The second JW trailer was aired. What did we learn?
That this is the official parting of the ways with the
original novel duology. As one of the characters tells another one in the
trailer, ‘the dinosaurs are old news’, they’re gone – and they most certainly
are, as we get a proper glimpse of the Indoraptor this time.
It is decisively anthropomorphic, the proportions are all
wrong. The I-Rex was a carnosaur, a RL dinosaur with some supernatural skills, cough, technically speaking. The Indoraptor
is thoroughly anthropomorphised, on the other hand, a genuine D&D troll
with some reptilian traits on top of everything and anything else.
Here is the thing. The dinosaurs of the JP franchise grew
clearly more and more anthropomorphic since, well, the beginning. In the
initial JP novel, the dinosaurs were animals, RL animals; science might have
returned them back to life, but they were still animals. Crichton’s raptors
were reminiscent of tigers, the dilophosaurs – of leopards, and so on. They
were intelligent – but then again, RL modern animals are themselves can be
quite intelligent, cognizant even – but they had no human DNA in them, period.
Frog, (or some other amphibian) DNA – sure, but human? No.
Then came the JP3 film, and while in the first two JP movies
the dinosaurs were animals, (though there were some dodgy moments with the
tyrannosaurs), in JP3 anthropomorphic traits were appearing, especially in the
raptors.
A brief aside about the raptors: part of the reason why they
had such… incorrect PR in RL may be in part because of Crichton and his JP
novels. You see, in those novels, he officially and publically conflated the
generic term of ‘raptor’, (now known scientifically as dromeosaurid dinosaurs…which
isn’t much of an improvement, because one of the ‘raptors’ is known
specifically as ‘Dromeosaurus’…never mind), with specifically Velociraptor – only
it wasn’t the dinosaur that we call the Velociraptor in these modern times, but
its’ bigger cousin called Deinonychus. Deinonychus was just as big as the
raptors in the first JP movie – at 4 m in length, it was the third-largest
raptor in RL, with only the Utahraptor and the more recently discovered
Dakotaraptor, being bigger – and it was the star of the JP movies, albeit under
an incorrect name…though even in the late 1980s Deinonychus and Velociraptor were
scientific synonyms…science can be confusing, in short.
Back to JP3. There, the raptors were decisively
anthropomorphic, not only able to deduce that them pesky humans have stolen
their precious eggs, but open to communication, literally. Dr. Grant directly
communicated with the raptors in JP3, bargaining their safety in return for the
return of the dinosaurs’ eggs. RL animals do not behave like that, (unlike
fictional ones, as the ones described in medieval bestiaries, for example),
but-
But already in the previous JW movie Dr. Wu, (who apparently
didn’t die back in the first JP film –
maybe S.H.I.E.L.D., or Hydra, or some other shadowy organization saved him back
then), admitted/confessed/exposed to the viewers that these dinosaurs aren’t ‘real’,
(i.e. realistic), they’re ‘hybrids’, (i.e. chimeras), fictional, artificial
creatures.
An aside regarding the chimera. Initially, in ancient Greece
and Rome, it was a mythical monster; it was part lion, part goat and part
snake, and it breathed fire. It was dragon-like, but also composite, so not
even the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves believed it to be real…
In later times, the chimera lost, in part, its’ specific
features, and became a composite, generically vague-looking monster instead.
Some of the gargoyles on various basilicas and cathedrals were probably considered
to be chimeras instead in the older times – but in modern times, while the ‘classical
chimera’ is once more a feature of the fantasy genre, in sci-fi the term ‘chimera’
is used to describe various hybrid creatures, whether composite animals, or
human-animal hybrids, (and there were some in various sci-fi novels and TV
shows over the last few decades). Thus, the ‘new’ dinosaurs of the JW films are
not really dinosaurs at all, not even by Crichton’s standards – they are
chimeras. The I-Rex supposedly had human DNA, and the Indoraptor certainly has
it; even the vague shots of it in the new trailer show it, it even behaves like
a human – a stalker, maniac, mad killer, but a human nonetheless. Thus, with
the Indoraptor being probably the main villain of the new JW movie, it is safe
to suppose that the next JW movie will only loosely be a dinosaur-associated
movie, and more of a generic sci-fi one – but we’ll have to wait and see until
its’ release properly for further assessment.
That’s it for today; see you all soon!
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