Pajiba

Man, I still love this movie. Loved it from the very moment I saw it, in the theater. I was not 13. Have seen it quite a few times since, I think it all holds up.

You forgot a couple of other quotes (may be slightly inaccurate, but this is the gist):

"Yeah, but your scientists were so busy trying to see if they could, they didn't stop think whether they should."

And:

"These are living creatures who have no idea what century they're in and who will defend themselves, violently, if necessary."

And:

"No, dinosaurs had their shot, and they were selected for extinction."

I think Crichton's point was, just because we can do something nifty like bring back dinosaurs, doesn't mean we should. Also, Malcolm was upset not only by the bringing back of dinosaurs and how obviously unwise that is, but by the monetization of it as well. Because the crazy old fucker who funded the research was funding it so he could sell it. Not because he was respectful of the science that allowed it to happen. Malcolm's point was, the old guy didn't respect the science at all. He used the science in the service of making a buck and embellishing his own reputation.

Also, the difference between the dinosaurs' intent and ours is, supposedly, we're smarter. We have the advantage of the supposedly superior homo sapiens brain. That implies more responsibility on our part not to fuck things up. Not to do stuff just to see if we can, for the hell of it. To show some care in the use of the science we've created. The same science that can create penicillin and a polio vaccine also created weaponized anthrax and the nuclear bomb.

Jurassic Park was the first adaptation which I'd read the book before the movie. It still holds a fond place in my imprinted memory, both book and movie. The book was probably the first time I really got excited about a novel, and the movie was so eye-poppingly amazing, it was easy to miss all of the popcorn fluffy plotpoints that are now standard-fare for action movie spectaculars.

Personally, I don't think the story was all that bad. Sure, it had minor flaws, but it wasn't so out in left field, and at least it made an effort to be compelling, as few effects movies today even bother to attempt. I don't think it was meant to be a screed against technology and advancement in general as much as the commercialization of both science and nature. At least, that's what I took from it.

I wonder if the movie will be remembered 20 years from now like we think of Jason and the Argonauts today: as a hokey story with what were at the time ground-breaking visual effects?

Sorry, this is Pajiba, so I should be saying something outrageous by now.

Umm .... COITUS!

The ripples in the cup of water are pretty great too.

leftylad, are you blaspheming Ray Harryhausen? The man was a genius.

And we have to remember, the scientist who invented dynamite thought it could be used for productive purposes like mining and not just destruction. He couldn't help us being humans. Science can all be great but humans in general are darn good at using it for destruction.

This is one of those movies that I can watch any time and still enjoy. Sure, the story isn't the best ever told, but the acting, the visuals, the swelling score and the general feeling of awe well make up for that. It's just so viscerally enjoyable.

Also, it's given me and my sister one of our favorite movie quotes that works in a variety of situations: "Clevah girl!"

I keep getting a link to a "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" trailer whenever someone has typed the word 'movie' on this page. I'm taking it as a cruel irony.

The guy who played the old man looked exactly like my grandfather when this came out. To the point where it kind of freaked my sister and I out a bit.

I agree with Nadine, that first shot of the dinosaurs still gives me chills. And it's less about the special effects, and more the emotional impact of the moment. Well played indeed Spielberg.

Yo, man, I don't care if the plot is a little thin or self-righteous or whatever. This moving effing RULES. I've seen it at least fifteen times, and I know how and when each person is going to die, but I still cringe a little when the lawyer gets ripped off the toilet by the T-rex. "When you gotta go, you gotta go."

This is absolutely, 100%, my favorite movie of all time.

Jurassic Park the only movie that has given me nightmares.
It's the only movie that has given me repeated nightmares.
It's the only movie that has given me nightmares that I have enjoyed.

Love it.

"Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word. Ah ah ah..."

I LOVE this movie. I always laugh when i watch it because i know i would not survive. Something would eat me. Plus, i seem to love falling down.

I saw it around the same age, too. It was the first movie I wanted to see after catching the trailer on TV. Seeing it alone in the theater was one of the most intense experiences of my youth. The rest of the family went for Free Willy that night (it was shorter so they waited for me afterward) and I remember their reaction when they saw me come out of the theater white as a sheet and wobbly. They could hear the T-Rex steps and screams from the lobby.

RE ZombieScientist
"Can't really put that one on scientists. Doctors and patients screwed the pooch pretty hard on that one. But despite their best attempts to screw things up, they don't hold a candle to livestock agriculture for creating super-bugs. Bad farming practice and awful business practice with nary a scientist in sight."

I was including doctors under the umbrella of "scientists," maybe unfairly. Point taken. Certainly, if a scientific discovery is taken out of the scientist's control and misused, that can't necessarily be blamed on him/her. I know that other people misuse technology far more often than the people who first developed it, because, like Malcolm says, it didn't take them (the people who misuse it) any discipline to attain it.

RE DarthCorleone
"That line has always bothered me a bit. Getting randomly pummeled by a giant asteroid - assuming you subscribe to that theory - does not fall under the traditional concept of "natural selection."

I think it does. Not everything died as a result of the asteroid (if that's the current consensus, that an asteroid was responsible). Dinosaurs did, our direct ancestors didn't. Natural selection. Giant asteroid hitting earth may not be a frequent occurrence, but by definition, it is natural. No matter how random it is. Sure, the dinosaurs got a really shitty break there. If not for that asteroid (or whatever it was), they'd be ruling the planet now, maybe.

Sounds like you and I aren't that far apart in age Stephen. Who knew?

My dad took me to see this movie on my 12th birthday with two friends and my younger sister. We all got to pick out candy, popcorn, whatever we wanted. It was going to be a movie going experience. My dad was partial to Sour Patch Kids at the time. (Sweet gummy candies with sour salt-like stuff coating the outside for you non USofA dwellers.) During the scene where Laura Dern is up to her armpit in a pile of dino shit the size of a Buick and Malcolm lets fly with the "I hope she washes her hand before dinner" zinger, my dad lost it. He laughed hard and unfortunately had a fresh Sour Patch Kid on his tongue while he did so. A Sour Patch Kid that quickly relocated from his mouth to trying to squeeze out through one of his sinuses. If it were milk, it would have shot out of his nose and been that much more the funny. However, according to him, there was mirth followed with a half-hiccup and then searing white-hot sinus pain. My memory of the event involves hearing my dad let out one good belly laugh, half of a second one, and then seeing his face turn to terror while he snorted and convulsed his face to try and swallow the candy fire directly behind his nose. He ended up having to get up and leave and go to the bathroom and snort water with a straw in order to loosen it up enough for it to come out.

I got to eat the rest of the bag.

On the drive home, I was still SO worked up from the awesome that I had seen on screen that I was scanning the bushes, sure that there were intelligent lizards just waiting to pounce on our car.

The asteroid was an extreme form of selection, but it was perfectly natural. The things that could handle a sudden climate shift survived. Outside of the oceans, these tended to be pretty small critters for the most part.

But the asteroid wasn't the only selective pressure going on. Example: Snakes and egg-eating mammals were likely already doing a number on the big boys when the asteroid hit.

Besides, if the asteroid hadn't done them in, most of the dinosaurs would have taken it on the chin when the next ice age rolled around. Maybe we would have had a few tropical species survive through that, but by the time the weather warmed up enough for them to spread again, mammals would have grabbed a lot of the temperate niches.

I was 10 years old when I watched this, and it was the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my short years. I still remember being completely awed by how beautiful it all was, and how completely terrifying.

And you know what's one of the best things about this movie? Some of the special effects look better than half the CGI shit that's come out today. Yes, there are some moments when it's not as polished, but damn, some of those dinosaurs still look real. The effects were better than they were in the sequels! That's pretty damn impressive, I think.

Flawed story, groundbreaking special effects, sense of wonder and awe. Hmmmm, that reminds me of another recent movie.

I was eight years old and beyond excited to view my first PG-13 movie in a theater. My mom went along with me and my dad gave me a troll (heh, remember those?) wearing a bright pink dinosaur costume so I "wouldn't be scared."

I loved every minute of the movie and faired much better than a middle-aged woman a few rows in front of me who sputtered "Oh my God oh my God oh my God..." with her hands over her face as the raptor tore into that first victim in the movie's opening scene.

Maybe I should have let her borrow the troll.

I agree with Nadine. In fact, the brachiosaurus reveal is probably my favorite single scene in all of cinema or TV or other moving media. Every single component of it was perfect, and then combined it was somehow greater than the sum of its parts. There are other performances, others effects, other movies, other cinematography, other music I like better...but that one single scene is a flawless jewel in the treasury of cinema. If anyone has the context to understand the power of the scene, they will be blown the fuck away if they have anything approximating a soul.

I saw this film four times at the cinema. I think that's the most times I've ever seen a film on screen. I just loved it. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I was 12, so I think that's allowed. I'm not even sure what it was about it that was so amazing, looking back, but it got me, whatever it was.

For me, Jurassic Park is a rollercoaster. It is expertly designed to give the audience a ride and it succeeds incredibly at what it sets out to do. This was the last movie he did where Spielberg actually approached it with a sense of wonder and allowed the camera to be our eyes. The absolutely stunning first reveal of the dinosaurs is a perfect scene. The characters, the cinematography, special effects, the music, everything perfectly encapsulates the wonder and joy of what is happening on screen. Then the action downshifts to the "how" it was done with the clever animated movie, but the euphoria of the previous scene never wears off for the rest of the movie. And as it jolts the audience time after time as things get worse and worse for our heroes you believe 100% that dinosaurs really are trying to kill them. Rarely has suspension of disbelief been so easy than it was in Jurrasic Park.

The plot may be weak but it just doesn't matter at all. That movie is a summer masterpiece. Arguably the last truly entertaining escapist film of Spielberg's oeuvre.

And John Williams score was incredible. Still one of my favorite orchestral scores of all time. I played the shit out of that soundtrack. It was my go-to study music.

I also have an autographed hardback copy of Jurassic Park. One of my more prized possessions as I was a huge fan of early Crichton.

Eh. There's a bucket of conjecture about how these critters lived. Some percentage of it's going to be wrong. In the earliest versions, they lumbered around dragging their tails and weren't bird-like at all.

That said, lots of critters base their detection (not their vision, precisely) on movement, so it's not like they just made that one up. Just misapplied it. Made for some nice cinematic tension, though.

I'm not going to lie, this movie remains one of my absolute favorites. I remember seeing it for the first time and being completely, totally amazed by it. It was pretty much love at first sight.

One cloud. The man who played Hammond looked just like my fifth-grade teacher. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal, but this is the man who tried his damndest to tear me down and make me hate myself - and he nearly succeeded. So though I saw this movie for the first time before meeting that ever so pleasant teacher, it was forever soured just a little after...mostly because I wasn't allowed the pleasure of seeing his doppleganger bite it. But hey, that's what the book is for, am I right?

Wow. Someone is ridiculously cynical.

And if you EVER compare Jurassic Park to Avatar again, I will castrate you.

I LOVE this film - but for fuck's sake, why in the world did ANYbody making this movie think that a T-Rex (or any other animal) had vision based on movement? It makes absolutely no sense. It's like...one of the greatest predators to ever live was blind 99% of the time? C'mon.

That was an example of being unnecessarily faithful to the book. Michael Crichton gave his dinosaurs a number of unlikely traits inspired by amphibians and lizards/snakes, like forked tongues and those venom-spitting dilophosaurs, despite the fact that dinosaurs are more closely related to birds and crocodiles (I think frogs do have vision based on movement, or at least they only flick their tongues in response to moving bugs). I suppose you could say it wasn't an original feature of the dinosaurs but just a consequence of the fact that they used frog DNA to fill in missing sequences (though this is itself pretty silly, see item 3 here)

I'm not a specialist in these areas, but I've taken in a bunch of background over the years. There's probably a healthy mix of good and bad conjecture in here.

As for time to evolve... even among the feathered-set, only the comparatively little guys made it through ice ages. Feathering an Apatosaur isn't going to get the job done. Blubber would be a better solution. Being warm-blooded and that big is a huge energy cost. Remember, we spend the bulk of our energy just maintaining temperature.

Egg care was varied from what we can tell, with many species on both sides of the parental care spectrum. But all of this is conjecture. We know very little about actual behavior. Something was driving the proliferation of snakes and mammals with interesting teeth, though. Certainly, some of the eggs were so large and thick that the known snakes of the time couldn't have eaten them, anyway. But the smaller species? The larger ones who abandoned nests?

Mammals had been on the quiet rise for some time, grabbing little niches here and there. Lots of seemingly accomplished insectivores, for example.

In the cooler parts of the world, I would think mammals would have been in competition for lots of niches by then. They had been around almost as long as dinosaurs, after all.

mr. Wilson, you write well and yr assessment of the films merits on a whole is good and interesting to read. howevre, i think you may be a bit harsh on the Ian Malcolm character -- i think his hollow, hypocritical philosophy makes him a richer, more believable character.

as for the hollowness of the film as a whole, malcolm's character needn't be the mouthpiece for the movie's moral. a deeper look and synthesis of the movie might let the viewer come to her/his own conclusion about the meaning of the movie, rather than the movie's apparent self-assessment.