Movies That Settle: Jurassic Park
Still awesome after all these years...
A friend texted this morning with the news that Sam Neill had passed. He and I both share a love of Jurassic Park, so he knew I would want to know. As a small tribute, here’s a post I wrote about that movie awhile back.
Several years ago, I remember seeing 9, the Tim Burton-produced vehicle about odd-looking burlap dolls saving their planet from... whatever the Hell it was that had taken over the planet. I can barely remember the thing, really. All I seem to remember is that the main character (Doll #9) was attempting to save his fellow dolls' souls that were trapped in this machine, and at the end, the dolls were still dead. I guess I thought saving them would involve saving them. That's why I'm a soulless bastard.
More than the movie itself, I remember the conversation I had with my fellow 9-ers after the movie. I was invited by a friend of mine to see it with him and some friends of his, and one of them, who is much more optimistic and jolly than I, said that he likes most movies because life is just too hard not to. He specifically loved the live-action Transformers movies for the simple reason that he wanted to see stuff blow up (and Michael Bay movies occasionally feature such things.) Honestly, I cannot blame him. Movies are supposed to be an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. However, must we sacrifice quality for explosions?
I pointed out to this man that J.J. Abrams' Star Trek re-make, which had been released recently, had plenty of action, and even some explosions, and was an excellent movie. Far better, in fact, than anything Michael Bay has ever directed, or sniffed. He concurred, yet was not swayed from enjoying Transformers. Which is good, because for whatever reason, I had a tendency to try and convince people that they were wrong and whatever movie they liked and I despised was, in fact, terrible, so I applauded him for sticking to his guns. Even though he was wrong.
Obviously, that was years ago, and now, I feel we live in curious times as far as our entertainment goes. We forget that movies, as we know them, have not been around all that long, and yet there are so many of them that the audience sometimes takes good movies for granted and now just wants to be mildly amused for a couple hours. During the early stages of the pandemic, when we literally could not go to the movies, I realized that we shouldn’t take new movies for granted. I remember sitting down to watch Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas night 2020 and being really excited. After it was over, I found it to be an incredibly silly movie, but I enjoyed the experience, simply because I hadn’t seen a new movie in awhile.
So much of our enjoyment is in the context. Plots, themes, truly amazing special effects,... these are often lost amid giant fighting robots who are mostly indiscernible from each other and super-heroes who suffer such strife yet always manage to defeat the villain and get the girl/man at the end, even if the man’s body was being controlled by their former lover. Of course, people will try to convince me that, sure, the story sucked, but the effects in a movie like Transformers were really awesome. Well, of course they were. They were all done with computer programs that are being run by hundreds of engineers. Have you ever looked at the credits to a movie like that? The digital effects artists could populate a small town. To me, that takes a little of the magic away. Plots, themes, and yes, special effects all matter, but only because they go into the stew to make the movie (hopefully) enjoyable. They all need to be there. Explosions alone aren’t enough. You have no doubt heard the expression about sizzle and steak, right?
This is why Jurassic Park is still one of my all-time favorite movies. There was still an element of "How did they do that?" when it came to the dinosaurs. The special effects wizards behind the Raptors and T-Rexes combined elements of CGI and animatronics to create creatures that actually looked real because they were. The dinosaurs had weight and dimension, things that no Transformer had.
Let’s get in the Way-Back Machine and travel back to the early 90’s. Michael Crichton had written a best-selling novel about an amusement park where the main attractions were real, living dinosaurs that had been engineered by scientists. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale about Chaos Theory with some real-world implications, but let’s be honest, it was Jaws with dinosaurs. Nobody read the thing thinking, “Boy, this is an interesting take on mathematics.” Everyone wanted to read about people getting eaten.
Since it was Jaws with dinosaurs, who better to direct the film adaptation than Steven Speilberg? Speilberg and Universal actually bid for the rights and won, and Crichton got a cool $1.5 million and a share of the gross, so good on him.The interesting thing was Speilberg really wanted to make Schindler’s List, but the money men only green lit that on the condition that he also make Jurassic Park. Ah, Hollywood.
Speilberg brought in the A-Team of special effects artists, including Stan Winston to make the animatronic dinos and ILM to do the digital compositing. He also brought in Phil Tippett for go-motion long shots. Tippett is hilariously credited as Dinosaur Supervisor on the film (I’m sure you have all seen the meme: “You had one job, Phil!”) Even Paleontologist Jack Horner was brought in to help out. The point of all these people working on this? To not just make a monster movie. The dinosaurs had to look like real animals, not King Kong or Godzilla.
Dan Muren from ILM then suggested to Speilberg that CGI could actually be used to make the dinosaurs move. When the director liked the early results, he asked for more. Eventually, no go-motion was used, but Tippett was retained to supervise the dinosaur movement. An exchange between Speilberg and Tippett, when they watched the CGI footage regarding Phil being “out of a job,” and Phil replaying, “Don’t you mean ‘extinct?’” was actually used in the film.
However, CGI in its infancy wasn’t enough. They needed them to appear real. That logic also applies to the story of the movie. A man breeding his own dinosaurs opens up a big can of worms - the morality, the corporate-ness of it, the idea that they are selling this scientific boon that could probably be used for more noble means. Or as Ian Malcolm adequately puts it, "What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world." I know Jurassic Park wasn’t the first movie to use CGI to create characters, but it did open a lot of doors. It wasn’t exactly raping the film industry, but it did pave the way for crappy Transformers movies, which kind of raped my eyeballs.
It’s not just cool-looking dinosaurs that make Jurassic Park great, for the same reason that Jaws isn’t great because a few people get eaten by a shark. It’s the whole stew. There are rich characters, interesting philosophy, and a new concept. The movie even takes the first half-hour introducing the premise and developing the human characters before we even see a dinosaur. Transformers didn't waste a whole lot of time developing Shia LeBouf or Megan Fox (not that she needs much developing). As I recall, the robots landed and the chaos ensued. Jurassic Park even has a great antagonist in Wayne Knight, the greedy computer hacker who becomes a victim of his own hubris when he becomes a meal (and quite a big one) for a Dilophosaurus. But it is his attempt to steal the dino DNA for his own financial gain which sets the events of the story in motion, because that’s what a good villain does. The Raptors aren’t really bad. They’re just “drawn” that way. Wayne Knight is the real killer.
Just like Chief Brody is fighting against the environment Jaws, Alan Grant is fighting against his environment in Jurassic Park. He is less of a “fish out of water” (or on water) than Brody, because he uses his knowledge of dinosaurs to survive, and one of the interesting facets of the character is that his knowledge is sometimes ridiculed, even by the child he is doing his best to save (“They don’t look like birds to me.”) A lot of the dino-science has since been debunked, but at the time, Grant seemed like he knew what he was talking about, and in the world of the movie, a lot of his theories were proven right. This helps the audience get behind him as a main character, and gives us someone to root for. Yeah, we do want to see people get eaten, but wouldn’t you have felt a little bad if they ended up eating Grant? And let’s not forget that Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm dies in the original book, but is resurrected as the main protagonist in the sequel. Why? Because he was cool. You need these kinds of characters to make the story work. This is why horror movies where everyone gets killed are dumb, and movies like Jurassic Park, that have character development and, you know, a script, stand the test of time. And real-looking dinosaurs certainly don’t hurt, either.
This story I heard about Jurassic World: Dominion is telling to me; Upon hearing that Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum were reunited for this new film, almost thirty years later, and that they were all friends, Steven Speilberg openly wept. I obviously don’t know these people, but I feel like all of these amazing talents realized that they were part of something special all those years ago, and it bonded them for life. I know that this new movie will not compare to the original, because none of the sequels have, but upon seeing those characters together again, I’m sure something will stir in me, too. Even though I am a soulless bastard.