I spent most of last week sick (not COVID, or at least not what the tests said), which meant I canceled a lot of plans and stayed home mostly bingeing The Nanny. I will extoll the virtues of the absolute goddess that is Fran Fine at a future time, though; today I’m focusing on another intellectual property that is also available on HBO Max and kept me company during my sickness: the Jurassic Park trilogy (in this house we do not acknowledge Jurassic World or its offspring.)
The first time I ever heard of JP was when my family rented it on video; the movie was released in 1993, when I was a wee 3-year-old, so this must have been sometime later. I was an absolute nerd as a kid (and in adulthood as well), obsessed with adventure and sci-fi stories, which put me at high risk of falling for JP’s charms. But I was also scared of my own shadow, and during the first watch-through, I quit after the T-Rex broke loose, hiding in my room quivering while my family continued to watch.
Still, my nerdiness was very intrigued by the setup of the movie, so much so that I remember the next day I cut out the JP logo from something (maybe a magazine ad?), I glued it to an old briefcase that was lying around, and I showed it to two of my sisters saying: “we’re playing Jurassic Park now” (I was Tim, my older sister was Lex, and the youngest was a new character we created for her, “Nelly.” I do not recall why the briefcase needed to be JP-branded or what role it played). JP remained a very popular game in the household—we were constantly under attack from dinosaurs for a while—and that may have made me amenable to watching the movie again in its entirety. One of my aunts had moved to the U.S. by then, and she sent us the JP VHS as a gift, which we played incessantly despite a) it being in English with no subtitles (we did turn on the captions as if that would help us—though I low-key think that’s part of how I learned English) and b) it playing in black and white instead of color, due to a bizarre color system region issue.
Unlike other childhood crushes, my love of JP has faced the test of time and come out swinging every time; one of my mottos is NNWJP (Never Not Watch Jurassic Park). As readers of this newsletter know, when I stan something I stan it true, and I stan few things as much as I stan JP. When the trilogy was available on Netflix last year, I watched it; when it moved to Peacock I didn’t because I won’t stoop that low, but now that it’s on HBO Max you bet I watched it again. My grandma says she’s read Don Quijote at various points in her life, and she’s always discovered something new; I won’t do that because Don Quijote doesn’t have dinosaurs, but much like my grandma, every time I rewatch JP I similarly discover it anew. The movie is the same, but the nerd man watching has changed.
Jurassic Park (1993)
I got the idea to rewatch JP this time around from a friend sending me this tweet (which in turn reminded me of this video). That night, trying to fall asleep, I recalled the scene where this song plays, when the audience first sees a dinosaur (and then a whole ecosystem of them, as pictured in the header), and thought “damn, JP was a great fucking movie.” In the morning, I googled and found out it was on HBO Max, and that clinched it.
One thing I noticed this time around is the very interesting way the movie starts, with four separate (but interconnected) scenes that have no overlapping characters:
We meet Muldoon, the game hunter, as he supervises the transfer of a velociraptor to a new cage. The raptor cleverly foils her captors and manages to eat one of the handlers.
Then we meet Gennaro, a lawyer representing InGen’s board (the company that owns Jurassic Park), who goes to a mosquitos-frozen-in-amber dig to talk to JP mastermind John Hammond about the accident and demand an inspection of the park to appease the board. Hammond isn’t there, and Gennaro talks instead to one of his representatives (who utters the iconic like “apuesto mil pesos que se cae” #LatineRepresentation); this guy says Gennaro will not get the expert he wants for the inspection, Alan Grant, because Grant is “a digger like me.”
Then we meet Alan Grant himself in an Arizona dig in which he terrifies a child by mock-slicing his crotch with a raptor claw and then tells his girlfriend, Ellie Sattler, that he doesn’t want kids (no doy) before Hammond lands in a helicopter and offers to found their dig for three years if they come to inspect his park.
Then we meet Dennis Nedry, JP’s IT person, in the only scene that is not super closely related to the previous one—he’s getting paid to steal dino embryos for one of InGen’s competitors.
The next scene finds Alan, Elie, Hammond, Gennaro, and new character Ian Malcom on the way to the park in a chopper, and from then on the movie becomes much more linear—but I had never noticed how it takes a risk in the beginning, challenging the audience to pay attention and keep up. Trust viewers! JP did it and it paid off.
Another thing I noticed is just how much the iconic moments have remained potent. The “welcome to Jurassic Park” scene still conveys wonder. I was legitimately scared when the T-Rex breaks free (though I didn’t hide in my room this time), and I still hated (not because it’s bad, just because it’s upsetting) watching Nedry get killed by that venom-spitting dino. The kitchen raptor chase runs laps around any of the many many imitators it spawned (including, most recently, in Beast, a movie whose basic pitch is “Jurassic Park but lions.”)
Clearly, collaborators showed up to work. Spielberg is a great director, obviously, but it’s not just him. The special effects still hold up thirty years later—both the animatronics, which are insanely good, but also the then-nascent digital effects (in the kitchen scene, you can notice the switch back and forth between puppets and computer—but it’s not distracting, just interesting). The acting has no weak links; even actors with smaller parts, like B.D. Wong or Samuel L. Jackson, craft rounded characters out of a few lines. And it’s a testament to the script that despite being super predictable, it’s still so engrossing—probably because Spielberg does a great job of conveying that yes, a dinosaur park is obviously a bad idea, and yet… we’d all wanna see it happen. There’s barely any character development (Hammond learns not to play God, Alan learns to like kids—that’s about it), yet the movie has no boring parts; the closest it comes is a Hammond monologue about a flea circus that thankfully ends before Ellie can tell him to shut up.
Yet, also in this rewatch, I found myself asking questions that I couldn’t find answers to, and I’m writing them here in case any of you can:
In the opening scene, the raptor container is confirmed to be locked into the new pen, and yet the raptor manages to push the container away. Explain?
What board would trust the opinion of two experts who have been bribed to come to the island? Like, sure, they end up saying “this park is a horrible idea,” but they couldn’t be counted on to do that—it’s a mad conflict of interest!
I need to see an accurate map of this park (apparently, that’s a whole thing). At one point, the group just wanders into a triceratops pen without walking through any fences; after escaping the T-Rex, Alan and the kids watch some brachiosaurus from a tree—we were given to understand they had been thrown inside the T-Rex paddock, and I highly doubt the T-Rex and the brachiosauruses share a paddock…
Speaking of the T-Rex paddock: when we first see it, it looks like it and the road are on the same level. But then when Alan and Lex are thrown in, the difference between the paddock’s floor and the road is so substantial that they climb down using a cable, and the car they were in lands on top of a tree. That implied height is too big for the T-Rex to scale without some serious dexterity, which I do not believe she possesses.
The scene where Muldoon dies is the fulfillment of Alan’s speech that terrorized that boy early in the movie, in which Alan said that when raptors are hunting you, you think you’re up against one of them and then two others appear out of nowhere. I personally think Muldoon is smart enough not to fall for that, but whatever—the raptor is a “clever girl” and the movie wanted to be foreshadowy. BUT in that same speech, Alan said raptors wouldn’t go for biting your neck, like a lion would, instead using their claws to slice your guts open—yet the raptor that kills Muldoon very much holds him down and bites his neck; no talon slashing occurs. Can you be consistent, movie?
This is, of course, without mentioning the bonkers bananas concept that you’d be lucky enough to find ONE mosquito frozen in amber with its guts full of dino blood, let alone enough mosquitos to produce all those species, let alone being unlucky enough to then mix that DNA with a frog’s and just happen to choose the rare West African species that’s been known to spontaneously change sex in a single-sex environment… #SuspensionOfDisbelief
All of these are nitpicks, though, because the main thing that this rewatch revealed is that, like the T-Rex roaring at the end while the banner falls dramatically around her, JP totally rules.
(Also, am I super stupid for only now getting that at the end, when they look out the helicopter and see some albatrosses flying, that’s a callback to Alan’s theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds?)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
I have mixed feelings about LW. It’s easier to forgive a bad movie when it’s just plain bad. But LW has a lot going for it, and that causes me a lot of frustration because I can imagine a version of the movie letting its good ideas blossom organically, and I mourn that it didn’t happen. LW is the closest the JP franchise came to Hollywood’s current sequel approach (“same same, but different, but still same”) before Jurassic World. The JW trilogy (which, again, I don’t acknowledge) feels like it was made by an algorithm that tracks box office stats and meme retweets; LW just feels like it was made by a competent team who was under pressure to live up to the original’s exorbitant box office (it had the highest gross ever, for a while).
In an alternate universe, the team took more time off, cleared their heads, and returned only when it felt right. What would that movie have looked like? It would probably have built on this movie’s concept, which is good: the tension between letting the natural ecosystem of dino life that is flourishing in Costa Rica exist as an untouched sanctuary, or exploiting it/trying to control it. It would probably also have used this movie’s inciting incident (or a similar one): a clueless family stops by the island on a private cruise and their daughter gets hurt, prompting action by the people responsible for the island’s existence and dividing the movie into two camps: those who wanna preserve the island, and those who wanna bring it under their control.
The way this movie chooses to go about it, though, is super convoluted. First, by making the island into a separate one (Isla Sorna), a so-called “Site B” where dinos were bred before being taken to the JP island (Isla Nublar). Just like Site A, we’re told, Site B was abandoned by humans and is now overrun with dinos. Why was this necessary to the plot is beyond me. The original island could’ve well developed into a “lost world” after a few years of no human presence (not to mention that JP negates the notion that another island was necessary to breed dinos by literally showing us dino eggs hatching in a park lab). Creating a Site B made me spend the whole movie wondering what was up in Site A and why no one was asking that.
Then, it finds the most convoluted way to send Ian to Site B five seconds after he swears he’ll never go, by making it so that he just happens to be dating the foremost behavioral paleontologist in the country, Sarah Harding, and she happens to be approached by Hammond about studying the dinos in their natural habitat and accepts, and now Ian has to go “rescue” her. So many issues with this premise—some in the credibility of the plot, and some in the gender dynamics at play.
JP crafted a great heroine in Ellie Sattler, a woman who has strong (correct) opinions, says cool shit like “dinosaurs kill men, woman inherits the earth,” can stand her own against velociraptors, and yes, is a bit of an asshole (like when she sends the kids to torture Alan, or openly flirts with Ian in front of him). LW thinks it’s doing the same with Julianne Moore’s Sarah, but this character is little more than an OG Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a free spirit who never picks up the phone and whom we are asked to believe is super knowledgeable about dinosaur behavior but still messes with not one but two dino babies and puts her life and others’ in danger when the babies’ parents get angry—not to mention spending a good chunk of the movie walking around in a shirt that’s soaked in baby T-Rex blood, attracting the T-Rex parents for a second time and getting a bunch of people killed. Get your shit together, Sarah! In Ellie’s words, “people are dying.” Sarah only has one interesting scene, a monologue in which she tells Ian that she needs him to rescue her in the moments that count (like at dinner with his parents that he never showed up to), but that hint at a complicated relationship gets quickly discarded in favor of more scenes in which she acts like a dino Mother Theresa who harms more than she helps.
Similarly underdeveloped is the very very puzzling character of Ian’s daughter, Kelly Curtis. On the one hand, it’s great that young Black JP fans were now represented in the franchise’s universe; on the other, they were woefully underserved with Kelly, who doesn’t have a single consistent personality trait in the entire movie. She’s scared when the movie needs her to be scared, pissing her pants at the very thought of a dino approaching her trailer; later, unprompted and for no clear reason, she’s brave enough to swing from some bars and kick a raptor down to its death (this after we’re told that she got cut from the gymnastics team). When the movie doesn’t need her anymore, she disappears, only to emerge in the end in a quick scene where she has no lines. Kelly deserved better.
The movie’s pace is off, jumping to the next plot point without having given the previous one enough time (people were already dying of dinosaur causes and I was still not convinced about why anyone needed to be there), and the plot is less a straight line and more a game of Snake, with the movie absorbing new themes, characters, and goals as it goes along. By the time we get to the third act, a completely unjustified and underdeveloped T-Rex rampage through San Diego, it’s not at all clear what the script is trying to say other than “dinos good, humans bad.” And (perhaps the movie’s worst sin) the raptors STILL don’t slash anyone with their talons. I’ll die waiting for that promised raptor-talon-slashing.
However… I still like watching it. Not every day do you get to see what the world that was promised in that “welcome to Jurassic Park” moment would look like. This movie offers you a fully realized dino jungle, and at that, it is very good. The “safari” scene makes my heart beat faster; the T-Rex trailer attack almost matches the original T-Rex breakout in tension and fear (“Mommy’s very angry” is no “clever girl,” but still iconic). Even the later T-Rex attack is quite engrossing, as is the raptors in the tall grass setpiece (which would be recreated four years later in the best scene of The Mummy Returns).
There’s a nostalgia factor involved in watching LW. Not for JP itself, but for a time in which even cash grabs like this one were made by people who cared, and if the whole endeavor collapsed, it was because its motives were rotten, not because the team had absolutely no respect for audiences, as is the case with most current franchises. I will always mourn the LW that could’ve been—but of all the ones we could’ve gotten, this isn’t the worst one.
Jurassic Park III (2001)
You know how I said earlier that it’s easier to forgive a bad movie when it’s just plain bad? JPIII is so easy to forgive that it 180s into love. This is a movie that starts with the JP logo getting slashed by an unseen claw to form the “III” in the title; the rest of the film lives up to that intro, shunning anything resembling talent, dignity, or verisimilitude—and I love it for it. Consistency is key!
If LW felt like it was made by people under pressure to match the original’s box office gross, JPIII feels like it was made by people being sued for child support and needing to make a quick buck ASAP. The movie even alludes to this in its plot: Alan Grant is convinced to be a tour guide for a wealthy couple who wants to fly over Isla Sorna (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni—the cast is ridiculously stacked) and writes him a huge check, only to later reveal he was duped: they didn’t wanna just fly over the island, they wanted to land in it to search for their missing son. And, worse, the check was fake. The way Alan feels in that moment is the way I imagine the cast felt after signing up for this movie and realizing that the script wasn’t even finished and would not be completed during production.
There’s something fascinating about seeing the JP intellectual property used in a movie that feels like it was produced to air exclusively on network television at 2:30pm, a timeslot reserved for people napping in front of their TVs. The scene where the Spinosaurus (the movie’s big baddy, replacing the tried and true T-Rex) causes the plane to crash and proceeds to terrorize its passengers is so bad, its special effects so amateurish, that I dissociate a little every time I see it, wondering if I’m in an alternate universe where a couple of film grads said “what if we tried to do our own Jurassic Park” and that movie somehow ended up being recognized as a legitimate entry in the series and given a standard roll out in cinemas (yes, I first saw this movie in theaters, an experience that I remember fondly).
The JP movies, like much of Spielberg’s oeuvre, are about divorce (he’s finally taking that concept to the extreme and making a film about his parent’s divorce). JP had Lex and Tim run away from their parent’s divorce to spend time with grandpa Hammond on the island and learning to open up again by bonding with father figure Alan Grant. LW had Kelly follow Ian into the island because neither of her divorced parents will give her any attention, and she learns… how to…. kick raptors? Because she… found… confidence? Okay, I don’t know what she learned or why, but there was divorce in there. JPIII also has it: the rich couple is divorced, but the love of their kid has brought them together to find him, and eventually brings them together for good—because a family who survives several dinosaur attacks together stays together. Obviously, Spielberg had to be out of the picture for JP to allow divorced parents to come together (Joe Johnston directed instead), and there is, in a super super distant dimension, a version of the movie that gets you excited at the parents reuniting. JPIII is of course not that movie, and Macy and Leoni fail to create any chemistry, though is hard to blame them at all for it.
Sam Neill is perhaps the biggest loser, being saddled with the moral compass of the story—which is very unclear. If JP’s lesson was “don’t play God” and LW’s was “don’t interfere with nature,” JPIII’s is “real paleontologists study the rocks, not the bioengineered mutants—but also, get your face out of the fossils every once in a while and go experience the world.” No one could sell that, and neither can Neill. He is asked, in fact, to invest in a storyline involving the possibility of raptors taking over humans as Earth’s dominant species, and witnesses some dubious sign of human-like intelligence (a raptor goes as far as snapping a man’s neck purely out of spite at one point). He even has to endure a dream sequence in which a velociraptor speaks to him! The only winner here is Laura Dern, who got paid a bunch of money to film two scenes, both in a comfortable suburban set—she doesn’t set foot on the island or even appear at the end, though that would be the most natural conclusion. Congratulations to Laura Dern!
The movie also further muddles the whole Site B concept, by showing abandoned structures (fences, a huge bird cage) that were clearly meant for adult dinosaurs, not the babies we were told were bred there and then transported to Isla Nublar (it also at one point shows human skulls, and it’s quite unclear whose they’d be, since we’re told the InGen team left of its own volition, not because of any dino attacks).
I struggle to think of a single thing this movie did that I admire in any way, and that’s perhaps why I like it so much: there’s nothing to mourn here. It’s purely terrible! And it’s the sort of terrible one can enjoy and have fun with, trying to discern what kind of frustration each actor is feeling in each scene, or imagining the studio meetings that led to this disaster. It’s a fitting end to the franchise, because you know JP had to be really good to span something so bad and still have a studio carry it all the way, hoping to coast solely on the original’s name.
In conclusion, I have a real soft spot for JPIII, and while I wouldn’t go as far as to say I will never not watch it, I do recognize it as part of the family (unlike, again, the Jurassic World offspring). Perhaps my motto in this case is NFJPII (Never Forget Jurassic Park III)—because in my book, no JP rewatch would be complete without it.