10 Deadly Design Flaws in Jurassic World‘s Theme Park

Ever since the first park opened its' gates 22 years ago in Steven Spielberg's classic Jurassic Park, a part of the appeal of the series is predicting how the dinosaurs are going to break out of their enclosures. In the original, it was the hubris of park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), a bad storm, and the treachery of the park's computer coder Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight, Newman!) that sprung the T. Rex and the raptors. In the upcoming Jurassic World, going by tidbits culled from interviews with director Colin Trevorrow and the most recent trailer, it's corporate greed and the "been there, done that" nature of our attention spans that unleashes the beasts.

Start with what Trevorrow said to SlashFilm last year; the inspiration for Jurassic World was a simple image: "Our relationship with technology has become so woven into our daily lives, we’ve become numb to the scientific miracles around us. We take so much for granted…What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. 'We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?'"

Human hubris, greed and a need to be entertained at all costs are what put the people in the Jurassic films in danger, all of which are baked into the design of the park. Think of the park like the Titanic—beautiful, awe-inspiring, and ultimately doomed. For Jurassic World, the way Trevorrow and the rest of the the filmmakers answered that 'what else you got?' question, and the first and most deadly of the park's design flaws, is the Indominus Rex.

As Trevorrow explained to Joe McGovern at Entertainment Weekly, the park masters built the I-Rex in response to that bored teenager. The creation of the I-Rex was a little like a studio showing a new film to a focus group, or a company unveiling a new product on consumers. Trevorrow said that park goers would want to see something "bigger, faster, louder, more vicious." What they wanted was a killer. "And they get what what they ask for…we live in a cult of the upgrade right now. There’s always something around the corner that will make whatever you think is cool right now feel obsolete. And I feel like the Indominus Rex tis the animal version of that."

There would be no Jurassic Park or Jurassic World if the dinosaurs didn't eventually get loose, so we've identified what we believe are the massive design flaws in the new park. These flaws all flow from that cult of the upgrade, our impulse to make everything shinier, cooler, tempting enough to be the background in our latest selfie. Here's the new trailer and our observations on where those design flaws are—let us know if you think we missed any or got ours wrong.

0:08: Okay, stop right there; two boys alone in egg-like, translucent rolling balls? They're called Gyrospheres, and the design schematics scream FLAWS. First, rolling along out in the grass beneath some 90-foot long, 30-ton Aptosauruses seems like a terrible idea. Yes, you would solve that bored teenager problem real quick by giving them some autonomy to explore the park themselves in these things, and yes, the Aptosaurus can only move at 2mph while the Gyrosphere can go as fast as—wait, the top speed is 5mph? Golf carts go faster than that! And sure, there are apparently invisible fence technologies that keep the dinosaurs in their respective areas, but come on. It's unclear whether one can control these things themselves, either way it's a design flaw. If you can't control them, you're trapped, much like the Jeeps-on-tracks from the original Jurassic Park that ended up becoming chew toys for the T. Rex. If you can control them, you'll panic and roll yourself into trouble. These things are Gyroflaws.

0:21: Open-aired trucks taking excited passengers, Safari-like, into the middle of a herd of Gallimimus. Certainly safer than being with only one other person in a rolling ball scooting beneath giants, but these Gallimimus are still 500 pounds and can run 30mph…

0:24: Okay, this can’t be a good idea—old fashioned canoes in a river that doubles as a major water source for countless, massive dinosaurs? Even if this river runs through a part of the park that only houses herbivores, putting people on a body of water surrounded by dinosaurs is a huge, huge design flaw.

0:26: We’ve seen the giant Mosasaurus in his huge tank before—freeze the wide-shot at exactly this point and tell us if it doesn't seem like the fence that keeps him from launching himself out of the water just abruptly stops on both sides. Also, his aggression index is rated as high. And he's 60-feet long and weighs 5-tons—pretty sure they don't make glass that can keep something that size contained. He's like LeBron James that way; you can't hope to stop him, you can only hope to contain him. But not in glass. This whole part of the park is a series of design flaws.

0:35: Oh happy day, here area the boys in the Gyrosphere again, enjoying a rampaging herd of stegosauruses. Nothing like taking a Sunday stroll amongst 5-ton creatures with swinging, spiked tails. Design flaw.

0:48: Here's Chris Pratt as Owen Grady, in his animal-trainer mode, getting a pen full of raptors to respond to him and follow his hand like their dogs. Treating raptors like golden retrievers? Design flaw.

0:53: Cool huge log look-out point, park creators, but are we not worried about some bruiser of a beast crashing directly into this thing? Isn't a horizontal viewing station hanging above the forest floor screaming for something monstrous to rip through it? Seems like a…

0:55: Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing: “Every time we’ve unveiled a new attraction, attendance has spiked”—cut to the Mosasaurus, which, again, is definitely going to crash through that glass at some point, right? The birth of the most egregious design flaw of all!

1:12-1:14: And here she is, the mother of all design flaws. “She was designed to be bigger than the T-Rex,” says BD Wong's Henry Wu. Man, Henry Wu, you didn't learn anything from Jurassic Park, did you? Remember the whole "we only bred females so they wouldn't reproduce?" routine? How'd that turn out again? It just seems like designing the ultimate killing machine is going to result in a lot of ultimate killing. Henry Wu, a genius at designing design flaws.

1:18: Oh wow, wouldn't you know, the Gyrosphere has rolled itself into danger. Shocking.

1:38: Cool shot here of Pratt and one of his beloved raptors shackled in some kind metal harness while he runs his hands along the raptor's sweet, pebbly jawline. Shackling raptors, both a design flaw and rude.

2:00: Dinosaurs that can fly? Come on. But pretty impressive that she held onto her bag.  (*Editor's note: We are aware there were flying dinosaurs, the point was more that re-creating them for a theme park is a bad idea, as things that can fly are harder to control. Thank you and good night.)