Board Thread:Movie discussion/@comment-124.107.40.130-20150613082140/@comment-107.138.133.108-20150814062520

The director, Colin Trevorrow, said something to the effect that one major point he wanted to make in the movie was that we have become so jaded by and take technology and nature and all the 'miracles'/'amazing things' around us for granted that even if they cloned dinosaurs, after a while people would get bored by it and so they would have to keep pushing the envelope till they pushed it too far. The scene where Zach is on the phone with his girlfriend at the T-Rex feeding and not even caring to watch the T-Rex eat the goat, while the rest of the crowd are baying for blood like Romans at a gladiatorial match, is one example of this. A lot of what Claire says as she 'sells' the I-Rex to Verizon Wireless is in line with this - only Owen and Gray seem to retain any wonder and respect for the creatures of Jurassic World.

And this is the problem, the 'fatal flaw' as Shakespeare might have called it, of Zara's character. She is constantly on her phone, bored and irritated that she has to babysit - to be fair she is doing something that Claire should have done herself but because Claire's the boss, she passed it off to her hapless assistant - and she obviously has very little interest in doing her job properly. This is what dooms her. If she had taken an active interest in the kids, if only for the sake of her job, then she wouldn't have lost them when Zach decides to give her the slip. It's only after the two disappear that she's worried and then, one can assume, not because she cares about their welfare but because she might get fired. Essentially she is a 'selfish character' no less than Hoskins, Claire, Zach, and to a somewhat less obvious extent, Mazrani and Henry Wu. Claire and Zach have redemption arcs. Mazrani is more benevolent than cutthroat but it is clear in his exchange with Dr.Wu (I love that, Doctor Wu!) that he didn't care enough to study the implications of 'bigger, louder, more teeth'. Dr.Wu, while not necessarily selfish, has a very singleminded, almost fanatical dedication to innovation, excusing himself by saying "if I don't innovate, someone else will". But for these two, Dr. Ian Malcolm's caution is worth remembering -they were too busy discovering whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. Wu's blind devotion to innovation regardless of possible consequences, so long as the product was delivered, and Mazrani's apathetic carelessness and laissez faire attitude toward innovation so long as the people and animals were 'happy' are the foundation of sand that Jurassic World is built on and when the I-Rex came down and the warnings came up, at least one of them would pay the ultimate price.

So it is with Zara. She is a selfish character, caring more about her job security than her bosses' nephews, unable to look at all the technological wonders about her with anything but a jaded eye and these two things doom her - if she had been more careful about her charges and evinced a genuine interest in their welfare, they wouldn't have been able to run off without her noticing. She sets out to find them but just when she finds them, she is so oblivious to the danger around her - and the pterodactyls had been flying around for a fair amount of time already - shat she is easy prey for a marauding pterodactyl and later the mosasaur.

Also... didn't the mosasaur have a row of inner teeth within the upper palate that functioned like a chain saw. So Zara wouldn't have been swallowed alive - she would have been sliced and diced within the mosasaur's great maw and hopefully, mercifully would have died from the shock before being ingested.