Sara J. Mikkelson
My friend beside me gasped in horror as the bloody scene of a dinosaur tearing into one of its human victims flashed across the big screen of the movie theater. When I went to see the new movie, Jurassic World, last weekend my first impression was that it is unnecessarily gory. However, there were several ideas and concepts in the movie that I found rather interesting. Although the opening scene allude to the far-fetched idea of birds evolving from dinosaurs (read about a few of the problems with dinosaur to bird evolution here), I was relieved to see that this movie did not try to depict any of the dinosaurs with feathers or other bird-like features. Many modern dinosaur artists are trying to make dinosaurs look “bird-like” in books, museums, toys, etc., giving our kids an image that really doesn’t have any supporting fossil evidence.
What I think is most funny about Jurassic World (and Jurassic Park, etc.) is that it features a lot of creatures, like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, that are actually found in Cretaceous rock layers – not Jurassic. This doesn’t really bother me because I believe that God created Jurassic dinosaurs, Cretaceous dinosaurs, people, and other mammals on the same day just a few thousand years ago like the Bible says. While “Jurassic” and “Cretaceous” are often thought of as being time periods in the “geologic timescale”, they are really just sections of rock layers that were laid down during the global flood mentioned in the Bible. Each of those rock layer sections were probably different areas, ecosystems, or events (like different volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc) that happened during the flood and while earth was recovering from the flood.
There was one scene of the movie that really stood out as important to an underlying theme of the movie – survival of the fittest. Here’s the conversation between Owen Grady (one of the main “hero” characters) and Vic Hoskins (one of the “bad guys”):
Vic Hoskins: “War is part of nature. Look around, Owen. Every living thing in this jungle… is trying to murder the other. Mother Nature’s way of testing her creations. Refining the pecking order. War is a struggle. Struggle breeds greatness . . . Progress always wins, man.”
Owen Grady: “Maybe progress should lose for once”
According to Hoskins, war, struggle, and death are just natural parts of good progress (i.e., evolution). But, just like Owen brings up, should it be that way? Well, without our Creator God, there is no absolute moral standard of what should and should not be. When God originally created the universe, dinosaurs, and people, He said that it was all “very good” – there was no war, pain, or death before Adam and Eve chose sin. War, struggle, and death are not the way things should be, but are consequences of sin. God isn’t responsible for our pain – we are.
“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” ~ Romans 8:22
Jurassic World is a good reminder of how frail we really are, and how disaster can turn a person’s world completely upside-down in a very short amount of time. So often I hear ideas like: “whatever happens, we’ll be okay as long as we’re together” . But, we can’t really depend on anything or anyone in this world always to be around. The only One we can really count on, no matter what happens, is our Creator God. You know how He originally created everything good, like it should be – no death, pain, war, or struggle? He also promises to restore that perfect world one day. Because Jesus took our punishment for sin, we have the option to cling to this promise and live in that perfect world – the way things should be – if we choose it.
Copyright Sara J. Bruegel, 2015
The gore in the movie didn’t bother me because I’m so used to seeing all kinds of movie with more so I actually wanted to see more. What bugged me was yeah them pretty much saying dinosaurs are now birds and talking about evolution.