What got me about that scene was just how utterly long it took the ACU (or whatever they were called) to begin firing. It took Fisk shouting the order on the radio to get them to fire and by that time the I-Rex had established her Alpha status over the raptors and the tables had turned. But during the whole scene up to that point the I-Rex and raptors are "talking" to one another, studying one another, and everyone is staying quiet and still. Meanwhile we see the laser-sight beams through the forest fog all trained on the I-Rex. At this point it seemed containment was no longer the goal and they were hoping to take the thing down. Why was no one firing?!
Yeah. Unless they were being polite to the dinosaurs, I haven't a clue.
Nostalgia Critic reviewed the movie recently, and brought up another thing that bothered me. did it take them so long to figure out that the big dino was part raptor? It looked like a raptor, moved like a raptor, sounded like a raptor, and talked to the raptors. Yet, the movie made it out to be a huge mystery that gets solved over halfway through the film!
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6umfTLuCI8[/yt]
Wikipedia indicated that Dilophosaurus was reduced in size for the first JP movie,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilophosaurus
Imagine full size specimens as pack hunters.
Ironic, considering we now know that Velociraptors were the size of a dog.
I like The Nostalgia Critic but the problem with this review it seemed like a lot of Doug Walker seeped in and he's tried to make it over the years as clear as possible that The Nostalgia Critic is a "character" and doesn't necessarily reflect his own opinions or rather TNC takes Doug's opinions to Nth Degree and adds in a lot of hyperbole. This was at most an issue as TNC would do Mara Wilson movies and he'd constantly make fun of the child star and express annoyance with her. Eventually Mara got wind of this and over social media spoke of how upset it made her. Eventually, Doug Walker got in contact with her and explained TNC is a character and the he, Doug, doesn't have a problem with her and the two actually became something of friends and he let Mara make an "appearance" on TNC show using videos Doug made in high-school of himself against her.
But in the JW review there's a LOT of Doug bleeding through, especially if you've seen The Sibling Rivalry review of JW Doug did with his brother Rob where Doug makes many of the same arguments and seems to have basically wanted the movie to be purely dinosaurs attacking and eating people....? This comes in the light of well received movie and is becoming what I call "The Fury Road Effect" where people start wanting movies to be more mindless action and violence more than story.
Which is what Fury Road, for me, is. I *liked* Fury Road but let's be honest, there wasn't a whole lot of character, story or drama to it. It was series of vignettes with awesome action scenes in between. But it's not what I want to see all movies become. The characters and story in JW were all fine, I didn't need -or want- to see a movie with dinosaurs eating up 20,000 innocent tourists.
So, can't say I agreed with Doug (or TNC's) review of JW and more agreed with Rob who more-or-less seemed to like it and thought it was fine and during TSR review seemed just at a loss as to what Doug wanted as I was.
And I don't completely think the I-Rex looked like a raptor. It had some raptor-like qualities, I suppose, but given its size, the way it walked, its stance and such I got a lot more of the T-Rex from it. Though the use of raptor DNA wasn't a surprise since simply from a story-telling and fan-service POV that was obvious. But it may have not been obvious to the characters since there still seemed to be some respect and danger around the raptors and the I-Rex just didn't scream "raptor" to them. And it's not like Owen or the others ever really got a good look at it anyway to judge what dinosaurs were in its genes.
So this is a long thread and I may have missed it, but I haven't seen any discussion of the most ridiculous unbelievable part of the movie, which was the asinine deus ex machina, which is the mosasaurus leaping into a normally guest/pedestrian accessible area of the park to take down Indominus Rex.
That's good point, but maybe nothing ever came close enough to the edge of the lagoon that the mosasaurus was interested in and the huge presence of the I-Rex interested it enough to intervene.
Surprisingly enough, the "tamed" raptors, which was the part of the movie I thought I would hate the most, didn't bother me. I thought they credibly set up Owen's relationship with them, and the fact that they were never really tame, and in fact, Owen was against the idea of using them in the manner that they did and that the entire enterprise back fired pretty horribly, set me at ease a lot.
I thought the "tamed" raptors was well done too, mostly because as you said they weren't tamed. Owen just managed to establish Alpha status over them, he earned their respect as their leader. Owen respected them in turn and did his best to protect them and, as you said, was against using them for military applications.
Which is a dumb idea and not sure where anyone got the notion that was a good idea. I mean we have plenty of vicious, carnivorous, animals around today and we don't use them for military purposes. We're not taking lions, cheetahs and bears into battle why would the presence of dinosaurs be any different?
