Blockbuster Month: Jurassic Park (Dir Steven Spielberg, 2h 3m, 1993)

 Jurassic Park's masterstroke comes barely half an hour into the film. By the moment that Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) turns, attention caught by something off-screen, rising out of the jeep that he shares with his colleague, Dr Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), we have seen precisely three dinosaurs, two fossilised in the badlands of Montana, and one for a fraction of a second as it drags a hapless worker to his death. What is about to happen is about to change cinema. Off come the sunglasses, Grant reaching down to turn Sattler's head, and she too rises from the car. For nearly forty seconds, we are kept in suspense, their expressions stunned, until we switch to a long shot from the back, the jeep in midground. A J-cut bellow over the cut from reaction to real and the camera pans up as a set of legs enter frame.We pan up.

Up, to reveal, through the wonders of cutting-edge CGI, the tireless work of animation god Phil Tippett, he of improper dinosaur supervision fame, and the sterling score of John Williams, a dinosaur. Our reactions are just as stunned, as mind-blown, as Neill and Dern. This is a dinosaur. On film. A creature 65 million plus years dead walks among us. They hop down from the vehicle, as John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the owner of this park, approaches, and the Brachiosaurus rears up. More is to come. The park, explains Hammond, has a T Rex, and we are welcomed to Jurassic Park, as the camera cuts over shoulder once more to reveal herds-worth of dinosaurs, the full scale of the park, and the ambition of its creator, revealed.

"How did you do this?" Grant asks
"I'll show you", replies Hammond.
How did they do it?

How did Steven Spielberg, the man who practically invented the blockbuster, do it again? How did Jurassic Park, another adaption of a mid-tier airport novel by the master of the airport novel, Michael Criction, reinvent the blockbuster, to propel it to heights previously unthought of and landing it the highest grossing film for a solid five years until Titanic rumbled into view. Along the way, Jurassic Park would change, once again, how films were marketed, and indeed merchandised, launch a three-decade franchise that looks certain to continue past next year's Jurassic World: Dominion, and, perhaps most importantly, set the stage for the arrival of CGI as an integral part of cinema from here on out. This is an adventure 65,000,002 in the making.

By the 1990s, the blockbuster was reaching its late teens; whilst the end of the 90s would see it reach saturation point, as endless sequels and franchises flooded into cinemas, leading to a quasi-dark age in the summer blockbuster, between Terminator 2: Judgement Day in 1991 and the triple whammy of Batman and Robin (1997), Godzilla (1998), and Wild Wild West (1999), the blockbuster enjoyed a positively halcyon age. Roland Emerich reached his creative zenith in the enjoyably dumb Independence Day. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones teamed up to fight aliens in Men in Black. Nicolas Cage was in not one but three films where his gonzo style of acting rattled around, occasionally bumping into other classic performances, as he plays a terrorist (Face/Off, 1997), a government agent teaming up with an escaped prisoner from Alcatraz (The Rock, 1996), and became prisoner himself aboard a plane of escaped convicts (Con Air, 1997).

But one director was missing, as John Woo, Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, and co rolled into town, along with a brat pack of upcoming directors from the underground and independent scenes of American, and increasingly, international cinema. By the time that Spielberg options Jurassic Park, even before its source novel is complete, in the summer of 1990, he has directed only one true blockbuster, in the form of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in five years, with his filmography turning towards more dramatic and largely historical films (The Colour Purple, Empire of the Sun), or taking a backseat as producer. Between Last Crusade and Jurassic Park, he will direct one more, the cult-classic but financially disappointing Hook. More astonishingly, Spielberg will essentially pull a double act with Jurassic Park, pairing it with the then in-production Schindler's List, with the two films released barely six months apart, and utterly cementing the director as a master of moving historical pieces as much as that of thrilling action movies.

Spielberg's approach, though, is brutally simple. First, as the sequence I've described above, shows, his fascination in bringing dinosaurs back credibly is the crux of the film. We have to believe they're real. And it's here that perhaps the most important decision of Jurassic Park is made. Despite the best efforts of Phil Tippett, the go-motion animator already famed for his work on Empire Strikes Back's AT-ATs, Robocop's ED-209 and perhaps most famously, Star Wars' outlandish chess set, all backed up with cutting edge paleontogical research, something isn't clicking, especially when compared to the astonishing animatronics.

Spielberg has an idea; he believes that CGI can bring beasts 65 million years dead back from extinction. He's right. An early sequence of the T-Rex walking snowballs into a chase between the T-Rex and a herd of herbivores. The dinosaurs become the first major non-humanoid creature to be rendered in this way, and the seachange in cinema is nothing short of seismic. In the process, the decades-old medium of stop-start animation, at least to provide special effects in live action movies, goes extinct. Tippett becomes  the memetic "Dinosaur Supervisor" as he pours decades of knowledge on animation into how these computer rendered dinosaurs should move, and the majority of his team are re-trained as computer animators. It heralds in, in a change as seismic as the coming of colour and sound to the movies, a brand new way of making films.

Spielberg's other approach is even more brutally simplistic. Jurassic Park will be nothing less, nothing more fitting, than a spiritual sequel Jaws on land. Where the two films differ, most perfectly, most simply, is in how much they show of their top-billed monsters. Jaws appears on screen fully for four minutes out of necessity, Jurassic Park's iconic T-Rex is on screen sparingly, but still, at eight minutes, many of them of the colossal Stan Winston Studio built anamatronic, doubles Jaws's fleeting appearances. Much like Jaws, Jurassic Park is puncuated with moments of dinosaurs, most notably the T-Rex and the sinister and highly intelligent velociraptors, whose appearances bring with them danger, death, and a nigh-unstoppable momentum, against which its human cast have little recourse other than to run and hide.

Thus, over the opening twenty minutes of the film, we are introduced to the concept of the park, through an atmospheric opening in which one of the raptors, transported to the park, attacks and kills a worker. With the park now on thin ice, its owner, John Hammond calls in a number of experts, from his lawyer, Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), introduced in the jungles of South America, who is told of Grant, who is then introduced in the badlands of Montana along with Dr Sattler, and, following the arrival of their unexpected fundee, John Hammond, find themselves whisked off to the island of Isla Nublar, along with Gennaro, and the idiosyncratic Dr Ian Malcolm. And there is, undeniably an economy to Jurassic Park's character work, not only in their costuming-the all-black clad Dr Malcolm, the pristine white suit of Hammond, the grey blur that is Gennaro, and the primary colours of Grant and Sattler, that neatly invert each other, and carry on into the designs of their young wards Lex and Tim.

But moreover, Grant and Malcolm are two parts of a very familiar triangle. A quiet figure of (at least some) authority, especially when it comes to the threat facing them, who increasingly becomes alarmed at the lack of care taken by those in power-it doesn't take much to compare Grant to Jaws' Brody, and the comparison between the gregarious Malcolm and Hopper are too many to list. But here is where the two films most notably diverge thematically and where the threat, the terror of Jurassic Park begins to work its magic.

We arrive on the island, we are introduced to the first of many dinosaurs and whisked through what undoubtedly, given the failure of Hook a year previously, could be taken as a barb against Disney, whose Beauty and the Beast upstaged the former, as, in perhaps the only part of the film that has dated poorly, Hammond presents the science that makes the park possible. We're then introduced to the scientists, among them Dr Woo, and in the film's first truly threatening scene involving its heroes, not only a baby, but a pack of highly dangerous velociraptors. Where Jaws set its threat up from its opening titles, Jurassic Park deals them out unhurriedly, nimbly balancing new revelations with the reactions of our heroes, moving, as the best blockbusters do, from moment to moment with almost perfect precision. We're introduced to the team that support the park, from Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), the site's slobbish computer programmer, already in the pay of Hammond's rival, Dodgson, whose plot eventually brings the park down, and Muldoon (Bob Peck), the park's no-nonsense gamekeeper.

Moreover, in the form of Malcolm, the rationalist, Hammond, the pragmatist, and Grant, who moves from idealist to realist throughout the film, Jurassic Park's heavy thematic lifting is left largely to its main characters and their performances. Malcolm's belief that the park is doomed to failure and his distaste at the open commercialisation of the undeniably astonishing scientific achievement is Crichton heartland, but with Goldblum's offkilter scientist rockstar behind it, it's impactful. John Hammond is every astonishingly wealthy tycoon investing in technology beyond his real comprehension, but with the kindly Sir Richard Attenborough behind the performance, it's an undeniably infectious optimism in bringing long extinct beasts back. Grant, for his part, wouldn't be half as likable, or indeed half as effective a representative of the audience were it not for Neill's warmth, his clear ethusiasm for the park, and his growing bond and responsible guide for the two children.

Here, with the arrival of Tim and Lex, the film changes tack again; undeniably, both act as avatars for the audience, from the dinosaur-mad Tim to the cool teenage hacker Lex, but the group set off into the park, with the two children in tow. And it's here that Spielberg pulls the smartest move of the film. We barely see a dinosaur for the entire tour, yet we're introduced to the dramatis reptilia that are about to wreak havoc across the park, in the form of the Dilophosaurus, and of course, the T-Rex. What Spielberg presents, in short, is the Hitchcock "show, don't tell" form of suspense on a colossal scale. A storm threatens. The jeeps don't work properly. The unseen T-Rex is offered a goat that it clearly can't be cajoled to eat. To paraphrase Malcolm, you almost begin to wonder if Steven is planning to have more dinosaurs in his dinosaur movie. Even a downed Triceratops, whilst an astonishing special effect, is simply a sick animal. We are utterly tricked into a false anticlimax.

And it's here, post Nedry's espionage going into action, in a well-played and wonderfully taut sequence as the trio of Hammond, Muldoon and John Arnold (an under utilised Samuel L Jackson) begin to understand the extent to which the park is utterly doomed, that the true star of Jurassic Park makes her appearance. With the jeeps stalling outside the T-Rex enclosure, and the fences failing, so Spielberg pulls his master move. His star, like Jaws' barrels, has a calling card, a perfectly terrifying shorthand. It's this. A glass of water ripples on a dashboard. Closeup on Tim. Another ripple. This time, closeup on Gennaro, half-asleep. This time we hear it clearly, a low "boom" on the perfectly mixed soundtrack, and in a spectacularly Hitchcockian shot, we see Gennaro's eyes, the panic growing. More booms. Tim picks up the night vision goggles he's spent part of the previous scene playing with, and we see.

We, from Tim's POV, see that the goat has gone. Lex has seen it too, and her panic, her breath on the point of hyperventilating, acts more perfectly than any score could to raise the tension. Gone is the need for a two note chug to introduce the film's antagonist. The camera behind Lex pans up, and like the introduction of Jaws, eighteen years prior, we are left with a yawning gap of negative space into which something should-nay must-appear.
"Where's the goat?" Lex exclaims.
And into shot, with a heavy thud, falls what's left of it. A perfectly timed flash of lightning as she jerks back. Reaction shot from Tim, seeing something, in the last moment before the true horror of the film takes hold, we do not.

A clawed hand lets go of the now useless fence, and we cut to inside the car as something rises above it, and the camera rises too. And then the T Rex, tossing down what's left of the goat in one swift action-and one, astonishingly enough, entirely done with the animatronic, turns towards the camera. It's a stunningly effective shot, and only the prelude to just how terrifying this encounter will be. Gennaro bolts. Inside the car with Grant and Malcolm, we see the wires of the fence snap. Cut to the now broken fence listing in the wind. Inside the car with a now terrified Tim and Lex.

And out onto the road steps the T Rex. One step. Two. Three. And it roars. And cinema will never be the same again. For, whilst much of the sequence will be shot using a colossal-and very quickly waterlogged forty foot long, four and a half tonne, twenty-four foot high animatronic, the T-Rex that steps out to introduce the world to their nightmares for the next decade, is entirely computer generated. What follows over the next six and a bit minutes is the stuff of nightmares, the T-Rex practically dismantling the jeep to attack the two children, with sudden, horrifying twitches of the head to face camera as Tim slams the door, before crashing through the plexiglass roof to threaten them once more.

This is without going into the pure size and sound of the creature, those full body roars that practically rattle the screen as much as your nerves. It is this scene, barely lasting four minutes from beginning to end that not only changed the very nature of CGI and action scenes forever, but reinvigorated the very interest in dinosaurs to almost stratospheric levels. Jurassic Park turns the T-Rex from mere beloved of small children somehow pronouncing long Latin taxinomical names to global superstar. That we get barely three minutes of the T-Rex elsewhere, and that it remains a threat, thundering in at the end to dispatch both velociraptors, only compounds what an impact it leaves upon the film.

The Raptors, for their part, are almost deliciously nasty, and just as fleeting. Their appearance, even compared to the T-Rex is a full encapsulation of the "less is more" approach-they barely appear before the hour mark, and even then, it's only once our heroes are scattered, and the plan to reset the damage that Nedry has wrought upon the Park that those fiendish raptors sidle from the shadows to wreak chaos. Here, once again, Spielberg's approach is wonderfully developed from his previous thrillers; where Jaws is a blunt force of a villain, the Raptors have something akin to a duo of slasher villains, horrifyingly cunning as they stalk Muldoon, before offing him in perhaps the film's most memorable death, before the raptrors break into the building and proceed to terrorise Lex and Tim through the film's most memorable setpiece, the nigh-iconic "Raptors in the Kitchen", before the quartet, with Grant and Sattler, manage to get the park back online, battling the raptors all the way to the entrance hall, where the T Rex makes itself known and saves the day.

We are left with a final image, a roaring triumph, a triumph that translated admirably into the real world. Dinosaurs not only ruled the world on the big screen, Jurassic Park took home three Oscars, and until the dying weeks of 1998, gained perhaps the biggest trophy of all, as the highest grossing film of all time, though it would take until its 20th Anniversary re-release to finally top a billion dollars. In its wake, though, comes not only a pack of sequels, few of which have managed to reach the majesty of the original, but a vast raft of merchandise, tie ins, and a colossal marketing campaign that cost almost the film's $63 million budget again.

But more that this, Jurassic Park is perhaps the last great piece of the cinematic puzzle. CGI would go on to revolutionise cinema, not just as an effect, but in the way it would develop the work of studios like Pixar and the Spielberg co-created Dreamworks. But it is also the ending of an era. Whilst Spielberg would later direct a sequel to Jurassic Park, largely following the original's template of scares and thrills, a sequel to Indiana Jones in the form of the enjoyable if wobby Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the so-so Ready Player One, he has largely stepped away from action cinema. Jurassic Park, thus, is the coalescing of nearly twenty years of continual action cinema development, bringing things full circle with the man who brought the very concept of the blockbuster to life, in a still astonishing piece of action cinema that still feels fresh, terrifying, and vital.

Rating: Must See: Personal Recommendation

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