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Sunday I decided to relax and take in a movie. The big release this weekend was Jurassic World and since I loved the first so much as a kid, I thought I'd enjoy the sequel. Little did I know I wasn't taking time off, but instead, watching a work related movie. I was floored that Jurassic World was really "Dinosaur care, training, and enrichment and what goes horribly wrong when you fail"- the movie.
I had a lot to say after seeing the movie, both good and bad, but I am glad I slept on it as my tone has softened. Instead of raves and rants, I choose instead to pen a letter to the "Dinosaur Whisperer" himself - Chris Pratt, on my thoughts of his methods, philosophy, as well as how the park cared for the behavioral health of its animals. Enjoy.
I wanted to start by telling you that I am very proud of your choice of methods in training your Velociraptors. Clicker training is at the forefront of the most effective forms of animal training. After watching your technique I would like to suggest you refine your timing and use of the clicker. Perhaps practice with Raptor cousins for a while by attending a Chicken Clicker Camp. From my observations, Raptors have profound hearing and don't require multiple clicks or clicking so close to them. I'm sure the skills and timing you would learn at this programs would help you turn your raptors into some amazingly well trained animals. But of course, don't let the military catch wind of this. I mean look what they did with the poor sweet dolphins.
I am very impressed with the facilities the dinosaurs are housed in. Most seem filled with enrichment and get lots of stimulation throughout the day. I agreed with your assessment that it was a poor choice to limit Indominus Rex's enrichment and stimulation. As we learned, bored animals get very creative and not always in the ways we would like. Especially when it comes to human interactions and shock type boundary containment systems. I was pleased though that even with limited access to enrichment, Indominus was very happy to interact with a treat ball when given the opportunity.
I was also pleased to see that you work to embrace a Raptor's natural instincts in capturing their tracking behaviors. It was nice to see all your hard work and proofing worked well when you did a real life test of their training. I don't consider the end result a failure. Not many trainers think to proof that outcome. I know a few tracking and Nose Work instructors who might be able to give you a few tips but otherwise I think you have a very good grasp on what you're doing.
In closing the only real concern I have is where the science is on Alpha/dominance/pack theory regarding Raptors. I know the this theory has been significantly changed with dogs as they don't actually pack or have a hierarchy like wolves. If Raptors do pack with a hierachy, are they really a species that would allow dominance or hierarchy from another species? Presumption of this might have been what got you in trouble at the end of your tracking exercises. Perhaps more research is needed. Anyway, thank you for your hard work and keep training those Raptors!
When young Steven Spielberg was first offered the screenplay for "Jaws," he said he would direct the movie on one condition: That he didn't have to show the shark for the first hour. By slowly building the audience's apprehension, he felt, the shark would be much more impressive when it finally arrived.
He was right. I wish he had remembered that lesson when he was preparing "Jurassic Park," his new thriller set in a remote island theme park where real dinosaurs have been grown from long-dormant DNA molecules. The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.
It's clear, seeing this long-awaited project, that Spielberg devoted most of his effort to creating the dinosaurs. The human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream, utter dire warnings, and outwit the monsters.
Richard Attenborough, as the millionaire who builds the park, is given a few small dimensions - he loves his grandchildren, he's basically a good soul, he realizes the error of tampering with nature. But there was an opportunity here to make his character grand and original, colorful and oversize, and instead he comes across as unfocused and benign.
As the film opens, two dinosaur experts (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) arrive at the park, along with a mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum whose function in the story is to lounge about uttering vague philosophical imprecations. Also along are Attenborough's grandchildren, and a lawyer, who is the first to be eaten by a dinosaur.
Attenborough wants the visitors to have a preview of his new park, where actual living prehistoric animals live in enclosures behind tall steel fences, helpfully labeled "10,000 volts." The visitors set off on a tour in remote-controlled utility vehicles, which stall when an unscrupulous employee (Wayne Knight) shuts down the park's computer program so he can smuggle out some dinosaur embryos. Meanwhile, a tropical storm hits the island, the beasts knock over the fences, and Neill is left to shepherd the kids back to safety while they're hunted by towering meat-eaters.
The plot to steal the embryos is handled on the level of a TV sitcom. The Knight character, an overwritten and overplayed blubbering fool, drives his Jeep madly through the storm and thrashes about in the forest. If this subplot had been handled cleverly - with skill and subtlety, as in a caper movie - it might have added to the film's effect. Instead, it's as if one of the Three Stooges wandered into the story.
The subsequent events - after the creatures get loose - follow an absolutely standard outline, similar in bits and pieces to all the earlier films in this genre, from "The Lost World" and "King Kong" right up to the upcoming "Carnosaur." True, because the director is Spielberg, there is a high technical level to the execution of the cliches. Two set-pieces are especially effective: A scene where a beast mauls a car with screaming kids inside, and another where the kids play hide and seek with two creatures in the park's kitchen.
But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs.
Think back to another ambitious special effects picture from Spielberg, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). That was a movie about the "idea" of visitors from outer space. It inspired us to think what an awesome thing it would be, if earth were visited by living alien beings. You left that movie shaken and a little transformed. It was a movie that had faith in the intelligence and curiosity of its audience.
In the 16 years since it was made, however, big-budget Hollywood seems to have lost its confidence that audiences can share big dreams. "Jurassic Park" throws a lot of dinosaurs at us, and because they look terrific (and indeed they do), we're supposed to be grateful. I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made "Close Encounters" today, we would have seen the aliens in the first 10 minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan with death rays.
Spielberg enlivens the action with lots of nice little touches; I especially liked a sequence where a smaller creature leaps suicidally on a larger one, and they battle to the death. On the monster movie level, the movie works and is entertaining. But with its profligate resources, it could have been so much more.
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