On June 11th, 1993, I had my one and only "religious experience." It began, as is tradition, by staring into the cold hard eye of a raptor. It lasted for 127 minutes, in which I was in a complete state of raptor—sorry, rapture (these words are synonyms to me). I emerged from the movie theatre a changed person. I was like Saint Paul after he fell off his horse and realized, "Holy crap, Jesus is a god-man-thing!" Only my revelation was about dinosaurs, and so is obviously superior.
I had borne witness to the birth of Jurassic Park. I had seen it bite through the fence of public anticipation and burst into the public sphere. And oh, how it bellowed.
I was 8, but I remember how completely earth-shattering this film was right away. My friends and family laughed off my obsession, and chalked it up to childhood dinophilia. Exactly 20 years later, I have signed portraits of the characters framed all over my room, two sets of Jurassic Park toys splayed across my work desk, and all of the dialogue of the movie memorized (and that includes the dinosaurs' "lines"). So who's laughing now? Answer: Ian Malcolm, like this.
To say that Jurassic Park is my favorite movie would be like saying Earth is my favorite planet. These are prejudices over which I have no control. I love the movie's subtle foreshadowing, such as the helicopter landing scene in which Alan Grant—that's Sam Neil as the paleontologist—has two female seatbelt buckles that won't connect. But Dr. Grant finds a way (just like the dinosaurs' lil gametes). I love how Jeff Goldblum makes a tyrannosaur bite look really sexy. I love that when Jurassic Park owner John Hammond is forced to cut the tour short, he whines, "Why didn't I build in Orlando?" This throwaway line summons magical visions of raptors and Rexes marauding around the Magic Kingdom eating Mickey mascots off of Porta Potties. People on the Jurassic Park theme park ride wouldn't know what the Fukuiraptor was going on! Makers of Jurassic Park 4, take note: this alternate universe is where you should set your movie.
The minor characters of JP are also beyond phenomenal. For example, Robert Muldoon, the game warden, who has spent months embroiled in crazy staring contests with raptors, and it completely shows. By the time we meet him, he's too far-gone into this weird rivalry with the "big one" in the pride, like he's slowly losing his soul to her or something. Indeed, one of the great insights of the movie is that Grant learned more about raptors by studying them as wild animals than Muldoon learned by observing them in captivity. If only Muldoon had overheard Grant's take-down of that bratty kid at the beginning, he might have understood the most important thing about raptors—they attack from the side. Clever girls.
I'm even an apologist for the movie's many mistakes. I mean, the Rex footsteps' produce these monstrous impact tremors, but when she arrives to save the day at the end, she literally materializes out of nowhere. It definitely makes you wonder if she learned to tiptoe. Also, could Dennis Nedry, the park's computer programmer, have made a more suspicious exit speech? Would that even be possible? Try to sweat and stutter a little more there, guy. And did you notice that the embryo vials for Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus were both spelled wrong? I think that screw-up might actually be intentional, a subtle endorsement of Malcolm's criticism of how Hammond slaps stuff on lunchboxes before he even knows what he has. Indeed, if you watch the movie closely, you can see that Hammond's charismatic hypocrisy is a running gag. My favorite example is that he claims to be present for every raptor birth as it helps them to, no joke, "trust" him. Cut to: the highest security paddock in the park. Because trust.
But I digress, and on this subject, I always will. So let's get down to the meat, which is what the dinosaurs would want. What I really love about Jurassic Park is that it is about everything. Or at least, it's about the everything of science, and that is the most interesting kind of everything.
by Becky Ferreira, The Awl | Read more:
"Electric Rex" is by Kyle McCoy
