dinosaurs – Co-Geeking

Updated Competence Porn Viewing List

September 9, 2026August 23, 2026Eppu3 Comments

It’s over three years since I posted my Competence Porn Viewing List. Time for an update, I think. 🙂 I’ve both added and dropped a few items.

As I mentioned in my original post, there is quite a bit of variance in the use of the term competence porn. Here, as a refresher, is what I mean by it:

Typically has multiple competent, intelligent characters of different skills or areas of expertise working together, often towards a fairly big goal.
Involves complex problem-solving. Can but need not include a heist.
It helps if women are being awesome,
and/or, it helps if the characters are learning to work together.
It needs to be fun or rewarding on some level. (This is highly subjective. YMMV.)

I’ll first reveal my favorites and then give my reasoning why each of the works made it onto my listing.

In alphabetical order, here is my short viewing list:

The Avengers / Avengers Assemble
Black Panther
Charlie’s Angels (2019)
Elementary (2012-2019)
Jurassic World: Dominion
Leverage (2008-2012)
The Martian
Ocean’s Eight
Passengers
Rogue One
Wonder Woman

And a back-up list with works that fulfill some criteria, fail others, but that I nevertheless like enough:

Black Widow
Captain Marvel
Godzilla (2014, directed by Gareth Edwards)
Miss Marple (the series with Joan Hickson)
Murdoch Mysteries
Oppenheimer

The Avengers / Avengers Assemble

(According to IMDB, Marvel has started to call this movie Avengers Assemble. Right then.)

Too few women getting too little screen time, otherwise a fantastic learning-to-work-together story. It also helps that the threat is mostly external (i.e., no infighting).

Black Panther

Like I said in our random thoughts post on Black Panther, it’s outright GLORIOUS to see that WOMEN ARE PEOPLE in their own right, with their own interior lives. And such a spread of different women, too, each doing their thing according to their interests and skills. So many intelligent people (on both sides of the law), with plenty of problems to solve.

Still remains the best, IMO, among the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. RIP, Mr. Boseman.

Charlie’s Angels

I find the protagonist Elena (played by Naomi Scott) very irritating; on the other hand, Jane and Sabina (Ella Balinska’s and Kristen Stewart’s characters) plus Boz and Bosley (Elizabeth Banks and Djimon Hounsou) are great. Stewart has a bad rep, I guess, and I guess primarily from the Twilight movies (the only things I have seen her in), but on the basis of her performance here I’d suggest she does have skills but was just badly directed in that series. Anyway, it’s a learning to work together story, which I like a lot, and all the women down to the side characters are awesome.

Elementary (2012-2019)

IMDB Elementary s2 e12 The Diabolical Kind

A modernized version of Sherlock Holmes set loose in New York City with a gender-flipper Watson. Both Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu are fantastic as the detective duo, and the smart NYPD cast, Captain Gregson and Detective Bell (played by Aidan Quinn and Jon Michael Hill), also contribute their fair share. The Ms. Hudson and Moriarty versions were also interesting, but all in all there are too few women. (Still half of the population, hello?) Nevertheless, the astounding cases, quality acting, and scenes of real NYC in all its glitter and grime continue to keep my interest despite some less successful story lines.

Jurassic World: Dominion

Finally a significant portion of women in a mixed cast! (And not everyone is glaringly white.) And everyone gets to be awesome—not to mention terrified of the dinos—regardless of what’s in their pants, as they should. So much working together. No heist, but escaping alive counts as problem-solving, too!

Leverage (2008-2012)

Yes, yes, yes—ticks all the boxes despite some unevenness in the writing. If only it didn’t have Nate nor the actor, Timothy Hutton; I’m so fed up with wallow-y man pain (and, whoo boy, does he wallow) with or without alcohol, but it’s infinitely worse with.

The three youngsters should’ve had a series of their own; THAT would’ve been great, and I would throw money at it!

The Martian

No heist, but: People working together? Check. Women being awesome? Check. Competent characters? A very big check. Extra bonus for wholesome spud nutrition. (The only minus comes from women amounting to about a third of the more significant roles. It’s better than 10 or 20 %, but come on.)

Ocean’s Eight

Yes, yes, YES! (Despite Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway, and Helena Bonham Carter, who all are far from favorites of mine.) Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, and Rihanna were fabulous. The heist is simply staggering, and it helps it’s also a learning to work together story in part.

Passengers

I resisted seeing Passengers for a long time (and probably would never have seen it if I hadn’t received the disc from a relative’s estate), because the marketing materials at the time of its release made it sound digustingly creepy, coercive, and unsafe. Turns out, they really did lie through their teeth.

The main protagonist’s behavior is creepy at one point, that is true, but he owns up to his actions and doesn’t get to escape the consequences, which makes a difference. The actual characters are all competent and intelligent (while the AI-driven ones aren’t even supposed to). They certainly end up working together towards a big goal, learning as they go. Complex issues are indeed at play. Beautiful space imagery and other visuals. So, there are enough rewarding features to include Passengers on my list for now.

Rogue One

Although in the beginning we only see a glimpse of Jyn Erso’s childhood and we hear little of how she lived afterwards, it’s clear that she can handle herself, backwards and blindfolded if needs be. I enjoy seeing just how the Rogue One group slowly comes together to run their desperate mission. It needs more women, though.

Rogue One is clearly the least fun of my six competence porn stories, which makes it really hard to put into words why it’s on my list. I just know that it is.

Wonder Woman

There are some plotholes and/or weaknesses I’d rather do without, but the learning to work together aspect of the story nevertheless makes the movie work for me. And—need I say it?—SO many awesome women. I could spend more time seeing Amazon action on Themyscira!

Images via IMDB: The Avengers. Black Panther. Charlie’s Angels. Elementary (s. 2, ep. 12, “The Diabolical Kind”). Leverage. The Martian. Ocean’s Eight. Passengers. Rogue One. Wonder Woman.

In Seen on Screen, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Trailer for Jurassic World Dominion

June 3, 2022May 29, 2022Eppu

Good grief! Either I haven’t been paying attention, or there really is a whole slew of SFFnal trailers out in the past month for me to blog about and comment on. Here we go…

The end cap for the dinosaur park franchise(s), Jurassic World Dominion, puts together characters from the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy. And dinos, of course:

Jurassic World Dominion | Trailer 2 [4K] by Jurassic World on YouTube

I was surprised to learn the movie takes place four years after the preceding one; it will be interesting to see how the writing team will have figured humans and dinosaurs might coexist. It will also be very nice to see some of the older characters, and I hope there will be less time spent on my least favorite faces and more on the nicer ones.

There is, however, one thing I will NEVER want to see again: high heels that stay glued to the female protagonist’s feet while she’s running through the jungle. Oh, hello?! Yuckkk!

At this writing, Jurassic World Dominion will be released on June 10, 2022 in the U.S.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Joy to the World (of Warcraft) 13

January 4, 2019January 4, 2019Eppu4 Comments

Alunaria, over at Alunaria’s Avenue, has proposed a holiday challenge: stay away from the griping, grousing, and general grinchiness about World of Warcraft that’s all to easy to find these days and post something positive instead.

(I had meant this post for yesterday, but I ran out of time. Oh well; here it finally is.)

The Horde side has Caravan Brutosaurs! If you hang out awhile in the city, you can see Dazar’alor drudges unpacking these brontosaurus analogues—people at the top of the saddle structure chuck baskets and boxes down, where others first pile them up and then take away.

The same model is also called Roughneck; there are some traveling the roads west of the city.

The really awesome thing, though, is that you can ride some of them! There’s at least one rideable Caravan Brutosaur walking back and forth over the bridge that runs west towards the Village in the Vines from the stretch of land between the Great Seal and Tal’farrak in Dazar’alor.

When you mount, you get an action panel with two options: toss fruit to scare away saurid and other beasts, or hop off. I don’t yet know whether it’s only available during the Brutal Escort world quest; I have been able to ride the brutosaur and the fruit tossing worked fine, but I didn’t see any attackers nor were any other events triggered. I was on my level 114 warrior, though; maybe the rideable brutosaur is available below 120 but not programmed to do anything else.

It’s pretty awesome anyway—then again, the brontosaurus is my favorite dino. 🙂

Images: World of Warcraft screencaps

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.

Wrangling That Raptor Squad Smithsonian Style

June 25, 2015June 24, 2015Eppu

The Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History’s Dinosaur Curator Matthew Carrano prepares for a new dinosaur exhibit:

Tumblr Smithsonian Dino Exhibit RaptorSquad — Smithsonian on Tumblr.

By Smithsonian on Tumblr. This is by far the best I’ve seen to come out of the Jurassic World #prattkeeping meme!

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Some Random Thoughts on Jurassic World

June 21, 2015April 14, 2019Erik

In no particular order. Spoiler warnings in effect.

There is a point at which running from killer dinosaurs in the jungle in heels crosses the line from “This character is a professional businesswoman who isn’t at ease with the wild nature of the animals she supervises” to “This character is a moron.” That point is: the very moment you start running from killer dinosaurs in the jungle in heels.
The only time Claire actually seems to know what she’s doing is when she’s coordinating things in the control room. This movie could have been much better if Owen had stayed out in the field doing what he’s good at and Claire had stayed in the control room doing what she’s good at. Or maybe have Claire in the field and Owen in the control room, each of them desperately trying to coach the other through a job they’re not prepared for. As it is, it feels too much like the script is saying: “Silly woman, stop trying to do a man’s job.”
Kids are annoying. Badly-behaved kids are even more annoying. Badly behaved kids who run away from the adults who are supposed to be taking care of them (even if those adults are doing a crummy job of it) are annoyinger still. That said, these particular kids were a tiny bit less annoying than they could have been. They were still pretty annoying, though.
The nods to the original Jurassic Park were for the most part nicely done and not too obtrusive. I have a fond nostalgia for the original movie (not so much the first two sequels), and I was touched.
That said, what made the original Jurassic Park work so well was that the dinosaurs were not characters. They were animals. They didn’t have motivations beyond the animal drives to hunt and defend their territory. The raptors’ stealthy pack hunting was the limit of their intellectual abilities. They were easy enough to understand; what made them scary was mass, speed, claws and teeth. It didn’t matter if you were smarter than a dinosaur. All the smarts in the world didn’t make you any bigger, faster, or less squishy. The sequels have turned the dinosaurs into characters and it has not served them well. Jurassic World is the worst yet in this regard. When a giant dinosaur starts just messing with the humans (decoy tactics, camouflage, velociraptor subversion), it becomes less scary because it’s entering a contest of smarts, not power, and that’s a fight Indominus rex can’t win, no matter what genes they spliced into that thing.
Either that dinosaur is bulletproof or In-Gen is recruiting straight from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Either way, bad move, guys.
Rolling fields full of Apatosaurs, Stegosaurs, and Triceratopses can still send me straight to six-year-old bliss land, and this movie delivers.
I’m of two minds about the Mosasaurus-ex-machina ending. On one hand, it was well set up and executed. On the other hand, after bringing the old T. rex onto the field, it feels like a Hail Mary too far.
If ever there was movie calling out for a “sudden but inevitable betrayal” joke, this was it. We got robbed.
Watching the trailers, I nursed a hope that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character was a grown-up Lexie from Jurassic Park. Nope.
The movie is better than The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3 and feels like a worthy successor to the original. It’s still one competent professional woman, one hurricane, and one Samuel L. Jackson short of measuring up.

Image via comingsoon.net.

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.