A selection of classic films have been screened outdoors at Howard Davis Park over the last week, among them Frozen, Top Gun Maverick and Back to the Future. The series concludes this weekend with a showing of the first – and best – film in the Jurassic Park franchise, which will be shown tonight at 8pm. In an extract from his work-in-progress book (666 Horror Movies – And Why You Should Watch Them), TOM OGG details why Steven Spielberg’s dino-themed blockbuster remains a perfect film for introducing younger audiences to scary cinema
IT may have been a mammoth-sized summer smash-hit, the 38th highest grossing movie of all time no less, but Steven Spielberg’s big-budget blockbuster contains at least one scare scene that warrants its inclusion in any book on horror cinema.
As with the Michael Crichton novel from which it was adapted, Jurassic Park is basically Crichton’s Westworld only with dinosaurs in place of robots, as Scottish* billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) seeks to open a theme park on the remote – and fictional – island of Isla Nublar, with cloned dinosaurs as the star attractions.
Even without the tell-tale PG/PG-13 rating, it is obvious almost immediately that Spielberg intends to tread a lighter path than that of Crichton’s novel, and this is apparent even before Attenborough appears playing the cold and calculating Hammond as a twinkly-eyed cuddly eccentric.
Whereas Jurassic Park the book has dinosaurs eating a newborn baby within the first few pages, Jurassic Park the film opens with a random dino handler being dragged to his death in bloodless fashion. The scene isn’t very frightening but it is effective, with Spielberg calling the bluff of viewers by having a crane appearing through the foliage, the swaying trees and ominous rumbling initially suggesting an approaching dinosaur, only for an actual dinosaur – a velociraptor – to then appear and cause chaos. It is a neat summation of all that will go wrong later in the film: humans think they can contain and control their prehistoric charges, and the dinosaurs reveal the opposite to be true.
On the back of this tragedy, Hammond invites a group of lawyers and scientists to Jurassic Park for a safety inspection/tour, among them palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill), palaeobotanist Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Goldblumesque chaos theory egghead Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), all of whom have mixed feelings about the ethics and practicalities of Hammond’s genetically engineered creations. And justifiably so, because it isn’t long before it all goes horribly wrong, leading to one of the greatest and most intense set-pieces of Spielberg’s career.
After duplicitous tech nerd Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) deactivates the park’s power, the electric vehicles in which Dr Grant and co are travelling are left stranded directly beside the T-Rex enclosure, the electric fences to which have likewise gone kaput.
A moment of Spielbergian genius then masterfully ratchets up the tension, as shots of water rippling in a plastic cup signal the approaching footsteps of the T-Rex, much as tugs on Quint’s fishing rod in Jaws (1975) announced the arrival of the unseen shark.
The T-Rex then appears, its enormous animatronic jaws polishing off a sacrificial goat, and the sheer scale of Stan Winston’s life-sized creation still maintains its awesome power all these years later; granted, the effect is diluted somewhat when viewed at home, no matter how large the widescreen TV, but, for those of us who first watched Jurassic Park on the big screen, the palpable sense of fear and fascination that arrived in conjunction with the T-Rex is hard to forget, as its guttural growls shuddered the cinema seats and it slowly turned to eyeball Hammond’s tasty grandchildren, Lex and Tim (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello).
The melding of practical effects and CGI is close to flawless, no doubt helped by the night-time setting, and the T-Rex appears more organic and fluid here than at any other time in the film; in fact, it looks more organic and fluid than any other dinosaur in the entire Jurassic Park/World franchise. In hindsight, the limitations of early-1990s computer-generated imagery worked to the advantage of the scene; CGI was used more sparingly than in later films and, as a result, the T-Rex has a real sense of presence, far more so than, say, the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World (2015).
Both in terms of scenario and setting, the eight-minute T-Rex sequence is one of pure horror, with the characters trapped in a confined space and stalked by something monstrous, and all while thunder and lightning intermittently light up the night sky.
As a filmmaker, Spielberg likes to keep audiences invested in the moment, he’s not one for flashbacks or dream sequences**, and the absence of music throughout the T-Rex attack makes a fanciful scene feel all too real; gone is John Williams’ rip-roaring score, replaced by the unrelenting drum of heavy rain, the growls, grunts and roars of the T-Rex, and the screams and cries of its victims. A similar technique was later used by Peter Jackson for King Kong (2005), with the “Insect Pit” sequence enlivening a bloated and over-long film with an unexpected detour into out-and-out horror.
Plot-wise, Spielberg doesn’t always follow Crichton’s novel in terms of which characters live or die, something first made apparent when the T-Rex eats lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) in surprisingly brutal fashion; in the book, Gennaro lives. Such changes add an element of unpredictably even for those who have read the book; on first viewing at least, it seems possible that Tim and Lex – T-Lex – might well end up on the T-Rex menu. Instead, the scene culminates with Dr Grant and Lex leaving Tim behind in a moment of sheer self-preservation and scaling a wall into the T-Rex enclosure, with Tim and the vehicle in which he is trapped following closely behind (how the T-Rex itself scaled this wall is a still-ongoing debate among Jurassic Park fans).
As a standalone scene, the T-Rex attack is a masterpiece, but Jurassic Park as a whole isn’t top-tier Spielberg. There is little of the warmth of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), nor the linear storytelling that characterises the director’s finest work; there isn’t a single wasted second in Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), yet many are the seconds wasted on Dennis Nedry’s convoluted sabotage mission.
Nevertheless, there remain many memorable moments throughout the film, mostly involving velociraptors: the abrupt mood change from awestruck to alarmed as a newborn dinosaur is revealed to be a raptor; the surprise appearance of Samuel L Jackson’s severed arm – a callback of sorts to the famous severed leg in Jaws; the death of no-nonsense game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck), ambushed by a pair of raptors (“Clever girl”); the same raptors hunting Lex and Tim in a kitchen. A particularly witty shot in the final act sees a raptor bathed in DNA code as it chases its human prey, a single shot that neatly encapsulates the perils of dino genetic engineering.
Sadly, the success of Jurassic Park resulted in a series of ever-diminishing sequels and spin-offs. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) – also directed by Spielberg – and Jurassic Park III (2001) both have their moments, but the magic of the original is largely absent, and the franchise has already jumped the shark by the end credits of The Lost World, with a fun but stupid sequence in which a T-Rex runs rampant in San Diego.
In a just (jurassic) world, the introduction of a dinosaur with cloaking powers in Jurassic World would have immediately ended the franchise, as would the unforgivable transition of the raptors from ruthless predators to Chris Pratt’s obedient lapdogs, but the film made a fortune, and two dreadful Jurassic World sequels and a reboot followed. By the time of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Pratt was fleeing from erupting CGI volcanoes besides hordes of CGI dinosaurs and the entire spectacle had become exhausting rather than awe-inspiring.
Extinction is long overdue.
*As played by Attenborough, John Hammond is a Scottish billionaire with the least convincing Scottish accent since Lord Clarence MacDonald in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
**Granted, the entirety of Saving Private Ryan (1998) is a flashback, and an illogical one at that (the character having the flashback isn’t present for two-thirds of the flackbacked action), but this is an exception to the rule.
Jurassic Park is showing at Howard Davis Park this evening at 8pm, rated PG. For more details, or to book tickets, visit jerseyscreenings.co.uk
‘Dr Grant, my dear Dr Sattler, welcome… to Howard Davis Park’
