Jurassic Park

Steven Spielberg harnesses his unique magic to bring dinosaurs back from extinction

Directed By: Steven Spielberg
Other Notable Films From Spielberg: Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schlinder’s List
Starring: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum’s libido, Richard Attenborough’s voice, Samuel L. Jackson’s cigarette, various dinosaurs
Screenplay By: Michael Crichton and David Koepp

Movie Synopsis: A billionaire attempts to open a theme park where the main attraction is living, breathing dinosaurs.
Signature Line: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

THE INTRODUCTION An accounting of time, and people, and context

Steven Spielberg is as good as it’s ever gotten at weaponizing an audience’s imagination against them. It’s part of what makes his movies so captivating and part of why he has become the most commercially successful director of all time. Take, for example, just the first 30 seconds of Jurassic Park:

The movie begins with a shot of some tree branches. It’s nighttime, and the mood, owed largely to a score from the brilliant John Williams, feels tense and intimidating, if not outright scary. After a beat, the branches begin to shake, first a little, then a lot, suggesting that something very big and very powerful is just outside our view. This being a movie about dinosaurs, you say something to yourself like, “Ah, okay. I get it. A dinosaur is walking through the brush right now. Probably a T-Rex. That's what I’m about to see. That’s pretty cool.”

Except that’s not what you’re about to see. Because that's not what’s about to happen.

Instead, the camera cuts to a man; a worker of some sort. He’s standing there, staring, concern stretched across his face, a construction hat atop his head. The camera cuts back to the tree branches. The branches bend and crack and snap. The camera cuts away again, this time to a group of men, each one wearing the same hat and the same fearful expression as the first. One more time to the trees, now fully breaking, then one more time to a new group of men, all of them holding guns. And then finally, we see what’s happening:

It’s not a dinosaur causing the commotion—it’s a forklift carrying a massive crate.

We’re not watching some prehistoric behemoth stomping through a lush South American jungle. We’re watching some guys at work do a job that they’re probably getting paid $17 an hour to do.

It of course would’ve been cool to open Jurassic Park on an actual dinosaur—to have a T-Rex doing terrifying T-Rex things. That would’ve been a really fun way to start the movie. And, in fact, the first version of the script—which was written by Malia Scotch Marmo, who co-wrote Spielberg’s Hook two years prior—began exactly that way: with a T-Rex doing terrifying T-Rex things.

But Spielberg felt something inside him—the same thing that told him to use the dolly zoom into the close-up of Brody when he saw the kid get eaten by the shark in Jaws, and to have Indiana Jones shoot the sword guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and to film the wide shot of Elliot and E.T. flying past the moon in E.T. He knew that the one thing more exciting than opening a movie about dinosaurs by showing a T-Rex was to open a movie about dinosaurs by not showing any dinosaurs at all.

So he hid one away to start, tucking the promise of the creatures’ wreckage into a box that 30 guys were just trying to move from one place to another.

Spielberg knew if he did that, the audience was gonna be his.

And he was gonna use those next two hours to show them something unlike anything they’d ever seen.

THE VIEWING A timestamped rewatch of Jurassic Park

1:24: The Jurassic Park font family was created by a guy named Doug Olena. Per a 2015 article in the Springfield News-Leader, one of the fonts he sold to a publisher in the early ‘90s eventually got resold to the producers of Jurassic Park, who then used versions of it in the movie. (This is the least interesting thing I could find to start a rewatch of one of the most entertaining movies ever made.)

1:55: We’ll find out later that this guy—Robert Muldoon, played with a surly brilliance by Bob Peck—is the game warden at Jurassic Park. We don’t know that right now, though. Right now all we know is that he’s a cool-looking dude with a big fucking gun, which is one of my favorite types of guys to show up in a movie.

2:18: Here’s the forklift with the crate that I mentioned in the introduction. This is actually how we have to transport our 12-year-old son to and from school each day.

3:38: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand a guy just got eaten by the dinosaur in the box. The workers were trying to release the dinosaur from the crate into a larger paddock. But the dinosaur bucked right as a guy was opening the crate door, causing him to fall. The dinosaur (which we never get to see) yanked the guy inside and began eating him. What a sucky day at work for him.

5:10: We’re in the Dominican Republic now. A lawyer (Donald, played by Martin Ferrero) is telling an employee from Jurassic Park that the investors he represents want the park to get a safety inspection and certification before they’ll commit any more money to its build. The guy’s response: “Hammond hates inspections. They slow everything down.” BITCH, A GUY JUST GOT EATEN ALIVE. Maybe slowing down a little is a good idea?

6:40: We’re in Montana now with a paleontology dig team being led by Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Neill and Dern fucking crush these roles. Jurassic Park was such a massive success that they effectively became responsible for reshaping what scientists looked like in the pop culture canon.

8:19: This kid is a first-ballot Annoying Movie Kids Hall of Famer. Just a great and hateable face. (His induction class is him, Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Anakin Skywalker from The Phantom Menace.)

8:28: One of my favorite action-movie tropes is when they build up the threat a given character poses by way of a monologue delivered by someone else. For example, there's a part in 1984’s The Terminator where Kyle Reese is trying to get Sarah Connor to understand the degree to which her life is in danger.

11:01: Richard Attenborough is here. He plays John Hammond, the billionaire creator of Jurassic Park. And he’s dressed like he’s one of The Backstreet Boys.

11:24: Hammond, we learn, has been one of the people helping to fund Alan and Ellie’s work. He points this out by saying, “I can see that my $50,000 a year has been well spent.” And when Hammond says that sentence, he does so with a little bit of jolly-old-man smugness. But here’s the thing: We know that Hammond is a billionaire. A BILLIONAIRE. That means that, at the absolute very least, he has one billion dollars. And if you have one billion dollars, that means you have $50,000 dollars 20,000 times.

15:10: Wayne Knight’s here. He plays Dennis Nedry, a computer programmer at Jurassic Park who intends on stealing some dinosaur embryos and selling them to a rival company.

16:14: Jeff Goldblum is here. He plays Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and chaos theorist who’s visiting the island to point out things that might go wrong. Goldblum in this movie is like if a panther were a human, but also that panther had an erection that never went away.

18:10: There's a quick moment here where, as the helicopter descends, it begins to get wobbled by wind shears. Alan, in a bit of panic, grabs two female ends of two separate seat belts and ties them together. For a number of years, there was a fan theory suggesting that the moment was meant to foreshadow the way that all the dinosaurs on the island were bred to be female but still found a way to procreate.

19:43: We’re headed toward the scene when Alan and Ellie see the brachiosaurus for the first time. It’s my favorite part of this movie, and also one of my favorite parts of any movie ever. I love every single piece of it—the pacing, the score, the framing of each shot, the actors’ performances, the way the camera moves.

20:35: You know what? Normally, the only video I include in a GOOD MOVIE essay is the FOOTNOTES one, but let’s actually watch this moment together that way we can have the whole impact of it:

Perfect. Just perfect. My favorite parts of the scene: