not only leaps up right beneath the girl and holds her panel aloft (perfectly balanced on its head), but also hangs in the air for around seven seconds like that with no visible means of holding itself up.
  • It didn't "leap straight up." It was standing on a desk just beneath the panel, and straightened up to knock the ceiling panel up. When Grant kicked it, it fell down off the desk to the floor.
  • Once again, this is explained a bit more in the book. The raptors are described as disturbingly intelligent: they attack the fence again and again, but, as the resident zoologist Muldoon explains, they never attack the same spot in the fence twice. Presumably, when the power went out, they just continued their cycle of attacking the fence, realized the power was off, and off to the races they went.
  • That was all said in the movie as well.
    Ellie: I thought you said the fences were electrified?
    Muldoon: Yes, but they never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. And they remembered.
  • In the book the raptors had somehow gotten out very very early. Tim sees one free during the initial tour. We don't know the gestation takes for raptors but we know they had a breeding colony not to far away in the book. The bigger problem for me in this is that the raptors had tested the cage, presumably most if not all of it. Unless raptors can hear electricity (which is plausible, I turn off the lights in my office because whatever sound fluorescent lights make bugs me.) then why would they attack the cages once the power is down? They already know what will happen.
  • While not stated directly, the below bullet hampers on at the beginning the raptors probably did get out before to attack the guy who died at the hospital. Given that the Park people would not have thought there could have been more then they expected, they probably stopped looking once they tracked the right number in the pen, leaving some free to keep breeding and be able to be out for Tim to see during the tour.
    • This is explained in the book. The computer had an automated program that kept track of all the animals in the park. They could input how many animals were expected to be found, and how many actually were. The downside of this is that it would only alert them if the animal died. If there were, in fact, more animals than they were expecting (which was exactly what happened with the raptors), the computer would not count the surplus. Thus, some of the raptors were able to breed and escape without anyone realizing it for a long time.
  • Some species can detect electricity e.g. sharks, platypi. As you mention, high voltage electricity can also generate a buzzing noise and many animals have much better hearing than humans.
  • In the books, the raptors were constantly attacking the fences, even when they knew that the power was on. Most of the animals were conditioned to avoid the fences; the T-Rex, for example, only realized it could escape when it discovered that the fence was unpowered by accident. The raptors, on the other hand, were excessively stubborn and constantly attacking the fences whenever a human got near, probably because they'd already managed to escape at least once, killing three workers (including the one at the intro to the book). The raptors in the movie were probably acting similarly to the ones in the book; they may have simply realized power was out by paying attention and then got loose. After all, they're smart enough and dangerous enough that the pack leader realized she could knock open the loading crate if she attacked at the right time. It may have simply been a case of them sensing something was different (or merely following their usual routine of 'testing' the fences), making an attempt to escape, and discovering that the electrified fences were out.

Displaying the Raptors

• How was Hammond intending to put the Raptors on display? The characters couldn't even see them under the canopy of their enclosure and they required an enormous amount of resources just to keep them from escaping.
  • Assuming they didn't come out of hiding, lure them out with food. Remember the goat for the Tyrannosaurus Rex? Same principle.
  • I'd assume that as with the book, the raptor pen was only a temporary holding place. In the book it was mentioned that they first put the raptors in a normal enclosure but being the crafty little buggers they are, they kept escaping and mauling the personnel (and also breeding in the wild, but that was only found out later), so they moved them to the specially designed pen until they could figure out how to fix the security issues.
  • Or they will put them in semi-aquarium display; the viewers will walk around the cage to see them.
  • I can answer this one; if you listen carefully to Hammond and Ellie's conversation that takes place in the background while Grant and Muldoon are discussing the Raptor-specs, Hammond's telling her about the viewing area on the ground level of the raptor compound. He mentions some dandy reinforced steel frames, which unfortunately doesn't change the fact that those frames are pretty much just holding windows...
  • Had the frames held three-inch thick bulletproof glass it wouldn't have been a problem.

No Back-up Plan for Power Outages?

• When the power goes out, all hell breaks loose. This was a tropical island, and thus would yearly hurricanes. What the hell were they planning on doing when the power went out without any sabotage?
  • Put the cables underneath the grounds. That's the precaution.
  • Exactly. This is a common anti-hurricane feature on a lot of structures - it's not practical in places like California that suffer relatively frequent earthquakes, but in places like Jurassic Park, it's a lot easier (and more aesthetically pleasing) to have subterranean lines than power lines strung over the roads.
  • And why didn't they have hurricane-proof shelters on the island for the park personnel? Animals have to be fed, so zookeepers are often among the last people to evacuate because of hurricanes. You'd think that one of the first things Hammond would have built on the island would be facilities for a skeleton crew to remain behind, ready to feed the dinosaurs the moment a storm abates enough for them to go outside. The technicians, yes, they can run for the mainland, but letting his billion-dollar menagerie starve on account of a little bad weather would be cruel and stupid.
  • In the book at least, one of the ongoing problems mentioned is an automated feeding system, which is dispensing unneeded medication to the animals and continually sounding alarms when the medicine isn't available. And considering everything else was automated out the butt...
  • In the film, Nedry says in one scene that the park is designed to be run by six people locked in the control room for up to three days, if necessary. (He doesn't actually say how, but it can.)
  • Short answer: they weren't. The place was very poorly designed.
  • They did have shelters. That is where they go while they are waiting for Arnold to turn on the power.
• Here's the thing, though: it wasn't a power outage. Nedry deliberately sabotaged the park so that he could move the embryos. Presumably they had taken such precautions as underground cables in the event of a hurricane, but that didn't matter when the power was shut off at the source (except for the raptor fences— as Muldoon said, even Nedry knew better than to turn those off). The "power outage" was Nedry's cover for corporate espionage; the storm just provided convenient cover for him (at first) while simultaneously throwing a monkey wrench into the whole plan, since it made him get lost, get eaten, and be unable to turn the power back on, which was his intention. An eighteen minute window, in and out before anyone realizes he's gone.
  • He didn't even need the storm, the bugs in the system were sufficient cover. "Some of the minor systems might go on and off, nothing to worry about."
  • In the novel, there was auxiliary power to cover for if the main power failed, but it was a poor backup which didn't supply enough to run the electric fences, and only warned the users once as opposed to continuously after the system reboot.

Why not just shoot the computer room raptor?

• In the climax, when they get into the computer room, a raptor tries to push the door open, and they all panic and try to push the door closed. But they have a shotgun... why not let it open the door a little and SHOOT IT IN THE FACE?
  • It moves too fast. If they let the door open, there's a possibility the raptor jumps down on them and kills them. Then proceeds to kill everybody else as they are now defenseless. Although, there is no reason why they couldn't have asked one of the kids to pass or nudge the gun to them.
  • Actually, if I recall correctly, Alan did shoot it. A shot can be heard off screen and when we cut back to the scene, Alan drops the shotgun on the ground and the raptor hasn't gotten through the door as they run away. As I was also curious about this at one point, I counted the raptor deaths with the amount Muldoon said they were holding, and it matches up.
  • The shotgun jammed, which is why Alan left it. When it's lying on the floor, you can see a shell jutting at an odd angle from the stock.
  • Which raises another question, why do they use shells? With things like dinosaurs, a shotgun shell wouldn't be much use against anything very big. Surely shotgun slugs would be far better, a single good size round would be more effective for penetrating heavy scales. A shotgun makes sense, because it is harder to jam (Alan really buggered that gun up), but why use shells?
  • The gun Grant was using was a SPAS-12, a pump/semiauto shotgun that was known to have problems cycling rounds in semiauto mode. Whenever the gun appears in other movies, it's always used in pump-action mode because it can't cycle blank shells at all. When Hammond hears the shots over the phone, they all occur in rapid succession one after another, so it's pretty safe to assume that Grant was firing in semiauto mode and the gun jammed on its own.
  • Based upon the large single holes in the glass that were left after Grant attempts to shoot the velociraptor, they were using slugs. Which raises yet another question: how can a shotgun loaded with shells be firing slugs?
  • All shotguns use shells. The shell can be loaded with shot, lots of small spherical pieces of lead, or slugs, one big piece of lead. You can't tell by looking at the shell what type of shot is used, and based on the holes in the glass it seems like the shotgun was firing slugs.
  • Weren't there only three Velociraptors? One was locked in the freezer by the kids, and the other two were killed by the T-rex.
  • Yes Alan did shoot the raptor, AFTER Lex debugged the operating system and got the auto-locks activated. The question should be, why didn't Alan and Ellie tell Tim to stop being Lex' cheerleader and get the damn gun for them? All he did was stand behind her by the computer. In fact, before he even stood behind her, if one watches the scene where Lex first sits down in front the computer and says "I know this system.", you would see Tim in the background just standing in front of Alan and Elle pulling his hair, and jumping up and down. They could have said to Tim, 'Stop jumping up and down and give the us the damn gun!"
  • We even have a trope for this. Tim is playing the Neutral Female role to perfection by reducing his usefulness to that of background furniture.
  • They were panicking and not thinking very clear. The goddamn raptor was inches away from them actively trying to get in, so their only thought likely was 'Must hold the door, must hold the door'. Tim probably was panicking too, though he could at least look for a way to make himself useful.
  • The problem with panicking is that you're panicking. Panicking and rational, useful decision-making are mutually exclusive things.
  • Mostly because they're scared. But also raptors are insanely fast... it could theoretically kill one of them in the time it took Alan to try to just shoot it. Add in the fact that they could theoretically be like alligators... shoot it in the face and all you'll do is piss it off, shoot it in the body and it'll still function just fine long enough to tear you to pieces. They might only be vulnerable to being shot where their spine meets their skull.
  • My opinion was that they were too concerned for the children, to call Tim over. Even with two people holding it, the door was opening and closing erratically, which would have made shooting through the gap hard. The Raptor would have gotten through at any moment. You want a small boy who's barely standing anywhere near by then? The gun was needed because they knew it WOULD burst through. And either way, admit it, there's something horribly wrong with shouting "TIM! THROW ME THE GUN!"
  • The only thing wrong with that phrase is stupid handling of the firearm. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Grant, for example, telling Tim to make himself useful by picking up the gun while keeping his hands far away from the trigger and hand it to him. Was I the only one whose parents hammered how not to shoot yourself in the face with a firearm into their heads as a child? There is no way that shotgun could possibly be more dangerous than the raptor that was trying to knock down the door.
  • Meta-explanation: Children of Tim's age don't get to handle deadly firearms in Spielberg movies, ever. It might give real kids who watch his films very dangerous ideas about what's safe to play with.
  • Perhaps he could have had a walkie talkie...

No blood on the cow sling

• The velociraptors were shown being fed by lowering a steer in a sling into their enclosure. The destroyed sling is then retrieved. But the sling was absolutely pristine in terms of viscera. I would have expected the sling to be covered in blood and pieces of steer guts given how raptors kill their prey. Did they lick it clean when they were done?
  • Sure, why not?
  • Once it got a whiff of those things, the steer probably tore its way free of the harness itself. It didn't get far, but far enough so that its blood didn't splash on the straps.
  • Actually, with the advent of high-definition screens, there is plenty of blood on the sling. It was just hard to see the dark red against the mid-tone blue on older screens.
  • On a related note, why in the world did they use a steer with horns as raptor food? They made such a big deal about Hammond not wanting to risk his dinosaurs' health with better electric fences and so on, so why give them a prey-animal that was actually armed and dangerous to kill? Granted, the raptors were killing machines, but the steer still could've gotten lucky; heck, even mice have been known to seriously injure the snakes they were being live-fed to.
  • They probably didn't cover the straps with gore for a few reasons: firstly, there really isn't that much gore in the movie to begin with; deaths are violent but non-explicit, happening behind shaking palm fronds or the like. There's some bloody limbs (goat leg and the arm of Samuel L. Jackson) but not much else. The film's rated PG, after all. Secondly, isn't the fact that the straps were picked completely clean with only a bit of blood more disturbing and brutal than if a bunch of intestines and bones were hanging off it willy-nilly? It shows the raptors as particularly thoughtful and thorough killing machines, not sloppy. And as for the steer in question having horns, well, the animal handlers weren't proven to be the most thoughtful people in the world during their run on the island. Also, apparently cows can have horns too. Just because they're born with horns doesn't mean they'd be inclined to use them.
  • What I meant was: why not feed them a de-horned animal? Steer or cow, it's not going to make much difference in the price of the feeder-animal, and it'd help guarantee that Hammond's precious raptors won't get injured taking it down. Heck, it'd even be safer for the keepers who handle the livestock and load them into the harness.
  • Maybe the staff are trying to kill the bastards without being too obvious.
  • Or Hammond himself believes that, even inside that cramped and low-visibility enclosure, it's better to have the animals keep a good hunting instinct and that includes (given the intelligence of the raptors) being able to think about the threat of the horns and come up with good hunting strategies to avoid them. It looks like at least by the time of this steer's death, they're doing well with that.

Dumb Goat

• Why didn't that goat run like fuck?
  • It was chained up.
  • It still should've tried to flee, but getting a sufficiently terrified response from that goat probably would've gotten the filmmakers accused of cruelty to animals.
  • Its also possible that the goat was not familiar with an animal like the Rex and thus showed no fear. Like how dodos and other animals were wiped out because of their lack of fear of humans.
  • Similar to the above point, it may have just been a domesticated, docile goat with no idea what would be happening. Also to emphasize the lack of activity in the T.rex paddock earlier on.
  • It may have been sedated.
  • Animals tend to evolve to be overly-skittish (i.e., falsely believing there is danger is much more advantageous to falsely believing there isn't danger). I would imagine the goat would be terrified of the T-Rex regardless, since it's a big thing with sharp teeth making noise. More likely the T-Rex just didn't take too much time to come upon the goat and chomp it, all of which happened off-screen so we didn't see how the goat reacted to the T-Rex.
  • The goat has been put in a clearing where it can see most of its surroundings. It can probably smell or sense that there is a very big carnivore with a hankering for a nice bit of lamb somewhere in the jungle area. It's going to stay right here thanks very much. If the film rex is anything like the book one though it's much faster and sneakier than expected for its size and the actual attack is over in seconds.
    • That goat simply had nothing left to lose. Already buried under a mountain of debt, no job and trapped in a loveless marriage, he'd very recently received some very bad medical news. His life was an unending string of defeat and despair with death as the only way out. Rexie did him a profound mercy.
  • We don't actually see the point at which the T.rex hunts the goat. For all we know, that goat tried to run like hell as soon as Rex showed up, but we never actually saw it.

How many slugs are in that shotgun, Grant?

• When Grant fires the SPAS-12 shotgun at the raptor, we only see four very small bullet holes in the glass in the next shot. So, either the shotgun was fitted to fire single rifle-style bullets, or we're only seeing four of the pieces of shot from one of its rounds. Either way, it's messed up...
  • Presumably the SPAS-12 was loaded with a solid slug, akin to a deer slug in hunting rifles. After all, I would assume the dinos have thick skin, and scatter shot isn't so good against thick skinned animals (thus the reason for deer slugs).
  • Yeah, slug shot is very common when you're hunting large game.

Where'd that T-Rex come from?

• The T-Rex isn't exactly a stealthy animal. The characters can always feel it coming because of the earth tremors it causes with every step, and it tends to roar and growl a lot. And yet it somehow manages to smash through the wall of the visitors centrer walk past one of the raptors and the humans and eat the other raptor without anyone noticing it's there. Did it suddenly learn ninja skills or something?
  • From what I read in another trope, Rexy can actually be VERY sneaky when she wants to be. The reason you could hear her footsteps when Ellie and Muldoon were out looking for Grant and the kids was that they were in her paddock, and because she's highly territorial, she's stomping around and roaring, basically telling them to get off of her lawn. When she's in hunting mode, she's a lot more stealthy, which is why they didn't hear her coming at the end, or notice her when she first appeared in the storm.
  • Maybe it didn't approach, but was already snoozing in one of the adjacent galleries when the heroes and raptors came running into the lobby? It woke up when it heard the racket, smelled those pesky raptors, and lunged out to chomp on these annoying little rivals. It'd already dined on lawyer and some of the smaller dinosaurs, so could've seen the main building as a nice sheltered cave in which to take a nap and digest its meal.
  • You know, that's the best explanation I've ever heard for this scene – while the unfinished building accounts for how the animals are able to infest it at will, the 'wall' of plastic sheeting doesn't exactly provide enough soundproofing to mask the tyrannosaur's approach. I've always thought the soundtrack should contain some subtle thumps so one could at least pick them out among the background noise if you knew what you were listening for. However, if one decides it was having a snooze right nearby then that would help negate that flaw!
  • I figured the characters were too worried by the immediate threat of the raptors to notice the shaking ground warning sign of the T-Rex.
  • Presumably at the same tyrannoninja training school that enabled the one in The Lost World to move so amazingly quickly and quietly from the San Diego docks to being all alone in silent sleeping suburbia, without detection and in no time at all...
  • It didn't smash through the wall, the Visitor's Centre was still under construction and those hanging tarps covered a big gaping hole in the side of the building. (I have a picture to prove it.) After the raptor escaped from the shed it was hunted by the Rex which followed it into the building.
  • This site explains how the Rex got in.

Stop the Automated Cars!

• If the tour in the first novel/movie is automated, why does it stop while the characters examine the sick dinosaur?
  • Because they got out of the car and the guys in the control room hit the emergency stop button? Being automated just means it can run without supervision, not that it can't be overridden. In the movie (don't remember the book), they show Hammond and others watching in the control room, and one of the characters says, "How many times have I said we need locks on the car doors?" when they got out. I'm pretty sure they did override the tour and turned it around because of the storm, as well.
  • In the novel (where it was the Stegosaurs instead of the Triceratops that were sick), they were expecting Ian and Company to get out of the cars and go see what the resident veterinarian was up to. The line was approximately "Well, it looks like the cars have reached the southern area. I'm sure they'll want to see what Dr. Harding is doing with the stegos." So in the book the locks or lack thereof was never brought up, and it even made it sound like anyone could get out of the cars and walk around with the herbivores.
  • Because Hammond (or Muldoon, but I'm fairly sure it was Hammond) yelled "Stop the tour!" when they got out of the cars, and then Muldoon starts bitching about needing locking mechanisms on the doors. Generally, when you yell "Stop the tour!" and hit the button to stop the tour, the tour stops.

System Ready (But Is There Any Power?)

• After they figure out that they're losing control of all of the systems, Samuel L. shuts down the power. Then he flips the switch and gets... nothing. Not even lights or emergency systems. So how can the computer be on to display "System Ready"??
  • It's probably just that the computer network is ready to operate, but the actual park subsystems that it's hooked up to are still turned off. Like, say, turning your PC tower on after a blackout but forgetting to switch the USB printer and scanner on too.
  • I've wondered about this, and here is my WMG. When he turns the power back on and gets nothing but the "System ready...", it means only that "dumb terminal" is ready and the main computers were not powered up. Since the computers controlled the power grid, there would need to be an active terminal to bring up the main computer to turn the power on for the rest of the park's subsystems (after the breakers were turned back on, anyway). I can't remember how many CM-5 machines they had, but they would require a lot of power to run - ergo they had their own circuit breaker in the movie. I figure that the terminal was on a dedicated circuit that was "always on" regardless of the breakers for the control room being off. It would be more like turning your monitor on and it saying "No signal" when your computer is still off. As to why they had no emergency lighting, probably bad design and No OSHA Compliance. Again, this is just my WMG because I'm combining computer capabilities shown in both the book and the film.

Lex and her flashlight!

• What the hell was Lex doing, shining a spotlight at the face of a T-Rex?
  • She's just a kid acting on fear. She probably didn't know what she was doing.
  • The amount of time she spends flailing the light in every direction, and then continues shining it at the huge carnivorous creature right outside, while utterly failing to just switch it off (or even cover the end, or merely point it downwards) is eternally frustrating, but one has to assume utter panic grips her and infuses all her (in)action throughout this sequence.
  • We have the benefit of being an audience. She, while not a dinosaur expert, at least knows that one by reputation and would be shitting bricks. It's easy to criticize her as an outside viewer, but in her shoes as a ten- or twelve-year-old, you would probably be doing much the same thing.

Nedry is only kinda dumb?

• Nedry knows the Velociraptors are extremely dangerous creatures. He makes the effort to ensure that his electronic sabotage does not disable their fences. Why, then, didn't he do the same for the Tyrannosaurus? Its fence wasn't in his way, and it's every bit as dangerous as the raptors (if not more so, given that it can destroy vehicles).
  • Precisely because it wasn't in his way, one could argue. Even in the unlikely circumstance of the tyrannosaur discovering the power was down and staging a breakout during the less-than-20-minute-window his plan should have taken to execute, he had no reason to be anywhere near there.
  • Nedry not only needs to escape, but he needs to divert suspicion so he doesn't end up in prison. If he only shuts off the fences in a beeline for the dock, it leaves an electronic trail right to him later. If he shuts down all the fences, he can pretend it was some kind of general system failure and he was off looking for a candy bar or whatever his alibi was. That way he only gets fired instead of prosecuted.
  • He wasn't planning on having an alibi at all. He was planning on leaving on the boat at the dock and taking his shaving cream can to Dodgson. I don't think he could be prosecuted for anything he did there, either; a privately-owned island is outside the jurisdiction of any nation that would prosecute him.
  • Just because the island is privately owned doesn't mean it isn't subject to the laws of the country that sold it - Costa Rica in this case.
  • Don't know about the movie, but in the book, Nedry is NOT going to flee on the BioSyn boat, he has it planned out to return to the control room and fix everything in a few minutes.
  • He's not leaving on the boat in the film, either. He mentions an intermediary while meeting with Dodgson ("your guy on the boat"), and he's seen pleading with this intermediary to give him more time later on.
  • Plus Nedry didn't take precaution to not shut off the Raptor-fences, it's probably because they're not part of the perimeter fence (which he does need to shut off).
  • Actually, Nedry did keep the Raptor fence on. It was the complete shutdown of the system that allowed them to get out.
  • It is precisely because they are not a part of the perimeter fence that the velociraptor pen remained on. It was not a conscious decision on Nedry's part. And he stated to Dodgson that he had an 18 minute window in his work schedule, meaning that no, he was not leaving on the boat.
  • Nedry was just going to drop off the can and be back in a few minutes (he had an "18 minute window") and restore everything. How he was going to explain being drenching wet from his trip to the vending machine is anyone's guess.
  • As a matter of fact, the storm is precisely why Nedry's plan was ruined... The island didn't have a good harbor, so the boat he was going to pass the can to was going to leave with or without him. You can tell because of how panicked he sounds when he's trying to get his guy on the boat to "just give him fifteen minutes." Thusly, he's forced to drive in a hurry (a sheer impossibility, given the driving force of the rain massively reducing visibility) which is why he had the accidents that ultimately resulted in his death.
  • His in-movie stupidity aside, the book version of Nedry notes that he can't just shut down the cameras - with the way the network is tied together, he has to shut down the fences and just about everything else in order to get away with his theft. He was going to pass off the can and then get back and fix everything, but came down with a bad case of dilophosaurus. Then Arnold screwing with the system, while trying to fix it, only made things worse.
  • It also stands to reason that the dinosaurs would have learned by then that fences=PAIN OH GOD THE PAIN, so they'd stay away from them. The T-Rex was lured to the fence by the goat and coincidentally found that the fence was no longer functioning.
  • Stated as such in the book. When the characters in the control room realize the fences are off, they speculate that probably nothing will happen, since the dinosaurs have been in their paddocks long enough that they know not to touch the fences.
  • Furthermore, the velociraptors were kept in a holding pen that was not part of the actual park. In fact, the raptor holding pen was quite close to the visitor center and lodge. It stands to reason that the raptor pen would have been on a different electrical grid than the park proper; remember, the power stayed on in the control room and lodge even after Nedry opened the electronic back door.

Electric Fences and Zoo Animals

• I was under the impression that animals held behind electrified fences in zoos need only touch those fences two or three times before learning (permanently) not to approach them again. I can buy the raptors, as they’re extremely intelligent animals (not to mention that they had constantly been testing the fences for weaknesses) but why would the the other species be so willing to attack the fences once they were de-electrified? I was further under the impression that when power outages de-electrify fences in zoos, the animals rarely attempt to do so. Anyone?
  • Rule of Plot, and maybe they realized that the "Humm" sound electric fences emit had stopped and something was wrong with them. Perhaps the shock was not that great to the massive dinosaurs.
  • The fences had little lights that blinked constantly to indicate they were on, and the raptors in the movie (and especially in the book) are implied to have been intelligent enough to realize this was an indication that they were not on anymore, or at least that something had changed. As far as the actual electric charges in the fence, the way that zoos that use them do it is that the charge is different for animals of different size, and knowing Hammond's greater concern for the cost of his "creations" than for safety, the charges on all the fences, except perhaps the perimeter fencing around the main compounds were probably significantly lower than they should have been. Put an electric charge on that fence high enough, and not even the raptors will touch that fence more than once. More than likely, on the containment fencing, it was just high enough to be unpleasant, not unbearable, lest they risk damaging Hammond's precious animals. As far as how the other animals figured out, perhaps they saw the raptors and decided to try it themselves?
  • Plus electric fences are more about causing a painful shock rather than anything that could cause injury. I have actually been shocked by a fence and felt no effects after about two seconds other than an adrenaline rush. Maybe the animals went for that.
  • In the book, the fences carry a charge of 10,000 volts (I don’t know the amperage). 10,000 volts isn’t really that big of a charge for large animals. For comparison, a stun gun delivers a charge of about 5,000 volts.
  • And a small static shock you receive when shuffling your shoes on the carpet and then touching something? About 20,000 volts. So volts means jack when it comes to danger, but higher numbers scare people (10,000 volts sound more impressive than 5 amperes...).
  • In the film, the only dinosaurs that we know escaped their pens are the T-Rex and the raptors. Grant and the kids start off in the T-rex paddock and cross over into one of the herbivore areas. Nedry had to pass through the Dilophosaurus paddock on a service road to reach the east dock.
  • Or maybe the raptors busted through those cages too, in order to hunt the other caged dinosaurs.
  • Or maybe it just never came up because, as already stated, the only dinosaurs we know escaped their pens are the T-Rex and the raptors.
  • I always thought that it was because the T-Rex had come for the goat. She might've brushed up against the fence then and found to her surprise that she could go out on holiday.
  • In the book, the raptors attack the fence constantly. One of workers notes that they do it all the time, and don't seem to be terribly bothered by the shock. They appeared to be both impressively stubborn and patiently waiting for the fence to go down. It is implied in the books that the raptors had been mauling and killing workers periodically, so they were likely aware that the systems keeping them trapped were fallible as well - especially considering that they were breeding and escaping to that cavern near the docks.
    Also, in the book most of the animals did avoid the electrified fences. The only ones to break out initially were the rexes, the raptors, and the compys, though I think the compys were allowed to free-roam so they could clear out the faeces. The rexes are implied to be smarter than everyone else expected (and she was aware that the fences were keeping her from attacking the brachiosaurs) and it did grab the fence by accident, at which point she realized the fence wasn't electrified (she did something similar in the movie, as you can see her arm grabbing the fence). The raptors (aside from the ones in the pen by the main building) were already on the loose before the power was out.
  • The storm might've knocked debris onto some of the sections of fence too. When the dinosaurs came to sniff at the fallen tree branches, they discovered that touching the wires didn't hurt anymore.
  • In the book, two paddock fences were in fact damaged by debris. One for the dilophosaurs and one for the herbivores (which seemed to largely share a single paddock).
  • It's mentioned that the raptors are constantly attacking the fence, testing it to see where weak points are so they can plan a way to get out.

Why doesn't Tim get the gun?

• When Allen and Ellie are trying to hold the door closed to keep the raptor out, she's trying to drag the gun closer with her foot. Is there any reason they couldn't have told Tim to hand them the gun? He was the only one who didn't have his hands full. He was just watching his sister trying to "hack" the computer.
  • Tim was too busy hopping up and down with his fingers in his mouth on the verge of panic.
  • It likely had to do with content; people in Hollywood, when not making a straight up action flick, are generally not fond of portraying guns positively, and absolutely hate having children even touch guns.
  • Too Dumb to Live
  • Think about it. Really, honestly, think about the consequences of putting a shotgun in the hands of a small child that is already in a panicked state, in the middle of a dangerous situation. The last thing they need is for Tim to pick up the shotgun, the raptor throws itself against the door and screeches in the window, Tim screams, and shoots Dr. Grant in the face.
  • He would have to be touching the trigger in order to do that. I'm not even certain the gun was primed to fire anyway. Seriously, I knew by the time I was seven not to touch the trigger of a gun when anything I didn't want to shoot was in front of me. I wasn't allowed to even touch a disassembled gun unsupervised then, but the extremely deadly situation in the film would have been an easy exception.
  • You were also never at any point trapped in a room with a Velociraptor intent on ripping you to shreds trying to barge through the door trying to eat you. Under which circumstances, I can almost guarantee that seven-year-old you would have had less nerves of steel and consequently less flawless gun handling. So you can probably dial down the self-satisfaction slightly.
  • He could've at least push it closer to Dr. Sattler and she'd picked it up herself.
  • He is a small child who, in the last twenty-four hours, has been attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, been knocked over a cliff in a car, had to flee down a tree while said car toppled down on him, been electrocuted, been chased by the same large killing machine that is currently at the door, and has had nothing but a few mouthfuls of cake to eat in the last twenty-four hours or so. The fact that he's upright and sane is a testament to how tough he is, complaining that he didn't assist in Grant going all Action Hero on a raptor is just nitpicking. He's supposed to be and act like a human being, not an RPG character. "3 HP remaining. Click on the shotgun, then click on Dr. Grant to open the trade window."
  • The above, and also they didn't want a small child anywhere near that door. The Raptor could have burst through at any moment. They'd have to let go of the door to fire the gun anyway, thus letting it in. The gun was needed because they knew the Raptor WOULD burst through and they needed to defend themselves. Whenever you ask this question, finish it with the answer "Because Tim is 8 years old."
  • Also, are you really questioning why Steven Spielberg would be at least a wee bit hesitant to showcase an untrained eight-year-old handling a loaded shotgun in a movie he knows every movie-going kid on the planet is likely to be acting out scenes from?
  • Yes, there is a possibility that Tim might accidentally shoot himself or Grant when handing the shotgun over, but isn't it preferable to take the risk? A risk far more minimal than the one they take by not having him get the gun and throwing everything behind them holding the door long enough for Lex to finish? What is more important: what will happen or what might happen? And evidently nobody arguing against Tim getting the gun has ever heard the old saying that desperate times call for desperate measures. That, and everyone seems to be acting like Tim simply touching the gun is the equivalent of him picking it up and firing it himself. Of course, the only satisfactory explanation for why Tim doesn't get the gun is an out-of-universe one. Nobody's provided a good in-universe explanation. I don't buy "the adults are too concerned Timmy might shoot himself" due to the aforementioned desperate times thing; the one thing that can kill the raptor is lying where they can't get it and the only person who can retrieve it is a child. I'm sorry, but it's worth the risk.
  • The in-universe explanation why Tim doesn't get the gun is because he's a scared, injured child and isn't thinking clearly.

Why did Tim get electrocuted?

• The electric fence that zaps the kid - why does it electrocute him even though he's not in contact with anything other than the fence? My very simple understanding of electricity leads me to believe that nothing should really happen, the same way that birds can quite happily sit on pylons and the cables they support. Furthermore this fence is meant to deter large dinosaurs (and indeed we see the kid get thrown off the fence with the power of the shock) but after some CPR it's like nothing happened to him, not even any surface burns on his hands.
  • He created a circuit between two conducting lines in the fence.
  • I have seen the corpses of squirrels that tried to cross from one live power line to the next, accidentally touched both wires at once, and got fried.
  • Tim was not okay after the shock. He's bleeding out of one ear, one of his hands is bandaged with Grant's handkerchief (probably the aforementioned "surface burn" on his palms you mentioned,) and he develops a serious limp (look how useless his leg is when he's trying to hop away from the raptor.) All these injuries appear immediately after the shock and remain for the rest of the movie, and they're only the visible ones; who knows how bad his internal injuries are, the ones the movie audience can't readily see.
  • I find it interesting how the Animal Paddock fencing manages to turn back on, considering how many holes Rexy put into it on her trip to the VC.
  • Electrical fences IRL aren't a single circuit, they're segmented (otherwise they'd be a bitch and a half to maintain and power.) There are even individual switches for the various paddocks across the park, so if the T.rex tears a hole through her own paddock's fence, the triceratops' fence is unaffected.

Did Malcolm inadvertently kill Gennaro?

• Ian got Gennaro (the lawyer on the toilet) killed. When the T-Rex made its first appearance, Malcolm distracted it with a flare to lead it away from the children. But once the dinosaur was chasing him, he lead it straight to the outhouse, where minutes before he saw the lawyer run to. ("When you gotta go you gotta go.") There are some plausible possible explanations for this (maybe he thought he could hide there with Gennaro, or maybe his glasses were fogged and wet and he couldn't even see where he was running). But did they ever actually explain that?
  • Or maybe he was scared out of his mind and didn't really know where he was running. His brain was just telling him "RUN MOTHERFUCKER, RUN!" not where to go.
  • As Rincewind would put it, the important thing isn't where you're running to, it's what you're running from. He had a T. Rex bearing down on him to eat him. He's just bolting in a straight line away from it.
  • It's possible, as you said, that he wanted to hide in the restroom with Gennaro. He just didn't expect a shed placed next to the T.Rex paddock, in an island filled with dangerous animals and located in a typhoon area, to be built out of balsa wood. However, what bothers me about this event is that, when Rexy crashes her head into the restroom, Malcolm is already perched, monkey-like, on her snout, and he does this strange Spider-Man leap off her nose. It just looks awkward. Since she later butted her head against the side of the Jeep, it would've been more believable if she had slammed her head against him too to make him an easier prey to catch, resulting in his injury.
  • Wait, "perched, monkey-like, on her snout"? Where the heck did you see that? I'm pretty sure that just headbutting him is exactly what the Rex did.
  • Look at the scene again. It's fairly noticeable at normal speed, but frame-by-frame makes it extremely obvious that the actor is riding on the nose. Malcolm's feet are planted on either side of her nose, his knees bent and his arms above his head, while she's crashing her head into the stall (ouch. It means that she pushed him through the wall.) When she stops moving, he bends his knees for a split-second before extending his legs and jumping off (a possible explanation is that, in filming, the stuntman is holding onto a cable with his hands, and the cable pulls him off the Rex animatronic to get him out of the shot.) A Jurassic Park T.Rex's headbutt would smash into him from the side, or strike his back, not go up between the legs of a small, shorter animal whose legs are in motion, close together, and shorter than her snout is tall. The composition of the shot is just contrived and awkward, and it effectively looks like Malcolm is nimbly jumping off the Rex's nose after being put through a wall.
  • This, to be fair, is probably just a consequence of the director and SFX team trying to make Malcolm getting the snot smashed out of him by the T-rex look halfway convincing with the practical model and doing the best they can with what they've got. The idea is clearly supposed to be that the T-rex is shoving Malcolm into the restroom with her snout as she crashes into it, but that was almost certainly the best or only way they were actually able to depict it under the circumstances; it's not a literal T-rex, after all, and Jeff Goldblum isn't likely to consent to genuinely getting seriously injured just for a movie effect, so they didn't really have much choice than to get him to squat on the head while some crewmembers pushed it into a wall and hope that, with the wonders of camera positioning and movie editing, it would look halfway convincing on the screen. And really, the fact that you have to "frame-by-frame" it in order to make it "extremely obvious" is testimony to the fact that it actually isn't that noticeable at all without close, repeated viewing, and that they did the best they could to make the effect as natural and seamless as possible. But they're not literal magicians. Acting like the filmmakers were genuinely trying to give the impression that Malcolm was sitting the T.rex's head despite this making no sense and then complaining that this doesn't make sense seems somewhat disingenuous considering that it's clearly not what they're actually going for and that what they're actually going for is incredibly obvious within the context of the scene. At some point we just have to accept this is a result of limitations of the production process and give the creators credit for what they were attempting within the limits placed on them rather than acting like the fact they didn't get it 100% flawlessly perfect is a plot hole that needs to be pedantically taken apart.

How does Grant know raptor behaviour from fossils?

• Okay, I can buy that Grant might know from fossils that the raptors had large brains and were pack-hunters. But how in the hell could he predict their distraction/flank hunting tactics?
  • Well, are there any more modern animals that hunt like that? He could be inferring that previous large-brained pack hunters will hunt similarly to modern ones. Or he made an educated guess and/or was trying to freak out the kid.
  • Well lions do, but I can't recall ever hearing about it with regards to wolves, painted-dogs or hyenas.
  • Yes, wolves do hunt using distraction/flanking attacks. They do use disruptive attacks (charging a few wolves into the herd while the rest attack from the flanks) but distraction is a technique that wolves use as well.
  • Absent a very strong record from fossils and footprints you can't really know their exact tactics. Grant has at most an educated guess. A better question is how the heck he thinks he can actually state that a velociraptor will start to eat by slicing open the belly and leaving the prey alive (especially since we never see that in the movie) or that a Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn't hunt by eyesight. He probably isn't working with a lot of strong evidence for either.
  • That's what palaeontologists do. They make guesses. Compared to a lot of other creatures at the time, velociraptors were small, but they were fairly clearly built as predators. Makes sense they'd be pack hunters, and they'd probably behave quite similarly to pack hunters today. As for the T-Rex motion-based vision, it was apparently a hypothesis at the time, since disproven, based on studies of a T-Rex's braincase, that a Rex had the same basic visual cortex as a frog, who can also only see movement.
  • This is all true: Grant is clearly operating on nothing better than inference and guesswork. His absolute certainty in his pronouncements about raptors' hunting, tyrannosaur visual acuity, etc. does stand out for being implausible. Perhaps it just enabled him to screw with the annoying kid's mind in the Badlands more effectively than saying "well, it might do this". And later on it was more useful to immediately state a single, definite course of (in)action in the face of a glaring Tyrannosaurus, say, than stand there debating the veracity of his sources.
  • Heck, near the end of the novel, the narration all but outright says Grant is just gambling on his knowledge with his poison egg play.
    "Grant had spent his whole life studying dinosaurs. Now he would see how much he really knew.
  • However, that play did have some basis in evidence. Earlier in the book it was mentioned, that he had once uncovered the remains of a raptor in the middle of a hadrosaur nest, and therefore it was assumed that raptors would eat the eggs of other dinosaurs.

Why do Grant and Tim climb straight down the tree?

• When Grant and Tim are climbing down the tree and the car starts following after them, why don't they just move to the other side of the tree? Instead of trying to beat the car to the bottom and run out of the way, just move to the side and let if fall past them.
  • It's not stupid, it's instinct. Humans, like a lot of animals, are hardwired by evolution to move away from threats, be they fire, predators, rockslides, whatever. The quickest way to get away from the perceived threat is to move in a straight line away from it. Moving laterally goes completely against human instinct; it doesn't move you away from an oncoming predator as effectively, and the predator can turn and close the distance more effectively. This is also why humans will instinctively attempt to run upstairs or otherwise get to an elevated position if a threat is perceived, because we're descended from tree-dwelling primates, and first instinct among tree-dwellers is to get up into that tree when threats approach.
  • They're in a tree and about to have a car fall on them, so they panic, instead of pausing for a moment to reflect on what would be the most rational thing to do.
  • Going down is a lot faster than going sideways. Had they taken the time to clamber onto adjacent branches, or even to find suitable branches to one side or the other, they'd have had a facefull of Jeep before they were even halfway around the tree trunk.
  • You try shinnying lickety-split down a wet, vine-covered tree in the dark. See how easy it is to feel for footholds you can't actually see - again, it's dark, the vines are covering the surface, plus your own body is in the way of seeing what you're doing - merely to keep moving downward, never mind circling its trunk in the process.

Why is the raptor cage in the opening scene manipulated by hand? And other OSHA non-compliance

• Seriously, a cage that needs to be pushed into place by hand, isn't secured or clamped by the raptor enclosure to prevent it from moving once it's set, and worst of all it has to be opened by a guy standing on top of it? There wasn't even a forklift stationed at the rear end to act as counterweight, keeping the animal from pushing it! Combined with the electrical fences that are in plain reach of both staff and public (such as Nedry pushing open an otherwise-electrified paddock lock with his bare hands, or basically any idiot guest being able to get out of the easily-opened vehicles and grab a fence), the dangerous, windshear-riddled helicopter drop and ascent into and from the park, and the poisonous flora everywhere, the park didn't need dinosaurs to be a massive class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
• There appeared to be some kind of mechanism to lock the cage into place. Note the stoplight-esque light on the left of the pen and Muldoon saying, "We're locked" when they push it in far enough and the light turned green. A lot of good it did, though.
• As with most of the other complaints about the design decisions, this was a result of Hammond cutting costs. Every other thing you brought up was discussed on this page already.

Malcolm against cloning?

• Why was Malcolm against Hammond's idea of cloning endangered species?
  • He isn't: he's against Hammond's idea of cloning long-extinct species.
  • Because a) dinosaurs are not endangered, they're already extinct (in fact, when Hammond objects that Malcolm wouldn't have an issue with InGen cloning condors, Malcolm emphatically states that it's not the same thing,) and b) he explains why all throughout the book, and gives the cliffnotes in the movie itself. Basically, it boils down to ethics, the inability to create a truly controllable system, and the hubris of InGen's scientists.
  • Malcolm is the mouthpiece of Michael Crichton, and Crichton had many issues with science and scientists. Really, the way he portrayed all of the people working on Jurassic Park was quite Strawman, and Malcolm was letting him vent about his feelings towards them.
  • There are at least two good reasons he had: one, dinosaurs are the ultimate invasive species. They died out 65 million years ago, so there is no telling what kind of effect they'd have if they escaped into the wild (as they did in the novel). Two, dinosaurs don't belong in the modern world, and it's not because of any philosophical or ethical reasons; they're not built for it. The Mesozoic era's atmospheric conditions and climate were incredibly different from today's. One major difference is that the oxygen content was much higher. In the novel, the triceratops was a stegosaurus, and it was breathing like a human does on Mount Everest - gasping for air because it couldn't get enough oxygen. The sauropods defecated like elephants (their digestion is very inefficient), but whatever bacteria that decomposed their faeces in the Mesozoic had gone extinct, and sauropods are ten times bigger than elephants, so there was a huge waste management problem before park management (very, very luckily) found that compys eat faeces, and their faeces readily decompose. Unfortunately, the compys turned out to be some of the dinosaurs that were breeding, and escaped to the mainland to claim invasive species status. The only way for InGen to prevent these problems was not to clone dinosaurs in the first place OR clone them in much more secure, cautious, and isolated ways and locations, but instead they cloned them as fast as they could and then threw them out into a poorly secured island only 120 miles from one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet. So, even if Malcolm is an Author Filibuster, he had some valid points, too.
  • As Malcolm said in response to Hammond's "condor" analogy, "We're not talking about a species wiped out by deforestation or the building of a dam - dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction." So in fact Malcolm is not against cloning endangered species, just the ones that have been extinct for 65 million years. He wouldn't frown upon cloning condors because they are a viable, modern species with a niche in the current ecosystem, and Man is responsible for their extinction; whereas dinosaurs cannot be supported by the same ecosystem anymore and have already been discarded by natural selection and evolution.
  • You could just as easily argue that condors had been 'discarded' because the encountered a predator dangerous enough to completely wipe them out - humans. There is no universal moral guidelines concerning evolution that say 'this animal had its chance and no longer deserves to live' and certainly nothing that decides whether a certain species lives or dies. Resurrecting a species because it was hunted to extinction or resurrecting one for profit and excitement doesn't mean zip to natural selection.
  • You can also counter-argue that there's nothing 'natural' about the ability of humans to wipe species out, certainly beyond the point where we were hunting them for food: it's kind of the point that our adoption of advanced weapons, hunting for sport, changing the atmosphere and natural environment through urbanization, industrialization and so on, means that systematic killing, the breakdown of food chains and habitat destruction go way beyond anything that is necessary for the survival of the species in competition with others. So in that case one can say cloning a species to maintain its existence merely partly balances out this unnatural effect.
  • I actually disagree that Malcolm was Crichton arguing against "science going too far" because people made that same claim when he wrote and directed the movie Westworld as well (which is relevant as the movie is basically a proto-JP), and he went on to clarify that science isn't the problem, it's corporate greed prioritizing profit over rationality and safety. Maybe the thing Crichton was trying to say was that you shouldn't play God not because "dinosaurs are extinct and we need to respect that" and more because "rich CEOs like you will find a way to fuck it up and create disaster."

Scene Discontinuity?

• The first scene, with the guy getting eaten by the raptor at its pen... happens before the following scene where they've just dug out the mosquito from the mine. This isn't a flashback either, it has Gennaro specifically mentioning the accident.
  • Speaking of that mosquito, why the hell did Hammond get it polished into a cane knob and carries it around? That mosquito alone is worth billions of dollars. You'd think it'd be in a vault somewhere. Hell, Nedry would've had an even easier time stealing the cane, and even if there wasn't any blood left in the mosquito to clone new dinosaurs from (which, granted, would make sense - they'd drain it out completely and keep the blood well preserved and protected), once the park presumably became successful, he could've made a fortune selling the cane to a collector. If Jurassic Park became as popular as Disneyland, this would more or less be analogous to stealing an original animation cell of Mickey Mouse drawn by Disney himself.
  • BioSyn don't have the technology to clone dinosaurs; only InGen have that tech, and they're keeping it under wraps. That's why BioSyn needs to steal embryo samples; their problem is a lack of dino cloning tech, not a lack of mosquitos in amber.
  • It's not the same mosquito. The one he has on his cane is a symbol to him.
  • Of course it's not a flashback, and it's not an error. It's a perfectly valid timeline. After all, the JP technicians didn't use a mosquito. They dug up and used a LOT of mosquitoes, and they're STILL digging them up. Did you think all the dinosaur DNA for all the various species in the park could have come from just one bug? The one that was dug up from the mine, might yield something, or it might just be a mosquito in amber with no blood in it. Plus, it makes more sense that, even AFTER the park is completed and operational, InGen would continue to dig up more and more samples in order to increase its supply. Hammond's cane is just decorative; it could also be just a worthless sample that he had polished and set on a cane, or it could be a sample that has already been used and is no longer useful.
  • Or it could be a specimen of amber that dates to a period after dinosaurs went extinct, that Hammond won't have any use for unless he decides to create Eocene Park.
  • It's even mentioned in the novel, that Hammond and InGen have pretty much cornered the worldwide market for amber, much to the confusion of everyone else.

Where did everybody go and why?

• Why the hell were most of the park staff leaving the park on the boat? Especially during the preview tour?
  • Because of the storm that was about to hit the island.
  • But they didn't know about the storm until Muldoon got a call from the weather station in the middle of the tour.
  • Hurricanes / tropical storms / tropical depressions are huge storms that form in the middle of the ocean and travel for days or weeks before they hit land (whereupon they start to disintegrate due to the lack of warm water to feed the system). As anyone who has lived in a hurricane-prone area will tell you, it is literally impossible to be unaware that a hurricane is coming several days in advance unless you and everybody around you neglects to keep up with the news for some reason.
  • They had to have known about the storm. Hurricanes don't just spring up out of nowhere. I'll have to see the movie again to be sure, but if I remember correctly the call was about the storm having either changed direction or hitting them sooner than they anticipated.
  • Exactly, when Muldoon relayed the info, we learned that they knew about the storm and had been keeping tabs on it, and were hoping that it would "swing south" and miss them. Evidently, it didn't. In the book it's not as severe a storm; the staff was mostly just returning to the mainland because they were scheduled to do so, leaving behind the essential personnel that could take care of the park and tend to the guests (such as Dr. Wu, the game warden, the vet, assorted technicians and service employees, the sysadmins, etc.) that were later munched on by raptors. In the movie, it doesn't make any sense because having the entire staff (and Dr. Wu and the vet) leave on account of the storm resulted in the guests, the owner, and three absolutely irreplaceable employees left at the mercy of the storm, never mind the dinosaurs (and of those three, Nedry was also probably supposed to leave, so that makes only Muldoon and Arnold to take care of the whole island AND guests!) They didn't even leave a cook behind to make them dinner!
  • They're not leaving because of the storm. They're leaving on the evening shuttle transporting the staff to their homes on the mainland.
  • Bingo. It's the weekend, and the park is heavily automated, so most of the cloning staff were going heading home until Monday.
  • So why did they schedule the hatching of a new clutch of Velociraptor eggs on the very day before everyone was leaving? Surely the hatchlings would need keepers and a vet to tend to their needs and watch for any medical issues, in their first few days of life! Any real-life zoo director who'd allow their veterinary and care staff to leave an entire newborn litter of a priceless species alone in their nursery cages for the weekend would deserve to get fired.
  • This is a plot point in the film. In the book, Nedry's security shutdown only happens to coincide with a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm.
  • A better question is why was the facility put there in the first place? Hammond could have gone to any number of nations across the planet, proved that his idea actually works and they would have knelt and begged him to set up in their nation. It's not as though the conditions on the island couldn't be replicated on a far safer part of the world.
  • How does he prove his idea works prior to having his facility set up? Until they hatch a live dinosaur, it's all theory; is it ever suggested that they had dinosaurs before they had the island?
  • Yes, it's chicken-and-egg, so to speak – which came first for InGen, acquiring the island, or their first experiments to produce a dinosaur embryo?
  • And if you have a Jurassic Park on a continent, and the dinosaurs escape... well... that could be problematic. Same with an island nation, especially an archipelago. At least Isla Nublar was a privately owned, isolated, and tiny island as a consequence of which the breakout's collateral damages were minimal. Disregarding of course in the book how certain small carnivores made it onto the mainland via ships.
  • It reduces the number of character deaths. In the novel, more of the staff stayed on the island and more people died. Since the first movie was marketed as a family movie, having the staff leave for the mainland reduced the number of onscreen deaths significantly.
  • As for why they chose Isla Nublar (and to a lesser extent, Isla Sorna), it was made abundantly clear in the book at least, that Hammond hates government oversight, which is presumably why he lied about what he was setting up in the first place. At one point during of his rants, he also makes it clear that he considers Isla Nublar 'his' island and not a part of Costa Rica. And finally, having it on an island makes it easier to control access, both to prying eyes as well as government inspectors.
  • It's quite possible that there were certain other essential staff who remained on the island too, but they weren't seen because they weren't relevant to the plot (revolving around the control room). They may have been killed offscreen, or found their own means of escape. Or they just went to ground in other bunkers to avoid the storm and didn't even know about the dinos' escapes until it was all over.

Did they really need two flares?

• When they're trying to get the T rex away from the kids, Grant lights a flare then waves it around and throws it away. The T rex then starts walking after it, so it was working. Why'd Malcolm get a flare too and run with it? If he hadn't done that the dinosaur would have walked away, he wouldn't have gotten hurt, the other guy wouldn't have gotten eaten, and the kids would have been safe.
  • He probably thought the Rex was going to turn back, so he wanted to buy them more time. Grant immediately tries to tell Malcolm not to do it, so even the movie thinks it was a boneheaded move on Malcolm's part. Heroic, yes, but still boneheaded.
  • There is another reason: We know that Grant at this point doesn't like children, but when the cars stops, Malcolm (a father) immediately starts thinking about the kids in the other car ("Kids get scared" quote). When Grant has thrown his flare (and Malcolm taken up his), what does he yell to Grant? Get the kids! Basically, Malcolm's father's instinct kicked in and tells Grant to get the kids (which might not be Grant's first instinct) as he thought that was more important (with the Rex having attacked it and all).
  • Alan Grant is a palaeontologist. Ian Malcolm is a chaos theorist. Grant has studied dinosaurs all of his life. Malcolm hasn't. Grant is familiar with the notion of predatory motion-based vision. Malcolm isn't. When Grant threw the flare, Malcolm probably assumed it would distract the Rex for a second, before it turned back and chomped down on Grant. He didn't know the science behind the dinosaur's eyesight and believed that by offering a new distraction, he was saving Grant's life. This is further demonstrated when he finally does throw the flare and keeps running; he didn't understand it was the motion the Rex was chasing. With the limited information about the situation that Malcolm possessed, what he did was remarkably heroic, luring the Rex away so that Grant could reach the children. Unfortunately, because of the information he did not possess, it was ultimately meaningless.
  • Except, Grant did tell Malcom moments earlier (when they were still in the car) "Keep absolutely still! Its vision is based on movement!" Did Malcom not hear that?
  • My guess is he acted exactly on the premise that T-Rex's vision is based on movement. You see, when someone throws the flare away, it flies a little, then falls on the ground and stops moving, thus stops distracting the T-Rex. Also, unlike the viewers, Malcolm doesn't know the kids are mostly okay despite their car being mauled by a giant reptile. For all he knew they could be injured and require medical attention like NOW. Malcolm probably feared she'd return to Grant and kids while they are trying to get out of the car, receive first aid and hide somewhere. So he wanted to create a constantly moving distraction, and a running man with a flare was the best choice he had. Basically he was knowingly sacrificing himself to buy them some more time.
  • Malcolm not stopping probably has less to do with him running all the figures and probability of what the T. Rex will and will not follow and more to do with the fact that he is an extremely edible human with a T. Rex bearing down on his ass. Every instinct in him is going to be screaming, "If you stop, your ass is going to get eaten."
  • Alan jumped out of the car and endangered his life for those kids. Malcolm is a great guy and feels bad about staying in the car and not helping, so he thinks he can help some more by lighting another flare. It's a little bit of an attention thing, but mostly it's him not thinking it through.
  • Ian has a soft spot for kids; the second movie makes that apparent, but it's there in the first movie (as mentioned earlier, the "kids get scared" quote). Even though Ian is (rightfully) skeptical that the park was adequately secured, he's not a self-centered ass unless he's trying to prove a point to Hammond on how stupid the design of the park was. Besides that, Ian also was told by Grant that the tyrannosaur's sight is vision-based, too; he also seems to be in pretty good shape, so logically he could conclude that he would at least bide Grant time to get the kids to a safe hiding spot where the tyrannosaur would be unable to spot them if he was caught and killed. Ian saw that the flares distracted the Rex when Alan used one to get its attention, so naturally he would conclude that "running man + flare + vision-based sight = distracted tyrannosaur" and use that as a way of removing the Tyrannosaurus from the overturned safari car.
  • Grant only told Malcolm that the T. rex's vision was motion-based. He never mentioned to Malcolm that the dinosaur could also see in the dark much better than humans. Malcolm probably assumed she would follow the moving light, not the moving figure that the rain and darkness would've obscured from human-caliber eyesight.
  • To say nothing of the moving figure in the dark and rain dressed entirely in black.

Nedry needs to choose his timing better

• Why did Nedry choose to do his 18-minute window on the night of the hurricane? Why couldn't they have rescheduled?
  • Neither Nedry nor BioSyn was keeping tabs on the hurricane the same way the park was. Notice that Nedry is very confident about his timetables when meeting with Dodgson, but when his contact on the boat is forced to board because of the hurricane, Nedry pleads with him to give him more time.
  • Oh, and also, this is more evident in the novel: in the film Nedry is there without much of an explanation. He's the sysadmin and appears to be a permanent member of staff, so, OK, it makes sense that he'd be at the island, and the audience doesn't ask any questions about it. But in the novel, Nedry is there only to do immediate on-site corrections and fixes to the system, because he had designed and programmed it remotely from the USA. He even comes in with Grant's party on the helicopter, and would have probably left with them if nothing had gone wrong. This is his first time on the island at all, and who knows when he'll get to come back. So it's now or never.
  • It's evident in the movie, too. For whatever reasons (discussed above as not too bright) they were taken somewhat by surprise by the typhoon. And Nedry was on the clock the MINUTE he met with Dodgson. Pay attention to the conversation, as soon as Dodgson pulls out the gimmicked refrigeration storage shaving cream can, the bulk of the plan is talked about. They have only a short amount of time to get the embryos, as the can only has a short amount of time it will stay refrigerated. When Dodgson tells Nedry about the time limit, Nedry immediately responds by telling him that's up to Dodgson's guy on the boat who Nedry will be handing the can off to. Nedry wasn't planning on leaving, hell, he had just arrived not long before the protagonists' group. Note (in the movie at least) when Mr. Arnold announces that all those going to the mainland need to leave immediately because the boat has to depart sooner than expected, Nedry doesn't go, nor is there a brief bit where he's told he's supposed to leave and he says he'll just stay because of the bugs they picked up on the tour that would explain him being around if he was supposed to be going to the mainland with the rest. He has a terse conversation with Dodgson's man at the boat, and he's forced to accelerate his timetable. I've always figured the part with Nedry babbling to Hammond and Arnold before he sets his programming in motion is because this is not what he had planned, and he was "forcing" his "18 minute window" where it didn't belong, forcing him to come up with a lie about his whereabouts on the fly. In a nutshell: Nedry and Dodgson had obviously been in talks about that for awhile, and as soon as they met before Nedry went to the island and Dodgson gave him the can, the plan was irrevocably in motion. I think a better question would be "Why didn't Nedry just abort, contact Dodgson later that the storm hit at exactly the wrong time, meet and give him back the canister to get either charged or replaced, and set up a new weekend to try the heist?" Which of course is answered by "there'd be no movie."
  • Nedry actually was going to do that in the novel, before he ran into the dilophosaur. He didn't get the chance to even consider aborting until he saw how bad the storm was firsthand, driving out in the thick of it.

What was the point of the sick Triceratops scene?

• A lot of time is spent on a sequence which seems like it's going to be important but goes nowhere. It serves to separate Ellie from the rest of the group but her chastising of Hammond for his hubris and her heroics turning the power back on only occur after she has already returned to the T-Rex paddock with Muldoon and rescued Malcolm. So what was the point of it?
  • It put Grant and the kids alone together. If Ellie was with them, then Grant wouldn't have been forced to grow out of his Does Not Like Kids attitude, and that makes up most of his character arc.
  • True, but the writers manage to separate Grant and the kids from Malcolm easily enough. It's not a stretch to conceive of a scenario where Ellie stays with Malcolm (he's injured) and she and Grant still get to do everything they do, without introducing the sick Trike. It seems like the writers were going somewhere with it, then didn't.
  • Grant and the kids left Malcolm only because they thought he was dead. If Ellie was there and they all knew Malcolm was alive, then why would they split? They'd wait for the rescue/try to move somewhere safe together.
  • The purpose of the scene was, primarily, to show the carelessness of the park's landscapers (and, by extension, the park's creators themselves) when it turns out that the trike was indeed eating the poisonous West Indian lilac (accidentally) while grazing on other, non-poisonous food. The book and the comic book (oddly enough) show Tim discovering the gizzard stones regurgitated by the trike, which carry evidence of such poisoning; the movie deleted this scene, focusing instead on a) "Cool, a trike! Grant has a heart after all!" and b) scatological humour. So Tim's intelligent insight and the first clue of the park's failures are both removed in one stroke, while the rest of the scene was kept to justify Ellie staying behind.
  • I wouldn't say the clue is completely gone. I mean, they have a sick dinosaur and apparently no idea why— that at least hints at the idea that these guys maybe don't know what they've got on their hands. That's how I took it the first time, and they do keep her line later pointing out that Hammond put plants in the park that were pretty without worrying that they're poisonous.
  • OP here. These are all good points and there's no disagreement from me about what the scene was trying to convey. It's just a shame that it was so truncated. However, what really grinds my gears about this scene is that Ellie, the palaeobotanist, is the one that points out to the park vet that the dinosaur's pupils are dilated, and he's surprised to see it. OK, it's strongly implied that Ellie has some form of medical training (she gives Malcolm morphine when he's hurt) but are we meant to believe that the vet is so incompetent that he never bothered to perform one of the most rudimentary tests on a sick animal despite the fact that this has happened before? I know it could be explained as another indicator that Hammond and his people don't give a crap but, really, even a vet that had been struck off would exhibit more competence than this. You'd think that John 'no expense spared' Hammond would want to take more care of his multi-million dollar investments.
  • And how could Ellie, or anyone for that matter, know how big a Triceratops's pupils are supposed to be, anyway?
  • If your eye has pupils, it's for the same exact function as any other eye with them: to contract and expand in the excess or absence of light. Even if it's the first time she's encountered the animal, a palaeobotanist would know what the pharmacological effect of toxins is on at least warm-blooded animals. If she sees that the trike's pupils fail to contract even in the bright ambient light of the island, she doesn't know how large or small they're meant to be - she just needs to see that they're not changing size.
  • But we never find out what made the Triceratops sick in the first place. First Ellie thought it was this poisonous plant, but then she checked the dino doo-doo and found that, no, the Triceratops didn't eat any of that plant. And the movie makes a big deal about this whole sub-plot. For several minutes here it's nothing but "Why is the Triceratops sick? I don't know, let's find out." Then it's just dropped from the movie with no resolution.
  • The scene is a truncated version one in the book, except there it's with a Stegosaurus instead of a Triceratops. The mystery is solved fairly quickly, as Grant finds gizzard stones: rocks the stegos scoop up to help them digest plant matter. When they scoop up the rocks, they scoop up the West Indian Lilac berries, which make them sick. But the real point of the scene is that Grant also discovers broken eggshells, leading to the revelation that the dinosaurs are breeding- much earlier, and much more important, in the book than the movie. The fact that neither of these things happens in the movie does, indeed, make the scene largely pointless, other than splitting up Ellie and Grant.

Interactive CD-ROM!

• Interactive CD-ROM? So I can just eject the tour program whenever I want?
  • Assuming there is a disk to eject, the disk drive is probably covered and locked so tourists can't "borrow" the program.
  • CD-ROMs were an early-to-mid '90s buzzword.

No security guards?

• Why didn't the park have security guards? Seriously, even the average zoo has more security than the Jurassic Park, which is pretty baffling since the Jurassic Park was dealing with animals that they knew little about and were highly dangerous.
  • Like many questions about the terrible state of the park, the answer ultimately boils down to John Hammond's cost-cutting. Live human employees cost money. Money for living facilities, paychecks, insurance, etc. Hammond had a dream of a completely automated facility where he wouldn't have to pay a single human employee a dime once the park got on its feet and running. He had security fences, automated doors, etc and he believes that is enough.
  • There were. They all went home for the weekend. The island ran on a skeleton crew, since the park hadn't been opened yet, and there was barely anyone to guard. And Hammond was extremely hostile to even the slightest possibility that one of his expensive dinosaurs could be injured or killed.
  • The book mentions security guards searching for Nedry after his disappearance, and Grant and company find the bodies of three separate security guards at the visitor center after the raptors got out. Presumably the few security guards were overwhelmed and killed during the dino escapes.
  • The park wasn't open to the public yet. While, clearly, the staff should also have been guarded, that was an oversight by Hammond. It's possible security guards just hadn't been hired yet, or if they had, they hadn't been actually brought in to work yet as they don't have tourists to protect yet. The events of the first movie were an Obvious Beta and the park is clearly still under construction.
  • Never mind guarding the tourists from the dinosaurs; why doesn't the park have security to protect tourists from each other? Or to protect all those multimillion-dollar assets (animals, embryos, laboratory equipment, computer systems) from anybody with a private boat and a few black-market contacts, who might come swooping in over the weekend and haul off whatever they can get their mitts on? To heck with it being a theme park, we're talking about a major corporation's proprietary research facility here!
  • With regards to the tourists, to be entirely fair the park is still in its late development phases; you don't need to have a full security force to monitor the tourists when at this stage "the tourists" are about six people. Presumably InGen would start hiring a larger park security force closer to when the park was about to be opened. As for why there's still no skeleton crew guarding the massively valuable proprietary dinosaur embryo research? Umm...
  • The embryos had both cameras and secure doors surrounding them, and the embryos themselves are fragile. It took very specific sabotage and a special container for Nedry's plan to even be possible, and it was done by an employee. That's three very particular factors that would have to fall in place, making automated security a reasonable choice.
  • Automated cameras and alarms may suffice for security in situations where said system can summon the police in the event of trouble. Who, exactly, is supposed to respond to an automatic alert from Isla Nublar, the Costa Rican coast guard? Without a manned security force situated on the island itself, all a CCTV camera's liable to do about a crime in progress is give you some nice YouTube footage of the robbers scooping up all InGen's research data and portable hardware - screw the embryos, that stolen data will let the buyer make their own - before snapping some selfies by the T. rex skeleton and waltzing out the door.
  • There are guards in the book, although inevitably they act as little more than Red Shirts.

Why not analyze the code?

• Why don't they just go through the "about two million" lines of code? This would be FAR safer than venturing out onto the dinner table, though it would have been boring and taken a while, surely it was the more reasonable option.
  • They DID. Arnold didn't exactly sit on his hands the whole time he was in the control center. In the movie, Arnold found the object that created the backdoor and was trying to access it when he got the "Ah ah ah!" safeguard from Nedry, and soon after that plan got derailed because shutting down power was faster, and resetting the system was MUCH more important than figuring out what Nedry did. In the book, Arnold found the object and its definition, but it didn't help anyway, because there was no way to bring the system back up once the "White Rabbit" had been activated.
  • There's also the fact that they didn't expect to have to reset the breakers, so they were counting on power being immediately restored. They figured that was a better option than having Arnold sift through codes for god knows how long while the T-Rex was running around, Alan and the kids were lost in the park, and more importantly, no way to call for help. Priority was getting the phones back to call for a helicopter to get everyone out of there and to tell the other workers that went home for the weekend not to come back to the island. In the end it was the better option. Although the Raptors got out and killed Muldoon and Arnold, Hammond was able to call the helicopter to get everyone else out. More important the T-Rex went to the visitor center the next morning (where it killed the Raptors) anyway (and without any human actions guiding it there), so if they opted to keep looking for the code, T-Rex would have burst in and ate everyone long before Arnold found it.
  • There was a way in the book; there was another command code that simultaneously reversed White Rabbit's effects and erased all evidence of its existence from the computer's memory. However, the staff skipped an important step in resetting the park's systems, namely that when the system was reset, the park's command center (and only the command center) was being powered by a backup generator that could then be used to start the main power. They didn't realize they were on the backup and that consequently the fences remained unpowered. By the time they realized that, the velociraptors had escaped and were attacking. So, in the book, there was a way to reverse White Rabbit, but more human errors led to the situation spiralling out of control anyway.
  • If Arnold looked at one line of code a second, non-stop, it would take over three weeks to check all the code. This is all besides the fact that Nedry is the computer programmer, while Arnold is the chief engineer for the park. Arnold may know something about computer programming (demonstrated by finding the White Rabbit), but Nedry knows far more and knows how to hide it.
  • It's actually very plausible for Nedry to screw up the system in a way that Arnold can't fix. Nedry designed the whole thing, first off. And while Arnold may know something about computers in a general sense, that doesn't mean he knows anything about cybersecurity specifically.
  • Also, it's not just looking at individual lines of code, it's putting them together. If Nedry wrote the code but didn't leave any documentation or comments, not only does Arnold need to read the code but he also needs to figure out what it does, what it is referencing, if it is changing or calling a particular function, and so on.

Not just for the rich? Then who?

• How exactly did Hammond intend to make his park for everyone, and not just for the rich? The park is on an island out in the middle of the ocean and can only be accessed by helicopter or boat, the average middle-class folks wouldn't be able to shell out that kind of money.
  • John Hammond likes to believe he has more morals than he actually does. This falls alongside his "spared no expense" bullshit; taking the moral high ground around his peers lets him feel better about himself, but ultimately, he's still a greedy corporate animal. Note that after Hammond says his line about the park being for everyone, the "blood-sucking lawyer" answers that they can have a coupon day as a way of justifying the high expense of visiting the park, and John Hammond smiles and laughs in agreement.
  • That was less an expression of agreement than a look of, "I have to listen to this guy because he's tied to my investors." Hammond might have terrible business sense, and a spectacular naivete about a lot of things (that wound up getting people killed), but he meant well. It just didn't do anyone any good.
  • John was hoping to bait in the rich folk first, then was planning on baiting the middle class when he had enough money to open new locations or get in more people.
  • He could have been saying something more to the effect of "we won't charge more than we absolutely must", rather that "we'll make it affordable to everybody". Gennaro did say they could "charge anything we want" and listed off some ludicrous prices before Hammond interjected.
  • I figured what Hammond intended was that the Jurassic Park experience would be within reach of the average middle class family, but would still (by necessity) be rather expensive. The average-income types would be able to visit at least once in their lifetime, they'd just have to save a lot of money beforehand, and maybe choose a less expensive package than the richer folks. He's not saying the experience would be super-cheap, he's just shooting down the prohibitively high prices the lawyer is implying. Also, as something of an idealist, he's probably ignoring the fact that quite a sizeable amount of people wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.
  • The travel industry would have conspired to make it affordable, just like how it eventually put cruises and tropical vacations within the range of most people. With various packages, comparison shopping sites, etc., you could figure on something like boarding a cruise ship (which in itself would be a little vacation), travelling to the port and taking the Jurassic Park Ferry, heading to the park for the day, then coming back to the ship that night and it leaves in the morning on its return trip. Figure $200 a head for the cruise tickets, $100 a head for Jurassic Park entry, that's $1200 for a family of four (not including park food, shipboard purchases of drinks and gambling, souvenirs, and travel expenses to the ship's departure point). Not a truly bank-breaking vacation, even at two or three times the cost... many people budget that much to go to Disney World.
  • One $10,000 customer. 100 $1,000 customers. Do the math. In any case, this thing is so amazing and ground-breaking, everybody would want to see it. For many it would still be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but Hammond means it when he wants everybody to be able to see his achievements. He can charge very highly for the first year for the first people to see it, and then cut it down, still convincing himself that anybody can see it.
  • Jurassic World actually kind of explains this fairly well, and there's no reason to suggest Jurassic Park wouldn't have followed a similar model: there is a ferry dock at the northern tip of the island (southern tip for Jurassic World), people visiting the park fly in to San Jose, take the ferry over and head in to the park, either on specialized tour vehicles or whatever JP was planning to use. The path from the ferry takes them directly to the Visitor's Center, the helipad that Grant and company came in on was for Hammond's personal use.
  • I assume that it would work in a similar way to Disneyland. Now, Disneyland is pretty expensive, and unless you're very well off you probably can't afford to go on vacation there every summer. But if you save up and budget for it, you can probably afford to have at least one family vacation there within your life. I imagine Jurassic Park would probably work a similar way; for most people it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but still achievable.
  • Also worth noting that in the original book, John Hammond was a massive prick who cheerfully acknowledged that only the rich would really be able to enjoy Jurassic Park in all its glory. This plot-hole, such as it is, stems from Spielberg's decision to make Hammond a more cuddly and sympathetic character in his adaptation.

Malcolm All In Black

• Malcolm claims that his Limited Wardrobe is partly due to the ease of getting dressed, but also because, "black is an excellent color for heat. If you remember your black-body radiation, black is actually the best in heat. Efficient radiation." Um...what?
  • Radiation of heat. He is saying that while white clothing would reflect heat, black clothing radiates any heat it already has (i.e. gets rid of it) more efficiently.
  • Also, remember that Malcolm is kind of a pretentious dork (and the novel, at least makes this explicitly clear). He's justifying his decision to wear black clothing in an oppressively hot environment with some scientific jargon.

No Bathroom Breaks Allowed On This Automated Tour!

• I totally agree with Muldoon's rant on the tour cars needing locks after the main cast jump ship, but if they weren't wanting guests to leave the vehicle during the tour, why the hell did they install a toilet on the track next to the T-Rex Paddock?!
  • Maintenance crews.
  • Or there might be certain designated stops on the tour route. If the tour's around the whole island, then logically the guests are going to want to stop, stretch their legs, and relieve themselves occasionally, and most groups would want to linger around the Rex area anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a specific gift shop there eventually.
  • Seriously, the T. Rex is going to be the biggest draw by far, the main event, and the most popular exhibit in the park. It's a complete no-brainer for the finished park to have a dedicated stop there, complete with not only bathrooms, but a gift shop and restaurant and its own damn pavilion. Everybody would want to stop at the T. Rex paddock.
  • What do you mean by a pavilion?
  • The issue is less people leaving the car, and more people leaving the car while it's moving. Muldoon's probably more-or-less fine with people getting out while the cars are stopped at various points on the tour, but if people are able to hop out of the car at any point while it's in motion, that's a genuine health-and-safety problem. Also note that Muldoon is the one raising the objection, and Muldoon has been previously dismissed by Hammond as "a bit of an alarmist". One gets the feeling that this is just one of many safety suggestions that Muldoon has brought up which have been overconfidently shouted down.

Why Malcolm?

• Why the heck did they bring Malcolm in as a consultant? Grant and Sattler both had training related to the era in question, but Malcolm's specialty was Chaos Theory. What does that have to do with dinos?
  • The book explains this better. Malcolm was a critic of the Jurassic Park project because they were trying to create a completely enclosed, nearly self-sustaining environment. According to chaos theory, that involves far too many variables ("Life finds a way"), so the project is doomed to fail. Hammond supposedly brought him in an attempt to be impartial and have a critic voice all his concerns. In reality, though, Hammond actually didn't care at all about Malcolm's dissent, and intended to show off how they had addressed all those variables in order to make Malcolm look like a Straw Critic and thus make Jurassic Park seem more impressive.
  • Ian appears to have been brought in by Gennaro at the InGen Board's behest (quoting Hammond, "I bring the scientists, you bring the rockstar"), since (as Gennaro puts across) the board is dubious about Hammond's project themselves. So Ian's role is probably to play the critic and (should he be sufficiently convinced after the weekend) show that he was wrong and that Hammond had taken all of his concerns into consideration.
  • Hammond goes along with the above thinking he will win over Malcolm (who was critical right from the start) and that will prove beyond all doubt he was right all along... except he was wrong on both counts.
  • On a related note (and this is for the novel), but why on earth did Malcolm agree to go on the tour? He obviously knew something was wrong, and as soon as he saw the growth chart for the Compys on the screen, he must have known that they were breeding in the wild? Why wait until they were in the middle of the tour (I can't remember if they spotted the raptors on the ship before or after he pointed out the flaws in the counting and the growth chart), when they were far from the protection of the control room and the area surrounding it? I can only imagine he hoped that something representing tangible proof would appear on the tour.
  • Malcolm wanted to prove himself right, he's clearly got a sauropod-sized ego. On another note there are varying degrees of right. Malcolm would have been right if all of Jurassic Park's screw ups had been limited to compies breeding in Costa Rica and perhaps some of the plants starting to pop up there as well. In fact what actually DOES go wrong not so much proves Malcolm correct as it does prove people are dangerous. Had Nedry never sabotaged the system the majority of the first book would never happen. Eventually and likely under far more controlled circumstances than had actually occurred, someone would have found out about the raptor den and taken them out. Unlike the compies, who could stowaway on boats undetected or even survive on floating bits of driftwood with ease, it's unlikely the raptors would have made it to the mainland in any realistic amount of time.
  • In addition to the above, taking Nedry out of the equation, Malcolm had already been proven right during the park tour, with the discovery of the egg fragments and the compy growth chart. Even if they hadn't stopped for the sick Stegosaurus, and hadn't discovered the egg fragments, Malcolm must have known that he was right before they left for the tour. Once they came back, he could easily have pointed out the problem and holed up in the safari lodge until a helicopter could be called for to take them all off the island.
  • Plus, a nice free weekend on a lush tropical island resort? Why the hell not? He's expecting that Jurassic Park will fail eventually, he's not expecting to be attacked by dinosaurs literally that weekend.
  • As for why he goes on the tour itself, while he's predicting doom and gloom for Jurassic Park, hey, it's still a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a bunch of revived prehistoric animals. Plus he can flirt with the pretty blonde who is also going on the tour. Placed against hanging around by himself in the visitor's resort, I know which one I'd pick.
  • We seem to be over-exaggerating Malcolm's powers of clairvoyance just a little bit here. The man's a chaos theoretician, he's not a soothsayer. When he's predicting that Jurassic Park will fail, he's making an academic argument that the many variables involved in the development of Jurassic Park will lead to an eventual breakdown; that doesn't mean that that as soon as he learns about eggshells, he's going to be all "Lockdown! Immediate evacuation! The park is collapsing!" It's evidence for his theory that Jurassic Park is not as controlled an environment as its creators believe, it's not evidence that he's going to be running from a hungry tyrannosaurus within a matter of hours.

Raptor doesn't mean Bird of Prey

• What the heck was Grant talking about with his connection between "raptor" and "bird of prey"? Raptor comes from "rapere" which means "to take" or "to snatch". Besides that, even if it did mean "bird of prey" that in no way would automatically mean there was a physical connection between dinosaurs and birds. Tyrannosaurus Rex loosely translates to Tyrant Lizard King, that doesn't mean that the Tyrannosaurus was actually a monarch. Considering how unnecessary that part of the scene was, why was something so logically weak even put in the movie to begin with?
  • What he meant was that the word means "bird of prey." Ten seconds on google:
  rap·tor
  Noun
  A bird of prey, e.g., an eagle, hawk, falcon, or owl.
  • Yup. Same thing happens in the book's prologue, where a wounded worker tries to tell his doctor that a raptor attacked him, and she assumes he means a hawk.
  • Actually, initially she's told it's a kind of ghost or vampire that attacks young children in the night. It's only when she looks it up in her Spanish-English dictionary, uncovering the superstitious meaning in the Spanish section first, that she discovers the "bird-of-prey" meaning in the English section.
  • The point is that Grant's point doesn't work. When Velociraptors were discovered they weren't named for any known connection to birds. The name translates to "swift snatcher" (or more loosely "thief"). Grant isn't making some great point about how the names further his argument that birds are related to dinosaurs, he's showing that he doesn't know basic facts that a student of palaeontology should know. Also there's a gigantic difference between a doctor making a logical assumption from common usage of a word and a palaeontologist getting facts from his own field of study wrong.
  • I think you're missing Grant's point. He's not saying, "The words are the same, therefore they're related." I think what he's saying is that it was named "raptor" on the same basis that birds of prey are called raptors— that the traits that applied to birds of prey that earned them that name are also present in the velociraptor.
  • Essentially, he's saying "This dinosaur is so very birdlike that it was given a bird's name, because its bird traits were blatantly obvious from the very first specimen."
  • Eh, it's the same scene where the skeleton is uncovered completely unscattered and assembled like it was in life. Any fossils being found like that would be a miracle. Long story short, the writers didn't understand paleontology.
  • Or they're just simplifying the complexities of an actual dig for artistic reasons and the benefit of the audience. It is just a movie, not a paleontology seminar.
  • Besides that, that was the last point he made after referencing a number of biological similarities. It was just the finisher to his argument, and not really worth getting worked up over.
  • If headscratchers pages have taught me anything, it's that there is nothing so minor that someone doesn't think it's worth getting worked up over.
  • Grant is a palaeontologist in an action-adventure film, not an academic conference. The audience he's addressing aren't certified experts in prehistoric biology with Ph.Ds, they're people in a cinema who probably know some basics about dinosaurs but not much else. The scene is taking a simplified approach in order to more easily convey to the audience the then relatively new idea that dinosaurs were evolutionarily-speaking as close to birds as reptiles or lizards (if not closer), which the non-experts in the audience might not have been aware of.

There are no beaches at San José

• There's a scene in the beach that says "San José, Costa Rica". Why? San José has no beaches!
  • Because movies are terrible at geography.
  • Not sure about that, looked like they did it on purpose since the scene seems to be filmed in Limón, Guanacaste or any other beach in some part of Puntarenas.
    • It wasn't. Like most of the outdoor scenes, it was filmed in Hawaii, specifically in Kapaʻa on the island of Kauai.

Why "The Big One"?

• Muldoon describes one of the raptors as "the big one". Thing is, while all three raptors are never seen onscreen together, they all seem to be exactly the same size. Conceivably it could be the raptor that kills Muldoon in the jungle and is never seen in full frame, but accepted fan wisdom is that it is one of the two in the kitchen at the end, which are indistinguishable from each other.
  • It's been a while since I watched the movie so they may have specified how many raptors there are in the movie. In the book they've been breeding for a while meaning there were more than three of them running around. Alternatively they might just look the same size to us but Muldoon can actually tell the difference between a ten foot long five hundred pound raptor and an eleven foot six hundred fifty pound raptor which sounds significant but to an untrained eye probably looks roughly the same. And out of universe the CGI just didn't go into that kind of detail.
  • Considering she is about the same size as the other two, yet is significantly younger than them (Muldoon specifically says she was a late addition to the pack) it's possible that the "Big One" grew a lot faster than the other clones and was much bigger than her sisters had been at various stages of her juvenile period. Likewise, that she'd have wound up visibly larger when full-grown if the pack had survived.

Hammond on every tour?

• The ride that explains how they could make dinosaurs has Hammond interact with a video recording in a scripted scene. What was going to happen if he wasn't there? Did he plan on doing that for every ride?
  • Possibly. Jurassic Park doesn't seem equipped to handle more than three or four tours at once, few enough that a man with his enthusiasm could easily handle it for a few months until they got around to hiring full time tour guides or what not.
  • Or maybe he cooked up that version of the animation specifically to entertain his grandkids.
  • This, but more likely it's a VIP-only segment reserved for Hammond's personal guests. His grandkids didn't visit the facilities after all.
  • Alternately, he'd intended to hire some look-alike actors to substitute for him once the park was operational.
    • Probably Richard Attenborough. Sparing no expense and all that, you know.
  • Given how Jurassic Park was Hammond's dream project, coupled with his advanced age, I'm willing to guess that Hammond was likely planning to (semi-)retire at Jurassic Park. He owns the island, so he can probably get himself some private lodgings separate from the main resort, and let's be honest; living out your golden years at a luxurious resort on a beautiful tropical island containing dinosaurs that you've personally been responsible for bringing back from extinction doesn't sound that bad (in theory at least). So if he's basically living there, then it'd be easy for him to come in, do a cute little skit for about five minutes at the beginning of a tour, and then go and do his own thing.
  • Technically, it doesn't have to be Hammond fronting each tour for that little skit to work. The 'interacting with himself" bit only really involves two brief exchanges:
    Screen Hammond: "Hello John!"
    Live Hammond: (something presumably like "Why, hello John! How are you?")
    Screen Hammond: "Well, fine, fine, I guess."
    Then a pretend pinprick from the live host to the screen Hammond's finger:
    Screen Hammond: "John, that hurt!"
    Live Hammond: "Relax John, it's all part of the miracle of cloning."
    So you'd only actually need any random host named John (or even pretending to be!) for the 'conversation' to hang together...
  • If it's anything like certain Disney attractions they have a "B mode" as in plan B, for when certain ride effects aren't working that day or there's other problems (such as a video screen taking the place of a non working animatronic). They'd probably have something like that, if Hammond is busy that day there's a second slightly altered video that either removes the John talking to himself bit or has the other John be also part of the video.

Why bring in a dinosaur expert for living animals?

• So the plot is kicked off because the family of the worker killed in the opening was threatening to sue and the company wanted an expert to vouch for the park's safety. But why would the company insist on Alan Grant, or any paleontologist for that matter? He studies fossils. What makes him an expert on the best means to safely contain and control living, breathing dinosaurs? Wouldn't somebody who has designed things like zoo enclosures be a better pick?
  • Grant being there wasn't about safety, it was about creating good press. It was about having one of the foremost names in paleontology endorsing the place, so Jurassic Park would have a good image and keep going forward despite safety concerns.
  • It's also because, well, they're dealing with dinosaurs. A zoologist may be better with living animals, but knows little more than a layman about dinosaurs. A paleontologist would know dinosaurs better, and you have to know some basic zoology to be a paleontologist, since all you have are bones and have to make the best guesses possible based on those bones, you need to know about real, living animals to make good guesses.
  • As stated in a Headscratcher above: Grant was brought in to verify the taxonomy of the creatures. By his own admission, Wu's lab doesn't even know WHAT they'll get until they actually grow it; they then try to match the result to the fossil record, but they're not experts. And, for all they know, they'd grow a five-toed hadrosaur and wouldn't know this is an incorrect mutation until a paleontologist came to tell them they got it wrong. Grant isn't there to verify park safety, he's there so Hammond can point at him and say, "See? Our expert paleontologist confirms that this is 100% a certified, authentic T.rex!"
  • Let's be fair; a palaeontologist is probably the closest thing that you'll be able to get to an expert on dinosaurs that are actually walking around the place. No matter who you turn to, everyone would be kind of flying by the seat of their pants at that point. At least Grant has actually studied them.
  • Paleontology in Real Life is all about making analogies between fossils and extant species. Paleontologists need a solid grounding in biology to draw the kinds of comparisons that make fossil evidence meaningful.

Why didn't Ellie take a gun with her?

• When Muldoon and Ellie leave the emergency shed to turn the power back on Muldoon grabs a shotgun but Ellie doesn't. Why? She does the same thing later on after Grant returns from the Visitors Center. He takes a shotgun but she doesn't.
  • Possibly she has no idea how to use one and thinks it'd probably be more of a liability in her hands than anything. And when she left with Muldoon, at least, they originally had absolutely no intention of splitting up, and (if I remember correctly) at that point they didn't know the velociraptors were loose, so it was more common-sense precaution than anything.
  • The original plan was that Ellie would head to the shed to turn the power back on, with Muldoon as an armed escort. That plan quickly fell apart when they realized the Velociraptors escaped their pen, and then later, Muldoon realized "they were being hunted." He tells Ellie to run for the shed while he moves towards the Raptors, effectively using himself as a distraction so Ellie can get to the shed. Unfortunately for Muldoon, he underestimated the intelligence of the raptors and got killed by them, while unfortunately for Ellie, one of the raptors was inside the maintenance shed.

Big Pile of Shit

• They find a sick Triceratops and a question about its diet comes up which prompts Sattler to begin sifting through the dino droppings for evidence it was feeding on a particular plant. The doctor on site admits he hadn't done that yet and seems to find the idea quite novel. The triceratops in question is lying down but doesn't look to be much more than maybe seven or eight feet at the peak of its back and probably less than three or four at the hip. Those piles of crap are WAY too tall to have come out of the dinosaur in question unless they spend considerable amounts of time gathering them into piles for some reason.
  • It's implied that the modern plants in its enclosure were making it ill; Ellie even notes its eyes being glazed over when they first get a look at the Triceratops. Likely the fact it couldn't fully digest the plants it was eating gave it a case of diarrhea and that the large dung pile was created from said diarrhea.
  • The dung piles may have been what the zookeepers had heaped up when they'd been cleaning the enclosure, not deposits of poop left by a single individual.

Headlights?

• The cars' headlights failed, my question is: are they really necessary in an automated tour? Wouldn't they call the attention of the predators during the night if they worked?
  • That would be a good thing, since seeing the predators are why people are there in the first place.
  • That would only be a good thing if the dinosaurs liked attention. Sure it turns out that dinosaurs love juicy humans and knowing there were people nearby might very well bring them to the edge of the enclosure in the hopes some idiot stuck their arm too close. However realistically lots of real life predators associate lights at night with fire and stay away. Even more so if you're a nocturnal hunter your primary advantage is being able to see better than your prey. Going towards the light would be counter-intuitive. At least until the predators started associating lights with SUVs and SUVs with goats. Which at the very least the raptors were more than smart enough to get that sort of Pavlovian response out of.
  • For anyone who doesn't know, a Pavlovian response is something "relating to classical conditioning as described by I. P. Pavlov". Basically to pair a "biologically potent source e.g. food" with a neutral source (e.g. a ringing bell" and train an animal to associate the two.
  • Why would they even run the tour at night? In the movie they got a late start and then were delayed by examining the Trike, but there's no real point in running it that late during normal operations. They seem to just be there as a prop to serve the whole "safari jeep" theme the ride has.
  • Why wouldn't they run a tour at night? It's entirely possible that dinosaurs were nocturnal.
  • Of course if the dinosaurs possessed even average reptilian intelligence and not the much higher intelligence that we tend to associate with them now many of them would quickly come to recognize the sounds, sights and smells of the jeeps with food and come to the edge of the paddocks. Additionally science is coming to realise an increasing number of them were endothermic and so there doesn't seem to be a good reason to believe that none of the dinosaurs would be naturally nocturnal.
  • Part of the jeeps' route took them under the forest canopy, which would be pretty dark on a cloudy day. The vehicles may also be meant to be used outside of normal operating hours for other purposes, such as checking the roads for fallen branches and wash-outs.
  • It's highly unlikely the jeeps were built and engineered from the ground up just for Jurassic Park to use. They're probably just jeeps that were bought and then modified to run automatically on the electric rail. Thus, they'd come with headlights, and probably no one decided to paint over or unplug the headlights because why would they? They might theoretically be needed at some point so just leave 'em there.

Clever Girl?

• Given Muldoon's knowledge of raptors, how did he not know about their flanking tactics and plan his attack accordingly?
  • Rather pointedly he did. Muldoon circled around to try and outflank the Raptors hunting himself and presumably already flanking Ellie who was taking the expected path, putting his hat in position to be seen by one he spotted to lure it into his shot if it made a run on him. His mistake was in assuming that as he knew it was coming he was tracking the ambushing Raptor itself rather them being lured into their kill zone with a feigned ambush. In reality the Raptors were smart enough to grasp that Muldoon knew their hunting patterns as he'd observed them before so they set him up to spot one of them making the normal flanking moves in Ellies direction while another circled around his attempt to flank them. As Muldoon put it, clever girl, that shows a much firmer grasp of the idea of other thinking beings then most animals have.
  • For what it's worth, the book's Muldoon did know about their flanking tactics and wedged himself in a pipe so they could only come from one direction.
  • I always figured that he was expected them to try to flank him, just from a different direction.
  • Muldoon did know, but he thought he had the drop on them. What he didn't expect was for the apparently unaware raptor he was stalking to be playing possum so that the Big One could flank Muldoon. In effect, the raptors were a step more intelligent than anyone knew; so clever that they could play dumb. It foreshadows their ambush tactics in III pretty well, in hindsight.
  • Muldoon got outgambitted, essentially. He saw a raptor 'hiding' and thought that was the ambushing raptor. Nope- just bait whilst the real ambusher got into position. He's hunted all sorts of modern predators but this is evidence of far more intelligence and cooperation than pretty much anything other than maybe chimps on the savannahs or in the jungles.
  • Is it actually clear that Muldoon has ever seen raptors hunt? He knows about their physical abilities and intelligence, but does he know about their flanking tactic specifically? The park already doesn't let the T. rex hunt, so unless there's something to say otherwise, it would stand to reason that they do the same for the other carnivores. When Muldoon says "Clever girl," it might not be in the sense of "Fair play, you tricked me," but more like "Oh, I didn't know you could do that."

Computer Systems?

• One thing I can't figure out is Nedry's hack. Did he intentionally shut down the security fences? I get shutting down cameras but why the fences?
  • Watch Nedry when he raids the embryos. He pushes through several gates that have high-voltage stickers on them. Those are the fences he shut down— they point out early on that Nedry did not turn off the dinosaurs' fences.
  • No, they pointed out that he didn't shut down the fences on the raptor pen. He only shut down the fences he needed to go through to get to the dock.
  • If he didn't shut them down, then how was the T. rex able to touch its fence at the same time?
  • This has been covered before, but once more for clarity: Nedry shut down the fences to cover his tracks. In the film, he gives a technobabble (emphasis on babble, my God, man, take an improv class!) explanation that basically amounts to "things are gonna go on the fritz for a while." The book goes into more detail: he can't simply shut down the internal security systems and the fences between point A and point B because then anyone following along can figure out what he's doing. If he shuts down all the systems then he can slip in and out in the chaos. And it would have worked if not for that bothersome Dilophosaur.
  • And less than stellar driving.
  • No, the reason he shut the fences off is directly alluded by dialogue:

Hammond: "Why the hell would he turn the other ones off?" — Gilligan Cut to Nedry pushing a fence open with his bare hands. The perimeter fence is one system, so in order to get to the dock, the dinosaur fences have to be shut off. The raptor pen is not a fence, it's a separate system.

Why didn't Muldoon go with Sattler or back to the control room?

• I really don't understand why he remained outside, when it's basically asking to be eaten. He could have gone with and protected the completely unarmed Ellie, who sure enough ran into raptors, or went back in the control room and protect Ian and John. Either way, he and whoever he went with would be much safer. Hell, he could guard the door Sattler went in and only have to watch two directions, so he wouldn't be ambushed.
  • There weren't that many raptors, and Muldoon was confident that he could take out one or two of them if he correctly anticipated how they would approach. He knew no help would be coming to the rescue, at least until the hurricane was over, and didn't believe that just hiding would be enough to keep everyone still on the island alive if the raptors weren't dealt with. He's always thought they were too dangerous to live, and was betting on his own ability to reduce the threat to everyone.
  • Muldoon realizes that he and Ellie are being hunted. If he goes with her, then he and Ellie are both still being hunted, and the raptors will close in on and attack them before they're out of that wooded area. If he stays behind and presents not just a target but a threat to the Raptors, then he keeps their full attention while Ellie can get away.
  • The way Muldoon seems to have expected it to go down was that either before they got in or after the raptors would be in ambush position on either side of the road. One would feign an attack from the front as a distraction then the others would attack from the sides killing them both. Muldoon circled around intending to ambush the ambush, shooting at least one of the raptors to death by out flanking it. At worst that would mean one raptor dead before they took him down while at best his kill would disrupt the ambush forcing them to back off and regroup. He just didn't count in the raptors picking up on his plan of attack, letting one feign readying for an ambush on the road while another circled around him to out flank his attempt at out flanking them. Muldoons plan was good but he slightly underestimated the true intelligence of the raptors.

How can they stop back at the T-Rex paddock?

• During the tour, they pass the T-Rex paddock as the second exhibition (first was the Dilophosaurus). The third dinosaur paddock would be the Triceratops, where they jump out of the cars. Then the storm approaches, and the tour gets cut short. Since they're in automated cars on a track, they couldn't possibly go back via the T-Rex paddock. They could not just do a 180° spin with the cars and drive in the opposite direction. If anything, once the storm breaks loose, they should go back to the visitor's center via paddocks 4, 5 and 6, until the end of the ride. Right?
  • It's possible (likely, even) that there are various sections of track along the tour that the cars can be diverted onto so they can be turned around if they need to quickly head back to the visitors centre without having to go through the entire tour. Kind of like the sidings along a railway line; the tracks are changed remotely so that the cars go along the alternative track, they basically do a u-turn, and are then sent back along the main track.
  • In a previous draft, there is a small scene where Arnold states that he has found a way to turn the vehicles back the opposite way via a loop.

Weak Ankles.

• Ellie does some pretty cool stunts with vines trying to get to the bunker. Then she gets a limp? How in hell did she get one? Trip over a velociraptor tail?
  • She was wearing a flashlight on her belt. That might've weighed her down.
  • It gets loose and she's still limping.
  • The logical answer is that she mildly sprained her ankle somehow, possibly during the aforementioned "cool stunts with vines". She's a paleobotanist, not a ninja.
  • Adrenaline's a beautiful thing. She probably twisted or shocked her ankle at some point running in panic from the raptor in the shed, but had so much adrenaline from being terrified and literally running for her life she didn't feel it until later. It's why first responders and EMTs won't take someone's word that they're fine because they're not in pain. You can be in a major accident and have notable, even severe, injuries, but your body is flooded with "fight or flight" chemicals to such an extent you may not feel them until the next day.
• The Doylist answer is because a bit was storyboarded (and probably filmed) where Ellie stumbles over Arnold's severed leg, but this was cut.
  • Watch back the scenes in question. She doesn't seem to be limping whilst navigating the bunker in the dark. So it wasn't from the rush from breaking away from Muldoon to the bunker. But rather when the raptor tries to ambush her after restoring power. She seemingly tries to clamber over the mesh door (in mortal terror), staggers backwards through it on foot, then gets knocked over by the raptor through the door. Either of those last two actions could have caused the limp.

The original startup mode

• They turn off the power in order to reboot the computers in their original startup mode. How does that work? Are we meant to assume that Nedry's backdoor/malware existed only in RAM, with nothing on the hard drives?
  • In the book, Arnold executes the same command that Nedry would have used to close the backdoor (and swipe all traces of his actions) but the program's security measures wouldn't allow him to reboot. As a consequence he needs to clear RAM and restart the system manually.
  • In the movie, a sudden loss of and restoration of power forced the park to boot into safe mode rather then the fully fleshed out user friendly control system Nedry setup for them. Basic functions only and no automation of any kind which is why nothing kicked on immediately even when power was restored. Safe modes like this exist to allow for debugging and emergency repairs without having to worry that corrupted code or files messed up by sudden loss of power screwing things up further and were part of UNIX systems like the one Jurassic Park uses. Nedrys hack stopped working because the system restarted with literally everything disabled including whatever code was making thr hack function, allowing them to manually turn systems back on one by one.

Triceratops paddock

• The guests exit their vehicle when Grant sees something (the sick Triceratops, as it turns out). How are they able to walk up to the Triceratops? Won't Grant, Malcolm, Ellie, Tim and Lex encounter a wired fence, which makes it impossible to get close to the sick animal? At that point in the film, Nedry has not yet disabled the fences, so the paddock is live.
  • Some parts of the park seem to be more of a safari than a zoo, though a dangerous dinosaur like Triceratops definitely shouldn't be a candidate for the safari portion of the park.
  • Since the vet was tending to the sick (and thus not-so-dangerous) trike, one could maybe presume this fenced area had a door (outside which he parked his jeep) which had disabled electricity to allow him access, and so the guests were able to pass through the door too. Now it doesn't show them passing through such a fence, but there is a short cut where it may have happened.

Why wasn't the endorsement team made up of more relevant people?

• Hammond's decision to invite a couple of paleontologists makes sense, since he was expecting them to be more enthusiastic toward the park, and they're arguably the best sort of people to judge the actual animals. But why did Gennaro, who represents InGen's investors and is thus antagonistic toward Hammond, not bring along someone (or someones) better-suited to assess the actual infrastructure of the park, which seems to have been a big part of the initial reason for the weekend to begin with? Not even necessarily instead of Malcolm, either. Why not a theme park, resort, or zoo designer, for example?
  • Those specialists were already there. Harding had worked at a zoo, Arnold was an engineer for Disney World and Muldoon had plenty of experience with big game reserves. Furthermore, Hammond wasn't exactly open and honest towards his business partners as well. Although Gennaro and his law firm stood behind Jurassic Park, the lawyer knew relatively little about the project.
  • None of those people would matter to the investors because they're employed by the park, and by Hammond specifically. They're not neutral observers in this situation; that was the whole point in getting outsiders.
  • Given the nature of Jurassic Park, it's possible that a regular theme park / resort / zoo designer might not have been as much help, since the requirements of Jurassic Park would far outweigh anything they were already used to. It's also worth remembering that what ultimately scuttles Jurassic Park is unpredictable events resulting from an unexpected act of sabotage; until that happened, things may have looked okay on the surface to any of these experts.
  • Even if the park really was too far beyond what those sorts of experts were used to, InGen would still have an interest in trying, at least. But the park being that advanced wouldn't prevent those people from asking questions like "What happens if the park were to lose power entirely?", "Are the fences physically able to withstand the animals?", "What's the protocol if an animal were to escape?", etc. Those and other such questions don't have satisfactory answers, and so would have put the park in jeopardy without Nedry's plan.
  • It's also possible that this might have been intended as the first of many such inspections of the park before it opened, and a later visit would indeed have involved engineers and designers of this nature. Things just went massively wrong before they reached that point.
  • This arguably depends on how we're defining 'relevant'. Relevant in terms of real-world theme park design? Maybe. Relevant in terms of an action-adventure story about people being hunted by dinosaurs on a tropical island? Nah. At some point, we have to remember the Law of Conservation of Detail and that this isn't real life; it's a story, and in a story the characters will be chosen because of their importance to the narrative and the story, not their importance to what an actual fact-finding mission to a real-life prototype theme park would involve. While in a real-life Jurassic Park situation all would likely be consulted, in the world of the story, paleontologists are relevant so they can handle exposition about dinosaurs, so they go; a chaos theoretician gets to go because he can provide exposition relevant to the theme about the unpredictability of nature, so he goes; but a theme park engineer wouldn't add anything relevant that any of the characters employed by Hammond couldn't add because the story isn't actually about the building of the theme park itself, so they don't go.
  • The original question was referring to that first meaning of relevant; why, within the story itself, were the people chosen to go the ones chosen? It's a Watsonian question, not a Doylist one.
  • Maybe, but Watsonian or not it's also perhaps one of those questions that can only receive a completely satisfying answer from a Doylist perspective (especially since the other "Watsonian" answers provided for this question have received a bit of additional nitpicking). They're there because the writer needed them there to tell the story, whereas a theme park designer wouldn't have been helpful from that perspective. It might not be entirely satisfactory from a Watsonian perspective, but sometimes you've just got to shrug and remember that it's just a story, not real life, and so requires some Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Especially since it's not like those people wouldn't be consulted in the event of a real dinosaur park being produced (well, perhaps not the chaos theory guy, but paleontologists would absolutely get a look-in), so it's not like it's a huge leap to make.
  • Sorry, but that's not really helpful. Of course it's fiction. But an answer that boils down to "it's just a movie" doesn't answer the question, because the question isn't about why the characters are there from an out-of-story perspective. Trying to answer it from the opposite angle is irrelevant and not appreciated.
  • Okay, but again — there've been other attempts at answering this question from an in-universe perspective, almost all of which have received additional and slightly nitpicky criticisms that they don't fully answer the question, or open up other plot issues. Helpful or not, it's beginning to seem that this particular question might not have an in-universe answer that you will find wholly satisfying, so you might just have to either accept that one of the previous answers is about the closest you'll get to an in-universe answer, even if imperfect, or accept that you might have to turn to the meta-answer of "it's a story and they needed to be there for the purposes of the plot and no one more 'relevant' did" to have some kind of resolution. Frankly, it doesn't seem like you have many other options on this one.
  • This is a case of Adaptation Explanation Extrication - in the book, the reason why the inspection was going on in the first place is because compys got off the island and were attacking children on the mainland. Basically, the aim wasn't just to assess the park's infrastructure - the aim was to figure out a) if compys had indeed gotten off the island and b) how the hell compys had ended up getting off the island. Would any of the experts you describe be able to supply any knowledge that a) is relevant to the situation and b) isn't already there (in the case of a zoo designer - Muldoon would probably be able to supply a lot of info already in that regard)?
  • The experts listed in the original question are for the problem as it exists in the movie; that is, Jophery's accidental death leading to the inspection. Nothing at all to do with compys. For the tour group featured in the movie, the book situation sounds more appropriate for their areas of expertise.
  • Yes - that's exactly the point. The reason why the experts are there in the book is because of the compy problem on the mainland - which is obviously not the case in the movie. Or to put it another way... if this is about the accidental death of a workman, shouldn't their contractor (if InGen went for local contractors for workmen) or union representative be there?
  • It feels like we're talking past each other. Yes, contractors, union reps, etc. would have also been good choices to send. The question is why, within the context of the film's story, were those kinds of people not sent? The answer given above about the tour in the film potentially being just one of several intended inspections makes enough sense even if it's not completely airtight.
  • Here's a possible idea to sort-of-resolve this debate - Hammond hijacked the inspection. This is the in-story explanation that makes the most sense - Hammond hijacked what was probably meant to be an internal investigation (possibly involving contractors and/or union representatives) to have an excuse to send his hand-picked experts and turn it into a big publicity stunt for the park.
  • That only works for Hammond's side, though. True, it makes sense that he'd be allowed to pick his own people to send and pick those likely to side with him. But InGen investors are also a party involved, represented by Gennaro, and have no reason not to send the sorts of experts originally mentioned. During the helicopter ride, Hammond seems to suggest that Gennaro himself picked Malcolm, so maybe Gennaro is just incompetent?
  • Keep in mind, there is no Watsonian explanation that covers all the bases - whilst "Hammond hijacked the inspection to make it a big publicity stunt" isn't airtight, it's the explanation I think makes the most sense (it's unclear how aware the investors were of the entire shebang). However, again, this is a question to which the Doylist answer - the problem in the book was completely different (compys getting off the island) - is the only really satisfying one.
  • Gennaro is the company man whose main job is to make sure things are on the up and up from a financial and liability perspective, and no doubt if he had survived longer he'd have enough experience with liability law to point out several blatant cases of negligance that don't require engineering experience to point out. Given how broad the topics they'd need to cover, I don't personally think that Gennaro could've brought any one single expert in any given field to cover all of the bases that he might miss, so he brought Malcolm as a general expert to try and cover his bases. His specialty is somewhat poorly-defined, but one can assume that the idea of "applied Chaos Theory" he's ostinately an expert about pertains either to the fields of mathematics or economics. The real question is, why did Gennaro HAVE to resort to bringing in a wild card to probe the system for potential weaknesses instead of being given free rein to bring a whole team of engineers and safety experts? Simple: John "spared no expense" Hammond already front-loaded this tour with his two paleontology picks for the publicity (with previous headscratchers also specultating he could've had them stop by to talk shop with his genetics technicians to make sure they're getting the taxonomy of their attractions correct), so the company only got to bring on Gennaro and one extra pick of his choosing. Fair play in theory that both sides of the debate have two experts each, in practice Gennaro by all rights should be allowed to bring two experts of his own instead of just one, instead of being stuck doing the legal analysis all by himself. But who is it that has a vested interest in keeping the number of people he has to sweet-talk at the same time as low as possible? And who set up the elite helicopter tour that won't have the capacity that coming in by ferry and hoofing it from the dock would? Jonh "spared no expense" Hammond, that's who. He rigged the arrangements of the tour so they could only bring in four analysts in total, left the company stuck only being able to pick two of them "in the interest of fairness" knowing that one of them HAS to be the legal rep and knowing that no one person can cover all the remaining bases the company needs looked at, then stacked the deck with publicity picks for his two experts who he expected to be yes-men had things not gone so pear-shaped.

Why did the dilophosaurus suddenly attack?

• It seems friendly at first, but then suddenly kills Nedry. He did say he was going to run it over, but it was a dinosaur, so how would it understand him?
  • Nedry was either a free meal or was seen as an invader on the Dilophosaur's territory. Maybe both.
  • It's a wild animal. It tried to scare Nedry away, and when it saw that he wasn't a threat anymore but rather a big defenseless chunk of meat, it attacked. Of course it's exaggerated behaviour. It's a movie after all.
  • So, it wasn't "friendly", but rather curious about Nedry. But it certainly didn't understand his words.
  • It's worth pointing out that just before he was attacked, Nedry flipped up the hood of his raincoat, which the dilophosaur could really only interpret as raising his frills, which she would recognize as a threat display. His body language managed to convey exactly what his words did in a way that she could understand perfectly.

What were Nedry and Hammond arguing about?

• Nedry's whining about something, I don't remember exactly what, and Hammond says, "Look, Dennis! I don't blame people for their mistakes. But I do ask that they pay for them." And this seemed to have something to do with why Nedry was disgruntled enough to sell out, but I don't remember them ever saying what mistake they were talking about or how Nedry paid.
  • The tour was running into a high number of glitches early on, and Hammond was angry that Nedry didn't seem to care about fixing them in a timely manner. Nedry argued that he was already doing enough for the low amount he bid to take the job, and that if Hammond wanted more from him, he needed to be paid more. The mistake Hammond is referring to is Nedry's own low bid, a shortsighted effort to get a job at the park without taking into account of the sort and amount of work necessary.

Test run but no disaster?

• Nedry tells his accomplice on the boat that he's done a test run for the espionage which presumably has to go the full route from his desk, to the cryostorage, to a jeep, all the way to the dock and back to his desk. That's fine and logical in the sense that of course he'd want to know the window of timing for the theft run, so when he has to put it into practice, he and his guy can coordinate to make it seamless (even though Nedry's competence in practice leaves something to be desired, the terrible weather not helping either). However. How on earth did this dry run go off without a hitch in the sense that he must have powered down the exact same systems (ok, maybe he did a few more non-security ones in the true run shown in the movie to give himself "cover" for the crime, i.e. random systems on the fritz during "system compiling") and yet no dinosaurs were said to have managed to break out of their paddocks, nor did anyone notice (namely Arnold and the rest of the security and sysadmin people)? Maybe you could put the no dinosaur escapee question to sheer dumb luck (yet you'd still want the movie to somehow justify that a bit better with exposition or something) and yes Nedry knows to always maintain power to the raptor enclosure. But on the staffing side Arnold seems to be reacting to the real run as if it's the first time it's happened, so what about the test run from the staff's perspective?
  • Nedry could be talking about the physical part of the heist, and didn't run the program until the real thing. He could test his code in a virtual environment to make sure it would work without actually running it.
  • It's a good point about the code test in the virtual environment, but think about the physical aspect. If he wants to exactly measure the time the run takes, that means he actually has to do it in full. As in, shut down the door locks and camera on the cryostorage, tinker with the vats (so he knows where they are, what species they contain, how long it takes to raise and put them back down etc but he doesn't actually extract the vials because it's merely the test run, only pretends to so as to simulate the time he needs as closely as possible) and drive through the park (and back, in time to quietly undo the breach in security). He would have to do all of this because if the security on the fenced gate which cuts through the dilophosaurus paddock is up (i.e. electrified), he can't physically transit this area to reach the dock (and before that, obviously if he's caught on camera or unable to get through the cryostorage doors, that's no good to him either). There's no reason that the dilophosaurus gate would be electrified on the actual run and not at any other given time, such as when he did the test run. So it's all or nothing on the test run, right from the code running for real, precisely to enable the physical aspect to be timed out.
  • Nedry could know about the embryo storage from watching security footage (knowing that it's possible to open them with just one hand), and if the contents aren't recorded in the system somewhere, he only has 15 species to deal with, which are all labelled. When arguing with the boat guy, Nedry mentions that he thinks he can shave two minutes off his test run time, which could be a reference to him using a longer, open maintenance trail for his test, which would've aroused less suspicion and be another reason why he gets lost when he actually does it. Some of that extra time could also possibly be gained if Nedry was only estimating how much time he would need in the embryo storage.

Why was the buffet spread still out?

• A few loaves of bread, fruit, a huge bowl of salad, Jell-O, and several types of cakes, apparently sitting out, at minimum, all night. Why? There wasn't a huge rush for the employees to leave the island, so it's not like the kitchen staff would've had to drop everything immediately and just leave. It's not a great selection or amount of food to feed 10 people over a weekend, either, so it doesn't seem right that it was left for the visitors and remaining staff to help themselves to (and that's not even getting into the risks of leaving some of those types of food out so long).
  • Perhaps the caterer had stayed to ensure that the main characters would remain fed, but then panicked at some point and hid or tried to run off for a helicopter or a boat (in vain, because neither were available) and may have been killed by the dinosaurs.
  • To be totally fair, everyone was kind of preoccupied with the whole "park systems failing and dinosaurs escaping" situation; presumably under such circumstances clearing away the buffet leftovers and putting on a better meal becomes a secondary concern if that. Presumably had the whole park not, well, started collapsing into dinosaur-related carnage and mayhem they might indeed have gotten around to dealing with this.
  • The park failing is irrelevant, and only matters to this under the assumption that there was an unseen and unmentioned kitchen employee still on the island the whole time. The culinary staff presumably all left the island well before the storm hit, without an emergency to justify leaving out so much perishable food.
  • Okay, well, assuming the caterers did indeed all leave before the shit hit the fan, all of those food items mentioned are standard buffet items. They're there in case the guests feel like a bite to eat between meals when the caterers, for whatever reason, are unavailable to prepare a meal. And they're not quite as perishable as being made out; fruit and vegetables typically last about 4-7 days being left out before starting to go rotten, bread lasts about 3-4 days before turning mouldy (though it might go a bit stale), and jello can last up to ten days if properly stored. They're not going to become inedible overnight; those dates are reasonably long enough for, in normal circumstances, a new catering team to arrive, clean up, and replace the food without the guests starving or being forced to resort to cannibalism. In which case, the park failing is in fact sort of relevant, because it was presumably the storm and subsequent meltdown which would have affected the ability of caterers to arrive to replace the team that departed. Presumably in normal circumstances, a replacement catering team would have arrived long before any issues began to manifest with the food.
  • "Properly stored" is the key term there, and most of that food wasn't. Jell-O and salad sitting out unrefrigerated for upwards of 12 hours? Cakes uncovered for the same amount of time? Yuck, especially on a tropical island in a building that isn't completely sealed to the outdoors. The only thing that would make sense to be left out would be uncut produce. As for a replacement catering team, that also wouldn't really work because the whole staff seemed to be leaving the island because it was the weekend; the storm wouldn't have prevented a new team from arriving because there wouldn't have been one to begin with, and the tour would've been over by Monday if no incident had occurred.
  • Watching the movie back, pretty much the one time we see the aforementioned food in the movie is in the scene where Hammond and Ellie have their conversation over ice-cream, which takes place well after everything has already started to go pear-shaped. There are thus a few things suggested or implied here:
    • 1. There are clearly refrigerators in the food preparation and serving areas of Jurassic Park (that ice cream had to come from somewhere) — ergo, the intention under normal circumstances was likely to store the food away in them when there were no guests around to eat it or between meals.
    • Yes. So why wasn't it?
    • 2. The suggestion that the food would have been cleared away sooner, but was not done so due to events spiralling out of control, cannot be dismissed so easily. Again; this takes place well after the power has been shut down, suggesting that the people responsible for clearing the food away would have done so had this not occurred and other priorities — such as getting the power back online, treating wounded individuals, and not getting eaten by roving dinosaurs — had not taken over).
    • Everything suggests they would have done this, though. There's no indication any catering staff is still present, and that they left before the storm hit, leaving for the weekend like almost everyone else.
    • 3. There is also no real point in clearing the food away at this moment; the refrigeration systems have been knocked out with the rest of the power (Hammond notes this as he eats the ice cream). At that particular moment, the food is going to eventually spoil whether it's left out or whether it's stored away, so as they have bigger fish to fry at that point they might as well leave it out until such a point that the refrigeration units are back online.
    • Again, the suggestion is that the catering staff left well before any problems arose. Any problems the park faced are irrelevant and wouldn't factor into their decision. That's what makes this entire question so puzzling.
    • The point is that the people who are still on the island might have under normal circumstances decided (or been asked) to put any food away in the refrigerators in lieu of the catering staff, either to help out during the one-off VIP tour or even because they might have just not wanted the food to go to waste. But since circumstances made it unnecessary, they didn't bother doing so.
    • 3a. Related to the above, as for "properly stored", the room would presumably under normal circumstances have been air-conditioned to standard room temperature, lessening the risks of leaving the food out under normal circumstances.
    • The building is still open to the outdoors and in the middle of a jungle. Insects would be a concern.
    • That particular room appears to be closed off to the outdoors, and insects are a concern everywhere (albeit moreso in the jungle, granted).
    • 4. It is never actually explicitly confirmed that all the catering staff have left that I am aware, making this a mere hypothesis, not technically a headscratcher; for all the movie actually confirms, there could indeed be an unseen skeleton catering staff on the island somewhere who would have dealt with all this (and who are currently facing some dinosaur-related issues off-screen that are preventing them from doing so).
    • Technically true, but it still assumes a lot of things (why were the staff never mentioned at all? Were they just left on the island to die? Why were they not mentioned in the deleted scene from The Lost World as casualties from the incident?) An unfalsifiable answer is still an answer, though, however unsatisfying it might be.
    • What bearing does a deleted scene have on the actual canon of a film series?
    • 5. However, if we assume so for purposes of argument that all the caterers have left, then given that Jurassic Park is still "in progress" then it is possible that the skeleton crew and guests who are still on the island would be expected to "make do" without the caterers for the remainder of their duration on the island. (Presumably the skeleton staff remaining on the island may have been expected to move everything into the fridges, had they not gotten side-tracked with the whole "park falling apart" issues.)
    • That first part is exactly it. Yes, the remaining staff and guests would've had to fix their own food from the freezers and fridges. That's the obvious conclusion if the staff is leaving for the weekend. So then why was all the food left out? These two things don't mesh. There was no reason to leave the food out barring this "unseen caterers" theory.
    • Actually there is a reason; so they didn't have to go into the kitchens if they needed a snack, and could just stay in the guest areas where it would be more convenient and comfortable for them to access.
    • 5a. The duration of the tour is unknown but, presumably once the dinosaur tour is done, there's really not much else for them to see or do; for all we actually know, the guests could have been leaving the next morning, with the buffet there to provide snacks as needed before then. As noted previously, under normal circumstances this would fall well within the time before the food started to seriously spoil (though it might have been a bit stale).
    • 6. As for the cakes and Jell-o, unlike the rest of the buffet these appear to have been dumped on one of the nearby tables in a somewhat untidy fashion. Given that we first see Hammond in this scene glumly wolfing down melting ice cream while silently contemplating his rapidly-collapsing dreams, the presumed implication is that these have not been left out by the caterers, but that Hammond himself took these out of the now-useless refrigerators and plans to at least partly eat them himself as part of his binging on comfort food to try and cheer himself up.
    • 6a. Alternatively, the cakes are not normally part of the buffet, but have been left out to welcome the guests back from the tour as part of a triumphant little celebration. Since there is no longer anything to celebrate, Hammond — understandably somewhat depressed at the rapid collapse of his life-long dream — doesn't really care if they spoil anymore, though he may still be willing to binge on them for comfort.
    • If 6 is the case, why did Hammond bother setting them up in the buffet line? 6a is more plausible for just the desserts.
    • So go with that one then; both are just being thrown out as possibilities.
    • 7. Ultimately, it has to be remembered that this is all just set-dressing, both in-universe (Hammond is giving his guests an impression of what the fully online park will look like, and is almost certainly willing to suck up the minor expenses of a little bit of potential food wastage in order to do so) and on a meta level (the filmmakers are establishing for the viewer that this is the visitor centre's dining area, so a quick glimpse of some buffet food helps establish this quickly), and is really not supposed to be thought about to any great extent. The viewer is almost certainly expected to see the food set out as a signifier for "restaurant" and focus more on Hammond and Ellie's conversation about the ethics of the park, and if they do focus on the former more than the latter, to the extent that this is possible they're watching the movie wrong.
    • If we were to never question anything that happens in a film, no matter how minor, then we wouldn't have Headscratchers pages in general. It's not watching a movie wrong to ask a question about something that doesn't make obvious sense.
    • It kind of is in this case, or at least is arguably being rather unnecessarily pedantic; to get to this particular headscratcher, you basically have to ignore everything else that is happening in the scene, in particular the conversation outlining the crux of the ethical issues the movie is positing and the emotional impact of a man grappling with his mistakes, his hubris and his failed dreams of glory, to instead focus exclusively on some barely-in-focus cakes and a buffet in the distant background. Nothing in this scene insists that you focus on or question the presence of the buffet, and in fact it's very clearly minimised. The only real reason they're there is to help establish the setting of the scene and you're clearly supposed to view them on that basis, not get hung up on the hypothetical catering schedules of a fictional theme park. To the extent that this is a plot-hole, it is far from one that leaps out at the viewer and demands to be answered lest the logic of the film completely fall apart; you have to really focus, likely over repeated viewings, to pick up on this one, at which point the question of whether you're really focussing on the right things about the film becomes entirely valid. There's asking questions about the logic of the narrative of the film, and then there's slightly nitpicky quibbling about set dressing, and this thread, frankly, falls decidedly in the latter category. By all means ask such questions if you must, of course, but if you're going to do so you should at least keep them in perspective.
    • So the question shouldn't have been asked because it's not important enough? Because it's "nitpicky"? That's not how Headscratchers work. It's an element present in the film that doesn't make obvious sense, and therefore is questioned; it doesn't matter how major it is or how many viewings it took to notice, only that it's there.
    • Not at all; I outright stated that you were free to raise the point, and offered numerous possible points of context and explanation before pointing out it's arguably very trivial nature even in the scheme of Headscratchers. I clearly respected your Headscratcher and your freedom to raise it. I merely suggested you keep it in perspective: it's a very minor, trivial and easily overlooked background detail, it's already been discussed at some length, it's heavily reliant on context that the viewer is not privy to because, frankly, it's irrelevant to the main narrative, and it's clearly heavily reliant on the viewer's ability to just accept a certain level of artifice within fiction in order to set the scene without constantly challenging them on every minor detail that isn't fully explained as if it is a major plothole that needs to be addressed and answered in detail. At some point, you're going to have to accept that this particular Headscratcher is a very minor and trivial one, that there is a limit to how productively it can be discussed and answered, that any answer you receive is going to be by nature imperfect (and so challenging and picking apart the answers people provide you with is going to be of limited use), and that you've already been provided with numerous possible (if imperfect) answers for your points of concern.
    • I'm with the primary answering troper who's defending the logic of the film (insofar as it even needs to be there for, as they say, what is really just set dressing). I provided the first answer in the thread (that first paragraph after the question way up there) and really that should have been sufficient, but instead the question was picked fully for nits to explain, ad-naseum, every scenario and basically rank them for plausibility. Not sure why the first answer couldn't have been just accepted, or at least addressed prior to about midway down the numbered list of explanations. Let me elaborate a bit more on it. Of course, a catering team is going to be up there in terms of priority (if also skeleton) staff which can't just leave the island, along with the CEO, the two guys running sysadmin and the park warden for the weekend and/or fierce weather. People gotta eat, whether guests or the other essential staff. Now if you've read the book, you know that security guards and possibly others (i.e. minor characters just there to show Anyone Can Die, whether named or not) were eaten in and around the Visitor Center by raptors as management tried to contain the situation. It's not a huge logical leap to say in the film's version of the continuity, the same unfortunate fate could have befell the catering staff. Further evidence in this line of speculation is that Hammond states "People are dying!" at a time when during the park crisis (we can separate the raptor event at the beginning as a prologue to the main action) only Gennaro was presented as being known by the characters to be dead (all they know about Nedry is that he won't be coming back to fix the problem), so the caterer (or caterers) could have factored into that statement. Not everything has to be spelled out to justify a story's internal logic, often times the audience can be left to fill in the gaps with their own speculation (or in this case exhaustively concluded as such with the help of others). But some people act as though this must be done, when in reality the creators of a story have other priorities (as the other troper stated, Ellie and Hammond's emotional and ethical discussion in the case of this scene). If this answer/hypothesis doesn't do it for you, if it isn't sufficiently Occam's Razor, then there's also the alternative answer immediately below this paragraph (at the time of writing) which may serve as the definitive statement.
  • You're all missing the key character: Hammond. He didn't bring the food out, that's ridiculous, he had this buffet set up so the tour would return to the visitor's center and immediately be met with an 'incredibly' lavish dessert selection. Just like the meal after the raptor pen he was 'presenting' and trying to impress them to endorse the park. It may even have worked had things not gone horribly awry.

Rexy's Sense of Smell

• When Rexy comes over to Grant and Lex, her muzzle can't be more than a few feet away from them. If Tyrannosaurs have a great sense of smell (which I'm assuming they do, to make up for their visual impairment), why couldn't Rexy smell Grant and Lex, especially since Lex probably had a few cuts and scratches that were bleeding?
  • Could be a few possibilities. Maybe the sense of smell was negatively impacted due to the T. rex being a "genetically engineered theme park monster". Maybe it was mostly smelling mud, since Lex was covered in it. Maybe the rain was somehow affecting its ability to smell.
  • Rexy DID know they were there... somewhere. But because they were keeping still and silent she couldn't pick them out against the car.
  • Alternatively she knew they were there and well enough to do something about it but didn't really care. Humans are too small to be worth the effort of hunting or to be a threat, the only reason Rexy ever chases them is because they run. Not unlike how a cat will ignore a toy mouse laying in the ground but will chase if you drag it around on a string Rexy has a reactionary instinct to attack things that flee in her presence.

Movement-Based Vision Issue

• Sort of following the same line of questioning as the headscratcher above, what doesn't make sense is that after Rexy kills Gennaro and turns her attention back towards the vehicles, Lex shrieks at the top of her lungs and Grant quickly steps in to cover her mouth and shut her up. Rexy's established at being, at most, a few feet away from her and Grant. It wasn't the same sort of degree of moving about as say, Malcolm getting out of the car and running off to try and lure Rexy away, but Grant went from being bent down trying to get Tim out from under the overturned car to quickly standing up, rushing over to Lex, and covering her mouth with his hand. In that period of time, between the shrill screaming and Grant moving around, Rexy didn't react to any of it, when we've been told and have seen several times (including in this very moment) that T. Rex tracks its prey based on movement (which means that Grant is telling Lex that Rexy can't see them if they don't move, even though he himself just rapidly moved). Am I the only one who questions how this makes any sense and how they didn't die right then and there?
  • It's not clear precisely where the Rex is while Lex screams and Grant quiets her, since she's offscreen. She only just steps up to them several seconds after Lex stops screaming, and the last time the Rex was shown, she was facing away from the vehicles while killing Gennaro. It could be that she was turning around because of the scream right as Grant was moving and didn't see him. Also, Grant doesn't move as much as described here; he only goes from lying basically prone to kneeling, while turning around and sliding a couple feet at most to his left. Even if the Rex was very close the whole time, the low profile of the humans may have put them partially or completely outside her field of vision to begin with.

Muldoon only loads one shotgun shell?

• Why would he only load one shell, when he goes with Ellie to the maintenance shed, pretty sure one shell wouldn't be enough to take down a raptor.
  • He probably just loaded up the others offscreen, because as someone who knows fine well how dangerous these beasts are, he'd be taking no chances.

Use the crane

• Instead of having a human lift the gate on the raptor cage, why not just use the same crane used to lower food into the pen? If the crane can lift a steer, it can definitely lift a gate light enough for a human to lift.

Why trust Nedry?

• John Hammond knows about Nedry’s money problems and how he thinks he’s being underpaid. Why trust him to be anywhere near Jurassic Park? He’s the poster boy for industrial espionage and even if he didn’t sabotage the tour and everything at the park went smoothly, Nedry still had access to a secret facility and secret research. He could have stolen any number of things, and his employers put him within an arm’s reach of their most valuable secrets despite knowing his background. Even if Nedry was the only guy who could write the code to the specifications the park requires, why not just hire him to write the program and have someone else who can pass actually pass a background check on site to review any issues and test the tour? “Spared no expense,” after all.
  • You nailed it with your last sentence. Various critiques of the film have pointed out where Hammond actually did cut costs; but that might be part of the point the writers (going back to Crichton) had intended. Also, Hammond is probably just naive in other aspects. It's possible that, like in the novel, movie!Nedry was mostly working remotely, with Arnold serving as the systems engineer aka the guy "who can pass actually pass a background check on site to review any issues and test the tour". But Arnold is only one man (maybe he has a support team but they're part of the non-essential workers who are leaving the island during the storm) and can only do so much by himself. As they come closer to the opening date of the park, they're coming to see that there's many bugs which you really need the programmer on-site for to be able to communicate with the system engineering team rapidly as he implements his fixes (doing it over the phone or via email would be cumbersome), for him to observe the impact of the bugs and fixes himself and for the team to give real-time feedback. John's business naivete prevents him from hiring advisors who could help him identify Nedry as a target to be turned for industrial espionage, and his own total computer illiteracy makes him utterly dependent on Nedry and Nedry alone. Per the novel, Nedry had to work in the dark initially as to what exactly he was working on but gradually got brought into the full totality of the secret of Jurassic Park, so Hammond probably doesn't want to hire new programmers and go through all of that again, with NDAs and difficult hiring and such. Note how when the shit hits the fan he suggests for Arnold to call Nedry's colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but perhaps only as a last resort (again, perhaps an example of an expense otherwise to be spared). Maybe he intended to reward Nedry for all the bug fixes with a raise or a bonus, but didn't think to mention it as an incentive before it was all too late.