Hollywood Utopia

Similarly, the two other characters on the expedition sent to find his girlfriend
noticeably lack altruistic motives, much less endorse conventional heroic ones. One
was in some environmental organisation but unhesitatingly admitted that his
primary reason for working there was because 90 percent of the staff was female
and monetary reward was now his guiding motivation. The third member of the
conventionally ‘elite’ expeditionary force is represented as an uninspiring
cameraman.
The head of the hunting expedition (played by Pete Postlethwaite), however, is not
interested in mercenary payment and only wants a crack at hunting the most
famous ‘hunter’ in history - by the ‘second most famous hunter’, man. Like Ahab
(as he is jokingly christened by others) or Quint in Jaws, he seeks the ultimate
adversary, the great land-based leviathan. Only then can he achieve his destiny and
affirm that he is truly ‘alive’, like all the great nature explorers. As suggested by
Faden, these (anti) heroes believe that the human species needs to feel in control
of nature, technology and their environment to feel fully alive, especially now that
the Darwinian instinct to hunt for food has been all but abolished within the
synthetic technological culture of western man.
The documentary cameraman provides spot advertising for Nikon (like the ironic
display of dino-merchandise in the Disney-like shop), as he captures images of the
majestic dinosaurs. ‘The Pulitzer Prize is mine now,’ he gloats as the ‘money shots’
are transfixed onto celluloid for spectatorial pleasure. But these high-tech
communication and recording devices always appear to let the humans down, since
several human agents unfortunately refuse to rely on natural instinct. As our
benevolent and eager palaeontologist tries to observe and record the bonding
rituals within the Rex family, an automatic rewind camera almost gets her killed
when the ‘objectified’ (applying Susan Sontag’s seminal thesis on nature
photography) dinosaurs misinterpret the sound of the camera as a threat to their
existence. Malcolm pontificates, through the clearest piece of ‘scientific ecospeak’,
how scientists cannot observe and research a native habitat without
affecting it in some way. This perennial ethical dilemma for humans has already
been discussed through films like Medicine Man and At Play in the Fields of the
Lord, and will become central to a reading of ‘the Prime Directive’ of Star Trek in
Chapter 4.
The key motivating premise of the sequel, as with the original, is that all ecosystems
are finely balanced and can easily be put out of synchronicity, even by the
sound of a camera. While this benevolent and ecologically responsible intervention
group merely wants to observe and scientifically analyse the island’s unique
species, it is their altruistic intervention which finally causes the eco-system to
become dangerously unbalanced and destabilised, rather than the more intrusive,
2 Nature Film and Ecology 81