"Dodgson, Dodgson, we have Dodgson here! See? Nobody cares. Nice hat! What are ya tryin' to look like - a secret agent? " - Nedry
"I'm always on the lookout for the future ex-Mrs. Malcolm." - Dr. Malcolm
"That's not very scary. More like a six-foot Turkey." - Boy
"I don't believe it. I don't believe it! You were meant to come down here and defend me against these characters, and the only one I've got on my side is the blood-sucking lawyer!" - Hammond
Way back when this came out, I couldn't give a shit about it. Its pretty strange, because I've always loved dinosaurs, but this one really seemed like a lame concept to me. Dinosaur island. Great. I'm calling bullshit. Didn't Sid and Marty Kroft already try this back when David Attenborough was competing with Telly Savalas when he was pimping "Mutual of Omaha's WILD KINGDOM"? I figured you couldn't get any better than LAND OF THE LOST, so I said fuck it, and never watched it until a few weeks back. I was wrong. This movie is pretty badass. You have Sam Neill, David Attenborough, Laura Dern, Samuel L Jackson, and Jeff Goldblum AND an extended cameo by fucking Newman from SEINFELD- all starring in JURASSIC PARK!!!
(I made a few mistakes in the original edit of this review. Thanks to Erica Bernstein for calling me out.)
So when the story begins a bunch of workers are unloading crates of some kind of animal to some pens. We of course know its a dinosaur because we either saw a trailer or the logo when the movie came on... let's be real. A worker gets killed. Cut to a scene where Sam and Laura are paleontologists working on an important dig. A few moments later a helicopter comes swooping down and ruins weeks of digging and research. They are super pissed until they see its some fat little guy who offers them a gig that will pay for their next whole year of research. They are psyched. Then they fly to a remote island with the old guy and a few other scientists.
So we have 2 dino experts, a mathmatician (Goldblum), a lawyer who is VERY adamant about making sure everything is up to snuff safety-wise - UNTIL he sees the dinosaurs and utters, "we're gonna make a fortune with this thing." They see a bracheosaurus and are all amazed. Laura Dern stops to help a sick triceratops. The others plan to go view the park in these motorized jeeps on tracks. Also they have to bring along the old man's grandkids. There's some kind of paternal struggle hinted at with Sam Neill. He doesn't like kids and freaks out on one in the beginning of the movie, and is clearly annoyed by the prospect of having to semi-babysit these grandkids while on business. Laura Dern thinks its hilarious that they love him. Meanwhile, fucking Newman has a scheme of his own going on. He's getting paid off by a rival of the old man's company to steal samples of the dino DNA. They create the dino DNA by extracting DNA from blood that mosquitos sucked from dinos out of the sap from 1000 year old fossilized trees. Newman can't get anything done that they need him to do because he's too busy shutting the system down so that he can escape and hacking their network- locking it up- covering his tracks so no one can find out what he's done or even find him until he is long gone and wealthy. Unfortunately he didn't expect or wasn't paying attention to the fucking HEAVY DUTY storm that blows through seemingly out of nowhere.
So Newman bursts out of the park as fast as he can go, turning down all the fences so he can escape. He's shitting his pants to get out of there in a hurry and its storming so bad, he fucks up and drives off into a ditch and wrecks his jeep. He loses his glasses, gets venom spit into his eyes and then gets eaten by a dinosaur inside of the jeep. T Rex gets loose and he smells blood. The lawyer splits from one of the jeeps and gets eaten while he's hiding out in the shitter. The other jeeps are squished and the kids are rescued by Sam. We think that Goldblum is killed but somehow he survives. The scientists and Goldblum escape in one jeep while Sam and the kids hide from T Rex up a tree. They get Samuel L Jackson to reboot the whole park's security grid, hoping it will reboot. He goes to flip a switch and ends up with his bloody arm in Laura Dern's hands while she screams and is chased by these made up mini velociraptors. They are fast and smart and blood thirsty. Also even though they are all females, somehow they are breeding. This is bad news for our heroes.
Getting chased all the way back to the head bunker Sam and the kids escape by the skin of their teeth, hiding in the kitchen and pulling some stealth moves. Turns out the little girl is a "hacker" who knows "linux". She fixes the security grid. LUCKY. Also the little boy almost gets electrocuted to death. In the end, the fucking T Rex actually saves everyone by eating the velociraptors that are about to kill them all. Goldblum helps everyone escape in a helicopter and they tell the old man he's fucked if he thinks they're going to endorse his park. I'm thinking of watching the sequels. You should watch this one. I was wrong about it, its pretty good. I'm sure the sequels won't be as good, but that's the whole point of this column. Rooowwwarrrrr.
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