Hammond: There’s no doubt our attractions will drive kids out of their minds.
Grant: What are those?
Laura Dern: Small versions of adults, honey.
Solid joke!
Then there’s a scene of Newman eating breakfast. Later in the movie, breakfast eats Newman.
Foreshadowing.
Dr. Grant and Laura Dern hop into Richard Attenborough’s helicopter and point the pilot toward Costa Rica. Also on board is Jeffward Goldblum as mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm, about whom it is extremely difficult for me not to write in all caps, even though Jeff Goldblum has kind of become a played-out meme now, which I resent.
Jeff Goldblum explains that he’s not a mathemagician so much as a “CHAOTICIAN. Chaotician.”
Dr. Grant, being some sort of Flintstone who has never ridden in a motorized vehicle before, fumbles with the seat belts like a confounded granny in an infomercial for lids. The helicopter descends, and everyone hops into some jeeps. At this point, Richard Attenborough has flown four people all the way to Costa Rica without actually telling them why the fuck they’re going to Costa Rica. Presumably, they’ve been sitting in a tiny enclosed space staring at each other in silence for hours and hours. Nobody seems to think this is weird. Nobody is yelling at all.
The jeeps rumble deeper into the jungle. “HEY, RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, WHAT’S WITH THIS BIG FENCE?” “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. IT’S DEFINITELY NOT FOR MONSTERS.”
Finally, it’s time for the Big Reveal. There’s dinos! Dinos everywhere! Dr. Grant pees his own pants, and then he pees Laura Dern’s pants too, and then a butterfly pees its pants and it causes a landslide in Calabasas. “We’re going to make a fortune with this place,” says the lawyer, who clearly doesn’t understand that greedy lines like that get you killed in Steven Spielberg movies.
“Welcome to Jurassic Park!”
Richard Attenborough leads them all into a little movie theater where he has a conversation with a piece of cartoon DNA named “Mr. DNA.” Turns out, Jurassic Park scientists were able to build their own “dahnasauwwwers” by extracting blood from the stomachs of dinosquitos, putting the blood in a jar with some frog DNA and glue, and then shaking it. Or something like that. I don’t know. Go ask B. D. Wong.
The dumb lawyer asks if B. D. Wong is “auto-erotica,” but he means “animatronic.” It is offensive how little the lawyer knows about B. D. Wong.
After watching a baby velociraptor hatch, Dr. Grant starts asking uncomfortable questions about how they control the dino populations. B. D. Wong explains that all of the animals at Jurassic Park are ladies because B. D. Wong is on top of his shit and he engineered them that way and why must you always question B. D. Wong?
Time to feed the raptors! The hunter man lowers an entire cow into the raptor cage, and they go fucking nuts. (Jurassic Park absolutely keeping the cow sling industry in the black.) Hunter guy gives a terrifying PowerPoint on how smart the raptors are, their SAT scores, their sudoku speed, their vengeful hunger for human intestines. Richard Attenborough tries to distract everyone with lunch—“Alejandro’s prepared a delightful menu for us. Chilean sea bass, I believe!”—but ALAN GRANT DOESN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT CHILEAN SEA BASS. He just wants to stand around and worry about raptors. (Dude, Alejandro probably worked really hard on that!)
Okay. Then these kids show up. Disregarding why anyone would bring children to an uninspected monster island, everyone gets back in the jeeps and they head out for a tour.
“Hold on to your butts,” says Samuel L. Jackson (Jurassic Park’s chief engineer), demonstrating that he’s the type of cool dude who says things like, “Hold on to your butts,” possibly even twice in one day. (Foreshadowing.)
They don’t see any dinosaurs right away, but that’s not really important because Newman is busy fucking up everything on earth. See, Newman figured out a get-rich-quick scheme called “steal the dinosaur embryos and sell them to a shadowy warlock” because that’s really who you want to have control of your rogue dinosaur embryos. Just the ne’er-do-welliest fool on earth. In order to get the embryos and get out of the park undetected, Newman shuts down the security system. AGAIN. REALLY PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE DINOS HERE.
Over in the jeep, everyone is irritated that they haven’t seen a T. rex yet and Jeff Goldblum is doing philosophy.
Jeff Goldblum: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Laura Dern: Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth.
MGTOW Lawyer for Sure in His Head: MISANDRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everyone stops to help a Triceratops with a tummy ache and dig through its mammoth dump. (Fun fact: Laura Dern never goes anywhere without her elbow-length dump gloves. Both Laura Dern’s character in this movie and the actual Laura Dern.)
Uhhhhh, okay, let’s fast-forward. This is taking forever. The T. rex gets out. The lawyer tries to hide in a toilet house, but T. rex finds him immediately because this is the ’90s, so T. rexes hate lawyers. Newman gets eaten by some fancy lads (GOOD), while everyone else runs around screaming, or holds perfectly still, depending on their prior knowledge of dinosaur eyeballs. They all spend a long time trying to escape dinosaurs and sometimes getting covered in boogers. Dr. Grant pulls an extremely hilarious and appropriate prank involving an electric fence and some severely traumatized children. Everything is fucked.
(Cut to the interior of the Jurassic Park gift shop. Foolish humans and your ridiculous dinosaur thermoses.)
Richard Attenborough is making a speech about fleas. He just wanted to make something that wasn’t an illusion, you know? “I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see and touch.” And get dismembered by.
Off in the jungle somewhere, in grave danger of being seen and touched, the boy-child calls the girl-child a “nerd” and she goes, “I’m a hacker! I am not a computer nerd—I prefer to be called a hacker.” Then the boy-child gets fried on an electric fence
