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Jurassic Parkhas no shortage of quotable lines from Clever girl to Hold onto your butts!
but one of the key bits of dialogue is also one of its least emphatically delivered.
Theyre not monsters, Lex, he replies.
Theyre just animals … they just do what they do.
Watch: How Realistic are Dinosaur Movies?
When the killing starts, that makes sense too.
And animals have to eat.
And the history of dinosaur movies is a long one, one almost as old as movies themselves.
In the film, the tribes go to war after one abducts the others women.
Its a setup that would be much imitated in the years to come.
One of his follow-ups,R.F.D.
10,000 B.C.features a postman riding a stegosaurus.
But OBriens creations here are an entirely different sort of dinosaur.
They move realistically and have a heft and reality to them that had never been seen before.
They look like real animals.
And, of course, they fight.
Because whats the point of bringing dinosaurs to life if theyre not going to attack one another?
Like OBriens creations, Harryhausens beast has presence and personality.
But Harryhausen wasnt done with dinosaurs.
Working alongside OBrien, he created a dinosaur sequence for the Irwin Allendirected documentaryThe Animal World.
The 70s were filled with lost-world adventures in which dinosaurs served primarily as adversaries to human adventurers.
So its surprising thatJurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom, directed by J.A.
(Oh, to have such issues dominating the news.)
Theyre vicious beasts, but the film makes us worry about them anyway.
As inJurassic Park, the dinosaurs just do what they do.
ButFallen Kingdomis the rare postJurassic Parkdinosaur movie that makes us care about why theyre doing it.
