• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer

    Two IT guys

    Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time

    The opening scene - a working class schlub dragged into the Velociraptor cage because the transport protocols weren’t up to the task of containing a dinosaur - illustrates the core conceit of the movie. That humans and their modern technology simply aren’t ready to contend with a far more primal and powerful animal kingdom.

    The hurricane flushing everyone off the island illustrated a major vulnerability. But the premise of the movie is that this park was never going to work precisely because the people running it were consumed by their own hubris and incapable of seeing the full extend of risk at play.

    Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system.

    A team he’s undercut and sabotaged in order to afford him the opportunity to steal Hammond’s embryos. The subsequent movies are all around various mega-corps trying to seize control of the island and its bounty of dinosaur specimens and failing time and time again. The issue isn’t merely that they’re cheap, its that they’re all greedy, myopic, and self-destructive.

    Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.

    He was stupid enough to get locked out of his own systems by trusting a skeleton crew to manage the park during a hurricane. But that’s just the kick-off of the story. Crichton could have written it differently - an engineering problem that the hurricane exposed, dinosaurs that outsmarted the security, the EPA coming in to shut the park down Ghostbusters style, animal liberation activists trying to free the dinosaurs - and ended in the same place.

    In many ways, Jurassic Park is a retelling of King Kong. Just swap out the big monkey for a big lizard. But the core of the story - the belief that humans can turn these primal forces into an entertainment commodity revealing man’s hubris - is tied up in Hammond’s belief in his ability to control the uncontrollable.

    Nedry is just an example of one more thing Hammond can’t control.