Arrogance finds a way

Watching the first installment was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life. And now, nearly 30 years later, I watched the final chapter of the Jurassic Park saga: Jurassic World: Dominion.

It wasn’t nearly as good as the first one, but an entertaining and satisfying conclusion nonetheless. After the first movie, with every consecutive installment, I always thought it was a rather unrealistic story.

I’m not talking about resurrecting species that went extinct millions of years ago. It’s a movie, that part I buy. I’m talking about the really stupid decisions the greedy antagonists make in these movies. It’s not only “Life finds a way” that is the central theme of the Jurassic movies, it’s also “Arrogance finds a way”.

No matter how many disasters happen with these dinosaurs, people keep cloning them, selling them, experimenting with them. If anything, the Jurassic movies are about mankind’s arrogant belief that we can outsmart nature. That nature should obey us, rather than the other way around.

“Really? What did you think was going to happen? Why do you keep doing that?” That’s what I keep thinking with every Jurassic movie. As the audience, we can see the disaster coming from a mile away. The characters, not so much. But maybe that’s the fun of it.

Later today I learned that while my family and I were watching dinosaurs in the theatre, just a kilometer away on the other side of the city center, 10,000 people were joining a ‘Climate March’, to raise awareness of the climate crisis. Talking about mankind making dumb decisions, and disasters that everyone can see coming…

Maybe the Jurassic Park movies aren’t so unrealistic after all.