The Relativity of Credibility in Science Fiction: Jurassic Park

The secret to a successful science fiction film is to trick your audience into believing it's plausible. This is done by balancing what your audience knows about a subject and what they think they know. If you can convince the audience to let your plot holes slide you have can convince them of anything. The title of the film, Jurassic Park, itself is a problem as the time period is over 20 million years too early for the dinosaurs it depicts on screen yet the audience is willing to forgive this glaring oversight. The real power of science fiction is all in it's timing. A 1950s science fiction film will generally be more prone to major plot holes than a modern one as technology and concepts posed are often ubiquitous in modern times. The longevity associated with science fiction film is simply the length in time before it is considered just fiction.

Jurassic Park makes itself creditable to the audience in two ways. The first is by simply showing it's audience what it can do. In he first scene with a CG dinosaur the audience gets to share it's sense of wonder directly with the characters in the film. We both experience seeing a creature that has been extinct for millions of years.The visual we are presented with in this scene is the first time (at the time of the films release) we have ever been presented with photorealistic computer generated images living creatures. In the past we have seen stop animation miniatures like in King Kong [1] of dinosaurs . The Jurassic Park audience would never be convinced these creatures were really alive. A few years before Jurassic Park the 1985 film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend [2] used state of the art animatronics to create a Brontosaurus capable of many complex interactions with actors. Yet, again Jurassic Park makes these complex machines look like very expensive puppets.


The second method Jurassic Park used to bring credibility to itself was by way of having the park own John Hammond directly explaining the scientific process in which it was able to create living dinosaurs. The method was done in simple and elegant manor by way of theme park ride so simple even a child could understand the process. While Scientists [3] have been cloning animals since the 1950s, Jurassic Park predates the infamous Dolly thus the actual process of cloning (as far as common knowledge) used in the film doesn't seem far fetched. The viewer goes through the process of connecting the dots. DNA is programming used by a living cell to build a complex organism. DNA can be found in blood. Mosquitoes feed on blood. If you can find a Mosquito that fed on a Dinosaur you could find Dinosaur DNA and thus clone a Dinosaur.

The reality is that it's not possible to obtain Dinosaur DNA that is intact from such methods. Even if you were able to find a sizable chunk of good DNA the gaps could no simply be filled by another creature as the final product would not be the Dinosaur of old but a hybrid that might be a close approximation of what it once was. This fact is pointed out in the film itself during cloning explanation video explaining just how large a string on DNA is. This explanation reinforces just how unlikely your creation would be to the actual dinosaur you were attempting to clone.


Science Fiction is often referred by it's more accurate name of Speculative Fiction. This is exactly what made Jurassic Park such a successful film. It was able to take what the average person knows and extend it in a plausible manor to achieve something we currently are unable to with science. However, time will only tell how long it will be before we look back on Jurassic Park in the same cynicism we look at early science fiction where common knowledge and modern technology has exceeded the original authors wildest imagination.