Jurassic World (2015)

My birthday week ended with a surprise: we saw dinosaurs! No, we didn't really see dinosaurs in an uncharted island in the middle of nowhere... we just went to watch Jurassic World.

Wound down the birthday week the epic way: with the socially inept Indominus rex, the Jaws-like Mosasaur, and oversized Velociraptors. Plus the Tyrannosaurus rex that (***spoiler alert***).

A photo posted by Rochie Cuevas (@rochiecuevas) on Jul 7, 2015 at 6:58am PDT

And what a joyride it has been, as always. I knew we'd see the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptors. But I didn't quite expect the appearance of the biggest baddie in this refurbished nature park: the extra ferocious Indominus rex. Seriously, it was claiming to be the wildest king of the jungle (the name said it all). Then there was the Mosasaur that made great white sharks look puny. The first few minutes of the movie was all about introducing these new characters, along with the humans that tempted fate by allowing themselves to get close to the animals a level higher than them in the food chain. What else is new, right?

Of course, something just had to go wrong... And it just had to involve the shortage of human common sense and the higher logical functions of Indominus rex. Why that enclosure had a door big enough for the dinosaur to pass through, I have no idea. The intelligence of the dinosaur was quite extraordinary as it figured that it could food humans and get them to open the door for her. But we cannot expect less from the scientist who had thought of mixing different DNA segments from different organisms to create the Indominus rex. If I understand the movie correctly, the scientist combined DNA from the T. rex, the Velociraptor, and another reptile (a lizard, maybe)... I was thinking that maybe, some human DNA got into the mix as well, to explain the animal's intelligence (but the movie never mentioned this). The funny thing is, the scientist claimed that this was the first time that they made a dinosaur hybrid! That can't be correct, right? A T. rex and a Velociraptor had to have been cross-bred to create the Indominus rex. If the scientist stuck with the "all dinosaurs are female" premise, then there shouldn't be any male dinosaurs to breed with female dinosaurs. Also, physical differences between the T. rex and a Velociraptor would have made the cross-breeding difficult. Then there's the third DNA source... I am not a geneticist or a breeder, though, so don't take my word for it. 

The Velociraptors, I was quite surprised, were tamed... well, behaved is the better word. They found an alpha raptor in the form of their human trainer. They're still ferocious, but they followed a leader this time around. At some point, they switched loyalties towards the Indominus rex and this made life particularly perilous to the humans (who thought that the raptors could be used to hunt down the Indominus rex). 

At the end of the day, the T. rex showed the Indominus rex who the real boss of Jurassic World really was... to the expense of the Indominus and the satisfaction of the Mosasaur. 

The thing about Jurassic World is that it showed truly scary dinosaurs even though these animals aren't so ferocious in real life. This has made the movie a steady topic over our lunch breaks because we just couldn't get over the movie for several weeks! For instance, we couldn't stop talking about how, in real life, the Velociraptor fossils suggest that this animal was the size of a turkey and has feathers. How scary can this animal be, right? But the movie maintained it to look like a baby T. rex (most likely for continuity's sake). 

And that's how we celebrated the end of my birthday week, the nerdy couch potato way. Come to think of it, we were eating potatoes before we watched the movie.