When Jurassic Park hit theaters on this date, June 11, 1993, it came after much hype and buzz. The late Michael Crichton’s book has been a popular bestseller since the holiday season of 1990. And production had started in the summer of 1992 in Hawai’i but was interrupted by Hurricane Iniki in September of that year.
I had read the popular novel in the seventh grade a year before it opened but when I heard Steven Spielberg was directing, I was wondering how he would tackle it. Crichton doesn’t hold back the violence and gore with the book opening by a child being attacked. Double-crosser Dennis Nedry, who would be played by Wayne Knight, suffers a gruesome fate. Even John Hammond, the rich man behind the island, gets eaten alive by scavenger creatures. And depending on who you talk to, Dr. Ian Malcolm, dies or just leaves the story.
Was Spielberg going to make a true hard-core sci-fi/horror movie with an R rating? The director hadn’t ever made an R rated movie by 1993. But he was desperately in need of something different and popular. His previous movie, Hook, may have made $300 million worldwide, but it was his least popular with some saying it’s his worst since 1941. Outside of an Indiana Jones movie, he had been struggling for years.
Critics had said he was wrong to direct The Color Purple even though he introduced us to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Empire of the Sun was a valiant attempt to make a different style of war movie told from the point of view of a young prisoner boy, played by a young Christian Bale. His reunitement with Richard Dreyfus for Always, a remake of A Guy Named Joe, had been a considerable hit but Spielberg’s direction was becoming common with Pollyanna as critics would call other people’s movies “Spielbergian.”
Crichton would co-write the screenplay along with a young rising screenwriter David Keopp who had the difficult task of adapting Crichton’s more cynical techno-thriller into a movie that could play to the masses. Even more troubling for Spielberg was the fact that Harrison Ford had said “No” to the role of paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant. This led to Sam Neill, who was still known as a character actor, being cast alongside Laura Dern as Dr. Ellie Statler. Stalter had just been nominated for an Oscar for her role in Rambling Rose.
That left Jeff Goldblum as Malcolm. And many people seeing Goldblum dressed in a black leather jacket and cool shades walking through the jungle thinking surely Spielberg won’t kill off Goldblum’s character. If you’ve seen the third Jurassic World or the now mostly obscure second Jurassic World, you’ll know that Goldblum’s Malcolm survives. Even Crichton revived him for the inevitable sequel The Lost World. Why? Because it’s Jeff-fucking-Goldblum, that’s why.
They spent $65 million on a budget for bring dinosaurs to the screen and most of what people remember is a few seconds of Jeff sitting in a recumbant pose with his shirt open exposing his chest. Goldblum was intended to provide comic relief for the more stoic performance by Neill as Grant. And considering that Malcolm is ready ready to nibble Statler faster than the velociraptors go after that cow, it added a little tension between the two characters. Goldblum and Dern would date off screen for a while.
The plot involves Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) as the rich and wealthy founder of InGen, a bioengineering company, inviting Grant, Statler and Malcolm to Isla Nublar, an island he has leased from the Costa Rican government. He’s secretive of what the purpose of the weekend visit is but they soon discover that his company has birthed dinosaurs, bioengineered from DNA found in prehistoric mosquitoes fossilized in amber. (However, the likelihood they would find any DNA after so long a time has been wildly disputed by scientists for years.)
Unfortunately, Grant, Statler and Malcolm (who believes in chaos theories), are wowed at first but they believe Hammond has done the wrong thing. He’s brought back animals that have natural instincts and introduced them to an enviroment and a time frame they’re unfamiliar with. So, naturally, as predators, they will hunt anything and anyone they see as prey.
However, Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), a lawyer representing other investors into Hammond’s vision which he calls Jurassic Park, believes they can make a fortune off the island. Also joining them are Hammond’s grandchild Lex Murphy (Arianna Richards) and Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello) who are visiting as their parents are in the midst of a divorce. They are all taken on a tour of the park which goes poorly as none of the dinosaurs show themselves but they do stop and see a sick triceratops.
What no one knows is that Hammond’s chief computer programmar Nedry has accepted money from a rival company to steal embryos. Not much is mentioned of Nedry’s reasoning except he has financial problems and feels that Hammons has underpaid him. But to steal the embryos, Nedry must enter shut down the park’s security system, thus shutting down the electric fences that separate the dangerous dinosaurs from the rest of the island.
The vehicles head back to the main offices with the threat of a tropical storm forecast to hit island. But because Nedry turned off the system, the vehicles which are being driven automatically on a rail break down near the T. rex paddock. The T. rex is able to break through the wires and attacks the vehicles harming Lex and Tim but when Grant and Malcolm try to divert it, it leads to Gennaro being eaten as he had tried to hide in a nearby restroom.
While it does eventually focus on more action and chases in the second hour, the T. rex scene is one of the most thrilling and tense scenes filmed. Mixing animatronics with cutting-edge computer-generated images, Spielberg shows that nearly 20 years after Jaws, he still knows how to scare us. It’s because of this why they rewrote the ending to have the T. rex to appear to more or less save the day as it stops the velociraptors from attacking Grant, Statler, Lex and Tim. A storyboard idea was to have Hammond appear with a shotgun shooting the raptors proving that he has realized the dangers he has put people under.
Having the T. rex come back at the end as a defacto hero goes back to something Malcolm says about if they have King Kong inside when they enter through the big gates. King Kong is also considered the hero and the villain of the movie. And since the T. rex only eats the sleazy lawyer, it’s not like she’s not all that bad. In the book, Gennaro survives but there was a sleazy PR person named Ed Regis who meets his end.
But you don’t go into a movie like this without expecting a lot to be lost in the adaptation. Spielberg still keeps his special touches when he shows Grant becoming a protector for Lex and Tim even though he started earlier he doesn’t like kids. Even though Goldblum spends the second half of the movie lying down mostly, he still does what he’s good at. It’s Dern as Statler who really rolls up her sleeves and does some action hero work. Although now the 20-year age gap between Neill and Dern as a couple looks a little creepy. That’s why Joe Johnston made sure they were no longer a couple when he took on the third Park movie.
At just over two hours, Spielberg and the team of Industrial Light and Magic make one of the most amazing and thrilling movies ever. While a lot of action sci-fi movies come and go, this one remains part of the pop culture era decades later. In nearby Tahlequah, there are people who drive a Jeep that is fitted to look like the ones that were in the movie with the same decals and everything.
Spielberg does some great casting in the movie. He says he cast Knight, who was mostly known for his recurring role as Newman on Seinfeld, for the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct where Sharone Stone shows him that she’s not wearing panties. Samuel L. Jackson was starting to make some headlines after years of small roles following his performance in Jungle Fever. Here he plays Ray Arnold, the chief engineer of the park, who is constantly smoking a cigarette perched between his lips. He says, “Hold on to your butts” a lot. Reportedly Arnold’s death scene was supposed to be filmed but Hurricane Iniki had caused production to move out of Hawai’i. However, I think the reveal used in the movie is more of a shocker.
The late Bob Peck steals the show as the game warden Robert Muldoon who has the same creepy leering eyes that the raptors have. He’s also the only one aside from Grant who fully knows and understands how dangerous the raptors can be. And his line, “Clever girl” when he realizes the raptors have pulled a fast one on him has also ended the pop culture lexicon. Peck was diagnosed with cancer a year after the movie was released and passed away in 1999 at 53. Yet, along with actors like Attenborough, Jackson, Neill, Dern and Goldblum, he steals every scene.
Made for only about $65 million, it made over $1 billion worldwide with Spielberg getting a nice cut of the revenues. People stayed away mostly from the other much anticipated movie Last Action Hero and some theaters actually had to use tickets intended for that movie because they were selling so much for Park. According to rumors, some kids went to the movie thinking it had Barney the Purple Dinosaur in it as that popularity was so high. Comic David Spade said that his nephew, a Barney fan, went thinking it would feature the famous children’s character.
The popularity of CGI went a little overboard in the 1990s as action movies didn’t have to rely on practical effects and models. Unfortunately, the plane crash in Air Force One is an example of how bad it could be. And then there was the 1998 Godzilla movie which seemed to follow a Jurassic Park touch. Parents upset over the violence of the movie didn’t say much when the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, was released in 1997. Jackson would go on to have a role in Deep Blue Sea, which was like a hybrid of Jurassic Park and Jaws.
More surprisingly, Diane Ladd, Dern’s mother, also appeared in Carnosaur, released a month prior, which was about a scientist who has genetically created dinosurs. Based on the novel by the same name, it also predates Crichton’s book by six years. It was produced by Roger Corman on a much smaller budget of $850,000 but made $1.8 million. And it also spawned its own film franchise.
However, now 30 years later, some people have questioned the inaccuracies in the movie. Grant makes a mention that the velociraptors are similar to birds than reptiles. Now, scientist believe dinosaurs had feathers and raptors themselves weren’t as big as they were shown in the movie and probably only weighed 100 pounds and fed on small herbivores. The T. rex, itself, is heavily debated among scientist still as predators or more scavengers. At least it spurn some new interest in dinosaurs.
The sequels weren’t as good as the first one. Maybe the allure of seeing the special effects are gone and there’s not really good stories to tell. Like the Jaws sequels, the focus came on just repeating the same thing over and over. The first one is usually always the best.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 