Greed is an emotion that corrupts good ideals and turns those in power into monsters. Often times, there will be those who will try to stop the madness greed brings before things go sour. But when one is faced with greed, logical thinking goes out the window.
The movie series, Jurassic Park and Jurassic World bring to light how greed can infect the human mind and destroy dreams. In the original movie, John Hammond refuses to listen to the park's investors concern about the safety of the park and if the park should even exist. John”s non concern for what could go wrong allows one of his competitors to bribe a park employee to steal some dinosaur DNA. The employee’s greed for money causes him to shut down the park and let all the prehistoric animals loose, killing those unlucky enough to be near the cages and himself too. He would not think of himself as monstrous but his disregard for the other people on the island makes him monstrous.
In the newest installment of the series, Jurassic World, the park is run by two new heads carrying on John Hammond’s dream of a dinosaur theme park. They also ignore the warnings of a concerned velociraptor trainer, and go ahead with a project that would bring the park more revenue. The chief geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu who was also a geneticist for the original park, sells his skills to an computador and secretly creates a dinosaur soldier. His greed creates the downfall of the park and the massacre of hundreds of park goers. He doesn’t think of himself as monstrous until he sees the death he helped create. All the park managers couldn’t see past their dreams of the prefect park. If they were able to, they might have seen the monsters they were creating in their ranks before it was too late.
I think that both these are great examples of greed turning into a monstrosity, and I also like how they manifest in different ways. The original contains a character whose greed leads to him releasing the monstrosities in order to destroy the park and make incredible amounts of money starting a new one. However, in this scenario where his greed causes the intentional release of a monster, he is punished for his actions by eventually dying to the monstrosity he unleashed. In the sequel we see a new perspective, where the scientist intentionally creates a monstrosity in order to gain more attraction and more money, but its release and the havoc that occurs is purely accidental. In this occurrence, the scientist is not punished for his greed, and is able to escape with some of the DNA of the dinosaurs and is likely able to make the massive amounts of money his greed initially pulled him towards. There seems to be a tie between greed causing you to harm others, which eventually causes your own demise, and greed with no ill intentions that eventually goes wrong, in which case you are less likely punished for your actions.
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