The Lost World: Jurassic Park | Steven Spielberg, 1997
"We're here to observe and document, not interact"
"That's a scientific impossibility"
A small army of experts and local muscle hired to transport dinosaurs from the original park’s “site B” to San Diego are armed with technology: phones, guns, tranquilliser darts, cages and restraints, radios, cameras, trucks, boats, helicopters. Palaeontologists spew facts about the dinosaurs they look at disbelievingly at rapid speed, barely stopping for breath. Educated precaution. They want you to know that they know everything, that they have everything covered. That nothing can go wrong. But they have no control here. Their technology fails more than it works, and their words have no purpose in the wild. They’re emboldened, but they don’t know what they’re dealing with. At a distance, these dinosaurs are pixels on a landscape, weightless and unreal, but spectacular giants, nonetheless, miraculous and impossible, demanding to be studied. But up close, these CGI creatures are puppets and models, awkward and ugly, still unreal but within reach. It’s easy to forget that these are wild animals, so they get too close, and the animals defend themselves. These dinosaurs are manufactured, but they've become natural. Technology can’t control them. Science can’t control them. People are killed by them. The events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park are hubris masquerading as curiosity. A human failure rather than a natural one. Survival of the fittest.