(NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past several months 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. Today’s chapter continues my discussion of JP 3, recapitulating the protagonists’ escape from the Velociraptors. The previous seven installments are listed below.)
Jurassic Parks, Part 1 Jurassic Parks, Part 2 Jurassic Parks, Part 3
Jurassic Parks, Part 4 Jurassic Parks, Part 5 Jurassic Parks, Part 6 Jurassic Parks, Part 7
Billy, Amanda, and Paul all make it to the tree tops, but Alan is seemingly surrounded until his scaly attackers are driven away by, gas bombs! It’s Eric, covered in a home-made camouflage poncho and hiding out in a wrecked tank truck, living off of stale energy bars. Alan and Eric spend the night in the trailer, while Paul, Billy, and Amanda enjoy a tall tree. In the morning the two parties set off separately for “the coast.” After some random traipsing, Eric hears a familiar sound, the jingle to his dad’s cell phone! Shouting joyfully and racing through the jungle, the two groups finally meet, well, pretty much, because there’s one of those Jurassic Park-sized walls between them. Even worse, what I forgot to tell you is, that the cell phone isn’t in Paul’s pocket. It’s inside the Spinosaurus! Oh, yeah, he’s there all right, and damned hungry too, but the humans on the wrong side of the wall find a chink that lets them through to the right side. Sorry, dude! Go eat some fish!
Mom and dad and Eric embrace, but while they do so the Spinosaurus trots down the fence a hundred yards or so, finds a weak spot, and bursts through! The fish can wait! By this point, any reasonably sentient viewer has realized that “good” people can outrun a big dinosaur. The five make it to another InGen installation, with a functional Spinosaurus-proof fence and gate. After the big guy gives the gate the shoulder and it still won’t budge, we can relax and catch up on a plotpoint or two, namely, that Billy, well, he sort of picked up a couple of raptor eggs a while back. Since Paul’s check turned rubber, Alan’s digs will need some alternative form of financing, and raptor eggs ought to fetch a pretty good price on someone’s black market. Well, we all know that tampering with Nature is, well, absolute evil, and Alan gives Billy a thorough tongue-lashing and gets into it with Paul over the issue of the eggs’ disposal. “What’ll they do if they catch up with us and we have the eggs?” Paul asks. “What’ll they do if they catch up with us and we don’t?” Alan counters. So it’s definitely time to find that damn coast, which providentially appears to be right out the back door, or at least a river leading to it, if you can just find your way down a thousand-foot cliff.
They exit the complex to encounter an extensive set of gangways, scaffolding, and stairs that ultimately will take them down to sea level, but the trip scarcely looks inviting. Clouds of mist obscure the path; arches of chain link fencing cover the gangways, protection against something or other; mysterious, limey deposits litter the bridges and stairs that groan and tremble at every step. What is this? We better get a move on. The gangways seem so shaky that our weary pilgrims must cross them one at a time. As Eric sets out on his journey, the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds and Alan realizes what they’re up against. “Oh, my God. It’s a bird cage.”1
Well, pretty much. They’re Pteranodons, giant flying reptiles with a twenty-foot wing span. 2 Naturally, one of them swoops down and carries off Eric. Amanda, now showing some real spunk, races along the gangways, heedless of her own safety, shouting desperately “I can’t see him! I can’t see him!” Billy slips on the parasail and makes the jump, ultimately saving Eric, but succumbing, it seems, to the Pteranodons’ beaks, while Alan and Paul watch helplessly on.
The war against the Pteranodons is perhaps Johnston’s finest moment as an action director, the movement from spooky uncertainty to frenzied action matching anything Spielberg had done, and taking particular advantage of the vertical dimension added by the winged, goblin-like creatures, who seem to have emerged from the lower depths of Hell.3
Escaping at last from the bird cage, the gang finds something left by InGen that actually works, a river boat with a full tank of gas, as well as a specimen cage that looks like it’s built for raptors. After an initial scare, when they hear Paul’s cellphone’s jingle once more, they catch another break. The phone’s not in the Spinosaurus any more! It’s in his shit! Pawing bravely through the muck, they find the little device, which, it seems, is almost indestructible. As night falls they’re finally en route to that near-mythical coast when they’re hit by the final element of Spielbergian JP mise-en-scène, a tropical downpour. Oh, and did I tell you, Spinosauri can swim?
- A bird cage that seems to have taken a leaf or two from Giovanni Piranesi’s “Le Carceri d'Invenzione”. ↩︎
- Pteranodons are pretty much Hollywood’s pterosaur of choice, perhaps because of the large, bony crests that protrude from the backs of their heads, making them look very much like witches. In a scene of classic sixties kitsch, Raquel Welch was borne away by a Pteranodon in One Million BC. The recently discovered Quetzalcoatlus is far larger, with a wingspan of at least 33 feet, but lacks the photogenic crest. ↩︎
- A sharp-witted viewer (i.e., not me) will realize at this point that it was a Pteranodon that attacked the boat towing Eric and Ben’s parasail at the beginning of the film, thus precipitating the entire adventure, a plot point that the film leaves implicit and unexamined. Of course, if one Pteranodon could escape the cage, why couldn’t the others do so as well? I guess we’ll never know. ↩︎
