In Laman's Terms: An Ode To Jurassic Park

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Given what a profound personal impact Jurassic Park had on me, it’s kind of shocking that it wasn’t my introduction to the Jurassic Park saga.

Nope, that honor belongs to the Jurassic Park novel, which I was obsessed with as an eleven-year-old. I always felt like I was getting away with something by reading this book full of graphic violence and swear words. No wonder I was so enamored with it! That fixation on the novel led to me trying out the movies, though I didn’t go the logical route of watching the Jurassic Park movie first. No, instead I watched Jurassic Park III with a middle school buddy of mine back in August 2007.

It was fine and benefited greatly from director Joe Johnston knowing how to make competent entertainment that doesn’t overstay its welcome. However, its approach to the dinosaurs didn’t have much in the way wonder. They were all now just beasties ready for a fight, they never exhibited much soul.

That problem got rectified when I watched Jurassic Park shortly after. Even though it wasn’t the first time I was seeing these dinosaurs or even characters like Alan Grant (Sam Neill), watching Jurassic Park for the first time was like stepping into a whole new universe. Suddenly, the concept of what movies could do shifted. Movies could be this scary, this thrilling and this awe-inspiring all at once! What a remarkable mixture of tone! Much of that tonal feat was owed to the dinosaurs. Gone were the Jurassic Park III dinos who existed to provide jump scares. The Jurassic Park dinos, they could instill a variety of emotions in the viewer.

Yes, Jurassic Park was certainly an accomplishment of a movie. However, was that just childhood nostalgia talking? Goodness knows some movies that inspire us as a kids just can’t stand up to scrutiny as adults. Revisiting Jurassic Park for the first time in years on Monday night provided me a chance to figure out if Jurassic Park really was the top-of-the-line cinema or just something enhanced by rose-colored visions of the past. As it turns out, Jurassic Park is even better than I remembered it being! The awe I felt as an eleven-year-old has been preserved, like a mosquito caught in amber.

However, as a grown-up, I’m now able to better appreciate the finer details of the picture in terms of screenwriting and filmmaking. Just from the get-go, Jurassic Park gracefully jumps from two prologues before landing on two of our lead characters, Dr. Grant and Ellie Satler (Laura Dern), on an excavation. A clumsier movie would have gotten lost with so many false starts. But the Jurassic Park script (penned by Michael Crichton and David Koepp) gracefully weaves connections between the various scenes. Most notably, we see a handler get devoured by a velociraptor in the very first scene. In the next prologue, we travel to a whole new country with no familiar characters. Surely this should feel disjointed from what we’ve just seen!

Instead, a passing mention by lawyer Donald Gerraro (Donald Gennaro) of the handlers’ deceased family doesn’t just provide a connection to what we’ve already seen, it sets in motion what’s to come. Stockholders in the Jurassic Park theme park are now worried this place is too dangerous. They want to send in experts, like Grant and Satler, into the island to make sure it’s A-OK. That leads us to the next sequence introducing us to Grant, Satler and Jurassic Park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenburough). In these opening scenes, Jurassic Park manages a storytelling feat of finding unity across several disparate locations and characters.

It also establishes that nothing in this movie goes to waste. Throughout the entirety of Jurassic Park, there’s a streamlined nature to things that keeps it constantly moving. That helps get to the dinosaurs in a reasonable amount of screentime, which is appreciated. It also ensures that the second-half of the story rings with real propulsive suspense. There’s no fat on the bones of this script to undercut intense scenes like the raptors hunting the kids in the kitchen. To boot, unlike in so many other movies featuring CGI beasties (like last years Godzilla: King of the Monsters), the human characters in Jurassic Park are engaging to watch. Whenever we just focus on them, you’re not just wondering when the dinosaurs are coming back. Attenborough’s quietly tragic performance as Hammond or Goldblum’s charismatic Malcolm are just as compelling as the ferocious T-Rex.

Then there’s the visual effects, which remain as impressive today as they did in 1993. It helps that modern-day entries in the series like Jurassic World don’t have considerably better CGI dinosaurs than the ones in Jurassic Park, so it’s not like we’re comparing, say, the visual effects in Superman and the Mole Man to Man of Steel. But Jurassic Park’s balance between practical effects work and CGI would remain impressive under any context. Jurassic Park only employs CGI when it really needs to, otherwise, incredibly tactile animatronics lend a sense of believability to these prehistoric creatures. The practical effects used for the raptors are especially effective. When they’re hunting down Lex and Tim in the kitchen, the tangible sense of weight in the animatronics make you truly believe these youngsters are in serious danger.

Clearly, this newest viewing of Jurassic Park led me to appreciate so many of the finer details of this feature. I even discovered new things about the score by John Williams. The Jurassic Park theme is, of course, iconic, but I never realized that Williams modulates it for different tonal purposes across the movie. When Ellie is packing up to go to the control room shed, for example, Williams employs a version of the theme that sounds like it’s being performed by a military marching band. This musical choices cements the idea that Ellie is going out on a mission, one fraught with great peril.

This is a great example of how Williams constantly finds new ways to tweak the Jurassic Park theme to accentuate the mood of critical scenes. That level of creativity found in John Williams’ score reverberates through practically every other part of Jurassic Park. Much like Hammond when it came to designing his theme park, the people involved in bringing Jurassic Park to life have spared no expense. That artistic ambition results in a movie whose magic is just as potent as ever. No wonder Jurassic Park had such a profound impact on me, even if it didn’t have a raptor saying “ALAN!”