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Jurassic Park
I’m already beginning to regret that rating. I loved this film when I was younger but thinking about it now it was probably just the dinosaurs. Just the dinosaurs, and the science. Just the dinosaurs, the science and Geoff Goldblum.
I am re-watching a bunch of old classics at the moment as my little brother and girlfriend got my a ‘100 Movie Bucket List – Scratch Off Poster’ for Christmas. I’m slowly working my way through them.
So what am I talking about there not been a Hero? The Hero is the one who drives the action. They are the ones with agency. They have skin in the game and have everything to win, or lose.
None of the Characters fulfil this role!
Dr. Grant, Sam Neill, is the obvious contender for hero. He fits some of the requirements but not all of them. If we are following the hero’s journey he is taken out of his ordinary world and taken on an adventure. On the face of it he can begin to check some of our boxes.
But let’s look at it this way. Grant has nothing to lose if he fails. He is offered to have his archaeological dig funded by Hammond which would obviously be nice but he is already has funding for his dig. Hammond is just offering more money. More money would be nice but this isn’t a change for Grant.
So the money is supposed to be Grant’s desire to see the park succeed. It’s supposed to make him care. But we already guess from what we know about the character that he is going to be much more interested in the science and respecting the dinosaurs than in the dollars.
Grant also has no real agency until things start to go off the rails. And if this is where the story starts and the rest was all setup, well we have spent half the movie establishing ‘Ordinary World’ and introducing the main character.
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Perhaps Hammond is the Hero?
The problem with this is that he has even less agency than Grant. He brings the scientists to the Island with a hope that they would sign off on the his park. After this he loses all control. And the control that he had at the start wasn’t much to begin with. He wasn’t driving the story and more than the location scout does for a movie.
What are the Forces that are in Opposition
If we are finding it hard to find our hero it can be a good idea to look at the forces that are in play in a movie as generally a character represents these forces and generally one of them will be our hero. This comes from one of the first questions that is looked at when developing a story.
Who wants what? This question generally establishes the hero and their quest (the plot of the film). This is what we have been trying to answer above and have been coming up blank.
The next big question that is asked is: Who is trying to stop them? The best contender for antagonist is Dennis and the shadow organisation trying to steal the embryos. There is a considerable amount of time spent developing this part of the plot and Dennis’ character. But this is important to drive the part of the plot where all the power goes off.
So while Dennis may be the adversary he has no Hero that he is in competition with – unless Samuel L. Jackson is the Hero. I mean, he’s my hero, but he is in this movie so little and hardly has a line worth mentioning. Also this force is only in direct opposition with Hammond but Hammond’s main foe is the legal team – or so we are told.
What do you have when you have no hero and no antagonist?
You have a movie with events that happen. You are not sure why they are happening and who is driving the action. You have some idea about who you should care about because the other guy has been a dick the entire time.
If you think about each character they could die off in any scene and the story could continue, really without any adverse consequences to the story and the film.
The plot is somewhat similar to the park’s vehicles. They stay on the track and keep going whether the characters or the audience are with them or not.
So Many Flaws
This film has so many small flaws that it is kind of embarrassing for both them and me to point them out. Embarrassing for me because I took time to note them down. My biggest issue is to do with the logic of the cars on tracks.
Let’s assume that you actually have a number of people attending your theme park. They will be heading out into the park at different times. But there is only one track for the cars. This would surely mean that they all go in one direction? But in the film they come back past the T-Rex enclosure. This would cause ridiculous traffic jams.
There are issues like this throughout the film. Try not to watch too closely if you really like this one. Yep definitely not worth eight out of ten but I’m not changing that. Why not, Goldblum, Jackson and Richard Attenborough in the same film. And there’s dinosaurs, did I mention the dinosaurs?
