(NOTE: Jurassic Park is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. Over the next eight or nine 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.)
Jurassic Park is a very meta film, a film that is almost about itself. Impresario Steven Spielberg is bringing dinosaurs to life for us just as impresario John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is bringing them to life in the film. Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton depicted Hammond as a “dark Walt Disney,” and probably saw the real Walt Disney as pretty dark, depicting an “Adult Disney”-style theme park run amok in WestWorld way back in 1973.1 Spielberg, on the other hand, clearly aspired to be the “Disney of Today,” the creator of America’s dreams. In the film, we sometimes get Crichton’s Hammond—genial showman on the outside, heartless, money-grubbing egomaniac on the inside—and part Spielberg’s Hammond—creator of dreams. But part of Hammond’s split personality is Spielberg’s own ambivalence about himself—“Yeah, I’m full of it and I always have to have my way, but I deliver in a way that the rest of you peons can’t imagine!” Thus, we see Hammond barging into Dr. Grant’s trailer and popping his long-saved bottle of celebratory champagne because, well, Mr. Ph.D., I’m a billionaire and you’re a wage slave, and this is how we billionaires roll! Jump on board or be left behind!
But before we get to Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), we have the opening of the film, cribbed shamelessly from Jaws, a night-time encounter with a ruthless, unseen menace.2 Seeing the film today, even though Jurassic Park is famous for helping usher in the era of overwhelming CGI special effects, they were still very expensive way back in 1994, and Spielberg is consciously hoarding their shock value, as well as his pennies, in the early going, keeping his menaces hovering just off camera.
Eventually we assemble the team that’s going to vet Jurassic Park, located on Isla Nublar in the Caribbean: Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), a clearly expendable lawyer; Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a hip “chaotologist”, so cool that he wears a black leather jacket in the tropical rain forest; Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) a paleobotanist who somehow displays a virtuosic knowledge of Triceratops physiology/coprology despite majoring in, you know, plants; and Dr. Grant, an actual dinosaur expert.
Also present on Isla Nublar are Hammond’s two grandkids, Alexis (Ariana Richards3) and Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello), plus disgruntled computer nerd Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), whose greed and lack of respect for “Nature” set the plot in motion. On top of all this we have Jurassic Park game warden Robert Muldoon (Robert Peck)4 and Jurassic Park computer expert and token spade Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson), two characters who do little more than provide exposition and, ultimately, dinosaur food.
There’s a great deal of exposition in the early going of the film, everything from Velociraptor vision to “dino DNA”—in itself a nice parody of dumbed down theme park science. Crichton’s 1990 novel ingeniously combined a variety of hot science topics, including both genetic engineering and chaos theory, with the solid gold box office appeal of dinosaurs, but all that talky-talk works better in print than on the big screen. To break the monotony, Spielberg gives us a major treat, two Brachiosaurs in the flesh, a promise of wonders to come.5
Throughout the exposition Jurassic Park displays a massive dichotomy that is never resolved. On the one hand, it’s wrong to play God! On the other hand, dinosaurs are so fucking cool! A veritable devil of a dichotomy, it runs unresolved throughout the entire Jurassic Park series. On the one hand, it’s wrong, but, on the other, if it didn’t happen we got no picture.
In the early going, Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm displays such a smirking, oleaginous charm6 that we figure he’s being set up as the atheist who either finds God or ends up being eaten in righteous retribution for his failure to do so, either with or without a Sidney Carton flourish at the end. Not only does he try to steal Dr. Grant’s girl right from under the obtuse doctor’s nose, he condescends to her repulsively, “explaining” chaos theory to her as though she were a 16-year-old school girl. Worse yet, Spielberg has her responding like one. Hey, I’m only a Ph.D. in paleobotany! What do I know about science stuff?
Yet, surprisingly, it’s Malcolm who leads the charge against the whole idea, even though he doesn’t play the God card very seriously, instead claiming that the whole thing is “unnatural” and therefore “bad”. “Nature selected the dinosaurs for extinction,” he tells Hammond, an entirely unscientific remark, since there is no decision-making apparatus of any sort sitting over evolution and deciding what should or should not happen. In addition, this argument has nothing to do with chaos theory, Malcolm’s supposed specialty, and when things do go wrong, as they do, spectacularly, it has nothing to do with the specifics of chaos theory—we aren’t seeing the operation of a nonlinear system where “trivial” variations in starting sequences lead to unpredictably large variations in outcomes—but rather a confluence of unexpected events—an insider’s betrayal, a massively disruptive storm—that lead to catastrophe.7 Fortunately, none of this matters very much once Spielberg gets the story underway. Stevie may not know science, but he can put a plot together like no one’s business.
- Disney installed an “Audio-Animatronic” Abraham Lincoln in Disneyland in 1965. In WestWorld, set in “the future,” guests can engage in gunfights with android gunslingers and get in bed with android dance-hall girls. ↩︎
- If I were moving a dinosaur, I wouldn’t do it at night. ↩︎
- In an interview, Richards said that Spielberg hired her based on her screaming ability. When she screamed, people who couldn’t see her thought she was really in trouble. Spielberg caught some flak for the heroines of both Indy Jones films, Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw, who after “cool” beginnings (Karen winning a drinking contest and Kate singing “Anything Goes” in a Shanghai nightclub) do little but scream thereafter. All-time scream queen Fay Wray said she screamed throughout her scenes with King Kong so that people wouldn’t forget he was carrying her. ↩︎
- Muldoon is a vestigial version of “Quint”, Robert Shaw’s swaggering shark expert from Jaws, easily Spielberg’s greatest character. Only Quint’s anarchic life force can save mankind from the Beast, but, having vanquished the Beast, he too must die, for he and the Beast are really brothers. Neither can fit in the confines of “civilization”. Spielberg had a similar big-game hunter character in Jurassic Park II and, once more, could find no role for him, because it’s impossible for a mere human to kill a dinosaur in a film these days. Dinosaurs, like whales, have become symbols of “Nature”, and it would be “wrong” to kill Nature. I strongly suspect that Spielberg’s concept of Quint was heavily influenced by the figure of John Wayne, even though, to my mind, Wayne’s screen persona was the opposite of anarchic, being rigid and repressed, a moralizing bully. ↩︎
- At the sight of the enormous beasts, everyone leaps out of the jeep to behold them. In all the Jurassic Park films, it’s an established rule that all herbivores are gentle. In fact, today’s large-scale herbivores, like hippos and rhinos, are extremely aggressive. However, I have myself petted an elephant (a small one, about half a ton) and it is a very touching experience. I was a freshman in college in 1964 and for our mock convention an alumnus rented an elephant. He was, perhaps, the happiest man I have ever seen. If you want to rent an elephant, do so. ↩︎
- Not only does Ian have the black leather jacket and obligatory shades, his open shirt displays both chest hair and even the hint of a medallion. Since the last two aren’t really emphasized, it’s difficult to decide if the intended effect is satirical or “straight”. ↩︎
- Forty years before Jurassic Park, sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury concocted a short story, “A Sound Like Thunder,” involving a T. Rex that not only illustrated chaos theory but named it—“the Butterfly Effect”—a decade before the scientists got around to doing so. In “A Sound Like Thunder,” a time-traveling hunter alters history by accidentally killing a butterfly while hunting a T. Rex during the Cretaceous Era. ↩︎
