This article was originally published in the June 21, 1993 issue of New York. We are republishing it in honor of the latest film in the Jurassic series — Jurassic World: Rebirth.
Among the many frightening and wonderful spectacles in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the most frightening and wonderful is a noise — the mighty yell of Tyrannosaurus rex after it has eaten. The roar has been worked up from a recording of an elephant’s trumpet blast, except that (to my ears) it’s louder, much deeper, and longer, the sound rushing from immense cavities and spreading out for miles. It is the happy bleat of the all-time king of beasts. Spielberg imagined it as a noise that has the power to appall.
No doubt about it: The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are fabulous. There’s none of that awkwardness, the comic-book flimsiness we remember from old movies. The T. rex walks ponderously, shaking the ground, but when it swings its neck and jaws to chomp on something, it moves with frightening speed. These beasts are hungry. The smaller velociraptors, or raptors, lean forward with their tiny front legs dangling in the air, and suddenly hop, propelled by the back legs; this graceful lean-and-hop movement becomes unimaginably sinister. The dinosaurs are always convincing, even when they smash through fences and intrude into a modern industrial kitchen. They are searching for their food — the human beings who become their prey. Jurassic Park, based on the Michael Crichton best-seller, is an evolutionary joke: Man, the master of the universe, has become mere flesh, consumed by animals allegedly too stupid to survive. In its mixture of excitement, wit, and fear, Jurassic Park comes close to Jaws, though the calculation involved in Spielberg’s recent big-machine approach to moviemaking can be depressing.
On a tiny Caribbean island near Costa Rica, a megalomaniacal tycoon (Richard Attenborough) has set up an animal preserve that is half theme park, half monstrous Bronx Zoo. The main feature: actual dinosaurs, re-created in the laboratory from DNA strings preserved for 65 million years in the bodies of blood-sucking mosquitoes. The huge creatures are …what? Post-extinct? Resurrected?
Before the park can open to the public, however, the tycoon brings scientists to the island to give their approval and help him raise money. There’s Alan Grant (Sam Neill), a paleontologist rather remote from humanity; his warmhearted colleague and lover, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern); and a hipster mathematician, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who dresses entirely in black and talks darkly of chaos theory — the notion that large systems are bound to pass out of human and technological control. Also two of the tycoon’s grandchildren, little fairy-tale blondies just made to be eaten. Within the park, a saboteur shuts down the computer systems, and all hell breaks loose. The animals attack the visitors’ center. Feed me!
As you’re watching, you have the sense that you’ve seen lots of this before. The reptilian head, the jaws with sharpened teeth have menaced people in Aliens, Gremlins, Predator, and other movies. To some degree, Jurassic Park is an exercise in conventional big-budget thrills — a machine for making money that has been programmed to work in a certain way, with certain built-in elements that have proved themselves in the past. Surely, Spielberg’s belief in chaos is only philosophical: Nothing like spontaneity is going to interrupt this large system’s march to a half-billion-dollar worldwide gross.
Spielberg sets things up cunningly, teasing us, but we know his tricks, and emotionally he breaks no new ground. The elements of his style, good and bad, are all in place. In the movie’s prologue, the raptors, so vicious they have to be caged (we can’t see them yet) devour a man, which recaps the opening of Jaws, when a young female swimmer is mysteriously thrust up out of the water by an unseen force and then violently pulled below. From Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we recognize the mood of thunderstruck anticipation, the camera rising on awed faces, the prolonged silences before the revelation of the apocalypse. The lowbrow ghoulish mockery is also familiar. A man so frightened he rushes to the toilet stays nailed to his seat right down to the moment when the T. rex smashes the bathroom flat and devours him. As the beasts approach, some sort of shaking liquid — water in a glass, Jell-O in a spoon — serves a repeated premonitory function, like the thudding music in Jaws.
But Spielberg does deliver; he delivers thrills with all his genius for the mechanics of movement and the psychology of fear. When the T. rex attacks a car holding the two little children, and the children haplessly flash a powerful light at the animal — just the thing that is attracting her — the vulnerability of the boy and girl is deeply upsetting. Dinosaurs, of course, are monsters that children love. They’re huge and scary, but they’re extinct, so they have a certain pathos for children — perhaps for anyone. After Grant and the children escape the tyrannosaur, they wander into the lush forests; and although Grant hates children, he feels a link with the kids. He has the same curiosity as they do. Mesmerized, he wants to walk among the beasts, and he forgets to get scared. In the loveliest moment in the movie — a moment to equal anything in Close Encounters — a herd of gallimimuses comes hopping toward the three of them, and they’re so transfixed they don’t get out to the way until the last minute.
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Is Jurassic Park just another cautionary tale about science? The movie could be seen as the outsize grandchild of all those cheesy sci-fi/horror films from the fifties in which scientists were mad and created giant mutated ants. But Jurassic Park is also a pastoral idyll. The beasts inspire not only fear but wonder, and the place in which they play is as much a garden as a killing field. Perhaps Spielberg is split himself. Part of him is like the starry-eyed paleontologist, awed by the creatures he’s dreamed about, and part of him is a sardonic black prince of chaos like Goldblum’s Malcolm, who expects the worst of any situation. Malcolm suggests — and the movie seconds him — that there are some things in nature that you can’t cuddle up to. “They’re just animals,” Dern says to the children, trying to reassure them. Yeah, and as animals, they just go on eating, like the shark in Jaws. In Spielberg’s best joke, the raptors chase the kiddies into a gleaming industrial kitchen, jumping over the shiny metal counters, scrambling for their dinner.
There’s a bit of earnest preaching going on here. Two lessons: Don’t muck around with the evolutionary sequence; the dinosaurs had their time and can’t adapt to the human epoch. And don’t sentimentalize the rapacity of nature. I suppose those things are worth hearing, but a day after the movie, when I no longer shuddered from the roar of the T. rex, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something stupid about going to all this effort to create dinosaurs on-screen only to turn them into big-toothed heavies in another scare movie. Spielberg is unkind to his own creations. After the humans leave the island, who and what is going to feed the animals?
