Top 10 Jurassic Park Scenes: C.C.C Issue #74

Top Ten Best Scenes in the Jurassic Park Series 

With Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hitting theaters this weekend, I have Jurassic fever once again. Even though I doubt this new entry will live up to the legacy, I thought it would be a good excuse to go back and look at my ten favourite scenes from the series—not moments, those are too hard to pinpoint and far too numerous—so only read on if you’ve seen the movies, because there are definite spoilers ahead. 

Honourable mention: Rexy & Blue vs. Indominous, Jurassic World

 

It’s not quite in there as an all-time classic scene, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. The long takes and roving camera style of the fight between the T-rex and Indominous Rex was pretty unique and well-executed, even if it frequently looked very fake and over-the-top. This was a dinosaur fight that fans had been craving for years—far surpassing the T-rex vs. Spinosaurus fight in Jurassic Park III—and is undoubtedly one of the best parts of Jurassic World. 

10. Wu and Masrani Talk Science – Jurassic World

 

Just squeaking in to the top ten is my favourite scene from Jurassic World, which is probably a favourite scene of few other people—most would cite the final fight as the best, I’m guessing, but as far as I’m concerned, Jurassic Park has never really been about big dinosaur fights, at its core. What it’s really about is science, and chaos. As a kid, I probably wouldn’t have even given notice to this discussion between Mr. Masrani, the owner of Jurassic World, and Dr. Wu, the lead geneticist for the park, but as an adult, the dialogue jumped out at me. Masrani is furious that Wu bred such a dangerous creature (the Indominous) and Wu throws it right back in his face because Masrani himself said they wanted something “cooler” and he did what he had to do to make it. He goes on to explain this is what they’ve been doing from the beginning, and many of the creatures would look quite different if not for the genetic tampering. This is a reminder of the concept from the first movie of the dinosaurs being brought back using frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps, and actually gives sound reason as to why the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (and World) don’t have feathers, or match the fossil record, or a dozen other attributes. It’s the kind of thing that really only stands out to the hard core fans, but I felt a notable increase in excitement watching this scene, and I hope for more scenes like it in future movies. 

9. “Clever Girl” – Jurassic Park

 

Though the character Robert Muldoon isn’t fleshed out much more than being a badass gamekeeper who wears a hat and stares intensely at things, he’s still one of my favourites from the whole series, particularly because of his final moments. He informs Ellie Sattler he can see a velociraptor “through the bushes straight ahead” though the audience can’t, and neither can she, then he instructs her to run, which she does. He ever-so-slowly-and-carefully sets his hat down on a log—at this point, we do see the raptor—and prepares to fire at it, when another raptor, “the big one”, pokes its head out right beside him, to which he says...well, you know the line, it’s one of the most quotable from the whole movie, and that’s significant, given how many there are. Then he gets mauled and torn to pieces. A brutal but appropriate way for him to go. You were right, Muldoon, they should have all been destroyed.

8. T-rex Rampage – The Lost World: Jurassic Park

I really love The Lost World, but unfortunately, it only gets two scenes in this top ten—the original movie just has that many great ones. We had seen dinosaurs in a park, and in a jungle setting, but when was the last time a dinosaur had rampaged through a populated area in a movie, and it had made for a truly scary scene? Well, Godzilla aside, the answer might be the 1925 version of The Lost World, when a Brontosaurus smashed its ways through London. For its time, that was a pretty ambitious and exciting scene, and the same can be said of the T-rex wandering through the suburbs of San Diego. It’s a very well structured sequence of events, beginning with the incredible shot of the rex roaring atop a hill at night with the buildings in the background, but my favourite scene is when the tyrant lizard king goes into the backyard of some unsuspecting family, drinks from their pool, eats their dog, and roars at them through a bedroom window. It’s funny, scary, and exciting all at once.

7. Opening Scene – Jurassic Park

 

The beginning of the first Jurassic Park is scary. No movie opening scared me more as a kid, with that haunting music, the titles matching the beat, and then fading in to lights shining through foliage with a bunch of workers nervously watching. Was a dinosaur about to walk out from behind those shaking leaves? Then you see…it’s a forklift, carrying an enclosure of some kind…the tension mounts, and mounts, until something runs inside, and suddenly a guy falls and is grabbed and pulled down a hallway and around the corner and lifted in the air! It’s freaky and exciting, thanks to Spielberg’s masterful direction. You catch glimpses of the raptors, but never really see anything, yet it’s still terrifying—even more so because you don’t see anything. This opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie, and does so perfectly.

6. Trailer Rescue – The Lost World: Jurassic Park

 

Easily one of the most exciting and tense action scenes from the whole series, the craft Spielberg brought to the trailer scene made it what it is—in the hands of a less capable director, it likely would’ve been lacking in tension or visual appeal. The tyrannosaurs push the trailer over the cliff, but only half the trailer is dangling past the cliff edge, the other half is still on land, but it’s sliding through the mud, slowly, bringing the characters to their doom. Eddie Carr, being the heroic dude that he is, tries to save them by tying a rope around a tree and throwing it down to them, but the pair of T-rex’s aren’t far away, and the trailer is slipping…there are long takes in this scene, the lighting is dim yet you can still perfectly see what’s happening, it’s tense, there’s even some humour to diffuse a bit of that tension within the scene and it works. Even for those who don’t like the second movie that much, this surely has to be the best part. 

5. Finale – Jurassic Park

The opening of Jurassic Park is plenty exciting, sure, but ending had to top it, obviously, and uh, yeah, it does. I would count the final scene as beginning when Grant, Ellie, Tim, and Lex emerge into the visitor center and leap onto the suspended skeletons. The raptors pursue them, the bones fall, the characters fall with the bones, the raptors fall as well, it’s chaos, then everyone is on the ground, and the two raptors close in on the group of survivors. It’s just like Dr. Grant said in the beginning of the film to the kid! Surely, this is the end. Just as one of the raptors is about to leap, the T-rex, who hasn’t actually made an appearance in quite a while, catches the creature in its jaws and kills it, inadvertently saving the humans she had tried to eat a day earlier. The scene ends on one of the best shots I’ve ever seen composed: the T-rex, roaring, with the banner “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” falling in front of it. Absolutely one of the most-exciting finales to any film, ever.

4. “It’s a dinosaur” – Jurassic Park  

In the trailer for the new Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, there’s a line about the first time you saw a dinosaur. This is that moment. But it works because 1) the actors completely sell the audience on it with their genuine reactions, and 2) Spielberg presents it the way only he could. He holds back for what feels like forever, just giving us everyone’s reactions without showing us what they’re looking at, until finally, a sweeping shot reveals the Brachiosaurus: the first time a dinosaur had ever appeared so large and lifelike in a film. Looking at it today, it’s clearly cgi, but only because we’ve seen it countless times. Even still, it looks convincing. The first time that dinosaur was revealed, its towering neck reaching high into those treetops, the people just tiny figures down at its feet, it was a special moment in cinematic history. 

3: Dinner Table Discussion – Jurassic Park

 

The discussion between Masrani and Wu in Jurassic World is a relatively short one, but this is likely the conversation that inspired that one. This is a crucial scene in the film, where there’s no action, and it perhaps defines what Jurassic Park is more perfectly than any other scene out of any of the four films. Even as a kid, I found it interesting, but as I got older, I only found it more fascinating every time. The dialogue is endlessly quotable, I’m not even going to put down my favourite lines, there are just too many. The questions of humans living with dinosaurs and the ethics of bringing back extinct creatures and the attempt to contain them, it’s all big, heady ideas and bold concepts—the kind of stuff missing from really smart, but still entertaining, sci-fi movies of today. There’s nothing quite like seeing all these characters, played by such incredible actors, talking about things that had never been talked about in a movie before, and will probably never be depicted in such an engaging, believable way ever again. 

2. Raptors in the kitchen – Jurassic Park

 

Jurassic Park combines two things Steven Spielberg is excellent at: terror, and wonder. In Jaws, we got some of his best terror. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we got some of his best wonder. This time we get both, and while the scenes of wonder in the first half of the movie are great, the scenes of terror are where the movie excels the most. Jaws is one of the best movies ever made, as well as one of the scariest, especially for the generation who saw it when it opened in summer 1975 and were afraid to go in the water long afterwards. How could Spielberg make anything more effectively scary than that? This is how. It’s a simple concept: two kids, trapped in a kitchen, with two velociraptors. There’s virtually no dialogue, it’s mostly very slow, and it’s all in broad daylight. Yet, it’s one of the scariest scenes in any movie, ever. The dinosaurs look utterly convincing, but it’s down to the details: we know these things are smart, they are expressive—growling, communicating with each other, clacking their claws on the floor—and they are hungry. The tension, even after having seen this movie dozens of times, is still palpable for me, and I’m sure many others. The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, couldn’t have done it better himself. 

1. T-rex Escape – Jurassic Park

 

This is it, my absolute favourite scene out of all of the Jurassic Park films, and might I say, one of my all-time favourite scenes from any film. Unlike the raptors in the kitchen, there’s no music here. There doesn’t need to be. It’s scarier without it. The T-rex breaks through the fence, which is no longer electrified, and steps out between the two jeeps—the first time we’ve seen the creature in full—uttering a horrific roar. “Boy, do I hate being right all the time,” Malcolm says. From that moment, until the moment after the jeep crashes over the side of the paddock and the rex roars triumphantly, it’s nothing but five minutes of pure enthrallment. 

The whole scene is tension-filled, indeed, but it has moments of humour too, and moments of sheer amazement. There have been video essays breaking down the art of this scene, it’s just that good. Every bit of technical work is perfect, the atmosphere of it all, with the dark and rain and lights from the jeep, the sounds of the rex, the kids screaming as it takes the jeep apart, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a case of this scene being the benchmark any future Jurassic movies has to try to top. There is no topping this scene. This, is, was, and always will be, the greatest scene from any Jurassic Park movie.