Raptors as human

 

Dinosaurs, of course, vary in intelligence in the first film, and strangely, get smarter as the films go on – particularly the raptors.

But the films differ sharply from the books in several key areas

In the movies, the raptors more or less take over from where the T-rex was in the second movie, a family who defends their off spring against intruders.

In the books, raptors – which may have been more civilized in their natural state when dinosaurs ruled the earth – have become the capitalists of contemporary society, selfish, beasts who back stab each other without a sense of community at all, pack animals as likely to turn on each other as their prey.

Crichton more or less compared the raptors to human beings, who are by necessary born premature, and forced to develop after they hatch. Most of their development comes as a result of socialization, and since the social habits of the raptors died with the race, the packs that are recreated turn to the most primitive of habits of every raptor for his or herself.

In the first film, the raptor works in unison to attack its prey. They are as smart (perhaps smarter) than their human counterparts, and seek perpetually to escape their captivity.

We see the raptor coming out of its egg, innocent and cute, then see it being fed as we hear reports of how the queen of the pride tested the electrified fence for a means of escape.

The intelligence and the skills terrifying the hunter and this frightens us. They are close to being human as any of the dinosaurs get in the first movie, and they are sad reflections on our own ruthlessness, raising the question as to what we have unleashed.

Dr. Grant – the bone digger – senses as much when he realizes that the beast he just hatched is a raptor. Earlier, he used the raptor’s tale to scare a kid, telling the boy about how the raptor hunts and how it east its prey living. (In his better films, Spielberg always foreshadows later events by having a character describe what will happen)

Once Dr. Grant sees the raptor in the flesh and learns from the hunter of their organized attack Grant seems to fear the worst will come sooner or later.

Even the experienced Hunter falls for the raptor’s ploy as outlined by Grant for the boy early in the film.

The raptors, the hunter notes, “Learns and adapts”. So by the end, these creatures have even figured out how t open doors and become more horrible the closer they come to becoming human.

None of the other beasts in the first move – even the T-Rex and the spitting little creatures – seem so close to feeling evil to us as the Raptors do. The T-Rex attack, while terrible, lacks that element to strike terror in us quite the same way as the Raptors do.

In the first movie, the T-Rex and others seem like mere animals doing what more or less comes natural to them.

The raptors come closest to the concept of Frankenstein because they so well mirror our own misguided ambitions.

They are in fact us.

In later movies, this is lost partly because Spielberg in the second movie and another director in the third,  try too hard to paint all the dinosaurs at human, even endowing them with families.

This breaks sharply with the concepts developed in the books, and why the second two movies fail.