(NOTE: Jurassic Park is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. Over the next six or seven weeks I’ll be running a strikingly unbalanced review of the four films, because I’m a big fan of parts 1 & 3, while distinctly unenthusiastic over parts 2 & 4.)
A major storm is headed for Isla Nublar, leading to the departure of all non-essential personnel. However, that doesn’t include the vetting team, because Hammond’s financial backers are demanding immediate verification of the park’s commercial viability. The guests are put into driverless, electrically propelled jeeps, which will of course later on fail, leaving them stranded. The tour is a nice parody of nature park visits where the animals display their ability to conceal themselves from gawking humans. “You are planning to feature dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour?” snickers Malcolm, while Hammond fumes helplessly.
Meanwhile, Wayne Knight’s Dennis Nedry—short, fat, awkward, socially inept—comes crawling up from the underground to have his revenge on the fancy folks, sabotaging all the park’s security systems so that he can steal the precious dinosaur embryos and claim a taste of the good life for himself. As the systems shut down, they isolate the cast into four groups—Hammond and Ray in the computer control room, wondering what the hell is going on, Dennis alone with the embryos, Ellie caring for the sick Triceratops, and Alexis, Tim, and lawyer/coward Donald in one stalled jeep and Ian and Alan right behind them in the other, trapped in a tropical downpour by the T. Rex paddock when the big guy decides that, with the electricity down, it’s finally show time.
The attack of the T. Rex is perhaps the greatest set piece in all of Spielberg’s œuvre, little things maddeningly going wrong at precisely the wrong time, escapes giving birth to new dangers, defenses becoming traps, an outrageous sequence of cascading catastrophes—one damned thing after another, as Dorothy Parker might say—that keeps us on the edge of our seats for a good quarter of an hour.
The T. Rex first announces his presence by dropping a goat’s leg on top of the first jeep, Spielberg returning to the severed leg in Jaws. When the T. Rex breaks through the fence, Donald does the lawyerly thing, abandoning the kids without a backward glance and hiding in the bathroom. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all, and, anyway, how can I defend my clients’ interests if I’m dead?
Alexis, in the meantime, has, in chicklike manner, panicked and accidentally switched on a searchlight, which she (naturally) cannot figure out how to turn off. I’m not sure why a T. Rex would be attracted to light, but this one is, leading to the virtuoso CGI shot of the big guy’s pupil contracting from the glare. Once the T. Rex has decided that the contents of the jeep look edible, he knocks in the glass roof with his snout. The screaming kids use their hands and feet to use the glass as a shield for protection, while the steel frame of the roof keeps the T. Rex from spreading his jaws wide enough to engulf his prey.
Frustrated, the T. Rex flips the jeep over while the kids continue to howl. Well, now they’re safer, actually, because the big guy can’t bite through the jeep’s undercarriage, can he? Well, no, but he can stamp the whole thing flat, can’t he? That doesn’t quite work. Instead of collapsing, the jeep sinks into the muck for a foot or two. Even a T. Rex foot can’t push the jeep entirely beneath the surface, but it hardly matters, because the mucky water starts to rush into the half-submerged jeep, just about drowning poor Alexis and Tim, who clearly cannot catch a break here. This is a favorite gag of Spielberg’s—while you’re hiding in your “castle” you find it’s become first a cage and then a deathtrap.
About this time Ian, showing surprising concern for the welfare of juveniles—and a surprising lack of concern for his own skin1—climbs out of the second jeep and starts waving a flare. The T. Rex lumbers after him, knocks him aside and crashes into the john where cowardly lawyer Donald is still cowering, like the craven lawyer he is, and is finally eaten for his sins. With the T. Rex distracted, Alan rushes to help the kids. Alexis is able to escape from the jeep but Tim is still inside when the T. Rex returns. Alexis, rather amazingly, is able to control her sissy girlness and obeys Alan’s simple but difficult rule, “Don’t move!” even when the dinosaur is roaring in frustration2 and then sniffing and snorting around their huddled figures like an inquisitive steam locomotive. Apparently dismissing them as some sort of inedible tree stump, the T. Rex goes back to the jeep, which he somehow senses still contains something alive. He starts batting the upside jeep around, spinning it like a top and endangering Alan and Alexis. Eventually, they’re forced to clamber up on the concrete shelf that abuts what was the T. Rex’s paddock but now mysteriously has become a sheer, fifty-foot drop. Alan grabs some helpful dangling cables and “walks” down the cliff with Alexis hanging on while the T. Rex sends the jeep whistling after them with Tim still in it. Fortunately, the jeep lodges in an enormous tree swathed in enormous vines, looking very much like the tree house in Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, which Spielberg saw in 1953 and remade in 1991 as Hook.
- Apparently, the original script just called for Ian to run away in the same manner as Dennis, and, one guesses, to be eaten like him as well, a just reward for all his bad-boy sniggering and (presumed) lack of faith in a Higher Being, but Goldblum, who, after all, knows how movie stars are supposed to behave, demanded a rewrite. ↩︎
- It’s a (fairly) good bet that dinosaurs didn’t roar. The only living reptile with a loud voice is the male alligator and (naturally) it’s a mating call. ↩︎
