NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past several weeks I’ve been 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. If you’re just joining us, I’m in the throes of a description of the first assault of the T. Rex in JP I. Previous installments are listed below:
Alan and Alexis make it down to the base of the tree and Alan, after calming the hyperventilating Alexis—“He [Donald, the shithead lawyer] left us! He left us!”—heads bravely back up the tree to get Tim. As he opens the door of the jeep and leans inside, he places his hand on the steering wheel to steady himself, causing the front tires to turn, destabilizing the jeep. Racing against time, he pulls Tim from the jeep and heads down the tree while the branches buckle and snap with immensely dark, woody tones. The two finally make it to the ground, collapsing between two enormous roots when the jeep comes crashing down behind them, landing on its nose and then falling forward with a second deafening crash, not quite crushing them, thanks to the sheltering roots, after which Spielberg finally gives our ears and the rest of our nervous system a break. Alan and the kids go for a hike—basically, so they won’t be found when Ellie and Muldoon come looking for them—and eventually climb up in another enormous tree, which is clearly magical and will protect them from all harm. In the morning they get to pet a Brachiosaur and everything’s copacetic, except that Alexis does get sprayed with Brachiosaur snot—basically because she’s a girl. Spielberg’s trying, but he’s definitely still having problems with that misogyny thing.
Meanwhile, poor miserable Dennis (remember him?) is discovering that, with all his clever tricks, Mother Nature can still fuck with him. In fact, since he’s sinned against both Nature and Capitalism, it’s a sure bet that his fate will be a particularly unpleasant one. Once more, everything goes wrong. Dennis races through an overwhelming downpour towards the dock where, in all probability, no ship is waiting for him. Even if it’s there, where are they going? But he can’t go back, so he has to go forward, his glasses fogging, skidding off the road, smashing a road sign so that he can’t even tell if he’s headed in the right direction.1
When the jeep is hopelessly stuck, he struggles on, unspooling cable from the jeep’s winch to tie it around a tree when he encounters a Fuckuopasaurus, looking remarkably like one of the Gremlins critters, who toys with Dennis before blinding him with a blast of poisonous vomit and then ripping him to pieces. As Dennis endures his doom, we see the can of Barbasol fall from the jeep into the flooding stream, which then deposits it in a pool of soft mud. And then? Could the embryos live? Well, no. It’s a cute dummy plot point by Spielberg, with a hint of the fate of the $40,000 Marion Crane steals in Psycho, a prize for which a poor soul risked, and lost, everything, and which similarly ended up buried in muck.
Also meanwhile, Ellie and Muldoon return to park headquarters, where Hammond and Ray are sitting around scratching their asses and wishing they hadn’t subcontracted software for the entire park to Dennis. When it’s clear how massively Dennis has screwed them over, Hammond sends them back out in a regular, gas-powered jeep to rescue the kids. Instead, of course, they find only Malcolm, whom they load into their jeep just as the T. Rex reappears. Clearly, the big guy is still ready to party, and he gives chase with steps of thunder. But they get away, and they get back to headquarters. In the most meta scene in the film, the camera scans past Jurassic Park gift shop shelves loaded with Jurassic Part merchandise and memorabilia, which may as well be the real thing—Hollywood ridiculing its own obsession with marketing and monetizing itself. Ellie encounters Hammond sitting in the ruins of his own kingdom, a reverse Midas who has gained the power to convert gold into dross. In an earnest, kitschy confession, he tells her of his first attraction—a flea circus! The tawdriest, most banal, most fraudulent “spectacle” of all, with the stage no bigger than a man’s hand, and a cast of zero! But that doesn’t matter. In show business, only one thing matters. “They believed it was real! They believed!”
Now, of course, they can’t help but believe, and, all too often, can’t help but be eaten, a fate that befalls both Muldoon and Ray. Ian, with an injured leg, doesn’t get eaten, but otherwise disappears, plotwise.2 It’s left to Ellie crawl into the very belly, bowels, and entrails of Jurassic Part to first shut down and then reboot the whole thing, brilliantly tying the two parts of the picture together, because naturally Alan and the kids are climbing over “dead” high voltage wires just as Ellie is getting set to turn on the juice. This time around, Tim rather than Alexis proves to be the chump, refusing to leap from the high wire until he gets a taste of the 20,000 volts that’s waiting for him. Fortunately, Alan proves up to the task of providing CPR, learning in the process that there’s more to life than digging up fossil bones.
- Dennis’ wild ride, and the earlier brief scene where he gets his Barbasol embryo carrier, have suggestions of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear, remade as William Friedkin’s 1977 career-ender, Sorcerer. ↩︎
- Ian’s irrelevance to the plot after he distracts the T. Rex suggests that Goldblum had enough clout to have his character “saved” but not enough to have the whole plot rewritten to feature him. ↩︎
