User blog comment:TheReturnOfTheKing/Jurassic Park 4: Whatever Happened To Our Hero, Rexy?/@comment-11047508-20130522091404/@comment-1791057-20130523034235

I find Ludlow to be arrogant, snobbish, and greedy. I dislike him because he's the only villain in the series that I want to strangle for being such an incompetent butthole. Hammond's team were made up of a bunch of fools, but I can live with stupidity as much as it annoys me. Ludlow on the other hand, proved himself time and time again to be incredibly arrogant, chauvinistic and incredibly incompetent. First off, he defrauds and slanders Malcolm until the man becomes publicly humiliated, then has the gall to threaten him and call him an ignoramus when confronted about it. He even goes so far as to attempt exploiting Lex and Tim's unfortunate involvement in the Nublar Incident while they are standing right in the room. Next, he attempts to set up base camp right on a game trail, and very well would have had Roland not called him out on it. Then, he gets himself drunk and goes and injures an infant endangered species, much to Roland's chagrin. After this point, you find multiple moments where Roland subtly insults Ludlow, two of my favorite being when he instantly grabs the maps and coordinates from Ludlow as soon as they are brought out and when he dismisses Ludlow and his schemes after he finds out his best friend died. Finally, he has the T. rex given some kind of amphetamine that ends up causing the San Diego incident, and then is stupid enough to still attempt to get a hold of the infant rex, right in front of the adult no less.

If you want to go back far enough, you can blame Ludlow for having the expedition in the first place and not letting old dogs lie. Going back even further, it's Nedry who ruined Jurassic Park and the reason InGen is bankrupt, and going back even further, it's Hammond that hired Nedry and created InGen and Jurassic Park, so HE'S the villain! Hammond is the villain in both movies! See the problem in that reasoning? You can't pin it all on one guy. In reality, it was a myriad of both circumstances and human acts that caused those fatalities. Was it Nick that invited the InGen Harvest team to Isla Sorna? No that was Ludlow. Was it Nick that crashed Jurassic Park and bankrupted InGen? No, that was Nedry. Was it Nick that caused the evacuation of Sorna? No that was the hurricane. Was it Nick that poorly designed Jurassic Park? No that was Hammond being cheap. Was it Nick that even wanted to go to Isla Sorna in the first place? No, that was once again Hammond. Though people love to do it, you can't rest blame on any one person. Nick Van Owen is not powerful enough to have been Top Villain. The Lost World: Jurassic Park isn't one of those movies that has Mr. Top Villain. There's really no clear cut way to define who was a bad guy and who was a good guy (this blurred line between protagonist and antagonist is one of the reasons why TLW is my favorite of the franchise). Picking Nick out of the group of characters that caused all the strife in the movies and saying "It was this guy! He did it! He did it!" is the equivocation of scapegoating. I don't know about you, but I don't feel right about scapegoating. Picking one guy out of the multitude of events and people who also contributed to the downfall of events in the films just doesn't seem right or fair in my eyes.

InGen cut a lot of corners and disregarded human safety for a dollar amount. Does that make them evil? No, it means their Board of Directors are sloppy, lazy, idiots who only care about the company image and their paychecks. There is a difference between intent and result. The difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter is intent. Neither Nick nor Sarah intended for anybody to die as a result of their actions. Regular manslaughter is usually premeditated, and is made when bodily harm is intended. What Nick and Sarah did, technically, counts as constructive manslaughter (a subcategory to involuntary manslaughter), by deaths occurring through acts of illegality (breaking and entering, destruction of private property, trespassing, sabotage of private equipment, etc) that were not done with the malicious intent for death. While that shows they have poor judgment skills, that doesn't make them evil villains. In the face of that, nor is Ludlow actually evil. He never intended for the cause of human harm by bringing the rex to the mainland. However, that does not excuse either of them from fault and liability. They all made poor actions and, although we never see Nick or Sarah punished for them, they all had to live with (or in Ludlow's case, die with) the consequences. Everybody was doing their own thing, it's just that their own thing happened to clash with each others views, and therein lies the conflict.