The Big Picture: Dinosaur Exodus

[Steve the Pocket]

As to the Exodus film it's a no win situation could you image a film with Israeli actors killing lots of Arabs? it would not only bomb in the US and Europe but would be banned nearly everywhere with a large Muslim population.

Well, they wouldn't be Arabs either; according to both Jewish and Muslim tradition (if I recall correctly), Arabs are descendants of either Abraham's first son Ishmael or Isaac's son Esau, or both. Egypt would have had to already be established as a kingdom (if not an empire) by that point. And I don't know what archaeologists have to say about that, but if you're already making a movie about an event from the Hebrew bible that also isn't backed up by archaeological evidence, you might as well be consistent.

Making the Egyptians black would have been problematic too, though, for similar reasons. It's a pity you can only ever make the bad guys in a movie white anymore, but maybe Western society should take that as an incentive to improve race relations to the point where it's not a problem anymore.

 

[DarthFennec]

I don't know what Bob's talking about, I think the newer feathered dinosaurs look just as awesome as the older reptilian ones. Maybe even moreso.

I guess it is a tad disappointing that Jurassic World decided not to be scientifically accurate in this regard, but it's not as if it's surprising. I would go as far as to say it should have been expected. I can't think of a single Hollywood film in recent history that gets its science entirely correct. Most don't try, because they would rather put energy into being entertaining, because entertainment is the entire point of a Hollywood film. And nobody cares, usually. Nobody lets scientific inaccuracies ruin a good film for them. Nobody hates Gravity because the orbits are wrong, nobody has a problem with Avengers because the Iron Man suit is technically impossible. So it seems odd to me that people would be freaking out about this.

The thing is it's not even a plot hole or anything like that. The fact that the dinosaurs look like this makes perfect sense, because they technically aren't even dinosaurs. According to the first movie, they're mostly frogs, amphibians, which have nothing resembling feathers. Only some of their dna is from dinosaurs. The scientists in the film mixed the two until they got what they thought looked like dinosaurs, which is what we thought they looked like back then. The fact that real dinosaurs didn't actually look like that doesn't change a thing.

Honestly, making the dinosaurs feathery would arguably go against continuity, because this series has already established what their dinosaurs look like, and you can't just change that because of science that happened outside the series' universe. Of course, if they explained why they looked different (maybe they were able to use more dinosaur dna, or they used a different process or something) would easily fix that problem.

 

[Johnny Thunder]

Oh god, and here I am... being Dutch. Hoping to evade the whole 'Black Pete' debate in my country and now Bob brings that up? Hey Bob, ever heard of the term whiteface [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteface_%28performance%29]? You as a film buff should know that. The film White Chicks also brought that up. Should we ban that? It's pretty racist to white people as well.

Now now now, Bob didn't attack Piet outright; he said the issue would be worth debating, which is fair. (if he did attack Piet and Sint outright I would have a thing or two to say about the worship of the American founding fathers and the Confederate generals in the south). But I welcome him to enter that debate and have his say, as long as he does his homework and enters it with an open mind...

Anyway... From what the internet tells me T-rex probably didn't have true fathers anyway: but rather spiny protofeathers: and then there's also the point that large animals like elephants and rhino's usually have a naked skin. So I think it would be safe to depict T-rex as featherless with perhaps a few spikes on it's head...

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Regardless of how you feel about feathered dinosaurs, the book provided two "outs" they can easily incorporate into the movie:

1) The Jurassic Park dinos aren't 100% authentic natural dinos. A big chunk of their DNA comes from modern-day amphibians and reptiles, which can account for their more reptilian look. (This also works as a general handwave for the story: any unscientific facts about the JP dinos can be attributed to this as well.)

2) Even if that doesn't, the Park isn't committed to creating an authentic reproduction of what actual dinosaurs would have looked like. They're a theme park selling people on the popular perception of "Real(tm)" dinosaurs, and most people picture dinosaurs as giant lizards, not giant roosters. There's a conversation in the novel where Dr. Wu, the geneticist, tells Hammond the dinos they've engineered are really fast-moving, but he could start from scratch and whip up a new batch that fit the slower, lumbering brutes their customers will expect. Hammond rejects this, but mostly because of the expense. In any event, reproducing prehistory accurately was never their mission statement.

Yep, pretty much what I was going to say. Crichton's books almost go out of their way to demonstrate that these aren't real dinosaurs, they aren't even true clones of real dinosaurs, they're just genetic jigsaws. Hell, in Lost World we see they're having trouble raising young simply because they have no idea how, being created in a lab means they have neither inherent parental instincts nor experience of their own upbringing to draw from. They just lay eggs anywhere and more often than not end up trampling over them because they forgot they were there.
Thats why I don't mind the increasingly inaccurate portrayal of dinos, and I don't mind the new film's idea for a genetic hybrid super-saur. Its just a logical extension of the message and themes from the books and films

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Here's my take on the dinosaurs with feathers thing in regards to Jurassic Park -

I think it was more important for the filmmakers to make their dinosaurs consistent throughout the movies than it was to be scientifically accurate. The dinosaurs have to look basically the same as they did in the first movie, otherwise plot questions start popping up as to why exactly they look different now. What would the plot explanation be for why the genetically resurrected dinosaurs suddenly have feathers when they didn't in the previous 3 movies?

I also think that there's enough in movie justification that explains that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are not what dinosaurs actually were and looked like. In the first movie (and the book) it's explained that the dinosaur DNA that they extracted from mosquitoes was slightly corrupted and that they had to fill in holes in the DNA with the DNA of other animals, specifically frogs (which is why the dinosaurs were able to change sex even though they were all created to be female). Frogs don't have feathers, so the simple explanation as to why the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park don't have features like their real life counterparts probably did is because they're all part frog.

 

[NoDamnNames]

given that the dinosaurs were already some kind of frog hybrid the story could totally work in why they have no feathers and retain its continuity.

on exodus, I would say a more glaring discrepancy is the fact that the story of exodus and the enslavement of the Hebrew people as a theory all together has come under fire in contemporary archaeology although to talk about it makes people jump down your throat with accusations of anti antisemitism.

 

[Hiramas]

Sorry, Bob, but those Dinosaurs in the clips you showed? Badass.
The look awesome. Maybe tone down the color a bit, especially in predators, and it would totally work.
Can't look sillier than that spitting dinosaurs collar back in the first movie.

 

[Lunar Templar]

I can see dino feathers work if they where like

Imagine a T-rex with a colloration more akin to a raven, or an eagle....

that. That feathered monstrosity you showed off in the video. No, not even a little. DO.NOT.WANT.

Also.

on the subject of that rather cool Cross Guarded Lightsaber.

A metal like Mandilorian Iron, a metal canonically know to be resistant to Lightsabers, for the guard. Bam, done.

 

[Starik20X6]

Feathers aren't even the weirdest thing we might have wrong about dinosaurs. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves as I present to you: "Shrink Wrapped Dinosaur Syndrome"!

Okay, so why is it that we always show dinosaurs as just their skeletons with skin stretched over it, and maybe a few muscles here and there? That's not how animals work. Truth is, most if not all dinosaurs would have had a lot more fat, soft tissues and yes, feathers, that weren't preserved as part of the fossilisation process. This has led to some [http://svpow.com/2010/12/13/pimp-my-pod-2-haids/] pretty [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/26/science-meets-speculation-in-all-your-yesterdays/] crazy [http://www.billmunnscreaturegallery.com/bmcgsite_014.htm] reinterpretations [http://io9.com/5965389/a-book-that-will-make-you-question-everything-you-know-about-dinosaurs] of what dinosaurs may have looked like, and honestly I think they're pretty awesome! Sure, they look less like dragons, but they look more like creatures from another world entirely, and I think that's equally cool.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Burn the heathen! His opinion is different than mine on the lightsaber!!!
(It amuses me that that is what is taking up more space in the comment section)

Right there with you on the Dino thing, Bob. I don't want Dinosaurs to have feathers because, yeah, it looks kind of stupid. I like my giant monster lizards too. That Jurassic World trailer actually has me excited about the movie, which is something that surprises me. Here's hoping that it lives up to it.

 

[justblues]

So..did you like the trailer bob?

 

[Muspelheim]

C'mon. The feathers are an improvement, surely. They've always looked a bit silly in the nude, and I imagine it'd have sagged a lot more than how they're portrayed.

Think of it like this; Lithe, agile proto-crows chasing down prey like an emu on bathsalts, rather than a chicken. And hell, a cock in a rotten mood still have faint traces of their legacy, as I've experienced to my cost.

 

[pearcinator]

I hear ya Bob!

I don't like these new 'science-fiction' films being based around hard science facts! Movies like Interstellar and Gravity would have been better if they went full-on crazy sci-fi without trying to tell the audience "hey, this is all based on real scientific theories and facts!"

Edge of Tomorrow was the best sci-fi movie this year because it wasn't trying to be realistic! It's science-FICTION. It should be fictitious with crazy out-there concepts and just be fun to watch! I hope sci-fi movies in future try to be more like this film than Interstellar (but that probably won't be the case because Edge of Tomorrow kinda flopped).

So, yes. I want the dinosaurs of Jurassic World to be like reptiles cos that's way better and scarier than giant chickens running around. However, I think the Lightsaber Claymore looks stupid

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I really don't think there's anything wrong with doing something in a movie just because it's cool. I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept a claymore lightsaber and lizard-like dinosaurs and have fun with it. Does anyone remember fun? That used to be the main goal of movies and games. I think.

 

[killerbee256]

You should know that both ancient Hebrews and (most) ancient Egyptians WERE Caucasians, as are most middle eastern nowadays. The only difference is the particular shade of skin color. As an Israeli Jew myself.

Really bad example, I'm going to take a wild guess and you're of Ashkenazi descent. Your ancestors mixed to a degree with Germans, Slavs and perhaps Romans before that. That is in addition to their skin naturally lighting over the generations in reaction to the UV at that latitude. The Palestinians are much closer to what ancient Hebrews would have looked like.

 

[Baresark]

The problem with the feathers is simply that they are going out of their way to make them look like big hungry man eating parrots. That is stupid. Sure, there are plenty of birds out there with colorful feathers, but it's far more common in many places to them be earth tones. When I lived in New Mexico, we had two Peacocks that took up the ranch as a home. We always see pictures of these big colorful birds with the shiny green feathers, but the reality that they are a much darker green than is let on. They were a dark green and black with a few flecks of other colors mixed in, but nothing that made them look like these amazing and colorful birds. There is no reason to think the coloring is wrong on the dinosaurs while the feathers may be much closer to reality.

I honestly think the only people with problems with the upcoming movie Exodus are white privileged males like Bob. I think the vast majority of people simply don't care. And it's also natural for people to imagine people in stories as similar to themselves, as in implicit egotism, rather than just racial superiority misconceptions. But why contribute it to anything else other just the fact that "white people think they are better than everyone" I guess. That would require too much critical thinking.

Edit: Also, the lightsaber. I like they were going in a new design direction and trying to come up with something new, I hate that they came up with that... it's idiotic. In canon, there is a triple bladed lightsaber, but it wasn't like that. The blades came out one in the middle, and two smaller ones at a 45° angle from the saber hilt. They should have just used that, but they came up with a design that is literally bad by design, and anyone who has ever seen Star Wars immediately can say why it doesn't work. But maybe it'll be awesome, we'll have to wait and see.

Also, that trailer was crap. They might as well not have did that trailer at all. It showed us nothing at all.

 

[Russell75]

To be honest, as much as Jurassic World is a gateway for a new generation, they still want to maintain a sense it's in the same franchise. Also, they have had paleontologists like Jack Horner consulting on this, making changes and correcting designs so it seems a lot like it's a lot of fuss over nothing.

 

[Rahkshi500]

I have to agree with Bob on this one. In spite of how much scientific evidence there is, dinosaurs are always going be considered more appealing resembling giant reptiles than giant feather-covered mutant chickens. In anything regarding feathered animals, they're much more considered badass and frightening when they're more of the flying bird variety. Chocobos are nice, but they will not have that kind of great majesty and awe that dinosaurs have, so no, I don't think making them more scientifically accurate with the feathers will change that. Realty is sometimes stranger than fiction, and that's not always a good thing.

I think Bob's comparing the line of thought between Jurassic Park and race portrayal in other movies is a bit of false equivalency; there's a big difference between long extinct animals of the past and the living groups of complex, sapient humans of today.

As for accusations at nostalgia bias, I have to disagree as well. While nostalgia can have a blinding affect, I also think that the urging desire to change and re-invent can also have a blinding affect. What's important to remember is that we are talking about fiction and escapism here, and neither of them should have to indexically recreate reality, otherwise it loses the point. It's possible to take liberties with some things.

 

[Methodia Chicken]

I had hoped the new Jurassic park would basically be to dinosaur audiences not too dissimilar to this comic.
It could have shown the world how awesome feathered dinosaurs could be. but I'm not unhappy that it didn't, it still looks awesome.

 

[JarinArenos]

Seriously, why is it always parrots and chickens with you people? Are those the only birds that exist in your world?

Bob's outlook:

Bob lacks imagination.

Those look pretty awesomely badass to me.

Also, I expect that with those designs... whatever movie you were showing clips from really sucked.