Looking back: Jurassic Park

Can you imagine a more entertaining person to spend a dinosaur apocalypse with?

"Chaotician, chaotician," Jeff Goldblum's stylish scientist, Ian Malcolm, says in a prickly tone of voice when describing his profession. That word evokes a newness that was in the air when Jurassic Park came out -- or maybe that just infects the mind and preoccupations of anyone at a young age, as I was in the summer of 1993, just 18 and finished with my freshman year of college. Earlier that year I'd had to read a couple of books for a science survey course -- James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science and John Gribbin's In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. Some of the science I'd been reading about was more than half a century old, and I never understood any of it well enough to realize how much I didn't understand it. But it all seemed of a piece to me then -- it felt like we were all marching into a bold future of science and technology and cool-sounding multisyllabic words and rock star scientists who dressed all in black. Or something. The Internet was just beginning to be talked about in the mainstream media, magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 were infecting the cultural air, and cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk or quasi-cyberpunk novels like Snow Crash and Schismatrix were passed around with a nod and a wink by nerds in the know. To me the world seemed a whirl of computer networks, Lorenz attractors, fractals, and any number of other poorly-understood scientific and technological buzzwords. It was a good time to be young, the summer of '93 was. But then, when isn't?

I was never under any illusion, even then, that Jurassic Park was a great movie. The dialogue was seldom particularly good; the superb character actor Sam Neill seemed ill-cast and uncomfortable in the "man-of-action" role of paleontologist Alan Grant; the cinematography seemed too bright, the sets a little cheesy; those adorable moppets who followed Grant around everywhere wore on the nerves (though the boy was played by Joseph Mazzello, a very talented child actor who would show considerable chops in the little-seen The Cure two years later).

Still, I saw the film six times that summer, to the point that it almost became a ritual, a regular thing to do with siblings or friends on a Friday night. It felt something like a return to form for Steven Spielberg, whose early films (particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark) had made such an impression on me as a child, and who I felt had started to lose his way with Oscar-chasing efforts like The Color Purple or schmaltz like Always. (I had seen neither film at the time -- still haven't, to be honest -- but that didn't stop me from passing judgment at the time. Judgment has since been revoked pending long-overdue viewings.) I responded not only to Jurassic Park's buzz-word-heavy air of scientific cool, but to the wryly comic presence of Jeff Goldblum as Malcolm -- by far the most entertaining and iconic character in the film, but always functioning best on the sideline and thereby horribly misplaced as the hero in the execrable 1997 sequel The Lost World. He got most of the better dialogue in the film, including his cute line about "always looking for a future ex-Mrs. Malcolm" (Hey, man, it was the '90s! Presuming inevitable divorce and mordantly acknowledging the inherently doomed nature of monogamous relationships was witty and with-it.) I enjoyed Wayne Knight's pitch-perfect delivery of the following line when, as the villainous hacker Nedry, he's accosted in the rain by a rather cute little dinosaur: "That's nice. Gotta go!"

And then every now and then there were those Spielberg Moments. Those moments that always pop up in his films, even his lesser ones, reminding you that you are in the hands of someone as innately gifted with the essence of Hollywood cinematic storytelling as anyone has ever been. I don't know whether he or screenwriter David Koepp came up with the scene where Grant scares the pants off the snotty little kid by describing what a living velociraptor would do to him; but what a beautiful scene. It's a perfect expression of the principle that helped make Jaws such a brilliant film and what motivated Spielberg's decision not to show the shark for the first hour or so: always, always, always let your audience's imagination do the heavy lifting for you. Oh, the relish with which Neill says that line, "you are still alive when they start to eat you." That's how you foreshadow something. By the time that scene was over, nobody in the audience could wait to see those raptors brought to life by the full weight of 1993-era Hollywood special effects.

The jaw-drop shot.

The effects are significant -- one of the milestones in movies, along with Melies's A Voyage to the Moon, Cooper's King Kong (which Spielberg wittily references here in the gigantic door that opens to admit entry into the park), Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Lucas's Star Wars. Looking back, the effects in Jurassic Park feel like a halfway-house between the '80s and today -- there's lots of CG, yes, but also lots of practical effects created by Stan Winston, and that T-Rex head is a knockout (love the close-up shot of its pupil contracting in the glare of the flashlight).  The climactic scene in which the T-Rex (subbing in as a Deus Ex Machina) fights off the raptors is the one that I think may literally have made my jaw drop sitting in that movie theater in '93 -- it was quite simply something I had never seen before. Those CG effects, preternaturally fluid and realistic in their time, paved the way for movies in which living, biological creatures could be presented as convincingly as bulky objects like spacecraft already were. It got past the hurdle which the Star Wars films grappled with -- the contrast between the utterly convincing space battles and the not-quite-so convincing stop-motion creatures like the Tauntaun or the Rancor. (Yoda looked great, but that sort of puppetry was not practicable all the time, and also his ears flopped around too much.)

I fear now that an over-reliance on CG has in a sense made every movie quasi-animated, has given a sense of unreality to the proceedings and has led to many an action sequence that disrespects physics so egregiously that we have trouble accepting it even as fantasy, as escapism. But that's a rant for another time. Used with discretion, CG is but another tool in the fantasist's box, and Jurassic Park paved the way for, among other things, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, which would have struggled mightily to bring Tolkien's visions to life using merely puppetry and stop-motion.

A word, also, for the sequence in which Grant and his companions first see the living dinosaurs. Here again we see critical elements of Spielberg's craft -- he shows us the reaction before he shows us the thing being reacted to, and he foreshadows it with the sound effects of the mighty sauropod's footsteps. It's a simple trick for ratcheting up emotion, but when aided by powerful imagery and appropriate scoring, it's extremely effective. By contrast, I remember seeing a Dinotopia TV movie in which the camera just cuts, sloppily, to a shot of a dinosaur romping around.  This is supposed to be our big sense-of-wonder moment but it falls utterly flat; no buildup, no delayed reveal, no time for the audience's emotions to get stoked. Spielberg knew better.

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