PG13 Shane?

Jurassic Park is one of Carrie's all-time favorite movies. I like it a lot, too (I've even read the book!).

So we both agree it's a great movie...., but we didn't agree when it would be a good time to show Shane.

Carrie saw the movie when she was younger than Shane is now. I was older and saw it at a birthday party in 8th grade (I think....I was the only other kid at the party, so I can't ask around).

I feel Shane is more sensitive than me. When I was young and a bad guy got shot in a show, I thought "Yeah! The good guys are winning!" 

Shane's asked, "Is he dead?" ("Who cares!? He was bad and the good guys are winning! Yeah!"....)

But I digress. Carrie and I had a discussion on when Shane would be old enough for some of the good PG-13s. Jurassic Park came up, because it was on the Netflix "The Movies That Made Us" series. I said we could do it in December after Shane turns 11.

Carrie didn't want to wait.

This is one of those gray zones that sometimes happen in marital disagreements. If Shane was 5 or 6, I'd be like "This is nightmare fuel!" I'd turn the TV off before having it on. However, if I was willing to have Shane watch the movie in a few months was now that much different?

Carrie put the movie on, because she wanted to see it. I had misgivings, but not enough to overturn anything...

....so I took pictures. I filmed Shane's reaction! He thought the movie was amazing up until the T-rex attack. I caught a few goofy faces, because Shane likes to overreact to everything (especially if he knows he's on camera).

If you haven't seen Jurassic Park, it has some jump scares and the dinos do get some fresh meat. They work to avoid showing gore and cut away and gross moments (With only one quick exception I can think of when someone gets a hand on their shoulder). SPOILER - We were able to tell Shane the kids would be alright (A courtesy neither Carrie or I had when we watched it!).

Carrie looked over before the T-rex scene. She knew there was going to be a reaction, too.

Shane was not as happy!

We didn't laugh out loud, but there were some silent laughs shared as Shane reacted and complained.

Shane tried to embellish what happened after he poked his head back up to finish the movie. We'd talked about the animatronics and stuff before to help make it less real. We even mentioned how they pulled off the scene, because "It's all fake."

Jurassic Park is the edgiest movie we've shown Shane. He ended up really enjoying it, but I don't think thrillers are his genre of choice at the moment! He'd seen the Lego Jurassic World stuff on Netflix, so he didn't go in totally blind.

For the most part, I don't mind showing Shane some PG13 movies as long as the rating is mainly from suspense and non-gory action. It's the birds and the bees stuff I want to avoid! He's at the age where there's a beginning to the awareness of it, but Shane has no impulse control or thoughts-into-words-filters! I can't say I think most media treats it appropriately/respectfully enough, either.

But anyway, Shane's now seen a classic! We'll probably show him the making of at a later point since Jurassic Park is the first movie that integrated CG effects....and that was after someone disobeyed his boss when told "not to look into it." It's a fun story!