I’m glad to know that this is where the IC/ RS throughlines were in Building a Better Dinosaur, but I have to respectfully disagree. The most emotional scenes are the ones with dinosaurs in them. Jurassic Park’s biggest emotional scenes revolve around either awe or horror. All those screaming scenes have dinosaurs in them. When Grant first sees a living dinosaur, he goes on an emotional roller coaster from awe, to excitement, to being so overjoyed he has tears in his eyes when he says, “They move in herds. They do move in herds.” Again when he sees the sick triceratops, he lies on its chest as it breathes with a big goofy smile on his face, then tearfully recounts how the triceratops was his favorite when he was a kid. I just don’t see how anything with the grandkids comes close to that, emotionally.
To be fair I don’t reckon there’s been any more discussion in this thread than there is in any given few minutes of a User’s Group podcast.
I generally agree with this, though I think their mere existence is maybe taking it a step too far. The problem seems more related to the idea of having dinosaurs and people share the same space. Nearly all the talk about the sort-of playing god issues are contained within a single 4 minute scene, so I think we have to be careful when trying to expand that discussion to encompass the entire story.
I kinda disagree about Grant and the raptors though. I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by “creates conflict.” It’s come up a couple of times now, so I just now went back and rewatched those few minutes. Grant does seem stunned when he learns they’ve bred raptors, and he looks concerned when he first approaches the raptor paddock, but once he gets up close and is watching the raptors feed, he’s completely fascinated. He has a smile on his face. He fires off one question after another to Muldoon, the game warden, and whatever concern he might have had appears to have evaporated. So, I would say Grant is conflicted, but the raptors haven’t created any extra conflict between the characters.
This wavering between “dinosaurs are awesome” and “dinosaurs are dangerous” is what this story is about–or a big part of it. “How can we stand in the light of discovery and not act?” Hammond says. Grant goes from concern to fascination when he learns about the raptors. Grant is so excited at the thought of a living T-Rex, he nearly faints, but when he comes face to face with it, reality sets in. Then later, with a safe distance between them, he’s perfectly happy to stand back and observe the T-Rex feeding until Lex’s fear pulls him away. In that same scene he watches the flocking Gallimimus and nearly gets trampled, showing that even the herbivores can be dangerous.