Movies That Settle: Jurassic Park
Still awesome after all these years...
My first paid post, so I thank you in advance for helping. There will still be some free stuff on here if you can’t contribute. Thanks for reading!
Opening Crawl:
This is a thing I see people do on Substack a lot, but I figured it was only for more important (or famous) people. Now I realize that no one is important, not even famous people. We all watch and do the same mundane stuff. So here goes:
“What should we watch?” - This is the question I ask my wife almost every night we eat dinner at home. It is literally the most difficult decision we have to make all day. Here’s what we have been deciding lately, minus my long-ass Temptation Island rant:
The Boys: The third season is now on Amazon, but if you haven’t watched seasons 1 and 2 yet, don’t start here, because the first few minutes will turn you right off. Still, if you haven’t watched it, it’s based on a comic where the super-heroes are the corporate-sponsored jerks (well, mostly. One or two are ok.) and the gang of thugs are basically the good guys. There’s obviously more layers to it than that, but the thing that really steals this show is the acting. Karl Urban can play the Hell out of anything, but this is the best I’ve seen him, and Anthony Starr as Homelander (the Superman-like character, except he’s a real dick) is making his career in every episode. Check him out in Banshee if you haven’t seen that one. Also, warning to all, this show is not for the weak-at-heart. Sometimes, it‘s freaking gross
Obi-Wan Kenobi: This is one of those shows that seems to have fans divided. Some people don’t care for bratty Leia. Some people don’t seem to like that Kenobi kind of got his ass kicked by Darth Vader (maybe forgetting how that one turns out for old Obi-Wan in the end.) Some people are just over Star Wars in general. It’s a very polarizing franchise. You can tell by checking out Rotten Tomatoes for proof, as it has an 87% critics score, but a rather disappointing 60% audience score. I will say this; after the poor pacing of The Book of Boba Fett, the show-runners clearly learned from their mistakes and got right into the story with this one, so it’s already a big improvement.
Reading Material:
Pearl by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Gaydos: I’ve gone back and forth on Bendis over the years. His Alias and Ultimate Spider-Man stuff are pure comic gold. His New Avengers, Dark Avengers and Ridiculous Avengers (not my joke, but I had to use it) were a little off. Fortunately, this is in the Alias vein, as he’s better when taking on a single character. Volume 3 just started in single issues, but you can pick up vol 1 & 2 in trade, and I suggest you do. It’s about a young tattoo artist with some yakuza family ties, and she has some wacky powers. A lot to digest, but worth it.
Listen here, you: I listen to podcasts, as one does.
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Ok, I don’t always listen, because I don’t need to pretend that I'm smart and cultured, but this particular episode where he interviewed Michael Stipe, former lead singer of R.E.M., was particularly good. Jesse is also the “bailiff” on the Judge John Hodgman podcast, which I do often listen to, and you should too.
Various Other Stuff: If you’re still here, I’ve done a lot of podcasts, a few comics, and I have a Teepublic store, so check all that out, if you please. And now, on to the ramblings…
With Jurassic World: Dominion hitting theaters this week, I went back to re-work a post from years ago that never made it to the webs on the one that started it all. Enjooooyyyyy!
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.
The 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.