Movies We Want and Movies We Need

Movies We Want and Movies We Need

I told a huge lie when I wrote about The Marvel Cinematic Universe before the release of Avengers: Infinity War:

“Infinity War will arrive soon, and you can bet I’ll be reviewing it as soon as I get a chance to see it, so stay tuned!”

What happened, Clayton? 

By the time I saw it, it had already made close to a billion dollars—yes, a billion dollars—and been reviewed and critiqued and analyzed and spoiled thoroughly. That was only one week after its release. I saw no point in putting my thoughts out there, since they weren’t much more unique than what everyone else thought. Yeah, I liked it, quite a bit actually, more than I expected. The end. Next.  

2018 hasn’t been a great year for movies for me, personally, and I’ve been struggling to figure out why, when it seems like general movie-goers are enjoying the content being pumped out by Hollywood for the most part. I think I’ve figured out the reason, with the recent release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the latest adventure in a galaxy far, far away, which has people talking and arguing once again.

The last big movie that really hit it home for me (and, without coincidence, is the last movie I reviewed positively on my blog) was Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Many fans—in fact, most, I’d say—were mixed to negative on it, mainly because they felt it got Star Wars wrong. If anything, I felt it got Star Wars right in places where the previous Episode VII: The Force Awakens stumbled. Writer/Director Rian Johnson made bold, unexpected decisions with the characters and delivered a far more unique story than Force Awakens’ basic rehash of A New Hope. 

But fans didn’t want that. So what did they want? Here’s a quote from Mark Hamill, about working on Last Jedi with Rian Johnson.

“Last Jedi was incredibly daring…I would say ‘we really have to think about what the audience expects and what they want. He says ‘no, no, we have to do the opposite, we have to give them something they don’t expect that we want.’” 

I champion this kind of writing mentality. Sure, not everything in Last Jedi paid off as a result of this approach, but it certainly made for an exceedingly more interesting film to watch and discuss. More interesting in comparison to what, you might ask? Well Solo wasn’t particularly engaging, story wise.

In case you don’t know, Solo is the second of Disney’s standalone Star Wars films set outside the main episodic storyline, with the previous one having been 2016’s Rogue One (check out my review on it for more thoughts). When Solo was announced, right away people went, “an origin story about Han Solo? Who wants to see that?” According to the box office, not many. It made less than 100 million opening weekend, which was considered a flop. 

This is the world we live in. A movie that makes 84 million dollars opening weekend is considered a failure. To be fair, in comparison to every other Star Wars movie, it is the lowest opening, and not by just a little. Why did it do badly? There’s a host of reasons, some of which I’ll get into shortly.

I’ve seen headlines like “Solo Box Office Disappoints: Does Star Wars Need to Shift Focus?” “Star Wars: How Many Movies is Too Many?” “Boba Fett Movie Announced: Do Star Wars Fans Want This Movie?” 

That last one is what struck me. Do fans want this movie? Since when do fans know what they want? 

And that’s the key to all of this, to my lack of enthusiasm for the big movies in 2018. All of the biggest movies these days are being produced with the fans in mind. Every one of these big tent pole blockbuster movies has to be a crowd-pleaser, in such specific ways. You have to have x, y, and z in there so people will stand up out of their seats and clap and cheer and point at the screen and say “I know what that is!” And I’m not even exaggerating. 

People don’t know what they want. They think they do, but they don’t. With these blockbusters, whether we’re talking superhero movies or Jurassic Park movies or Star Wars or whatever, they’re just focusing on what people want and making more of it. I admit to not knowing much about the true intricacies of producing large Hollywood films, but all I can go on is what is presented at the theaters week in and week out. 

I need to pump the brakes for a second. To gain some perspective, this isn’t exactly a new tactic. Movies that gain success are always milked for all their worth. Why are there 3 Robocop movies or 11 Friday the 13^th movies (not counting the remakes)? Because the first ones made money. Of course Hollywood has always been a business, and always will be a business, but it seems like every year there are fewer new attempts to make the next big thing and more and more rehashes of the same old stuff. We are firmly stuck in an age of nostalgia. 

Let me go back to Last Jedi. I didn’t just like it because it did unexpected things. In fact, some critics have cited its attempts to thwart audience expectations as a huge flaw in the film; risks were taken purely to be shocking, not to pay off in any dramatic sense, and I can understand where these critics are coming from. But, I interpreted what I saw as a clear vision from a filmmaker who knew what he wanted to do, and I enjoyed seeing that. What I didn’t like about Rogue One was it felt like the studio cobbled together some “cool” Star Wars elements and put them into what ended up feeling like the biggest, most-expensive fan film I had ever seen. There was no original angle or vision or story that I could see and latch onto, just lots of hollow visual effects without any interesting characters or plot elements to back it up. 

Back to Solo. Why are people not head over heels about it? It answers questions fans have been asking for decades, after all. What did Han Solo mean when he said the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs? How did Han meet Chewie, and Lando? Seeing all of these things answered in a film is purely fan service, not because it helps paint a clearer picture of the character or tell parts of a missing story. I think a big reason for Solo’s disappointment is that it’s only been five months since the last Star Wars movie. 

Star Wars isn’t the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it feels like Disney is trying to make it the next one of those. Let’s remember that the Marvel Cinematic Universe started only ten years ago, and from the beginning, fans have been conditioned to expect the next movie in the ongoing tale in a relatively short amount of time. With Star Wars, it’s utterly different. The original trilogy had three years between each film, and for a long time, those three movies were it. Then the prequels came, but they weren’t furthering the story. It was all backtracking. Still, three years between each. That’s six movies, over the course of nearly thirty years. All of a sudden, we’ve had four Star Wars movies over the course of four years, two of which are prequels, and to paraphrase Willy Wonka, it certainly shows no signs of slowing. Love them or hate them, these Disney Star Wars films all have the distinct sense of having been made with the fans in mind, catering to what they think fans want (especially with the standalone films). This still applies to Last Jedi, even if, as far as I’m concerned, it is the most original and least-concerned with “fans” of all four.  Do you really think there was someone who sat down at a meeting at Lucasfilm and pitched an original, bold vision for a Han Solo origin movie? I highly doubt it. 

Love them or hate them, you have to at least give George Lucas a pinch of credit when it came to doing the Star Wars prequels. He did some things in those movies out of fan service, yes, but not everything. You think he went “I know fans would love to find out that the force is really microscopic organisms!” He thought that was a good idea, and he went with it. I’m not saying it was a good idea, but kudos to him for having an original idea and sticking with it, not thinking about what the fans might like when it came to every little detail. 

When the original Star Wars came out, it was just a movie. It wasn’t purported to be the next great thing. To contextualize it for back then, no one was saying, “Star Wars is going to be the next Jaws!” (except for Spielberg), which was the highest grossing movie at the time of its release. It was a daring, ambitious film, and it paid off. Here’s a bold statement, or maybe it’s not so bold: not a single one of today’s mega blockbusters is ambitious or daring. Studios just play it safe, making films for fans so they’ll definitely make a profit. 

Not every example of a film made specifically for fans is bad, though. In 2016, we got Deadpool, which was a significantly different take on the superhero genre than what we had been used to seeing in recent years. It was R-rated, edgy, funny, and went hard. Not only did hard-core Deadpool fans rejoice at the character finally getting his own movie, it appealed to a wide audience, and was hugely successful. Now this year, we got Deadpool 2, which although a pretty good sequel, I thought, didn’t feel as hard or fresh as the original. 

While I’m on the topic of 2018 movies, what about Avengers: Infinity War, anyway? I think what I liked the most about it was how unexpected it was, kind of like The Last Jedi. Infinity War paired up characters I didn’t think would get to share the screen together, characters I expected to have limited cameos had full, well-constructed scenes, the storyline was layered and interesting, and it didn’t simply rehash what we had seen before. Having said that, it’s still just another big Marvel movie, so I can’t get that excited about it, because I’ve been getting excited about the same kind of movie for so many years now, it’s starting to wear thin. 

Sometimes I get this feeling when something like Avengers: infinity War or Deadpool 2 or Solo comes out that I’m supposed to like this. Oh, you’re a Star Wars fan? You will like Solo. You’re a Marvel fan? You will like Infinity War. These movies were made for you, after all. For the record, I didn’t like Black Panther from earlier this year, despite everyone giving it overwhelming praise, as if it were the greatest superhero movie of all-time or something. Sorry, didn’t really land with me. That’s another one that carried this sense that you have to see this movie and love it, it’s going to be huge! It’s all anyone is talking about! But it’s just another Marvel movie, the way Solo is just another Star Wars movie. Even with franchises I absolutely love. Alien: Covenant last year, The Predator and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom coming up this year. There will more—oh, so many more—and frankly, I’m just getting tired of it. Give me something new that’s as terrifying and clever as the original Alien. Give me the next great sci-fi-action thriller like the original Predator was when it came out. Come up with something as brilliant and ground-breaking as the original Jurassic Park. 

So what am I trying to get at with all of this yammering? Do I just hate modern movies now? No, I’m certainly not saying that, and I’m not even saying that I hate all the franchises I once loved. I did like Avengers: Infinity War, I hope The Predator reenergizes the franchise and lives up to the original. I just don’t put as much stock in new entries in existing franchises as I once did. 

I guess I just want Hollywood to cram something new down my throat instead of the same old thing. I want a new thing to come out of nowhere from a filmmaker who has an idea for something original, that a studio sees as something that could be the new big thing, and let it take off. Just stop looking to the fans for what they want and giving it to them. People love Han Solo, we should make a movie all about him! That isn’t going to make people love the character any more than they already do. It’s simply misguided thinking. Tell us what we should like. Give us something new and tell us to like it. We can still decide if we do or don’t, but quit serving up massive blockbusters just because it’s what “the fans” want. Make new fans. 

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Review

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Review/First Reaction

So I just saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the sequel to 2015’s Jurassic World, which was essentially a soft reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise, though I don’t really think of it as part of the true Park series—it’s the next step in the series’ evolution, if you will.

I don’t really know where to begin with this one. I wasn’t all that excited for it, based on the direction Jurassic World chose to go, with incorporating a genetic hybrid as the main antagonist and dishing out far more over-the-top action, dialogue, and situations than the original film. In the end, I’ve realized that, being such a fan of the Jurassic franchise, and a fan of dinosaur movies in general, it would take a lot for me to actually fully not like one of these movies. So yeah, I didn’t dislike it. But did I like it? Well...a little.

First, the positives. Chris Pratt is Chris Pratt, I’ve accepted that. But, he did a good job this time around. Not that he wasn’t decent before, but he’s even a bit more likable and entertaining. There are plenty of dinosaurs in this movie, from beginning to end, and not too many long stretches without any dinos. Plenty of references are made to the previous films, as well as the novels upon which the first two movies are based, and many of these references I quite enjoyed. The visual effects were a tad better than before, and the cinematography was much better. It was darker, more varied, and a few of the shots were really well executed, particularly one of a Brachiosaurus standing amid the volcanic cloud spreading over the island. Some of the action sequences were suitably exciting and unique. I really enjoyed the gyrosphere going over the cliff into the ocean, as seen in the trailers, which reminded me of The Abyss, and a scene with the T-rex, though not action-packed, was reasonably entertaining, as well.

The biggest problem is the story. It’s a bit familiar, a bit scattered, and significantly ridiculous. Yes, that word could be used to describe many parts of this movie. The concept of the island being an erupting volcano is one that turned many people off right away, I think. While you could say it plays into the general ridiculousness of the whole movie (which it does), it’s also something significant in the novels, and there’s mention in The Lost World: Jurassic Park of the facilities running off geothermal power. So yes, it does work, technically, in the world of the film. But I’m reminded of Malcolm’s line from the original: “Just because you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.” I still don’t love the island erupting concept, but moving past that, there’s a lot of material regarding the nature of cloning and creation, as there should be in any good Jurassic movie. That’s something I missed from Jurassic World, which focused more solely on the theme part aspect and the action. But now that I got what I wanted...I wish I didn’t.

Jeff Goldblum is back as Ian Malcolm—something all the fans were eager to see—but not only is his appearance predictably brief, his dialogue is not all that great, and Goldblum’s delivery is not that enthusiastic. Dr. Wu is back, as well, the only character from the original who returned for the previous Jurassic World. This time around, he’s gone full crazy Frankenstein, which annoyed me. Two of the new characters, Zia, a paleoveterinarian, and Franklin, an IT guy, are actually pretty likable additions to the series, both believable and funny. Unfortunately, they aren’t in the movie enough. There are two main parts of the story: the rescue of the dinosaurs from the island (blatantly copying what was done in The Lost World) and the goings on in a secluded mansion of an elderly rich man, John Lockwood, who was once partnered with John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park. This supposedly important character felt rather contrived—for being so important, how come we’re only hearing about him now? It’s been five movies! Some of the stuff that happens at the mansion ranges from boring, to straight up dumb, but almost every time it cuts away from the island or the transport of dinosaurs to the mainland, it’s less interesting.

Every one of these movies has to have at least one kid in it, apparently. The kid in this one is a non-character. She just wanders around the mansion, curiously looking at stuff, and yet she’s much more crucial to the story than you might expect. There was basically nothing I found likable about her. I just wanted her out of the movie.

A big problem Jurassic World had was a lack of practical effects

and an overabundance of questionable cgi. It was pushed in the marketing that Fallen Kingdom would have more practical dinosaur effects, with full-size animatronics interacting with the actors. There are a few, but they severely pale in comparison to the dinosaurs created by Stan Winston for the Jurassic Park trilogy. I don’t know if it’s the effects guys’ fault, or if it’s the lighting, or the way they’re shot, but they still don’t look as convincing or lifelike as in previous films.

I don’t want to say too much, as to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve seen the trailers, then the whole movie has basically been spoiled for you, anyway, so what I’m going to talk about in the next two paragraphs I’ll preview with a spoiler alert. The Indoraptor is introduced about halfway through, as the perfect killing machine—more perfect than any other cloned creature. The only problem is, it’s not! The Velociraptor is still more effective. I wasn’t a fan of the Indominous Rex, and this thing is essentially the same, only smaller. The third act tries extremely hard to be scary, but it just isn’t. This creature is no scarier than a real dinosaur would have been.

The climax of the film is almost exactly the same as what Steven Spielberg was originally going to shoot for the first Jurassic Park. Instead of having the T-rex show up to kill the last two Velociraptors, the collapsing skeletons were going to do the job, with one of the raptors impaled by a rib. I have no doubt Fallen Kingdom’s ending was meant as a tribute to that original idea. What I find baffling is, if Spielberg abandoned that concept in favour of something more epic and satisfying, which I don’t think anyone would argue that yes, it is better than a rib impaling the villainous creature, why would the filmmakers think doing that ending would make for a more exciting climax? Shouldn’t they be trying to outdo the previous Jurassic World ending? This ending is pathetic in comparison.

At this point, I don’t have a lot else to say about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. I really loved the opening scene, and I was into it for the first act, but it started losing me halfway through, and by the end, I was kind of tired of it. The more I think about it, the more issues I seem to find. Given this is my initial reaction, it could change somewhat in the future, but as of right now, I would say it’s my least-favourite entry in the series. They just pushed the boundaries of believability too far past the tipping point. Jurassic Park made you believe everything you saw. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doesn’t make you believe much of anything. It’s still a fun action adventure film with lots of dinosaurs, some surprisingly dark moments, and interesting concepts, but is far outside the realm of believable, exceptional filmmaking—even further than the first Jurassic World already was.

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.