Jurassic Park can be a pretty scary movie. It is at least suspenseful, as it shows, numerous times, people wildly scrambling to escape giant people-eating dinosaurs. The CG holds up pretty well, and even the plausibility of the concept is thoroughly explored and established by then-cutting-edge science.
Jurassic Park is a great movie of a great book. If you’re unaware, Michael Crichton wrote the book and himself was a phenomenal writer. Thankfully, he was also prolific. He wrote tons of books and Jurassic Park wasn’t the only book to get a film adaptation. He himself wrote and directed Westworld in 1973. Yep, that Westworld. And you thought it was new.
Brief Aside – Michael Crichton’s Cautionary Tales
I’m a big Crichton fan. He used science as the foundation of a lot of his novels. He used just enough of it, and used the very relevant parts, which were explained in a relatively accessible way, and pushed it into the fantastic with a little bit of extra fiction.
Most times when science is used in stories, it’s played with as a toy and features as the attraction. Usually that makes for boring stories and often manifests as really bad sci-fi. Good use of sci-fi in storytelling is a large topic by itself.
Crichton knew good stories are about people, and he also knew that science is merely one type of support structure for what people really want to read about: the human condition. That really was Crichton’s bag, and he knew how to use both science fact and science fiction to put humans in extreme circumstances. He put them in those circumstances to create an opportunity to explore their nature. Jurassic Park is only one of more than two dozen examples in his bibliography.
The theme of his career was cautionary tales. Humans, building and wielding powerful technology, end up being the engineers of their own demise. Despite having such technology, the rising action of the story was always due to a flaw in a character or in group dynamics. Someone’s avarice or hubris or some other failing is what puts everyone in peril, not the technology itself. In the case of Jurassic Park, the rising action was Nedry’s plan to steal the park’s secret sauce to sell to the competition. It was corporate espionage for cash money that caused everything to go to pot. This is the most important difference between good sci-fi and bad sci-fi; it’s a character that starts all the problems, not the tech.
I wish I could go into more detail, but this is just an aside, so perhaps another time. Suffice it to say, Crichton was great at keeping sci-fi focused on the people, and he was a great writer overall.
One of his novels, Sphere, I read in 3 days. It’s nearly 400 pages. Really, he’s that good.
Back to the topic at hand. Jurassic Park is scary. Ever have one of those nightmares where you can’t run away fast enough? Not necessarily frozen in place, but sometimes feeling as if you’re wading through mud?
That’s what this movie does to you. It shows you unstoppable, bloodthirsty beasts and then kneecaps you. Then it shows you those nightmares up close. It’s surprisingly methodic, the trend of starting off fast and gradually slowing to a crawl is apparent. It’s also subtle, as the trend isn’t terribly consistent, but it nonetheless exists.
How can we find it? Pretty easily. List, in chronological order, all the significant ways in which the characters are seen moving. Here’s that order:
- Helicopter that takes everyone to the island.
- Car a few times. First from the heli to see dinosaurs eating off trees, then a little later the slow on-rails tour to see more dinosaurs.
- Scrambling around the cars during the first T-Rex attack.
- Lots of running.
- Limping
- Unable to move
- Running
- Cars
- Helicopter
- End credits.
It’s interesting to see the progression and, once seen, how that progression affects the suspense. The principle is expressed very clearly by Malcolm as he lay infirmed in the jeep as he watches a T-Rex chase them. “Must go faster.”
Yep, faster would be a good idea. It’s an even better idea to slow down if you want to scare the crap out of the audience.
The progression is imperfect, which is to say, sometimes there’s a scene where they walk, then they’re back in a car, then walking again, then back in a car, etc. But the broad strokes are deliberate: the helicopters don’t come back. Nobody is able to radio for any until the end. In fact, the tropical storm plugs a ton of plot holes related to this. The helicopters, boats, and most of the staff evacuate the island because of the incoming storm. Without that storm, people would be asking all day long “They came in on helicopters. Why not just call for another!” or “OK, well, we haven’t seen any boats, but it’s an island, there’s gotta be a boat somewhere. Why not just get to a boat?”
Nope, and nope. That storm took away every plausible mode of immediate escape. Not only that, it was part of the rather large plot mechanism that also disabled an entire high-tech park management and security system. That whole mechanism also involved the avarice and vengeance of Nedry, but the storm was equally necessary. Without it, helicopters and boats would have been readily available and would have left open plot holes large enough to run a T-Rex through.
So, helicopters and boats get taken away. At the end of the first T-Rex attack, Dr. Grant and little Tim nearly get crushed by the twisted remains of a car, so, no more cars for those two, or Lex either since she was riding shotgun.
After the T-Rex attack, it becomes clear that the characters will be terrorized in two separate groups: Dr. Grant, Tim, and Lex are out lost in the park, while Ellie, Hammond, and Jeff Goldblum are back at the office trying to get the park systems working again. Let’s be honest, Goldblum’s character’s name is Malcolm, but he acts as Jeff Goldblum the entire time and we’re all better for it. Even though they’re separated, the movie does spread the knee-capping love around to everyone. At this point, Jeff Goldblum has already been rendered non-ambulatory – he can’t even limp.
No more helicopters, no more boats, no more cars. There’s a lot of running now. Grant, Tim, and Lex running from flocking velociraptors. Ellie running from a few velociraptors
When Ellie turns the power back on, it electrocutes Tim which causes him to limp the rest of the movie. Right after turning on the power, Ellie then sustains a leg injury that also makes her limp. They’re interleaved scenes, and the movie Tanya Harding’s them both. It’s kind of surprising once you see it.
Brief Aside – Interleaving Scenes
Interleaving scenes is a technique movies use from time to time. It starts with two scenes that can stand on their own, and takes chunks of each scene and alternates between those chunks. It’s kind of like a shish kabob that has steak and green pepper and alternates pieces between the two: steak, green pepper, steak, green pepper, steak, etc. Interleaved scenes usually shows two events that happen simultaneously, but not always. In the case of Jurassic Park, the two scenes interleaved here alternate between Tim climbing down the about-to-be-electric fence, and Ellie flipping power switches one by one, the last switch being power for the fences.
There are two reasons for doing this. First, it ups the tension by making the outcome look like it’ll be a photo finish. Ellie flipped a series of switches one by one, and it’s shown that the last switch on the panel was the electricity for the fences. So as she slowly flips switches, the audience is wondering if Tim will get off the fence in time or not.
The second reason, and far more important, it shows why the power came back on at all. In this case, it was a close call with unfortunate results: Tim gets electrocuted. Without Ellie’s scene, Tim still gets electrocuted but the audience won’t know that it was because Ellie turned it on. Without it, the power coming on will just look convenient for the drama, which is a big cop-out. If an event feels convenient, it would be better to explain why that event happened.
By interleaving the scenes, not only did it increase tension by adding the feeling of a clock ticking down, it also explained why things happened the way they did.
Tangentially and significantly, at the beginning of the Ellie/Tim limp scene, Muldoon has a weapon powerful enough to kill a velociraptor, and then fails completely to wound a single dinosaur. In fact, he gets eaten before he can even pull the trigger. With this bit, while not a mode of transportation, weapons appear to be useless. Here the movie pretty much says “Guns? lol keep running”
No vehicles, no guns, the movie then lets us marinate in the horror of being able to barely limp away from dinosaurs. Tim and Lex find their way to the buffet in the visitor’s center, only to be found by two velociraptors. Remember, Tim and Lex can only limp. And they’re only kids.
And the raptors have figured out how to open doors now.
Time to fly drive run walk limp! HURRY!
This leads to the shot where Lex, stuffed into the tiniest of kitchen floor cabinets, yanks wildly at a shutter to keep out a charging raptor. Cramped, legs injured, unable to close the door, about to get eaten. Tim then traps a raptor in the meat locker, but not after the movie literally stares at Tim’s dirty shoes unable to get traction and slipping every which way on the sheet of ice covering the floor. As if limping wasn’t bad enough, now you can’t even get traction. Ever have that nightmare? After scrambling out of the meat locker, he and Lex manage to cram the raptor back behind the door and lock the handle with the pin.
The can’t-close-the-door idea we’ve seen twice already is echoed again in the very next scene where Ellie and Grant try to keep out the velociraptor while Lex figured out how to turn the door locks on. Two full adults trying frantically to keep a dinosaur out because the doors won’t lock.
The moment Lex turns the locks on is the turning point for the mobility of the characters. Here, the whole immobility stack starts to unwind. All the modes of transportation that were taken away are given back. From a limp they quickly go back to running, driving, then flying in a helicopter off the island. Roll end credits with soothing John Williams music.
Phew.
If anything, Jurassic Park tells you that if you want to get the audience on edge, listen to what your protagonists wish for, and then do the exact opposite. Must go faster? Well, if you insist…