Juras­sic Park and the sto­ry of the mod­ern blockbuster

One sub-strand of pop­u­lar crit­i­cism that inter­ests me great­ly is when some­one claims to have ​“a the­o­ry” about a movie. It’s gen­er­al­ly some kind of crack­pot read­ing which might not war­rant being del­i­cate­ly chipped into that cul­tur­al mar­ble tablet we call the inter­net so that it may be pored over by wide-eyed ascen­dants as the con­sen­sus view of a bygone, pos­si­bly hap­pi­er age. It’s more an off-hand impo­si­tion that might rear its head around mid­night after a few sweet sher­ries, to be all-but-dis­missed as dilet­tan­tish whim­sy by sun-up. A movie like Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing remains per­haps the né plus ultra of the ​“the­o­ry” movie as, by design, any­thing you throw at it sticks in some way, shape or form.

I have a the­o­ry about the 1993 fea­ture Juras­sic Park, direct­ed by Steven Spiel­berg. The film was made con­cur­rent­ly with the ​“seri­ous” pres­tige pic­ture, Schindler’s List, a work which took the bold, eth­i­cal­ly con­tro­ver­sial step of actu­al­ly tak­ing cam­eras inside the gas cham­bers (or, a movie recon­struc­tion of said) in an attempt to depict their pro­found hor­rors for a new generation.

I men­tion this by way of bol­ster­ing the mag­nif­i­cent logis­ti­cal jug­gling act under­tak­en by Spiel­berg, not as a way to super­fi­cial­ly com­pare the films as two dove­tail­ing visions of the apoc­a­lypse, one root­ed in real­i­ty, the oth­er in fan­ta­sy. Yet, both films are loose­ly con­cerned with Dar­win­ian supe­ri­or­i­ty, Schindler’s List pre­sent­ing a cor­rup­tion of that the­o­ry to achieve nefar­i­ous ends, Juras­sic Park pre­sent­ing a group of humans believ­ing they can dis­prove the the­o­ry in the name of high-tax-brack­et immer­sive the­atre. Or, as it’s referred to in the film, ​“play­ing god”.

Hav­ing been born at the very front end of the ​’80s, I was a boy who came of age in tan­dem with that fate­ful long week­end when an ill-fat­ed duo of gung-ho palaeon­tol­o­gists were packed off to Isla Nublar to help a dod­dery Scot­tish entre­pre­neur get his new-fan­gled theme park signed off by The Lawyers. It’s rare to read a piece on Juras­sic Park which isn’t tinged with dewy-eyed nos­tal­gia, like the film’s qual­i­ty is because of, not despite the fact that it was, for so many, a for­ma­tive cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ence which real­ly show­cased the arse­nal of cre­ative tools avail­able to film­mak­ers who were entrust­ed with inor­di­nate cof­fers of cash. Maybe that’s too cyn­i­cal a way to put it, but it was for this writer one of the first films that I could walk away from and hon­est­ly say to myself, ​‘Well, that was new…’

On a pure­ly per­son­al lev­el, Juras­sic Park was impor­tant to me as I think it’s the first time in my life I can remem­ber being phys­i­cal­ly scared of some­thing. I’m cer­tain, at 13, there would’ve been plen­ty of things in the past that had giv­en me the willies for some rea­son or oth­er, but at a pre­view screen­ing at the now-defunct UGC Tro­cadero – with its famous Roman-themed art pan­els lin­ing the main esca­la­tor which one would ride to the heav­ens – I recall for the first time bank­ing in my mind what fear actu­al­ly felt like. The oth­er rea­son that Juras­sic Park was impor­tant to me was because it was the first time I start­ed to take vague notice of this mar­gin­al and rar­i­fied activ­i­ty known as film crit­i­cism or, as I would term it back then, ​“the reviews”.

Of those voic­ing their opin­ions in some kind of pub­lic forum, I dis­tinct­ly recall Empire mag­a­zine giv­ing the film a very volatile five-star review, essen­tial­ly dis­miss­ing it as cliché-rid­dled and with a ​“bad script” and ​“bad act­ing”, but that none of that mat­tered because oh man, oh man, oh man T‑Rex run­ning! oh man, oh man… Yes, the imag­i­na­tive effects were the sole rea­son to place this one on the view­ing docket.

Even my his­to­ry teacher of the time spent the intro­duc­tion to one les­son out­lin­ing what he con­sid­ered to be the film’s ugly flaws, only cur­ry­ing favour back with the room by doing an amus­ing impres­sion of a wad­ing Bra­chiosaurus, replete with puffed up cheeks and mock tim­pani drum foot­steps, pri­or to return­ing to work on the Mai Lai Mas­sacre. (I recall in a lat­er les­son he admit­ted to lik­ing the film Noth­ing But Trou­ble from 1991, so maybe this is all to be dis­missed as pro­to trolling?).

Back then, I couldn’t see any prob­lems with the film and, to this day, I still don’t. What were oth­er peo­ple see­ing that I couldn’t? Were they both­ered by the fact that Richard Attenborough’s bon­ny High­lands accent falls by the way­side in the final act? Were the kids deemed too icky and annoy­ing for their sur­vival to count as an emo­tion­al pos­i­tive? Was Sam Neill real­ly the tac­i­turn Indi­ana Jone­sian hero we were all wait­ing for? This wasn’t some­thing that irked me for much time. And, if it irked me at all, is was because I couldn’t com­pre­hend the crit­i­cisms, not that there were peo­ple dis­pens­ing barbs at some­thing I was fond of.

Like a favourite snack food, Juras­sic Park was a film I con­sumed vora­cious­ly in the inter­im years with­out ever once stop­ping to think why I was so hap­py to keep return­ing to it. Juras­sic World is forth­com­ing, a belat­ed sequel which, like the Alien fran­chise, seems set to prove that when it comes to weapon­is­ing flesh-eat­ing mon­sters (or plac­ing them into the enter­tain­ment indus­try), cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca just doesn’t know when it’s beat. For that rea­son, I decid­ed to give the old girl a re-watch, just because I was cer­tain that this new movie would play like a nerd cul­ture homage to the first one, and I’d want to have my ref­er­ence-hunt­ing capa­bil­i­ties ful­ly in tact.

Yet, see­ing Juras­sic Park again, I was fur­nished with a very dif­fer­ent film to the one I’d known and loved. For so long I’d thought this film was – to rake up an anaemic metaphor from a pre­vi­ous graf – a junk food movie, some­thing with no real nutri­tion­al val­ue, like the sug­ar-coat­ed con­tents of Den­nis Nedry’s cod­ing marathon pick-me-up draw. Only now did the implaca­ble beau­ty of its con­struc­tion and exe­cu­tion begin to reveal itself. This here was in fact a hearty ban­quet, a cor­nu­copia of exot­ic and colour­ful food­stuffs, akin to the pris­tine buf­fet din­ner hap­pened across and con­sumed by scarred-for-life pre-teens, Tim and Lex Mur­phy (Joseph Mazzel­lo and Ari­ana Richards). It’s that moment when your palate sud­den­ly detects untapped depths and rich­ness in some­thing that the rest of your body is sig­nalling as bor­ing­ly famil­iar. It was revelatory.

Juras­sic Park is, for want of a bet­ter term, a self-aware block­buster. Like the rap­tors, it has far more intel­li­gence and wile than we may have giv­en it cred­it for. It’s a movie which tells the sto­ry of its own pro­duc­tion. And not only its own pro­duc­tion, but the ensu­ing his­to­ry of mam­moth effects movies. Until its incep­tion, com­put­er effects in movies were mere cos­met­ic spec­ta­cle. Movies were a rea­son to inno­vate in that field. The movies came first, then the effects came afterwards.

Yet there was a Brecht­ian, desta­bil­is­ing effect to their inclu­sion in a film because you were instant­ly remind­ed that you’re watch­ing a movie, that it’s an expres­sion­is­tic reflec­tion of real­i­ty. There will of course be excep­tions to this rule, ear­li­er films whose effects man­age to daz­zle the eye into a state of dis­be­liev­ing won­der­ment. Yet what makes Juras­sic Park spe­cial is that the qual­i­ty of its effects are what pre­vent it from being pigeon­holed as a fan­ta­sy movie. Indeed, it’s the actors, act­ing and talk­ing like actors act and talk, which implic­it­ly remind the viewed that it’s only a movie. Even mag­i­cal real­ism doesn’t quite cov­er it. Juras­sic Park is roman­tic realism.

Watch it again, and think of the dinosaurs as spec­tral embod­i­ments of CGI. Spiel­berg him­self is John Ham­mond, the safari-suit­ed dream­er who has dis­cov­ered the for­mu­la to bring a once-extinct species back into being. The mos­qui­to trapped in amber, from which the ​“dino DNA” has been pre­served and is extract­ed, is itself the CG-sheen which adds that spe­cial some­thing to the latex and clock-parts ​“frog DNA” which are ush­ered in to com­plete the exper­i­ment. On their own, they are two sep­a­rate, immutable con­stituents (one bio­log­i­cal, the oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal), but togeth­er they form some­thing we can bare­ly com­pre­hend. It’s a cin­e­mat­ic atom­ic fusion, the mar­riage of diver­gent mat­ters to pro­duce some­thing else, some­thing new.

Spiel­berg and George Lucas have talked of their feel­ings when they saw the ini­tial dig­i­tal test shots of the dinosaurs, with the lat­ter com­ment­ing, ​“it was like one of those moments in his­to­ry, like the inven­tion of the light bulb or the first tele­phone call… A major gap had been crossed and things were nev­er going to be the same.” Hav­ing seen the film, we can attest that this wasn’t just hyper­bol­ic self-love.

This instance of pri­vate awe went on to be recre­at­ed in the film itself, at the moment where doc­tors Alan Grant (Neill) and Ellie Sat­tler (Lau­ra Dern) first lay their eyes on one of the reviv­i­fied crea­tures from the helm of a Land Rover. Dern’s split-sec­ond gaze, which switch­es on a dime from total dis­be­lief to unal­loyed, slack-jawed aston­ish­ment, from height­ened nor­mal­cy to tran­scen­dent stu­pe­fac­tion is, for me, one of the two or three great­est shots that the neon sewage sys­tem we call cin­e­ma has spewed to the sur­face amid its squalid back­wash over the last cen­tu­ry or so. Spiel­berg posits that see­ing a dinosaur that has been fab­ri­cat­ed by mod­ern man – a feat he him­self has achieved in the mak­ing of this movie – is no dif­fer­ent from see­ing a syn­thet­ic, com­put­er-assist­ed ver­sion of the same. Ellie the scep­tic has been beguiled.

I don’t want to run this the­o­ry into the ground by boor­ish­ly detail­ing all the moments which bol­ster its ​“integri­ty”, but you could con­sid­er some of the fol­low­ing: that Den­nis Nedry’s furtive pay­mas­ters, the ones brib­ing him into steal­ing frozen DNA sam­ples for their own exper­i­men­ta­tion are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a rival stu­dio attempt­ing to stay ahead of the tech­no-curve; that this tech­nol­o­gy can be minute­ly cal­i­brat­ed. I’ve always loved the off-hand line by John Ham­mond, ​“Well, we clocked the T‑Rex at 32 miles an hour.” You could read this as the sci­en­tists of Juras­sic Park mea­sur­ing how fast it can run by sim­ple obser­va­tion. Or, that they’ve some­how tin­kered at a fun­da­men­tal bio­log­i­cal lev­el and actu­al­ly decid­ed them­selves that this is how fast this crea­ture will be able to run. The fact that the speed at which a liv­ing being is able to run can­not be pre­scribed by inva­sive action is a reminder that these dinosaurs have been entire­ly sculpt­ed by man.

As any­one famil­iar with dis­as­ter movie lore will know, things don’t go quite as planned for the first tranche of guests at Juras­sic Park, with Grant even­tu­al­ly stat­ing that he won’t be rub­ber-stamp­ing this par­tic­u­lar fam­i­ly enter­prise. It’s a note which dry­ly pre-fig­ures the sniffy reviews. It’s inter­est­ing, how­ev­er, that so much of the film is about volatil­i­ty, about not real­is­ing that cre­at­ing some­thing is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent process to con­trol­ling it. ​“Life finds a way,” is how it’s expressed by Ham­mond as a way to sur­mise the suc­cess of his genet­i­cal­ly-pow­ered fol­ly, again allud­ing to the idea of nat­ur­al selec­tion and ani­mals pro­long­ing their species blood­line by phys­i­cal­ly adapt­ing to indif­fer­ent nat­ur­al surroundings.

Yet lat­er, when recent­ly hatched eggs are dis­cov­ered by Grant and the kids, despite being told that all the ani­mals in the park were the same sex, he utters the line once more, this time lend­ing it a more sin­is­ter tim­bre. If life always does ​“find a way,” then the notion of con­tin­ued human dom­i­nance is pre­car­i­ous at best. When will the CG devel­op a life of its own? Will movies even need human beings any more?

CGI also finds a way, and after Juras­sic Park’s run­away box office suc­cess, this brand of movie was to become the norm at mul­ti­plex­es the world over. As far as where this ​“the­o­ry” goes from here, you can take it and run with it in whichev­er direc­tion you please. The human con­tin­gent aban­don the island and the com­put­erised mon­sters begin to assert their dom­i­nance over one anoth­er. Good breed­ing might sug­gest a knee-jerk cut-and-run, drop a big ol’ nuke on the loca­tion and draw a line under what should per­haps be con­sid­ered a failed exper­i­ment. We can’t have nice things. But what the dinos – and CG – did next was that they mul­ti­plied swift­ly, and they began to ter­rorise human­i­ty on a near-month­ly basis. The ques­tion of whether we could or should became moot, as it became a ques­tion of how quick­ly, and what it would cost to scale it up to the next fea­si­ble level.

A school friend of mine had his own ​“the­o­ry” about Juras­sic Park, a spec­u­la­tion which per­tained more to how the saga would like­ly play out through its sequels rather than a grand alle­gor­i­cal read­ing of the first instal­ment. It relates to the (trag­ic?) death of Den­nis Nedry, blind­ed then (we assume) bit­ten to death in his jeep by the pea­cock-like Dilophosaurus. He’s en route to deliv­er­ing a cachet of pur­loined DNA sam­ples to a stooge from a com­pet­ing com­pa­ny, the phials hav­ing been hid­den with­in a (now icon­ic) can of Bar­ba­sol shav­ing foam.

Spiel­berg omi­nous­ly swings the cam­era away from Nedry’s unseen death throes and tracks down to the red-and-white striped can­is­ter which now lays aban­doned in the under­growth. The tor­ren­tial rain brings on a sluice of mud and – like a fos­sil – its sub­merged in the ground. My pal was cer­tain that the shav­ing foam was the key to the future, that some kid was going to hap­pen across it and start his own dino park. It nev­er hap­pened. But I remain hope­ful, still wait­ing for some intre­pid soul to unearth it and use its con­tents to make some­thing that’s as beau­ti­ful and beguil­ing as Juras­sic Park.