I was watching Jurassic Park 3 today and I was reminded that all 3 of those movies had the black guy die. Horribly. It can only happen so many times before you start to think something’s up. It happened all over, action films, horror, thrillers. The worst is when the black guy goes to get himself killed and then none of the other characters even comments on it after he disappears.
The word “representation” gets a lot of flack, but when I was growing up it was really demoralizing to watch film after film where the black dude was either a clown or was horribly killed a few minutes into the movie. Unless it was a hood movie anyway, but there’s an obvious problem there.
Anyway, this isn’t one of my more thoughtful rants, but just something I actually do like about modern film.
Muldoon wasn’t evil. He was the warden, tasked with park safety. He wasn’t super fond of the dinosaurs because they were ludicrously dangerous, especially the raptors. Honestly, he was a pretty good guy, trying to find Hammond’s grandkids, and dying covering Ellie while she ran for safety.
Yeah, but, like, did you consider it from the dino’s point of view?
Because I did
But on a serious side, most of the people working at Jurassic Park (in the first one anyway) were mostly just neutral people on a good/bad scale I suppose. Except Hammond. Even Nedry (sp?) was just exploiting his exploitative boss (underpaying him).
I don’t know how much of a point was trying to be made, but there’s definitely an underlying theme of capitalism forcing what could be a questionably ethical scientific project (bringing back extinct animals) into fast-tracked, hyper-capitalist, “just pay experts to come and rubber stamp this shit immediately so we can make money” disaster.
It is even more explicit that Hammond is a bastard in the books and the second book opens with some heavy anticapitalist messaging.
Also Muldoon lives in the books.
I read the first Jurassic Park book and a bunch of other Crichton books when I was like 13/14. Over 20 years ago. I enjoyed Andromeda Strain. All that shit has oozed out of my brain though and only the movies remain
I remember the first book being fairly anti-capitalist too, iirc it focused a lot on 90s silicon valley corporate culture being absolute scheming parasites, profit above all, especially lives.
Oh yeah. Hammond in the first film was only slightly better than in the book, from my understanding. Exploitative, rushing things, wanting quick and easy solutions, and thought he could fix shit just by throwing money at it.