Learning to Love Biomimetic Killing: How Jurassic World Embraces Life Forms as Weapons

• Author: Robin Andersen
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12183
• Date: 01 March 2017

Learning to Love Biomimetic Killing:

How Jurassic World Embraces

Life Forms as Weapons

By ROBIN ANDERSEN

ABSTRACT. This article examines how the latest film in a series of movies

about a dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, became entangled in the

politics of military representations in popular culture. Beginning with the

ways in which the Pentagon has influenced the film industry in the 9/11

media environment, we go on to detail how Jurassic World enacts the

current high-tech military research into biowarfare—weaponizing

animals and defining nature as the ultimate killing machine. In the film,

the dino-stars are harnessed into battle to protect the humans, led by a

former Navy soldier who takes a pack of Velociraptors, and filmgoers, on

a thrilling hunt to destroy a bioengineered, genetically modified dino-

monster. Though the film offers a commercial critique of designing

animals purely for profit, it fails to challenge the profit-making ties

between the military industries, weapons technology, and corporate

entertainment media. Character depictions, narrative, and visual and

filmic storytelling devices are explored in order to identify the tropes

directing the film’s message. Ultimately, Jurassic World presents the

military’s new frontier of biowarfare with enthusiasm, not skepticism,

and Hollywood welcomes a “brave new world” in which the biological

world has been harnessed for military purposes.

Introduction

Imagine a world in the not too distant future when war will be fought

entirely against a civilian population by unleashing a swarm of bio-

*Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She is the

author of four books, dozens of book chapters and journal articles and writes media

criticism for a variety of publications. Her book A Century of Media: A Century of

War won the 2007 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award, the honor society of Jesuit colleges

and universities.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 2 (March, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12183

V

C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

engineered locusts to destroy crops or mechanized killer bees that sting

every mammal in an area. The creation of weapons designed around

living forms is the latest phase of military thinking. Just to be sure the

public reacts to this prospect with enthusiasm, not horror, the U.S.

Defense Department is already beginning to work with Hollywood to

welcome a “brave new world” in which the biological world has been

harnessed for militarypurposes.

Jurassic World, the fourth installment in the Jurassic Park film fran-

chise, has been lauded in the Washington Post as a “brutal commentary

on military defense contracting” (Lamothe 2015). After all, Vic Hoskins,

played with campy glee by Vincent D’Onofrio, is the chief security offi-

cer at “Jurassic World,” and he wants to train the cunning Velociraptors

created at the park to fight alongside the military. The doughy, arrogant

Hoskins is set in opposition to the film’s main character (if there is one)

named Owen Grady, played by the hunky film star, Chris Pratt. Grady

cares about the animals, and he also knows the Velociraptors are unpre-

dictable. Hoskins’s plan is put to the test when the new “attraction” at

the park, a genetically modified, hybrid dinosaur known as Idominus

Rex, escapes, eats two park employees, and initiates total mayhem on

the island. The crisis allows Hoskins to order the pack-hunting Velocir-

aptors loose on Idominus Rex. As their trainer, Grady is furious, but he

agrees to lead the animals in the operation—they will be used whether

he is involved or not. The plan to deploy the Velociraptors as weapons

in the battle against the hybrid monster, not surprisingly, goes awry,

and like so many others in the Jurassic Park franchise before him who

have messed with nature, Hoskins too becomes dinosaur food.

After an initial viewing, film commentators could be forgiven for

reading the narrative as an oppositional, critical departure from the mili-

tary dominated features so prevalent on big-screens—the blockbuster

movies such as Iron Man and Transformers,which have been ably ana-

lyzed by Mirrlees (2014) and Breznican (2008). Maybe, just maybe, Ste-

ven Spielberg (given executive producer credit) made a film about

animal liberation, a film critical of bioengineering, one that truly

exposes the terrible processes and outcomes of weaponizing animals

for military purposes. Could the film actually offer a counter-narrative

to the dominant militarized culture of Hollywood movie going? If we

take a closer look at the film’s construction, the answer is most likely

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