I don’t know if you have noticed but the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park have never been what science would call accurate.
When you go into a JP movie you are going there to see “real” dinosaur come to life. Just like you aren’t going to see any other Hollywood give you a look at reality with its other offerings.
Yet I have heard from a number of people that they want accuracy for the movie, if only to “enlighten the general public.”
The general public are exactly the people who would be turned off by a raptor that’s 3 feet tall and feathered. If you want accuracy from the world you will need to read the book.
Michael Crichton did a lot of research going into writing the original Jurassic Park. Every decision he made was based off of something he found in his research; even the Velociraptor-Deinonychus name change was based on a hypothesis that Deinonychus was another species of Velociraptor.
Though that hypothesis was later disproven, but still, that’s where it came from.
I think Crichton was of two minds– for one thing, he favored research and he himself felt obligated to go through painstaking details to bring his story to life.
However, he also knew that audiences expected entertainment and ultimately they were looking for entertainment first before learning about dinosaur accuracy. For as much research as Crichton put into his work, he also indulge
d the truth quite a bit for thematic purposes.
If he wrote Jurassic Park in the present day, I can guarantee the raptors would be feathered and the dinosaurs overall would be far more bird like.
Most people don’t care about being knowledgeable about dinosaurs, truthfully. And the fact is that every single JP movie, even the worst and least accurate ones, has contributed to getting a bunch of little kids hooked on dinosaurs where they will learn on their own what’s real and what isn’t.
Bottom line is, just because the original JP was nice enough to provide fairly accurate (for its time) dinosaurs, and is a science fiction movie th
at leans hard into the science aspect, doesn’t mean they ‘owe’ us scientifically-accurate dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park was praised for when it came out, both the book and the movie: for such an updated look at how dinosaurs behaved and looked.
Wouldn’t you say the series has a standard to live up to in that regard?
To live up to Crichton’s hard research and creative work that spawned from that research?
I do.
~XO