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After years of waiting, we're finally getting a fourth Jurassic Park movie in Jurassic World, and the internet has been alive with details from the new film, spearheaded by star Chris Pratt's excited tour of the set and unboxing of his action figure. That got us thinking about the original and best entry in the franchise, which had a similarly interesting cast of character actors filling out an ensemble of complicated characters. Yes, there's heroes (Sam Neill's Alan Grant) and villains (Wayne Knight's Dennis Nedry), but the real villain is our desire to play God, and the real hero is that T-Rex who stomps everyone. When we watch Jurassic Park, we're not so much rooting for our heroes to survive as we are rooting for the dinosaurs to eat people.
The problem is, ours is not a perfectly just world. Even when rendered by Steven Spielberg, cosmic justice is rarely meted out with complete fairness. Who lives or dies in Jurassic Park is largely satisfying ... but it could have been more satisfying. In a perfect (Jurassic?) world, which characters would bite the dust if JP had dispensed of its characters in order of who deserved it most?
1. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough)
In Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, John Hammond is a lot grouchier, not into children, and his willful blindness regarding the grand experiment of a dinosaur park leads to his doom, as he is munched on by little dinos even as he foolishly plans to regroup and rebuild. Spielberg made Hammond a cuddly grandpa who survives the movie, and this is infuriating. It's all his fault that this nonsense happens to begin with, and he's so focused on creating this ridiculous tourist attraction he doesn't realize the insanity of playing God and creating dino-life. Hammond escapes with everyone at the end of the movie having realized his foolishness. Alan shoulda kicked him out of that copter for his hubris. —DS