Jurassic Park is a 1993 film that tells the story of an amusement park filled with genetically engineered dinosaur clones. There’s blood, guns and giant dinosaurs eating men in one bite. The movie is dark, it’s quiet, but loud at the same time. It’s set on a remote island that resembles a jungle that also happens to be at the heart of a tropical storm. The characters scream and the dinosaurs roar. Despite all of these horror film tropes, Jurassic Park is not considered a horror film but rather a sci-fi adventure film.
The director, Stephen Spielberg relies heavily on building suspense as well as these common horror tropes to heighten his audience’s fear. All of this comes together to create thrilling experiences throughout the film’s second half. In my opinion, the most recognizable scene from the film (and maybe the entire franchise) shows this technique off the best. This of course the T-Rex attack scene.
Interestingly enough, Spielberg is building up to this scene from the beginning of the movie as it is the first scene in which the dinosaur vs. human action that audiences had been waiting for comes into play. So far up until this point in the movie, there have been no clear sight of dinosaurs except for a sick herbivorous Triceratops lying on the ground (which comes 50 minutes into the film). The T-Rex attack is also one of the most prolonged sequences in the film. Spielberg takes at least ten minutes from start to finish.
The scene’s immediate build up begins when the main characters, including two young children, board self-driving tour vehicles that will drive around the park’s grounds showing them different dinosaurs. Tension begins to rise when nothing is being spotted. During a quick scene back at the park’s command center, the audience learns the impending tropical storm is nearing and the park’s security system has been disabled by a man working to steal genetic data from the park.
When we cut back to the tour vehicles, it has become night, began down pouring and the cars have come to a stop. Three men, and two children have been stranded in their tour vehicles in the middle of a dinosaur infested jungle.
The young girl says to her brother, “Don’t scare me,” not knowing that what’s about to come next will be so much worse. A full hour and two minutes into the movie, loud booming steps are heard, glasses of water in the cars begin to ripple, and a goat that was placed into the pen in order to attract dinosaurs goes mysteriously missing.
A minute later, the goat’s bloody severed leg drops from the sky onto one of the cars and the T-Rex appears. Another minute later, the T-Rex tears out of its pen and onto the path where the parked cars are, before letting out a few loud roars. These roars break the scene’s eery silence and constant sound of raindrops in a way to let the audience feel just as terrified as the characters in the car.
When the T-Rex comes face to face with the two children who are alone in their car and roars once more, the kids scream. The T-Rex then demolishes the car trying to get to them. Spielberg carries this portion of the scene out for a good minute or so before Alan (a man in the other car), comes to the rescue and attracts the dinosaur away from the kids. I think that all of this comes together to really emphasize the fear that the two kids and even the adults in the scene are facing.
In Robert Baird’s article, Animalizing Jurassic Park’s Dinosaurs: Blockbuster Schemata and Cross-Cultural Cognition in the Threat Scene, he states that “…threatening dinosaurs were explicitly depicted for only 8 minutes and 36 seconds, while they were offscreen or significantly occluded through masking or metonymy for 26 minutes and 48 seconds” (Baird 95). This statistic is crazy to me. In a two-hour movie about a dinosaur amusement park gone wrong, threatening dinosaurs are only on screen for eight and a half minutes? Spielberg was able to make this work exceptionally well by using suspense from the start of the movie and then “cashing it in” when the dinosaurs finally arrive on screen. The shock and fear of these moments is therefore extremely complex, fun and well deserved.
Works Cited
Baird, Hobart. "Animalizing Jurassic Park's Dinosaurs: Blockbuster Schemata and Cross-Cultural Cognition in the Threat Scene." Cinema Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, Summer98, p.82. EBSCOhost, proxy.library.umkc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=1060017&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Something that also caught my attention about some of the ways Spielberg would present the dinosaurs, after last class (upon thinking about the movie for a while) was how a good chunk of the cinematography used to create suspense whenever the dinosaurs would show up fell in line with Alfred Hitchcock analogy about the bomb, pertaining to the idea of giving the audience little bits of information as the scene progress to raise their anxiety levels little by little before it all comes to a head. There were always a couple of moments where you'd see silhouette or look at the terrain being portrayed and get the feeling something was off before a dinosaur would show up.
ReplyDelete-Kenneth
I remember watching Jurassic Park since I was little and the T-Rex scene scares the heck out of me because I thought the T-Rex was going to eat these two children alive even though they were inside the truck. Building up suspense and obscuring the environment with darkness gives me goosebumps. No one bothers to do that with blockbusters anymore; everything's loud and in-your-face stupid. It’s astonishing how this film was made 25 years ago that contains the most brilliant pieces of CGI I've ever seen in cinema even in today's movies. It holds up flawlessly because it just looks so darn real even dinosaurs were extinct before we humans arrived in the time period.
ReplyDelete-Kendra ZeMenye
ReplyDeleteI remember this movie! It kept me on the edge of my seat the entire movie. Is seems as if Stephen Spielberg used the combination of suspense and surprise. Almost like an Alfred Hitchcock twist to his own style. Spielberg gives you just enough information to predict the succeeding scene but not enough to know when it will happen. The part where the young girl says to her brother, “Don’t scare me,” is the distraction for the surprise. Very similar to Hitchcock’s technique.
-Rob D
Alex:
ReplyDeleteI think the lack of screen time for the dinosaurs played into Spielberg's favor, allowing him to manipulate the audience's expectations and keep them invested. The scene with the cup of water is masterful. You feel the danger coming, you know it is going to be bad, but the suspense makes you beg to see it as the scene drags on.