A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE MOVIE, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Jurassic Park
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
Every day I say I’m going to be nicer at work, and then thirty minutes later I’m ripping into the underside of a Jeep and screaming that there’s rubber stuck between my teeth and this prey sucks. The real ones know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, the movie skips over the ’80s’ all-consuming obsession with genetic engineering – look, there’s only so much they can do in two hours – and gets right down to business with the brutal death of a Jurassic Park worker who gets mauled by a Velociraptor, because the park blew millions of dollars on contactless dino-controlling equipment but somehow didn’t have enough left over for a raptor gate that doesn’t have to be raised by hand. The worker’s family files a $20M lawsuit, quite rightly, which spooks the park’s investors into sending attorney Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) to conduct a one-man safety inspection. Gennaro attempts to meet with park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) at an amber mine in the Dominican Republic, but is mightily peeved when overseer Juanito Rostagno (Miguel Sandoval) informs him that Hammond has already jetted off to support his daughter through her pending divorce. Unbeknownst to all, rival scientist Lewis Dodgson (Cameron Thor) meets with penniless programmer Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) and bribes him to steal dinosaur embryos from the park.
Meanwhile, pedophobic paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) casually terrorizes an obnoxious child in the middle of a dig in Montana, but his irreproachable customer service is interrupted by the arrival of Hammond, whose helicopter touches down in the middle of the site and almost destroys the entire dig. Initially furious, Alan quickly recognizes Hammond as a principal donor and introduces him to equally irate paleobotanist Ellen “Ellie” Sattler (Laura Dern), who is also inexplicably his girlfriend. Though quite cagey on any sort of meaningful detail, Hammond intimates that he has built a theme park featuring “biological attractions,” which now requires expert validation, and invites Alan and Ellie on a weekend trip to view the park. They try to decline, but come around soon enough when Hammond offers to fully fund their dig for the next three years. Long story short, they fly to Costa Rica the next day, accompanied by Gennaro and skeptical chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and come face to face with a living dinosaur for the first time in their lives.
Hammond’s vision seems like a paleontologist’s paradise at first glance, but the group (not Gennaro, who sees a potential dino-themed gold mine) develops some serious concerns after a fairly cursory look at the park’s operations and general aesthetic. A brief conversation with chief geneticist Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) is more than enough to establish that Jurassic Park scientists have been engineering mutant dinosaurs to fit marketable specs with little to no understanding of the broader implications of their work, nor even a vague awareness of the dangers presented by the carnivorous species. Hammond remains adamant in the face of all valid criticism and insists on sending his review panel on a driving tour of the entire park, packing them off with his very young grandchildren, Lex and Tim Murphy (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello). This is horrifying for Alan, who becomes even less enthused when Tim starts questioning his theories, but amusing for Ellie. After strategically ditching the kids with Gennaro, Alan ends up sharing a car with Ellie and Malcolm; however, the tour disappoints, as most of the dinosaurs seem to be in hiding, and even Richard Kiley’s narration cannot make them reappear. In addition to the frustrations of the absentee dinosaurs, a tropical storm sweeps down on the island at a dangerous speed, threatening the tour. Despite a worried Gennaro’s best efforts to keep the group intact in the face of the storm, they become separated when Ellie partners up with veterinarian Gerry Harding (Jerry Molen) to doctor a sick Triceratops.
Of course, neither rain nor snow will stop the mail and it certainly won’t stop Hammond from trying to fast-track an official endorsement of his now frankly alarming park, but game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) and chief engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) note the size of the oncoming storm and pressure Hammond into postponing the rest of the tour. While the majority of the staff evacuate, Nedry disables the security system and steals several viable dinosaur embryos, concealing them in a fake shaving cream can. He then attempts to drive to the dock in pouring rain, but quickly loses control of his car and crashes in the middle of the Dilophosaurus enclosure, where he is ambushed and devoured. Elsewhere in the park, the tour group becomes stranded in front of the Tyrannosaurus paddock when Nedry’s sabotage cuts the power. Murphy’s Law being what it is, the rex easily breaks the no longer electrified fence and attacks the kids’ car, possibly mistaking it for prey. (Well, we never said these things had good eyesight. Of course, the hilarious and apparently unintentional irony is that the books reject the notion that the rex’s vision relied on movement, where the movies uniformly embrace it.) During the course of the attack, Malcolm is badly injured and Gennaro eaten alive, while Alan manages to escape with the kids. Ellie and Muldoon later arrive in a gas-powered Jeep and rescue Malcolm, but are chased back to the visitor center by the rex before they can find the others.
The next morning Alan and the kids wake with the dawn and observe a herd of peacefully grazing Brachiosaurus, then stumble across a clutch of eggs en route to the visitor center. Despite Henry’s earlier assurances that the dinosaurs are all female, Alan realizes that their amphibian DNA has given them the ability to spontaneously change their sex, as do West African frogs, allowing them to breed in a seemingly single-sex environment. Back at the visitor center, Arnold reluctantly reboots the entire park system on Hammond’s orders, but the process requires him to visit a maintenance shed at the other end of the compound, where he is dismembered and eaten by the Velociraptor pack that broke free during the power outage. Ellie and Muldoon follow him when he fails to return; Ellie makes it to the maintenance shed, Muldoon does not. After turning the power back on, Ellie is attacked by the raptors and flees, reuniting with Alan just after he returns the kids to the visitor center. The ever persistent raptors stalk the kids through the kitchen, but they manage to lock one raptor in the walk-in freezer and take shelter in the control room. While Alan and Ellie fight off the remaining two raptors, Lex recognizes the software used by the park and restores the system completely, allowing Hammond to call for help.
After one final ambush, the group is unexpectedly saved by the arrival of the T-rex. Hammond and Malcolm pick them up in a Jeep, and they all flee the island. Alan tells Hammond that he will not be endorsing the park; Hammond agrees. As the humans escape, the rex kills the raptors and gives a gloating victory roar while the Jurassic Park welcoming banner drifts to the ground at her feet. In the helicopter home, Alan cuddles the exhausted kids (those are your kids now Alan, you’ve been chosen by the child distribution system, I don’t make the rules) while a morose Hammond silently mourns the death of his park. One mild consolation: their flight is escorted by a flock of pelicans, which are about as close as we’re going to get to actual dinosaurs on God’s green earth, never mind Henry Wu’s nightmare lizards.
Now. I have been asked in the past for my thoughts on the movie as an adaptation of the book, and my prevailing opinion is that the movie and the book should be regarded as two completely separate works, because the movie made some baffling choices and I won’t pretend otherwise. Put more charitably, the movie stands on its own, and its worldbuilding doesn’t require any previous knowledge on the part of its audience. On the other hand, I don’t understand the decision to shoehorn the twenty-four-year-old Ellie into a romantic relationship with the forty-year-old Alan, and I never will. First of all, he’s old enough to be her father. Second, the book makes a point of saying that they are not involved and never have been. The movies sort of get back on track with Jurassic Park III, in which Ellie is happily married to a man who presumably represents the Mr. Reiman she marries in the books, but they are divorced by the time Jurassic World: Dominion rolls around, which frees her up to resuscitate her relationship with Alan, which I guess is delightful to everyone who either didn’t read or doesn’t care about the books. Personally, I didn’t need the romance in Jurassic Park and I sure as shit didn’t need it in Dominion, and I don’t see why they can’t just be friends.
Equally strange is Movie Alan’s discomfort around children, though he of course outgrows this over the course of the first movie because Character Development – which would be completely fine if the book didn’t clearly state that Alan likes children, who can generally be relied upon to be enthusiastic about dinosaurs. Other puzzling changes: Malcolm is a playboy who has fathered multiple children with different women; Hammond is a dotty old man who loves dinosaurs and refuses to see any harm come to them even when his own grandchildren are being actively attacked by raptors, but he lacks the conniving nastiness of his book counterpart; John Arnold is renamed Ray, though this might have been to avoid confusion with Hammond; Lex and Tim swap ages and roles and don’t seem particularly bothered by their parents’ divorce, though this was a driving force behind Book Lex’s behavior; and what the hell is the deal with that flashlight?
I feel like any Jurassic Park movie review that doesn’t mention the flashlight is dropping the ball a bit, because what in the absolute fuckeroni and cheese was that supposed to accomplish, other than goading the rex into attacking the kids’ car? The logic escapes me. If Lex had happened to have the flashlight in her hands at the time that the rex broke loose, and if she had then pressed the button in a panic, that would’ve been one thing. But she is clearly shown rummaging around in the back of the car and purposely looking for the flashlight, which she then purposely turns on and purposely points at the rex, and she apparently has no idea that this is a terrible fucking idea until Tim yells at her to turn the light off, and I don’t understand it at all. If it was about getting the rex to attack the kids to make a point about motion-based vision (and to give Alan a chance to be the hero), this could still have been accomplished with a panicky accident. They didn’t have to make her stupid.
Having said that, Lex does toughen up over the course of the movie and she does show her actual intelligence, particularly when she and Tim are being stalked through the kitchen by hungry raptors, and she of course saves the day when she reactivates the security system. (And she is also shown pointedly turning off the lights in the kitchen just prior to getting stalked by the raptors, because Lex learns from her mistakes.) But the title of Most Badass Heroine indisputably goes to Ellie, who is not diminished by her strange relationship, and I am so glad the movie did her justice. I am a little sad that we didn’t get the Ellie-jumping-off-a-roof scene, though I acknowledge that the movie did not have time for everything. Despite this lack, she remains an active character with total agency, and the other characters would suffer tremendously if she suddenly turned into a sexy lamp. They would all be dead without her. I have to admit that “Dinosaurs eat man; woman inherits the earth,” besides being hands down the best line in the movie, is my favorite scene – not just because Ellie is unafraid to assert dominance in front of two men, but because Malcolm looks a little taken aback while Alan just smiles in a “That’s my girl” sort of way, and I love that so much. Even with the unjustifiable romance and the unnecessary attempted love triangle with Malcolm – which, in fairness, gets shot down before it can really take off – I love that Alan sees her as she is, and he loves her for it.
Nor is Ellie expected to do everything by herself: most of the characters contribute in some way to the park-reviving, the dinosaur-fighting, the island-escaping. It’s the balance that I like, because this is exactly the kind of all-hands-on-deck arrangement I would expect in a horrifying survival situation. It doesn’t all fall on the shoulders of one character, and no surviving character is completely useless; even the badly wounded Malcolm still has the wherewithal to give Ellie instructions on navigating the maintenance shed where Mr. Arnold met his doom when Hammond’s directions prove inaccurate. I will say that Tim could have been utilized better in the raptor control room scene, in that he could have at least handed Ellie the gun instead of batting on the back of Lex’s chair and anxiously micromanaging her while she turned the system back on, because to be honest I was seeing some underutilized resources there, TIM. Luckily for him and for everyone else, everything ultimately works out and he is quite young so I can’t really ding him too much for that, but it bothers me every time I rewatch the movie. If I were to label any character as “useless,” it would be Hammond, who has an irritating disdain for safety procedures and regulations but still has the nerve to wonder why his park is constantly getting in trouble, who makes a real nuisance of himself and screams at Alan not to shoot his precious raptors even while they’re all on the run from said raptors. Movie Hammond is nowhere near as bad as Book Hammond, yet his continued existence galls me because I know he will live to make more trouble in the next movie despite his very deserved death at the end of the book.
There are people who will tell you that this movie is the greatest piece of cinema – nay, the greatest piece of art – ever made, my ex-best friend among them. I am not one of those people. I agree it’s a good movie, but I am a child as well as a Philistine, and to be frank I’m less interested in cinematic value than I am in watching people getting eaten by dinosaurs. (In full transparency, I am eternally bummed about Mr. Arnold. Nedry and Gennaro can suck it.) In that regard the movie delivers, though the dinosaurs-eating-people angle is something that has grown more pronounced with each successive movie as spectacle has replaced substance. While I wouldn’t ever say the original is particularly subtle about toothy reptiles and the things they consume, it remains the best in its universe to date. They can make as many dinosaur movies as they want and I will watch them all, but this first chapter is, to my knowledge, unsurpassable because it was as unprecedented as the park Hammond sought to create. It has the most cohesive plot, the acting is far better, and the characters somehow feel more real, or at least more human, than they do in later installments. Ironically, it is also the most faithful to its source material, even if I don’t agree with a lot of the changes that were made. Either way, it is still one of my favorite movies of all time and it’s one of my most consistent go-tos when I don’t know what I want to watch, and if I’m honest I am probably going to watch it again just as soon as I finish this review.
