12 Days of Monsters: Day 9
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Indoraptor
from the 2018 film JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM
The Set-up
Bigger and Worse
Let’s get right into it.
So, the Jurassic Park movies have been doing that thing that blockbuster film franchises do, where each new entry basically just repeats the elements from previous ones but bigger.
JURASSIC PARK 3 introduced a version the Spinosaurus that’s just a bigger, nastier dino than T-Rex.
JURASSIC WORLD introduced Indominus Rex, which is a magic super dinosaur that is bigger and nastier than T-Rex and can also turn invisible and talk to raptors.
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM introduced the Indoraptor, which is the Indominus again but this time more…raptor-y?
The Indoraptor, as it appears in JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM
These new dino-villains have been looking worse and worse as the series goes on, with the Indoraptor looking shockingly unimpressive, so I figured it would be fun and instructive to pick apart why.
If I had to pick one word to sum up Indoraptor’s design, it would be:
Unmotivated.
As in: the choices made in its design appear to be made without a good motivation or intent. It’s just a bunch of generic dinosaur...stuff, thrown together without much reason or thought. It’s the creature design equivalent of an action movie made entirely out of lens flares and bad one-liners: everything you expect, and nothing memorable.
The Visual Design
Why the New Dinosaurs Suck
It’s hard to pick a place to start with here, but let's begin with one that I’ve mentioned a couple of times now: the mouth.
As a carnivorous dino in a Jurassic Park movie, the mouth is going to one of the main focuses of this critter's design - it’s going to be the primary thing it threatens our heroes with. The Indoraptor has sharp teeth visible on the outside of the mouth, presumably to help it look menacing all the time. For me, though, the teeth are one of the main reasons why this dino looks so bad.
The first time I saw these teeth I knew that dino design had taken a nosedive in this movie.
Although the teeth are the main focus of the head, and the mouth is designed so that they're always visible, they aren't that impressive. They are both too small and too few in number.
These are both impressions that we get not from “real” Indoraptors, but from the rest of its mouth: proportional to its jaw, the teeth aren't that big. Even when the mouth is closed, there are large gaps between each tooth - which heightens the sense that there aren't enough of them.
Compare this to living crocodiles, which also have teeth that are external to their mouth when their jaws are closed (and are related to dinosaurs, to boot): the teeth are very large relative to the height of their jaw, and when the mouth is shut they are nearly interlocking.
The teeth on this crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) make Indoraptor’s seem puny and sickly. Photo by Willyam Bradberry.
Teeth need to be kept hydrated to stay healthy. Animals with external teeth, like crocs, achieve this by keep their mouths submerged in water. The Indoraptor’s teeth wouldn’t last long.
The size and direction of the teeth in Indoraptor’s mouth seem to vary at random - some point this way, some point that way, some are bigger and some smaller. This makes the Indoraptor look fake. Real animals have teeth that grow in patterns - they only grow randomly when the animal is suffering from some severe pathology.
You don’t have to be a nerd like me to know that, though - the other dinosaurs in these movies show you this. Look at T-Rex: the prominent teeth on its maxilla (upper jaw) are small towards the front, gradually get bigger towards the middle of the mouth, then taper off again, all the while curving slightly back. The angle at which they curve changes slightly, but smoothly. If you’re going to give your fictional dinosaur an irregular tooth pattern to make it look scary/mean, you probably don't want to put it in the same movie with a bunch of more-realistic, extremely well-recognized dinosaur designs that have been the golden standard for dino verisimilitude since 1993.
A Tyrannosaurus rex, as it appears in the same movie as the Indoraptor. The dentition here isn’t strictly scientifically accurate, but it’s much more plausible than what is shown for the Indoraptor.
The T-Rex in FALLEN KINGDOM also shows us some of the additional detail you can convey with better-designed teeth. For instance, we can see that one of the teeth midway back on this animal’s maxilla is much smaller than the teeth on either side of it, either because it has been broken or because it is a new tooth that is growing in to replace one that’s fallen out. This helps tell us that this is a long-lived and battle-scarred beast. (In fact, this is supposed to be the same individual animal that appeared in the previous Jurassic Park movies.) Indoraptor’s haphazard and inconsistent teeth can’t communicate anything like that.
While we're talking about T-Rex, let's point out one more thing: Compare the shape of the teeth in the Indoraptor, a crocodile, and a T-Rex. What are these animals using their teeth for?
The croc has these really robust, conical teeth made for grabbing prey. The teeth aren’t all that sharp, and they don’t need to be - they’re sharp enough, strong enough, and spaced out enough that the croc can still puncture prey with them with the force of its jaws and hold it in place.
T-Rex teeth, by contrast, are flat and serrated, like giant steak knives. While T-Rex also had a phenomenally strong jaw, we can see that the teeth are also made to shear flesh - which tells you not just how the animal attacked its prey, but also how big its prey could get that it would need the ability to rip it apart in large chunks.
So what about Indoraptor’s teeth? Well...they're really pointy (sharper means scarier, right?), but they’re also small and needle-like. They don’t appear to have the blade-like profile of T-Rex, but they’re also not as imposing as a croc’s (nor is the jaw of the Indoraptor particularly buff-looking). They’re just kind of...there. What would this animal use them for? There are real-world animals with small, needle-like teeth that are exposed when the mouth is closed - but they eat fish and other slippery little prey (like the gharial, another crocodilian). They also have a ton more teeth.
But the point here isn’t the answer to the question “What were the made-up Indoraptor’s made-up teeth used for?” The point is that the people who went with this design didn't ask themselves that question.
Again, the word is unmotivated.
Here’s how little consideration went into the design: it’s supposed to be looking right at us, but they gave it such a wide snout, and put its eyes all the way on the sides of its head, that it can’t even look directly forward! There’s no pupils in this shot!
It’s like the fucking dragons from SKYRIM all over again.
And I want to be clear that the problem here is not that the dentition of this fictional magic sci-fi dino isn’t perfectly accurate to real animals - it’s that these design choices aren’t really made with consideration.
The earlier Jurassic Park movies made plenty of things up about their dinosaurs, but those choices were much more intentional (and thus, effective). To pick just one example: the velociraptors had well-developed lips, which enabled them to sneer, which helped to characterize the raptors as mean in a way that sets them apart from the T-Rex. Spielberg’s dino designers didn’t have the raptors sneer because they thought it was more accurate to real raptors - they made them that way to portray the character of the raptors in a certain way, which distinguishes them from other dinos and fits with their role in the movie (as clever, stalking, horror-movie-style monsters).
By contrast, Indoraptor’s mouth just communicates that it's there to bite people and...that’s it. But we knew that before the movie even began. It’s a deeply uncreative take on the bare minimum of a dino mouth.
Velociraptor mongoliensis as it appears in JURASSIC PARK, a.k.a. the reason why “raptor” is now a household name. The fleshy lips seen in this shot aren’t accurate to our understanding of this creature’s anatomy (and weren’t accurate back in 1993 either) - but they allow the animal to sneer, which emphasizes its on-screen characterization wonderfully.
I could put almost any other part of the Indoraptor through the ringer like this - but that would take forever, so I’ll just quickly point out 6 more of these ill-considered “badass” features and then get to the one actually interesting thing about this dino’s design:
Pointy quills on its nape (More pointy things means more scary, right?)
A row of bony spikes down its back (Yeah, definitely, pointy = scary)
A row of flat scutes running down its back (Beats me what this is supposed to convey)
A ridge around its eyes (To make it look mean and skull-like, even though this would get in the way of its forward-facing vision)
Long, budget-Halloween-witch-costume nails on its forelimbs (Even though this animal is supposed to run on all fours, so it would break those nails - and the movie even shows you why this is dumb! There are tons of shots where the claws scratch into the floor while it walks!)
An actual racing stripe (lol)
Now, to be fair, the dino designers for the Indoraptor had a pretty tough task ahead of them.
The Jurassic Park movies already have several “star” dinos, and they are each the exemplars in their “character archetype”. The T-Rex is the big one. The raptors are are the small, quick, clever ones. The Dilophosaurus is the one that spits poison and does the wild thing with its frill - neither of which they actual animal did, but those two were things added specifically to make it stand apart from the other carnivores. So if you’re planning to introduce a new star dino, you need to make it stand out from the rest of the cast. That’s a tall order, given the popularity of T-Rex and the raptors.
Someone working on this movie actually answered this question, though - and came up with a pretty good answer too, if only they stuck the landing.
The arms.
An Aside
Constructing Anatomy
Both T-Rex and raptors are theropods - all of which (as far as we currently know) are bipedal. Almost all of them have relatively small arms, too.
Giving the Indoraptor well-developed and articulated arms is a solid way to set it apart from T-Rex and the raptors. They lean into this too, by deciding to have the animal use those arms prominently in a lot of ways that those other dinos couldn’t - like reaching out in front of its face, climbing, and running on all fours. Complex use of its arms (and hands, in particular) can also make the animal seem more intelligent through the resulting resemblance to primates, which is convenient because one of the things that’s supposed to be special about this dino is that it's super duper smart. Lastly, having the animal prowl on all fours with these long, sinewy arms gives it a very “sneaky” vibe, which fits for the horror-movie-monster vibe they're going for towards the end of the movie.
This was a genuinely neat idea.
Unfortunately, the implementation was...well…unmotivated. Again.
None of the rest of the animal’s body plan supports or is impacted by the inclusion of those arms. It seems to prefer running on all fours, but whenever it does so, its back is bent into this pretty tight arch that looks uncomfortable and unsustainable (and the tail is practically being dragged on the ground, instead of being held aloft for balance). It has these ridiculously long nails on its hands, even though it is supposed to be running on those hands. (This is one of the reasons why the claws on, say, a tiger are retractable.) The musculature of the chest isn’t built up to support those arms, either.
They just look like human arms.
Musculature of a tiger (Panthera tigris), just to pick a real predator that runs on 4 limbs. Note the shape of the deltoids, in particular. Drawing by Ryan Heenan.
Note the shape of the deltoids (at the top of the arm) compared to those of the tiger. Reference sketching done by Bryan Eppihimer.
Look at Indoraptor’s shoulder and upper arm, and try to tell me that’s not just a human arm.
Granted, they’re stretched out, but otherwise you can see all the same basic muscle groups there. This dinosaur is running around with clearly human deltoids stuck in the middle of a completely different body plan. Human deltoids are round because they wrap entirely around our shoulder - attaching both to our scapula in the back and to our clavicle in the front. It seriously makes no sense for this critter to have round delts like that.
Even if you don’t know anatomy, you know what a human arm looks like, and you recognize a human arm even if it’s stuck on a made-up dinosaur.
Reflections
Building a real made-up monster
Indoraptor was an attempt to make a dinosaur that was cooler and scarier than the “real” dinosaurs appearing alongside it.
At the end of the day, though, it represented the filmmakers taking the exact opposite approach to portraying dinosaurs from the one taken in the original JURASSIC PARK.
The magic trick that JURASSIC PARK promised was to show you real dinosaurs - and to do that, they had to make their dinosaurs look real, even when they were making things up about them for artistic ends (like Dilophosaurus's frills, or the raptors’ hyper-intelligence). They needed to have the presence of real animals. There are many, many dimensions to how they achieved this, including things like cinematography and animatronics, but part of that is the way the monsters looked. They were trying to show us something with all the fidelity of reality, including details you wouldn’t have thought to imagine. (This point is even emphasized in the film itself, when our heroes first see the living dinosaurs. One of the first things the paleontologists excitedly remark upon isn't “wow that’s big” but “they do move in herds!” - a detail about the animal that they hadn’t known for certain before seeing it live.)
The title FALLEN KINGDOM may as well refer to the franchise itself, at least in terms of imagination. It showcases an attempt to imagine something better than reality, but with no consideration to reality - and therefore fails to create something even plausible-seeming. You have to be very lucky to stumble into a compelling monster when you’re just making a bunch of unmotivated, “looks good enough”-level decisions about what it should look like.
The biggest reason, I think, to look to real animals when making fictional monsters is not for accuracy, but for inspiration - and for guidance.
As Guillermo del Toro, a man who loves movie monsters perhaps more than anyone currently alive on this earth, once said:
“The worst thing that you can do is be inspired SOLELY by movie monsters. You need to be inspired by National Geographic, by biological treatises, by literature, by fine painters, by bad painters.”
And indeed, del Toro’s monsters (many of which he designs himself, or otherwise actively partners with his special effects shops and is deeply involved in designing) are an excellent antidote to the incurious approach of movies like FALLEN KINGDOM. To really drive home the point that this isn’t about accuracy, I would point you to the monsters in del Toro’s 2013 film PACIFIC RIM. These monsters are designed to be fantastical, improbable, world-ending beasts. They have half a dozen eyes, wings, knives for a face, four arms, glowing neon blood, acid spit, and so on - and they all felt more convincing and compelling than Indoraptor. The way they moved, held themselves, and were designed - it was all motivated and intentional, and it drew inspiration from many sources.
Real animals are complicated, messy, and unexpected. For every animal out there that you think you know well, there are biologists out there who could tell you a dozen things about that animal that will blow your mind. Because real animals actually exist, we can study them to answer questions about why they’re put together the way they are, and this can guide our thinking about how to construct our own monsters.
But if we try to invent our own monsters purely from scratch, with no consideration to reality (either ours or within the movie), then we are limited by our expectations. And if you want to make an unexpected choice - like putting primate-like arms on a theropod - then you need to do so with consideration to how that choice interacts with other elements of your monster’s design and your movie’s reality.
Otherwise, audiences will see right through it, even if they can't articulate why.
