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Sunday, January 8, 2012

JURASSIC PARK [1993]

Life Finds a Way

Maybe dinosaurs have more in common with present-day birds than with reptiles.
Look at the pubic bone, turned backward, like a bird's.
Look at the vertebrae, full of air sacs and hollows, like a bird's.
And even the word 'raptor' means 'bird of prey'.
~Dr. Alan Grant

Imagine yourself in the Cretaceous period.
You'd get your first look at this 6-foot turkey as you enter a clearing.
He moves like a bird, lightly bobbing his head.
You keep still because maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex
and he'll lose you if you don't move.
But no, not Velociraptor.
You stare at him and he just stares right back.
And that's when the attack comes.
Not from the front, but from the side.
From the other two raptors you didn't even know were there.
Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter.
He uses co-ordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today.
[pull out the claw of raptor]
And he slashes at you with this,
a 6-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the middle toe.
He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, no.
He slashes at you [he lightly 'slashes' across the kid's body with the raptor claw] here or here...
Or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines.
The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you.
So, try to show a little respect.
~Dr. Alan Grant, to the Volunteer Boy

Ellie: What's so wrong with the kids?
Alan: They're noisy, they're messy, they're expensive, they smell...
Ellie: They don't smell.
Alan: Some smell. Babies smell.

I own an island off the coast of Costa Rica.
I've leased it from the government
and during the last 5 years I've been setting up a biological preserve.
Really spectacular. Spared no expense.
Make the one I've fot down in Kenya look like a petting zoo.
And there's no doubt our attractions will drive kids out of their minds.
And not just kids. Everyone.
~John Hammond

Donald: This is not a weekend excursion.
This is a serious investigation of the stability of the island.
Your investors, whom I represent, are deeply concerned.
48 hours from now, if they're not convinced, I'm not convinced.
I'll shut you down, John.
John: In 48 hours, I'll be accepting your apologies.

Alan: We could tear up the rule book on cold-bloodedness.
It doesn't apply.
They're wrong.
This is a warm-blooded creature.
Ellie: This thing doesn't live in a swamp.
Alan: Thins thing's got a 25, 27-foot neck?
John: The Brachiosaurus? 30.
Alan: 30 feet.

Welcome to Jurassic Park.
~John Hammond

Just one drop of your blood contains billions of strands of DNA,
the building blocks of life.
A DNA strands like me is a blueprint for building a living thing.
And sometimes animals that went extinct millions of years ago like dinosaurs,
left their blueprints behind for us to find.
We just had to know where to look.
100 millions years ago, there were mosquitoes just like today.
And just like today, they fed on the blood of animals, even dinosaurs.
Sometimes, after biting a dinosaur, mosquitoes would land on the branch of a tree
and get stuck in the sap.
After a long time, the tree sap would get hard and become fossilised just like a dinosaur bone,
preserving the mosquito inside.
This fossilised tree sap, which we call amber,
waited for millions of years with the mosquito inside,
until Jurassic Park scientists came along.
Using sophisticated techniques, they extract the preserved blood from the mosquito,
and bingo! Dino DNA!
A full DNA strand contains 3 billion genetic codes.
If we looked at screens like these once a second for 8 hours a day,
it's take 2 years to look at the entire DNA strand.
It's that long.
Since it's so old, it's full of holes.
Now that's where our geneticists take over.
Thinking machine super-computers and gene sequencers break down the strand in minutes.
And virtual-reality displays show our geneticists the gaps in the DNA sequence.
We used the complete DNA of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code.
Whew!
And now, we can make a baby dinosaur.
~Mr. DNA

Henry: Actually they can't breed in a wild.
Population control is one of our security precautions.
There's no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.
Ian: How do you know they can't breed?
Henry: Because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female.
We've engineered them that way.

Ian: But, again, how do you know they're all female?
Does somebody go out in the park and pull up the dinosaur's skirts?
Henry: We control their chromosomes.
It's really not that difficult.
All vertebrate embryos are inherently female.
They just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male.
We simply deny them that.
Ellie: Deny them that?
Ian: John, the kind of control you're attempting is not possible.
If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us
it's that life will not be contained.
Life breaks free.
Expands to new places and it crashes through barriers, painfully,
maybe even dangerously, but there it is...
John: There it is...
Henry: You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will breed.
Henry: No, I'm simply saying that life finds a way.


Alan: What's their growth rate?
Robert: They're lethal at 8 months, and I do mean lethal.
I've hunted most things that can hunt you,
but how these things move...
Alan: Fast for a biped?
Robert: Cheetah speed.
50, 60 miles per hour if they ever got out in the open.
And they're astonishing jumpers.
John: Yes.
That's why we're taking extreme precautions.
Alan: Do they show intelligence?
Robert: They show extreme intelligence.
Even problem-solving intelligence.
Especially the big one.
We bred 8 originally, but when she came in, she took over the pride
and killed all but 2 of the others.
That one, when she looks at you, you can see she's working things out.
That's why we're feeding them like this.
She had them all attacking the fences when the feeders came.
Ellie: The fences are electrified, right?
Robert: That's right, but they never attack the same place twice.
They were testing the fences for weaknesses systematically.
They remember.


What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.
~Dr. Ian Malcolm

The world has just changed so radically and we're all running to catch up.
I don't want to jump to any conclusions,
but dinosaurs and man...
two species seperated by 65 million years of evolution,
have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together.
How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?
~Dr. Alan Grant

One of the earliest carnivores, we know Dilophosaurus is actually poisonous,
spitting its venom as its prey, causing blindness and paralysis.
Allowing the carnivore to eat as its leisure.
This makes Dilophosaurus a beautiful but deadly addition to Jurassic Park.
~Tour Voice

Ian: God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs.
God creates man, man destroys God, man creates dinosaurs.
Ellie: Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth.

Alan: Now, Lex, listen.
Lex, I'm right here.
I'm gonna look after you but I have to help your brother.
Stay right here and wait for me.
Lex, trembling: He left us... he left us...
Alan: But that's not what I'm going to do.

Tim: What do you call a blind dinosaur?
"Do-you-think-he-saurus"
[Alan and Lex giggles]
Tim: What do you call a blind dinosaur's dog?
Alan: You got me.
Tim: A "Do-you-think-he-saurus-rex"

They'll be fine.
Who better to get the children through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?
~John Hammond

[Lex got startled with a dinosaur]
Lex: Go away! Go away!
Alan: It's okay. It's a Brachoisaurus.
Tim: It's a 'Veggie-saurus', Lex, 'Veggie-saurus'.

[found egg-shell on their way]
Alan: It's the dinosaur's egg. The dinosaurs are breeding.
Tim: But, my grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls.
Alan: Amphibian DNA.
Lex: What's that?
Alan: On the tour, the film said they used frog DNA to fill in the gene-sequence gaps.
They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of frogs.
Some West African frogs have been known to spontaneous change sex from male to female
in a single sex environment.
Malcolm was right.
Look... [see the tiny footsteps of dinosaurs] Life found a way.

[see a group of dinosaurs running]
Alan: Tim, can you tell me what they are?
Tim: They're a... Gal, eh... Gala, eh... Gallimimus.
Lex: Are those meat-eating? "Meat-asauruses"?
Alan: Look at the wheeling. Unifrom direction changes.
Just like a flock of birds evading a predator.

John: All major theme parks have delays.
When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked.
Ian: But John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat tourists.

After careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your park.
~Dr. Alan Grant


*****

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