Comment by 542354234235
6 days ago
See, I think he is wrong about the rest of the movie. First, that scene is incredibly done. We have been talking about dinosaurs, explaining what how the park works, how he made them, etc. but we haven’t seen anything yet. Then we stop the Jeeps, but we don’t show the dinos yet. What we show is Neill and Dern’s faces. We see how absolutely awestruck they are and only then, once we have been primed to understand how truly amazing and unique what we are about to see is, do they show us the dinosaurs.
But he does this throughout the movie. The tyrannosaurus builds the same way. The “where’s the goat?”, the quick closeup of her swallowing it, the closeup of the claw on the now dead fencing, the slapping of the cables, then and only then, does she walk out into the open. The velociraptors are teased in the very first scene so you know how deadly they are but you don’t see them. You see what they do the rigging of the cow harness and learn how smart and ruthless they are. You see the ripped open cage and learn that Nedry specifically programmed their cage to not lose power because of what he knew about their danger, but now they are out after the reset. So when you finally see them, you are primed to be terrified of what they are and what they can do.
The whole movie is a masterclass, and it is insane to me that he reduced it to a “creature feature”.
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.