You Love to See It: Jurassic Park

The first forty minutes of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is all domino-setting and wisecracks. Sam Neill humiliates a middle schooler, Richard Attenborough says “spared no expense” a half-dozen times, and we get to slow down twice to let the reality of the dinosaurs sink in and to experience the genuine wonder of their existence. Then, in the middle of a tropical storm and an infelicitously timed act of corporate espionage, the movie starts. It’s not a gradual process. One moment the tyrannosaurus rex is on the far side of a towering electrified fence, a ghostly presence in the trees; the next it’s bursting through that liminal barrier, the wondrous dream at the film’s heart revealed for the nightmare it is.

The t. rex’s entrance takes a shock and awe approach to changing the film’s tone. First the rumbling tremors of its footsteps. Then the high-tension ping-ing sound of the fence’s wires snapping. Then the beast itself, forty feet of pebbled skin and rippling muscle, the rain washing over its bulk, obscuring its outline in the stormy dark just enough to preserve a sense of the supernatural. Its instantly iconic roar, an eardrum-scraping combination of alligator, elephant, and tiger vocalizations conceived of by Foley artist Dennie Thorpe and brought to life by dozens of skilled recordists and editors, shatters whatever remains of the film’s sense of safety. It’s a demonic sound, at once alien and deeply connected to some quivering rodent element of our genetic memory.

Spielberg’s finishing touch on this turning point is that in addition to a sudden explosion of carnage, the scene casts its human participants in stark new lights. The raw terror of the kids trapped in the car, the split-second decision two asshole men make to risk their lives to draw the tyrannosaurus away — the scene upends the film’s established dynamics completely in the space of perhaps twenty seconds. It’s a fundamental rule of filmmaking too often forgotten: if you want people to fear something, if you want them to bite their lips and dig their nails into their palms in terror of what’s coming next, you have to give them a thread of hope and beauty to hold onto. No jaws, no matter how powerful, can crush or devour what isn’t there.