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.
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

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

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

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

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


No comments:
Post a Comment