Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. The American
government, true, seems to be putting their own spin on it with the impeachment
that is authentically impotent; the best you can hope is that Pelosi never
implemented it but for the plan that it will keep the Democratic party from
turning upon each other and fracturing instead, but won’t know for quite a
while yet. On with the show?
Rather, with the ‘motion comic’ – recently the JW franchise
released the second installment of its’ motion comic. In it, we meet the rest
of the journalist’s family – we are talking the same woman from part 1 – Rebecca
Ryan – and learn that her husband, in particular, is working in the U.S.
Wildlife department. What is so special about that? This is a good question,
because as far as character development aspects of this motion comic go, they
are weak. So far, this motion comic is an exposition dump, showing various
interactions of humans with dinosaurs, sea reptiles and pterosaurs – nothing more.
It is a variant on the closing scenes of both the second JW film and the BBR
short feature – humans are interacting with the returned prehistoric beasts of
the Mesozoic and so far, there is a national alert and what else have you. The mother
of the family – Rebecca seems to be sceptical of this whole hysteria for some
reason, but we never see it in this installment, because it focused on the still-nameless
father of the family, and he encounters a couple of fighting dinosaurs on his
own. (The rest of his family is elsewhere, on the route to school or wherever).
I.e., it is less of an exposition dump and more of a shock-and-awe dump
instead. Yay!
Ok, let us talk about dinosaurs. So far, from BBR onwards,
humans are little more than cardboard features: the family in BBR did not even
have names; as I said before, the cast
certainly has names and you could see them in the credits, but the characters – nope. The first installment
of the motion comic actually had named human characters – Rebecca Ryan, the journalist
mother of the family – and Beau, the newspaperman from Hawaii – but here no go.
That is somewhat weak and dehumanizing, so let us try to focus on dinosaurs
instead. The news showed us a pteranodon harassing an airplane, (probably
because it never seen one before back in Isla Nublar), a pack of compys’
running around someone’s backyard, and a pair of boy scouts encountering a
stegosaurus. Again, we have seen variations of these encounters all over the
franchise, so let us go for the main event: Mr. Ryan’s encounter with the battling
dinos. There are two of them: a Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus, and-
And Ankylosaurus is depicted incorrectly. Sigh. Since there
are no professional paleontologists in our audience, let us just go with the
statement that there were two main groups of armored dinosaurs: the Jurassic
stegosaurs and the Cretaceous ankylosaurs. Clear? If it is, let us move onto
the team Cretaceous in particular. It was also divided into two main groups:
one that had clubbed tails and one that does not.
Back in 1999, Impossible Pictures™ released the ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ mini-series. The
final episode featured an Ankylosaurus – several of them. It had a tail club,
and its’ scuted armor was relatively smooth, almost like that of an armadillo,
for example. However, in the fourth
episode of WWD, there was another dinosaur – Polacanthus – that was more
closely related to Ankylosaurus than to Stegosaurus, but it had no tail club,
and its body armor was much less smooth and spikier. It belonged to the
nodosaur branch of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs.
Yes,
actually, the Polacanthus is a bad example of a nodosaur – the nodosaur branch
of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs were studied, and are known, much less than
their ankylosaur cousins were, but basically? Ankylosaurs had tail clubs and
small spikes on their body armor, if any. Nodosaurs had no tail clubs, but
their body armor was much more formidable looking. The armored dinosaur that
featured in JW’s second motion comic had both notable body spikes and a tail
club, making it a chimera.
Pause.
Yes, Dr. Wu admitted directly in the first JW film that none of their dinosaurs
were authentic; they were homunculi, concocted in the labs by Dr. Wu and his
fellows. That is fair, but it also rather undercuts JW’s intended messages –
that life finds a way and that people now have to co-exist with the Mesozoic
animals. They do not and it does not. Since all of the dinosaurs were initially
created in labs, they could have been made incapable of surviving on their own
in the wild – in fact, the first JP novel
made them so, supposedly: they were incapable of manifesting Lysol and had to
take it as a dietary supplement instead. The novel ended with Costa Rica
possibly being invaded by a force of animals that needed supply of foods rich
in Lysol – beans and chickens – but which were quite independent of surviving on
their regardless. Of course, they were raptors too – but we digress. The point
is that the rebooted JW franchise could’ve made its’ dinosaurs like this within
its’ canon – artificial homunculi that gained independence of their own and
which now run amok like a bunch of Frankenstein monsters… period. Instead, we
still got a horde of artificial dinosaur-shaped homunculi running the world and
no one is acknowledging it.
Is this
distinction important? Yes, even though it really should not. The truth is,
test-tube animals are still seen as inauthentic, especially within sci-fi genre,
and are treated very differently from ‘authentic’ or ‘real life’ animals. TLK,
for example, is not a sci-fi movie, even though it features talking animals,
for example. The online game ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ actually features
official hybrid dinosaurs, made by Dr. Wu, so artificial dinosaurs are JW canon
even beyond the I-Rex and the Indoraptor, so why haven’t the American military
and/or government try to use someone like Dr. Wu to create some sort of a virus
that would target those ‘artificial’ dinosaurs, (all of them, really) and rid
the world of them?
…Yes,
this probably will not happen – wherever the JW-3 movie will take the narrative
for the conclusion, this will not be this, most likely, and for good reasons:
artificial viruses are bad. Natural viruses are not much better, but still. That
said, given how stupid the American government (and its’ military) are running USA
in real life, it would not be too surprising either if they were to make or to
do something just as stupid in the upcoming JW-3 movie, (2021). As it is, we
will just have to wait for both its’ release and the release of the next JW motion
comic installments. Considering that right now we got human characters that are as developed as cardboard cut-outs and dinosaurs that are completely unrealistic, (come on, Ankylosaurus is not obscure, it is almost as well known as the Tricerotops and the T-Rex are), and are executing something that seems to be somewhat reminiscent of 'The Day that the Dinosaurs Died' documentary from the Discovery channel (2010), I'm not keeping my hopes are. ('The Day' has its own flaws, but we'll talk about it some other time).
This is
it for now. See you all soon!
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