For: language, strong promotion of evolution, strong violence and carnage, and a warped representation of natureJurassic Park is two solid hours of well-directed blood, teeth, claws, screaming, terror, dead people, and mangled body parts, set to a nice film score and liberally sprinkled with inappropriate language and old-earth/evolution sermonettes ad nauseam. The gripping but pointless horror theme, content issues and warped foundation destroy even the possibility of God-honoring entertainment in this movie that is ultimately as useless as it is iconic.
NOTE: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF EVENTS IN Jurassic Park WHICH ARE NOT RECOMMENDED FOR READING BY PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF TWELVE
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Strong Promotion of Evolution
Jurassic Park, which gets off to a horrible start by spending half of its title advancing an evolutionary worldview, isn’t merely written so that the story only works in the fictional Godless, evolutionary world (although it is); it’s written so that at every crucial point in the story, evolution is brought up by name, whether smoothly and relevantly or not.
Jurassic Park preaches, on several occasions, that dinosaurs evolved into birds. The main character gives a relatively lengthy dissertation on the allegedly striking similarities between velociraptors and birds, as evidence that the one turned into the other over millions of years. Upon seeing living dinosaurs of another species, he compares them to birds as well. Afterwards he, with a sly grin, tells the other characters, “Bet you never look at birds the same way again,” and, naturally, the movie ends with the main character watching a flock of birds.
A side character forcefully maintains that “the history of evolution has taught us” that Life spontaneously but deliberately persists in moving to the next stage of evolution, despite natural and artificial obstructions—that the naturalistic forces of the earth have creative power. This worldview is confirmed later on, when Life finds a way to turn female dinosaurs into males so that they can breed in the wild, and the main character repeats, “Life found a way.”
One character states emphatically that “dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.” Another declares that formerly-extinct plants “are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they’re in, and they’ll defend themselves—violently, if necessary.” Yet another character stresses the notion that dinosaurs and man were “separated by 65 million years of evolution” and are on the earth together for the first time, by artificial means.
There are numerous references to millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions of years ago. Various theoretical periods of evolution (Jurassic, Cretaceous) are mentioned multiple times. There are also references to “early carnivores”, and the evolutionary power of “gut instinct”. The main character, who stands to lose his job, says that he will just have to evolve, too.
As an aside, much of the “science” portrayed in Jurassic Park is completely erroneous, from the main character’s statements about the alleged similarities between dinosaurs and birds (some of which are false, and all of which have absolutely no scientific significance in the real world), to the movie’s portrayal of T. Rex vision (which scientists now believe was better than human vision) as being totally dependent on motion.
Strong Violence and Carnage
There is very little story or character development to Jurassic Park. It’s all violence, intensity, and carnage.
Five characters are seen being eaten alive, or in grisly pieces after they were eaten. One is grabbed by an enormous T. Rex who grinds his teeth on the man’s upper half while shaking his body violently, bones audibly snapping. His scattered remains are discovered later on. Another is attacked by a razor-toothed dinosaur which spits venom into the man’s eyes and then proceeds to eat the screaming victim inside a jeep with fogged windows. Two are attacked and eaten alive by velociraptors, being slashed and mauled (screaming all the way) as the dinosaurs viciously prolong the experience. One character appears, from a dark corner, to set his hand on a frightened woman’s shoulder, only for her to turn, in relief, and pull away in her hands a stiff, bloody and mutilated arm, from the hand up to the severed shoulder.
The movie is almost non-stop terror, with scared, wounded and bleeding children being hunted and attacked by velociraptors and a raging Tyrannosaurus rex, screaming people trying to run from blood-thirsty carnivores that leap after them at fifty miles an hour—trying to escape from predators stalking them in a dark underground compound—trying desperately to shut out the diabolically intelligent raptors that have learned how to open doors.
And the blood, the gore, the violence, the intensity, the startle moments, the life-or-death chase scenes, the T. Rex crashing through the jeep windows, the raptors slashing, clawing and snapping their jaws just inches from the characters’ running or dangling bodies—even the bloody, disembodied goat leg that hits the sunroof… These random, gruesome elements don’t support some great story or meaningful character relationship. They’re the main attraction.
A Warped Representation of Nature
The moral to Jurassic Park, if there is one, is that nature itself is the greatest force in the world, and it should not be interfered with. This view is completely at odds with reality and God’s Word, so the filmmakers created a fictional universe that is subject to neither reality nor God’s Word, in order to make their ethical standpoint work.
In Jurassic Park, it is the epitome of arrogance to assume that man could ever take dominion over, or subdue dinosaurs (or even ancient plants). And in Jurassic Park, that’s correct, because the dinosaurs are inconsistent with reality. In God’s reality, animals have a fear and a dread of humans, because God gave them that fear and dread1. Even the most savage creatures in the real world can be fought off, made to run, subdued. In Jurassic Park, all of the dinosaurs are completely fearless when it comes to humans—completely unable to be subdued—not because that is the way dinosaurs are, or were, but because the movie is at odds with truth.
The biblical command to take dominion over the earth is not just ignored but deemed dangerous and morally reprehensible by Jurassic Park. Characters are staggered by “the lack of humility before nature” displayed by those who would take dominion over it. They argue that man has no right to undo what nature has done by its inscrutable selection, and that if and when man may beneficially interfere with nature, it is only because man has already done something negative to throw nature off its course. Discovery—the advancement of man’s ability to shape and utilize the earth (for God’s glory in the real world)—is termed “a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores... the rape of the natural world.” In Jurassic Park, nature is God.
One character, whose profession is devoted to the study of chaos—the meaninglessness and unpredictability of natural existence—glibly remarks, “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.” A female character, completely unfazed by the idea of man having destroyed God, adds an equally glib remark about dinosaurs eating man and leaving the earth to women.
As an aside, the character’s conviction that the ultimate problem with the scientific power behind the resurrection of the dinosaurs is that it was founded on the discoveries and advances of scientist who came before, was reached only by standing on the shoulders of geniuses, and was developed through knowledge these new scientists didn’t “earn” for themselves, is deeply flawed. It is framed on the socialist assumption that people can only handle responsibly that which they earned by labor, each for himself.
1 Genesis 9:2
