The Jurassic Park franchise has been thrilling movie-going audiences for over a quarter of a century now and it’s showing little sign of slowing down. It centers around an overall concept that requires the audience to suspend a lot of disbelief just to go along with the plot.
But, with such great results, people are rarely bothered. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other offenses to logic within the movies that people are less forgiving about. Here are ten things from the Jurassic Park movies that make no sense and still have fans scratching their heads to this very day.
The Birdcage
In Jurassic Park III, the main characters accidentally stumble into a giant birdcage designed to house the island’s flying pteranodons and a lengthy action sequence occurs. During the characters’ escape at the end, a latch on the gate that they exit from isn’t properly closed and this leads to the door being left ominously ajar.
The shot implies that this is bad because the pteranodons will escape. But the only reason that the movie’s events take place is because the pteranodons attack a boat off of the coast of the island, so they must already be able to get out, and they don’t do anything meaningful for the rest of the film. It was perhaps an oversight from the movie’s extensive rewrites.
The T. Rex
The Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park is one of the all-time great movie monsters. A kind of chaotic neutral character who’s as much hero in the story as it is a villain. As an actual scientific concept, the resurrected T. Rex is all hocus pocus but, even if you could clone a dinosaur from fossilized mosquitoes, the T. Rex moves in a physically impossible way for an animal of its size and structure.
This is mostly a trade-off so that the movie can have its big T. Rex chase scene in the middle, where it runs after a speeding jeep, and most people agree that it’s worth it.
Spell No Expense
As the dastardly Dennis Nedry starts his plan to steal Jurassic Park’s dinosaur DNA and sell it to a rival company, he shuts down the security cameras and enters their cryogenic vault. As he begins to extract the vials of DNA for various species, viewers can see that the park’s scientists, who have brought these species back from extinction, don’t know how to spell a lot of their names.
It would make more sense of it was consistent but the mistakes aren’t even for the obscure ones. Both Tyrannosaurus and stegosaurus are misspelled while metriacanthosaurus turns out perfectly. It would appear that John Hammond spared no expense for his park, except when it came to proofreaders.
Hammond’s Presentation
As John Hammond begins to explain Jurassic Park to its first guests, he leads the tour onto a kind of theme park ride presentation that shows off the basic science behind the dinosaurs. The audience is locked into their seats like a rollercoaster and Hammond goes to the front to give the presentation in tandem with a video recording of himself.
As the responses from the video version of Hammond show, the presentation is designed so that John Hammond will be the one giving it. But is he – an old, infirm, man with a cane – expected to do this every time, every day?
One Hand on the Wheel
There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about the ending of Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The finale sees a transport ship crashing into the San Diego harbor before the T. Rex on board breaks loose and rampages through the city. For this to happen, however, the T. Rex needed to break out of its restraints in the cargo hold and roam the ship to kill every last crew member before getting back in the cargo hold and having the doors close most of the way on top of it.
The mind-boggling logistics of this are exemplified by a lone severed hand attached to the ship’s wheel despite it being in a closed-off cabin area that appears to have sustained no damage.
Chris Pratt’s Outfit
Chris Pratt plays former military man turned-dino-wrangler Owen Grady in the Jurassic World movies and he can be easily identified by his superhero-sized biceps and his distinct outfit. You can quibble about how practical it is for a man to be doing physical labor on a Central American island in jeans and a leather vest but one thing that baffles the mind is the outifit’s apparent indestructibility.
Whether being doused in automotive fluid or engulfed by a cloud of volcanic ash before being dunked in the ocean, Owen’s costume always returns right back to normal in the next scene. It makes you wonder if the clothes are magical or if he just keeps a lot of spares.
Bullet Holes
If you’re a stickler for things like continuity errors, then Jurassic Park has plenty of mistakes to point out. But there are few minor inconsistencies that will get a pedant riled up better than the three bullet holes that appear at the end of the movie.
After the security system and door locks are finally reactivated, the pursuing velociraptors simply smash through the glass window into the control room. Before they do, however, Dr. Grant fires three shots at them with a shotgun. When we see a shot of the glass, though, the holes in it are clearly too small to be made by any kind of shotgun and look more like they’re from a handgun.
Extinction
The inciting conflict in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s story is caused by the impending eruption of a hitherto unspoken of volcano on the park’s island. This triggers a public political debate over the legitimacy of the dinosaurs’ status as animals.
One side argues for nature to run its course, while the other argues to save the dinosaurs from a second extinction. No one ever seems to mention that the technology used to bring the dinosaurs back from extinction the first time is never, at any point, under threat. There’s no reason that people simply wouldn’t make more and it’s heavily implied that they will anyway.
The Indoraptor
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s brand new big bad monster was a little disappointing for a lot of fans of the franchise. Not only was it simply a smaller version of the Indominus Rex from the previous movie, its proposed military application was a little too much for even die-hard fans to swallow.
The Indoraptor is sold in the movie as a new weapon that can be harnessed with a laser sight and acoustic trigger. Functioning perfectly, the Indoraptor would – in terms of reliable long range weaponry – rank somewhere below the bow and arrow but it’s shown with the trigger device attached to a gun. Implying that it could only be used in situations where people already had a gun aimed at the target.
The Cliff
During what is probably Jurassic Park’s most iconic scene, the park’s T. Rex escapes from its enclosure and begins to terrorize the tourists in the cars unfortunately parked right next to its feeding area.
It rips through the fence and smashes around a car before forcing Dr. Grant and Lex Murphy to enter the enclosure from where the T. Rex escaped. It’s then that we see that, on the other side of the fence, there’s a sheer drop of about a hundred feet or more. Far more then the T. Rex could have climbed over, unless it was leaping across the treetops.