Suspending Disbelief

I saw the new Jurassic World movie a couple of weeks ago, on opening weekend. I loved it, but that was a foregone conclusion. I loved all the Jurassic movies when I first saw them. Some have aged better than others, but I found them all wildly entertaining at the time.

I was one of a legion of Dinosaur Boys back in the day. The best thing about my family moving around from state to state and town to town was that each time we relocated, I’d get to check out a new school’s dinosaur books.

I remember visiting the Field Museum in Chicago and just being gob-smacked at the size and posed ferocity of the dinosaur skeletons. Even in my 30s, visiting New York’s Museum of Natural History was awe-inspiring. They had more skeletons there than I’d ever seen in one place. It truly made one feel insignificant, standing next to the remains of these enormous beasts.

When the original Jurassic Park came out, I was with my first wife, and her young son was around ten. We all went to see the movie, and it looked so realistic, we couldn’t convince the son that dinosaurs didn’t currently exist because he thought there was no way they could fake that so well for the screen.

Personally, I was so excited to see a photo-realistic version of what one could only have imagined. My most exciting frame of reference was the old Saturday morning show, “Land of the Lost,” which featured stop-motion animated dinosaurs. At the time, that was the coolest stuff I’d ever seen.

I could forgive that they made the T-Rex and Allosaurus roughly the same size, not to mention ignoring that they were separated by 85 million years, and they had these furry humanoid-things also running around from an even more distant time period. And then there were the “Sleestacks,” who made a mockery of everything for me. Even then, I knew there was no fossil record to back up those things.

I could never understand why the humans on the show were so afraid of them. All they did was hiss and lumber after you. The dad could have knocked one out cold with a good-sized tree limb. When you think about it, they shouldn’t have been there at all, for the mere reason that they were so slow, the carnivores could have caught and eaten them so easily. Maybe they tasted bad. Anyway, I digress.

While I enjoyed the new JP flick, I walked out of the theater with a major doubt in plausibility. See, I can buy that they cloned dinosaurs from DNA extracted from old mosquitoes. Our tech is steadily advancing to the point that I don’t think that’s an unrealistic jump.

In the story, they mention that all of the dinosaurs have essentially “self-deported” to the areas around the equator because it was the most like their own ecological atmosphere, and now, all such areas are off limits to human residence or travel. And I’m sure there’s a large give or take zone; I mean, the animals were not all arranged in a line around the world, right on the equator. I suggest that they settled in the area between the two tropics.

The blue lines on the left are where I drew in the tropic lines (without extending them), which was pretty good for doing it off the top of my head. When I looked it up later, I was bang on. Whoo hoo, when’s my day on Jeopardy?

So this is my main beef: Does anyone seriously think that the people who live there were all going to just up and move away? Especially in the resort areas! There must be millions, if not billions, of dollars tied up in beachfront resort real estate in the coastal areas between the tropics, such as Rio, Cabo, and Aruba. There’s no way these rich fucks are walking away from that kind of investment. They’d be on the horn to their governmental officers, making sure that their turf remains viable. 

And I’m sure these governments would listen, because they’re probably on the developer’s payroll in the first place. Our current Administration would be all-in because if there’s one thing this president understands, it's resort real estate.  He’d help them find a way to ship the dinos elsewhere, like to inland Africa. There are probably not many resorts located in the interior of the African continent. They’d stick them in Congo, Uganda, and Kenya. If they displace millions of citizens, they don’t give a shit. But those coastal resorts would need to stand. They’ll find a way to fence them off, one way or another, or just mow down the intruders with heavy artillery to protect the assets. I don’t think real dinosaurs would be as bulletproof as the ones in the movies.

I don’t think Indonesia would be too badly affected, though. Only the flying creatures could get there. I know that some of the big guys can swim too, like the Spinosaurus in Jurassic World-Rebirth, but why would it suddenly take off from Southeast Asia and head for some islands it doesn’t even know is there?

So, yes, the basis of the whole new film is preposterous… just not in the way one might think it is. But don’t let that dissuade you from seeing it, if you like this kind of thing. It’s a great “popcorn” movie.

I mean, if you can’t tune out reality long enough to enjoy a movie, you might as well just watch the news, which is far more depressing than the idea of dinosaurs roaming around the earth.