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

摘要

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 biowarfareweaponizing 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.