So I see they went the route I was expecting them to take. Please tell me there's at least a hint of an interesting twist to it... (Either DM or just put it in a spoiler tag, I don't care.)
...
Jurassic Park was never about scientifically accurate dinosaurs. You could make the argument with the first movie and the behavior patterns courtesy of paleontology consultants at the time, but the dinos in JP were never meant to fully represent what real life dinos used to be. Get your head out of the gutter.
Regardless of how Hollywood fanciful the original designs were in both the book and the original film (and the contrivances it took to get to said designs; InGen and real-world scientists knew about the bird-dinosaur connection pre-1990s but they're still using frogs for dumb reasons), part of what makes it so notable in the first place is because they at least started with the most up-to-date stuff at the time and ultimately presented the public with an onscreen view of dinosaurs that was more modern and cutting-edge than most anything else that had been shown onscreen, fictional, documentary or otherwise. If they'd done the same with this new trilogy then I'm sure everyone would on some level enjoy these films more than we currently do, regardless of whether we like or not right now.
You have hundreds of documentaries about accurate dinosaurs if you're that desperate to see something.
Ha! No, actually there aren't and
Jurassic Park is in part to blame. (You can check this out for a brief overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl8bei4K6BM of what I'm saying if you don't want to read the next two paragraphs.)
Firstly, there's only a few dozen documentaries that are post-
Jurassic Park, and none of the ones that came before had the budget or vision to realize their subjects in the way that
Jurassic Park did on both technical and scientific levels. (Most programs focused on the fossils and paleontologists, occasionally punctuating a point with either a painting or a quick "in life" scene in cartoon form or occasionally stop-motion animation if the budget was large enough. On top of that, they were still largely relying on old science, or at least were more skeptical to embrace the new paradigms of dinosaurs as more active, behaviorally complex, visually interesting animals.)
Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) was the first documentary to even approach
Jurassic Park on a technical level, using the same techniques the film did to bring dinosaurs -- and their world -- to life in a dynamic way, and most notably putting the focus entirely on their in-life depictions, with the voice-over narrator as the only human element. In the next few years there were a few programs that were able to successfully follow this wildlife documentary style --
When Dinosaurs Roamed America (2001) and
Dinosaur Planet (2003) -- going the next step by punctuating their segments with brief interviews with paleontologists in order to highlight the basis for some aspect of the story you just saw. (There were also a bunch of
Walking with... sequels and spinoffs that came out during this period, covering other periods of earth history.)
After that came a dearth in this type of programming; that's not to say that dinosaur-related media went away, but it got replaced by stuff (both fictional and documentary-type programming) that just leaned on or reinforced the
Jurassic Park images and tropes, in part because companies making them had the idea that A)
That's what dinosaurs looked like regardless of what our consultants say and/or B)
Those will sell, so whatever programming you see up until about 2010 was largely just sensationalistic noise of varying animation quality that is often referred to in science-based paleontology circles as "Awesomebro!" culture -- well explained in this short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NJJTAse1Eg -- that still makes up the whole of popular dinosaur media nowadays.
Jurassic Fight Club (2008),
Clash of the Dinosaurs (2009), and
Monsters Resurrected (2009) are the most notable (and egregious) examples of this, made worse by the fact that they followed the mould of the talking head-driven format, which resulted in the shows either cherry picking, largely disregarding, or even twisting what their consultants had to say in order to present various old misconceptions and flat-out fabricated ideas as "facts" directly backed by the relevant scientists. (A notable example here:
https://svpow.com/2009/12/15/lies-damned-lies-and-clash-of-the-dinosaurs/)
There was a brief period in the early 2010s that saw a slight resurgence of the "in their world" storytelling, but those weren't particularly resonant, each for their own reasons.
March of the Dinosaurs (2011) had dull and poor creature designs on top of a dully executed story;
Planet Dinosaur (2011) cut itself short by just being too plainly conservative in terms of both creature design and story, with janky animation quality to boot;
Dinosaur Revolution (2011) was actually a movie with heavily anthropomorphized behaviors and stories using fairly decent creature designs, that got stretched into a documentary for Discovery Channel, resulting in lots of added small vignettes of varying animation quality; and the 2013
Walking with Dinosaurs movie was significantly marred by the last-minute decision to turn it into a kiddie film by adding insufferable telepathic voice acting. Once
Jurassic World reared its head as an actual project in 2013, various documentaries were made to try and capitalize on the incoming pop culture dinosaur wave, but most of these weren't really all that good. They largely went back to the talking-head-with-occasional-scenes format, their animation (and information quality) varying from okay to bad. The only exception was
T. Rex Autopsy by National Geographic, which was actually all-around decent (though the model is still off in a lot of ways) and anyone who likes [dinosaur] practical effects and animatronics should definitely check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9zqaAqQaw
The overall TL;DR version of all this is that
Jurassic Park started a trend that has affected how the public views dinosaurs over the last 25 years now to the point where even companies that are supposed to be producing well-made educational content often end up consciously opting to play towards those trends instead of showing the newest, truest science, and the
Jurassic World franchise is only reigniting that trend even though it's now two decades out of date. At this point, the best dinosaur project I've seen so far this decade (and will likely hold this title for the foreseeable future) is an independent early access video game called
Saurian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktbrUBUbjD0&t=
Im right there with you in being a part of the group that is still enjoying these films a ton.
t: Getting myself ready!
