Jurassic Park: Life Finds a Plot Hole

An affectionate rant about dinosaur islands, disappearing continuity, and one very suspicious boat

I love the Jurassic Park movies. Pretty much all of them, honestly.

I’m here for the messy ones, the weird ones, even the ones that probably never needed to exist. Give me dinosaurs, terrible corporate decisions, and people ignoring every single red flag. This franchise might as well have been made just for me.

The only real exception is the newest one, which doesn’t even feel like it belongs with the rest.

But as a series? I love it.

Which is exactly why the plot holes stand out so much.

And wow, are there plot holes.

Some of the plot holes are the fun kind, the ones you just shrug off because there’s a T. rex stomping around and John Williams is making everything sound epic. But then there are the ones that get stuck in your head and refuse to leave, no matter how many times you watch.

The first Jurassic Park is my go-to comfort movie. If I can’t sleep, I put it on and I’m out cold in ten minutes. So I’ve had plenty of time to think about all this.

So About That T. rex Paddock…

Let’s start with the original movie.

One thing that has always driven me crazy is the layout around the T. rex enclosure.

The first time the tour cars go by, the paddock is on their left. That’s fine. Everyone’s checking out the goat.

Later, just before everything goes completely off the rails, they pass the same enclosure again, this time on their right.

But they’re still on the same track.

I know, the usual explanation is there’s a loop at the end of the tour that turns the cars around. Okay, I’ll go with that for now.

But if that’s true, it’s an absolutely terrible transportation system for a theme park.

If the park had ever opened, you’d have a serious traffic jam on your hands. Cars doubling back, people heading head stuck facing people heading back head-on, and some bored lawyer asking why they’ve been staring at the same sick triceratops for almost an hour.

So either the geography makes no sense, or the park design does.

Neither option is exactly reassuring.

Jurassic World Has Some Huge Missing-Years Problems

But as much as that bugs me, what really makes my brain itch is the Jurassic World trilogy.

Because those movies want very badly to be connected to the original Jurassic Park. Same island, same legacy, same ruins, same nostalgic “remember this?” energy.

And that’s fine. I’m easy to win over with abandoned visitor center imagery.

But if Jurassic World is on the same island as the original park—Isla Nublar—then what happened to all the original dinosaurs?

Did they just retire and open a spa somewhere else? Did the Raptors form a tiny government and negotiate a relocation agreement? Is there a secret dinosaur HOA we were never told about? I know those all sound ridiculous, but I’m not the one asking people to believe a fully operational luxury park appeared on an island that, according to the earlier movies, should already have been full of dinosaurs.

Because, as far as the franchise had told us, those dinosaurs should still be there.

By The Lost World, we know the whole lysine contingency didn’t really work. The herbivores were getting lysine from plants, the carnivores were getting it from the herbivores, and nature was doing what nature does. And in the first movie, we already learned that Dr. Malcolm was right: life finds a way. The dinosaurs were breeding.

So no, the animals on Isla Nublar shouldn’t have just vanished when the first park shut down. They should have kept surviving and, while they were at it, probably made more dinosaurs.

Which raises not just one question, but several.

What happened to the original Nublar dinosaurs?

Did Masrani’s team round them all up and fold them into the new park?

Did they exterminate them and simply skip that awkward little detail?

Did they spend years trying to sort out a free-roaming dinosaur ecosystem before anybody could build a hotel lobby?

Because if those original dinosaurs survived—and the movies really make it seem like they did—then someone also had to build Jurassic World itself on an island already occupied by dinosaurs. Hotels, labs, roads, monorails, paddocks, viewing galleries, restaurants, gift shops—none of that just appears overnight.

So how did that construction happen?

Did they clear the island first? Relocate whole populations? Fence off huge sections? Quietly wipe everything out and start over?

Because “we just built around the wandering dinosaurs and hoped nobody got eaten during site prep” does not sound like a serious development strategy. Even for this franchise.

And that’s saying something.

Site B Was a Surprise…But It Shouldn’t Have Been

Then there’s Isla Sorna—Site B—which The Lost World introduces as the place where the dinosaurs were actually bred and raised before being transported to Isla Nublar.

And honestly, I like the idea. It makes the world feel bigger, at least in theory.

But the more you think about it, the stranger it gets.

In the original Jurassic Park, we are shown the creation of dinosaurs as part of the tour. The visitors are literally taken through the process: DNA extraction, embryo development, hatchery operations, the whole polished “we make dinosaurs here” presentation. Maybe some of that is just the public-facing version built for tourists, sure. But the movie absolutely wants us to believe that dinosaur creation is happening on Isla Nublar.

And Hammond doesn’t exactly help. He tells them he’s present for the birth of every animal on the island, which very much does not sound like a man casually outsourcing the entire operation to another island.

So when The Lost World suddenly tells us there was a whole second island doing all the breeding and raising, it makes Site B feel like more than just extra backstory. It actually makes the first movie feel a little misleading in retrospect.

How much of the Nublar hatchery was real?

How much of it was basically a theme-park version of the process for the tourists?

And if Site B was so central to the whole operation, why does the first movie act like we’re seeing the entire miracle factory right there?

It’s one of those changes that works fine while you’re watching, but the more you think about it, the weirder it gets.

Isla Sorna Still Exists, No Matter How Hard Jurassic World Tries to Forget It

And once Site B exists, the Jurassic World movies have an even bigger problem.

Because now the franchise has established that there are two dinosaur islands:

• Isla Nublar, the park island
• Isla Sorna, the breeding island

And both of them have dinosaurs.

Which makes the whole plot of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom pretty hard to take seriously.

The entire movie acts as if the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar die in the volcanic eruption, then dinosaurs are gone forever again.

Except…they’re not.

Because Isla Sorna exists.

And unless there was some major off-screen explanation that I missed, that island should still have dinosaurs on it, too.

So why does everyone in the movie behave as though the fate of all dinosaur life depends entirely on the animals on Nublar?

And even if you want to say, “Well, the rescue mission was never really about rescue,” okay. Fine. True. But if they wanted a believable cover story, why wasn’t the public plan to move the dinosaurs to Site B?

You know, the other dinosaur island.

The one already designed, intentionally or not, to support dinosaurs.

The one the franchise introduced and then started treating like an awkward family secret.

And Dinosaurs Wouldn’t Be Extinct Again Anyway

While we’re here, the “if these dinosaurs die, dinosaurs are extinct again” line of thinking doesn’t really hold up for another reason, too.

By the later movies, the franchise has already established that the science still exists.

The research exists. The genetic knowledge exists. Dr. Wu exists. Black-market interest exists. Various companies, labs, and deeply irresponsible people all seem to have access to enough information to keep this whole mess going indefinitely.

So even if every dinosaur on Isla Nublar died, are we really supposed to believe that would be the end of dinosaurs forever?

By now, even the movies make that hard to believe.

So Fallen Kingdom wants us to feel sad about extinction, but also keeps reminding us that people in this universe will never stop making more dinosaurs.

The Lost World Has a Ship Problem

And if I really want to start trouble, The Lost World gives us one of the best “wait, what?” moments in the whole franchise.

I’m talking about the San Diego ship.

When the ship arrives, the crew is dead, the bridge is covered in blood, and the movie clearly wants us to assume the T. rex did all of it.

But when they open the cargo hold, the rex is inside.

Locked in.

And then the movie gets even weirder, because they find the severed hand of the guy who supposedly pushed the button to close the hold.

So let me see if I have this straight.

The T. rex got loose, rampaged through the ship, killed the crew, then somehow ended up back inside the cargo hold. Meanwhile, the guy who hit the button managed to secure the rex, only to get torn apart so badly that his hand is still sitting on the control.

How?

Did he close the hold and then get attacked?  How?

By what angle? Through what opening? On what timeline?

Did the T. rex politely go back into containment for him before the doors fully closed, but after he’d been ripped apart?

This is one of those scenes that only works if you don’t think about it too hard. The second you try to figure out what actually happened, it just falls apart.

None of This Makes Me Love the Movies Less

The thing is, none of this ruins the Jurassic Park movies for me. Not even close.

Honestly, that’s part of the fun. After you’ve watched these movies enough times, your brain starts doing two things at once: loving every minute and picking apart every weird detail.

And the wild part is, the movies still work.

The original Jurassic Park is still a masterpiece. The Lost World is better than people say. Jurassic Park III is ridiculous, but I love it anyway. And the Jurassic World movies, even with all their wild plot holes, still know how to put on a good dinosaur show.

That’s the thing. These movies were never meant to be picked apart this much. They’re here to thrill you, scare you, and make you stare at the screen while a dinosaur roars at just the right time.

Mission accomplished.

I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep loving them. And yes, I’ll keep stopping the movie every so often to say, “Okay, but that still doesn’t explain the boat.”