Conversation

If I wrote a movie, it would be about a PhD candidate in the competetive field of Dinosaur Ethology, whose dissertation committee keeps rejecting their manuscript. So they decide to venture into forbidden dinosaur-inhabited zones with a ragtag team of other grad students to capture dinosaur behavior so that they can defend their dissertation before they have to repay all the student loans.

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@TarkabarkaHolgy add some engineering students that experiment with the currently relevant field of mounting lasers on t-rexes and I'm sold!
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@buherator Best I can do is engineering students trying to figure out how the Quetzalcoatlus was able to fly and I'm sold :D

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@TarkabarkaHolgy I'd watch that.
One question - how many of them get eaten?

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@kaasbaas I'd say none, but some come down with some epic parasites after digging around in the large piles of dinosaur poop that are left behind by those picturesque herds

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@nightdream Added bonus that the footage has to be well shot and the research data properly documented.

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@TarkabarkaHolgy @buherator Scene 1:
First person shot of frantic, terrified running through dense jungle, the sound of harsh gasps and panting mixing with the crashing of the underbrush and excited baying close behind.

The camera bursts through some foliage and comes to a screeching halt just before a cliff edge before whirling around as a pack of engineering students emerge, brandishing calculators.

The hunted dinosaur shivers in terror. There is no way out now.

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@TarkabarkaHolgy @buherator Some annoying schmuck in the audience: See that’s foreshadowing because if it were a purebreed then it would just fly off and-
They are silenced by an astonishingly accurate pack of Mike and Ike’s hocked right at their head.

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@kaasbaas *not me, having read an entire book for fun about parasites that lived on dinosaurs*

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@TarkabarkaHolgy NGL I would fucking watch that. A heavily-driven researcher willing to put their skin on the line by going to Dinosaurs-Eat-You-Island to confirm their hypothesis, putting increasingly more people in danger as they find more excuses to poke dinosaurs with a stick, raising moral / philosophical questions like "How much sacrifice is knowledge worth" and "If the observer grips the experiment too hard, do they effect the results" and "What is knowledge really... Is it objective truth or a story we tell ourselves about the universe to make it us-shaped, can this proxy model of resynthesized dinos living on a modern island even tell us anything useful about their millions-of-years-ago relatives..."

This has meat on the bones. And I don't just mean the bones of the asshole lawyer who will inevitably get eaten at the act-1 / act-2 pivot.

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@mark yes! Bonus if it's mating habits. There was a moment in this latest Jurassic movie where I genuinely thought we were about to see sauropods boink. But of course we didn't.

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Bonus if the dissertation is about same sex mating behavior among dinosaurs.

Because the world is not ready for gay dinos.

(*brandishes "Biological Exuberance"*)

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@TarkabarkaHolgy I'd watch for the accuracy in science and rewatch for the gay dinos

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@jadedtwin Honestly I'd write it for the gay dinos :D

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@TarkabarkaHolgy This... this is what would get me back in a movie theater.

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Critics complained about the lack of realism when, while fighting live velociraptors with an improvised spear, it was implied that they could in fact ever repay all their student loans.
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@TarkabarkaHolgy @kaasbaas One of them has to be eaten, so the others can say, "at least they don't have to repay their student loans now."

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@gkemp @kaasbaas One of them has to be eaten so the others have to face the ethical dilemma of hunting down the dinosaur that swallowed borrowed equipment alongside the victim

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@TarkabarkaHolgy

But in the PhD defense scene later on, a confident male academic makes what he thinks is a blistering point.

Then he reads upside down from her notes, and sees she's about the absolutely stomp on his entire career with field data that proves he's wasted his life.

Just before she opens her mouth, he shakes his head an inch and mutters:

"...Clever Girl..."

And then she bites his head off.

But just metaphorically.

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@RoyBrander And the snake fight portion of the dissertation defense suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

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