The Rewatchables - 'Jurassic Park' 25th Anniversary With Sean Fennessey, David Shoemaker, and Bryan Curtis

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

Hold onto your butts! The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey, David Shoemaker, and Bryan Curtis are taking their helicopter back to 1993's mesmerizing blockbuster ‘Jurassic Park,’ starring Velociraptors, a T-rex, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill, and directed by Steven Spielberg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get the Hotel Tonight app now to start scoring amazing deals in incredible hotels. That's Hotel Tonight, the only booking app you need. An adventure, 65 million years in the making. The logline is simple, What If Dinosaurs Walk to the Earth Today from 1993, directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the best-selling novel by Michael Crichton. This is the rewatchables, Jurassic Park. Do you feel that? dinosaurs are my slightest idea. Must go faster.

Okay. to the rewatchables. My name is Sean Fennacy. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Ringer. I'm here with David Shoemaker, who's got nine jobs at the Ringer. Brian Curtis, who's got one job, maybe two. Guys, welcome. Thank you. I feel 65 million years old, knowing that this movie is 25 years old. It is terrifying, devastating. But that's a beautiful segue into this opening part of this conversation. I wanted to read as a starting point, a quote from the director of this movie, Steven Spielberg. This is what he said shortly after the making of the movie.

It was very important to be a kid. directing Jurassic Park. I made that movie really as a youngster to see how much fun it was with great yearning and imagining what it would be like to meet a dinosaur. I think that that is actually

probably when we all saw the movie kind of what's great about it, right? We've been waiting for a genuine experience with dinosaurs in a way that wasn't like, you know, Jason the Argonaut style claymation, you know, that felt real and this movie really felt real.

Did you guys have the same experience with it? Totally. Rewatching this recently, I felt it dignified. It was a kid's movie in an adult movie at the same time. Yeah. And it did a really good job of dignifying both things.

The high-level DNA stuff is our adult mind saying, wait, how did they make dinosaurs? Does this work? How did this happen? But there's so much through a child's eyes. And the parts of it that I didn't think I liked, like the brannosaurus is sneezing and doing all those kinds of things. I realized, like, that's the childlike wonder. And those are the parts of the movie where you stop and go, ah, dinosaurs.

So I'm interested in the stop it. This is a bigger question, but the stopping and going basically anything. Wow, holy shit, whatever it is in this movie. Obviously, you know, Godzilla movies were made before this. There's a lot of million monster movies, movies with CGI broadly defined over the years. But there's, you know, I thought, I was watching it and thinking of like Star Wars and how a lot of the special effects that George Lucas used were to make you not realize he was doing special effects. Or a lot of the various effects that he was using were a sort of sleight of hand. and this is entirely the opposite thing.

It's like, look what I can do and give you that, and that's what provokes all of those moments. I mean, most of those, those aha moments, those, you know, holy shit moments in the documentary. I mean, documentary, in the film. Is this not a documentary? Yeah, no, there's points where you wonder.

But yeah, I mean, I thought that, you know, we talk about uncanny Valley now, but I don't know, you guys, I'm sure both of you would know better than me, me. I was wondering how many moments in film history we had prior to this where every single person watching it was saying, I cannot believe what I'm seeing right now. I think that that is actually still true. I think it is actually one of the few movies from this time. And Brian, you and I have talked about this before with movies like Terminator 2,

and there's a handful of movies that kind of don't age. You know, the technology that we achieved at that time made them perfect and long lasting. This one maybe more than anyone, just re-watching it again the last couple of times this week. I was like, this just works. Like, it just looks good. Totally. It's like Star Wars to me like that. We spent like 30 years after Star Wars going, where the strings, where the, where's the little part where you go, eh, not realistic, and there wasn't one. Yeah. And Jurassic's like that too. It's such a weird meta story, right? Because on the island, they made dinosaurs. Yeah. In Hollywood, they made dinosaurs. It is such an incredibly, the whole franchise is really meta, and that's something we can talk about

and really came up in a big way when Jurassic World came out a few years ago, too, where they sort of identifying the wonder of Hollywood and entertainment by making a movie about the wonder of entertainment. But is there anything else you want to say more broadly about the Jurassic Park movie? Just to the sense of the childlike wonder, I will be the Mr. D.N. A strand of Michael Crichton trivia on this podcast. He wrote the first draft of the novel through children's eyes. In fact, the first of it was a boy creating a pterodactyl, I think. But he wrote Jurassic Park from the point of view of the two kids in the park. He showed it to all his friends. They hated it. He went back and rewrote it in his disinterested New Yorker style Michael Crichton.

I'm above all this voice and the novel worked. So it was even more kiddie from the beginning. It's amazing too. And the story was optioned, I believe, by Spielberg or by the studio before people even read the book, right? Yes. And part of that, I assume, is because Michael Crichton was kind of a movie idea machine. A lot of his novels were adapted over the years. And this was this peak Michael Crichton, this period in time, 1990?

It kicks it off, though. Because he'd had adaptations, but there were a lot of You know, Congo's fear, all that stuff comes after. Right. This makes him into Mr. Iconsum. Every single Crichton IP that was available got made into a movie after this. Okay. And every book that he wrote subsequent was viewed through that lens.

Absolutely. He was oddly cinematic, not my favorite author, but for some reason he had just a knack for creating the structure to make brilliant movies. Or terrible movies, if you've seen Sphere. Let's get into the categories. the first category is most rewatchable scene. I'm going to pitch three nominees,

and you guys, feel free to tell me, those are terrible nominees. I've got bonus selections, but the first one is just the waterglass and the T-Rex intro. Maybe one of Steven Spielberg's finest moments. Probably the most iconic moment from the movie. You tell me if that's not the case.

I found watching it again just as effective. And it was fun to read a little bit about how they did it and how much time and effort they put into creating that scenario. How do you feel about that one? I think it's one of the most wondrous scenes in recent movies, the whole T-Rex attack, the reveal, the water, the fence, the sounds of that scene. Yeah.

You know, it's just amazing. And when you realize, like, how little he had to work with comparably with digital effects that we have now, and we'll talk about this, I'm sure, but that's why the scene's so good, right? Yeah, it's genius. It's like he had, you talked about this on Jaws. We always talked about this on Jaws about how, like, the movie was made great because of its limitations. It's almost like

they had to create, they had to invent CGI, like the concept of CGI on this level to bring back the level of limitations that it took for Spielberg to make in like a mind-blowing movie. Yeah. Because the fact, I'm sure that the fact, like all of the camera shots in that sequence were

chosen because of the restrictions, I mean, because of the limitations of practical versus CGI. There's an amazing documentary about the movie on the Blu-ray that talks, I think it was at the 20th anniversary of the movie, which you wrote about, as I recall. That's right.

And it shows Spielberg's storyboards of, and a lot of the vantage points of looking at the T-Rex through the sort of skyroof of that Jeep and how meticulous he was ahead of time about figuring out how he had to work around a lot of things you're talking about. I think one of the things, though, that makes so many of the effects, so to speak, work so well in this movie is it is kind of evenly divided between this new CGI technology that they're developing and a lot of practical stuff. You know, there's a lot of real, tangible, touchable dinosaur in the movie. And even some T-Rex.

Like, I saw a behind-the-scenes photo of, like, a big giant T-Rex, which I didn't know that they'd built that. They built a T-Rex. They built an animatronic T-Rex. So that's why this is so cool to me. It's like, CGI has just reached a level where it's, you look at it and you buy it, right? But practical effects were as good as they would ever be. That's right.

And they would never be that good again because no one would care anymore. When I was re-watching the day, I was like, oh, my God, these are helicopters flying up to Isla Nublar, right? Now they just do CGI helicopters. Of course, you wouldn't bother, right? You probably wouldn't even bother with the island, right? But we have to go to Hawaii and pick an island and run some helix. Like, practical effects were at such this great moment.

To David's point, the Jaws is exactly the right metaphor for this. There are 55 CGI shots in Drysport. 55, okay? Phantom Menace, which is 1999, if memory serves, 2000 plus. Right, now two to three thousand would be a normal summer blockbuster. Wow. Just thinking about that. Fifty-five.

I mean, they had nothing to work with. And everything else had to be, let's lift this Jeep up in that attack. Let's get some rain in here, real rain, not CGI rain, because you couldn't do that yet. I mean, it's just amazing. It really makes that stuff work. You can, and to go back to what you were saying initially about the scene, what you both said, it's not just one scene. It's like, it's a series of moments that are all tied together.

And that's a real, that's a real Spielbergian thing that I, you know, comes right out of the serials and everything else that influenced him, but it's a thing that's really lost. I mean, I don't want to belabor the point, but really lost in modern, you know, big budget action filmmaking that like, like, the confidence

and just general intelligence that, like, an action sequence is this can be a series of scenes. It's not just the scene where the dinosaur jumps out of the woods and starts biting people. Like, it is the series of moments that really just builds and builds and builds upon itself. And it would have been fine, you know, without, you know, if you cut it off halfway.

But it just built so magically. One last thing about the T-Rex attack. The Spielberg knows that other people forgot. Big things in the movies are only scary if you're small. So when you talk about shooting up through that car roof, that's why that works. Germo del Toro, when you do Pacific Rim and you have big monster versus big monster, guess what that looks like? The scale doesn't work. Two people fighting.

Two things fighting. But if you're little, and you're shooting up, you know, like this, and that thing looks really big. It's really scary. But so, this is a great segue to the next scene, which is something that is not as big,

but also just as fearsome, which is, I thought the Raptors invading the kitchen was one that, seeing it again was like, this is Hitchcockian thriller stuff going on here. Like, there's great action and there's great science fiction going on,

but the way that he establishes the terror between the two children and the Raptors. And we don't really, you know, it's taken for granted now that Raptors are just like a part of our pop cultural dinosaur consciousness but at that time at least for me

when I saw the movie I don't think I had heard of a Velociraptor I don't think I knew what it was so it felt like a new kind of big bad It was not in the child dinosaur cannon That ladle dropping on the ground Right like I'll always remember that sound The sounds are so good I know all that all the tins of

pots and pans banging around is the sound design so good We're gonna keep coming back to it But the CGI for those raptors It's unbelievable that it holds up You know? Clowning against the window, you know. Yeah, jumping up and jumping down.

I mean, that stuff is difficult. There's a scene in the shining where Danny runs into the kitchen and tries to get into this thing to hide from Jack Nicholson. And when I rewatched it, I thought, oh, that's what Spielberg was quoting. I didn't even realize that. Or the girl or Lex maybe tries to go and pull down that thing. That's the shining. Amazing.

That's his pal Kubrick that he's quoting. Okay, so that's the second one. The third one I have is sort of the race to turn the power back on slash shocking Tim off the electrical fence, which I think kind of cuts the divide between what you were describing earlier between the child like stuff and the adult movie stuff. As an adult movie watcher, I was like,

this is pretty good suspense filmmaking, you know? And then as a kid, you're like, what are you more afraid of than just getting shocked to death? That's a weird, like don't put the fork in the electrical outlet kind of feeling that I think a lot of people have. Do you guys have any other suggestions for... No, I would say that, but I also just did that scene.

The structures movie is really good. the way that he cuts between scenes is so good. And the rewatch, I was amazed. I was like, oh, I forgot. It's like the barbosol can that Dennis Nedri has going down into the water and then Alan Grant drinking out of the water. The fence is really masterful between cutting and you understand what's going on. I've forgotten how good that was.

Like, he was really thinking through how do we tell the story in sequence. Yeah, yes. And the suspense in that scene wasn't, I mean, it was about Timmy getting electrocuted, the potential from getting electrocuted. It wasn't the, like, running through the Velociraptor minefield and, you know, finding Samuel Jackson's arm or, you know, there's all this stuff builds up to it. But it was about, I mean, but the ultimate fear, like the ultimate, like, scare was about

electricity. And a kid getting caught in a tree, basically. You know what I mean, we've all been through that. Totally. The only other scene that I would mention is just the big, the first, the, what are they called? There's not Bronosaurus. The first time we see dinosaurs. Brachiosaurus.

Yeah, the brachiosauruses. Only because, I mean, not only because I'll defend that scene more if you want, but there's so few times in all the movies I've ever seen where I was, you know, kind of like just awed. I mean, that's not, there are many times where I've been awed watching movies. I can't think of anything else where it still awes me on the 30th rewatch. Like that scene, it's still. it still feels that it's because it's not just about look what I can do with CGI.

It's a it the seat this the scene is is constructed in the right way that that provokes this awe from you and it's it's it's a it's it's really impressive it's look what Sam Neil can do taking off his sunglasses. Yeah, I know, amazing. And it also is the moment when you get this sort of iconic John Hammond welcome to Jurassic Park. You know that line reading which is kind of burned into people's brains. Welcome to Jurassic Park. Okay, so what's your pick really quickly?

Gotta be the T-RX attack. T-Rex. David. Yeah, I'm in on that. Guess what? T-Rex unanimous. That's not a hard one. Best casting what-ifs. I didn't find many of these, and maybe that's because Spielberg was such a precise

and well-known filmmaker that he doesn't have to do a lot of, like, can you do this one? Can you not do this one? But there is one notable one that I found, which is that Harrison Ford was originally offered Sam Neal's gig. And he turned it down because he felt like he was not the right person for this job. And he saw the film and he said, I made the right choice. I was not the right person,

even though he loved the movie. Any other cast in one? William Hurt was also offered that role, apparently. Oh, interesting. I could have seen both of them pull it off, actually. I don't think it would have been that different. Yeah. And this is according to Wikipedia.

And this is not, I don't think he was offered the part, but Wikipedia says that Jim Carrey audition for the Goldblum role. Oh, that's interesting. That makes it a different movie. But I think that, you know, it's funny. I didn't know any of this. I'm reading this in real time, but I was just saying to Brian before we came on that

when I, rewatching Jurassic Park as an adult, and I've been watching a lot of Indiana Jones lately too, but I think the thing that I never really caught on was how neatly, and I agree with Ryan that this is for kids and adults and everything, but how neatly Jurassic Park fits into the Indiana Jones side of the Spielberg. How do you mean?

This is a very small thing, but Sam Neal felt like a full-grown adult to me as a kid when I was watching it. So I didn't quite see him as a Harrison Ford figure, who felt very, even though he was old, than me young and vital in his way. Right. But the fact that they were talking to Harrison Ford

makes perfect sense, because when I watch it now, I'm just like, oh yeah, he was just doing Harrison Ford. Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see. He uses coordinated attack patterns, and he is out and forced today. And he slashes at you with this. Six-inch retractable claw, like a razor. On the middle toe.

He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say? No, no. He slashes at you. Yeah, it was really. to be Indiana Jones in a lot of ways. It was that same sort of archetype. And I think that... Reluctant lover, you know, there's a lot of different...

Yeah, there's some archetypal. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, he was very much in that genre. The William Hurt thing is sort of interesting, too, although I think William Hurt turning down a role isn't exactly like big news. No, he's well known to have not done a lot of very famous parts.

I don't think it would have worked as well. William Hurt is just a little bit more internalized than intellectual and I'm not totally sure. Like one of the cool things about the movie is watching the Sam Neal character kind of evolve. He develops as like a caretaker. He develops as an action hero.

He gets to do some stuff. Just enough. Just enough. And I think it wouldn't have worked as well with Harrison Ford because Harrison Ford, frankly, would distract from the dinosaurs. I mean, they were the stars of the movie and Neil was able to sort of recede when necessary.

He wasn't this overpowering Hollywood star. And he did grow into the role of a leading man by the end of the movie. And, you know, as a kid, I don't think I'd ever seen him before. You remember the Sam Neal moment in Hollywood? That was kind of weird. It was a lead of like five or six movies in the early 90s. So, yeah, the piano, right?

A bunch of things. What I like about this, old Spielberg got, is like a lot of old directors where he's like, oh, I have a role in this movie. Who's a big star who could fill this? I have a bit part. Oh, Bob Odenkirk, you do it. Right. You know, Robert Altman got that way as an older.

This is young Spielberg going, who are the best people for these roles? Let me go out and find. an actor who works here, right? The movie has not very many stars in it for a giant blockbuster film, right? It's pretty perfectly cast, too. It's interesting because, like... But he used to do that. He doesn't really do that anymore.

Now it's kind of like, who's the best big star to play this? Because I don't want to go out and audition five billion people. There's good attention paid, too, though, to all the surrounding smaller roles. You know, this is an early Sam Jackson before he breaks out moment. There's a way night at the height of Seinfeld moment. You know, Laura Dern was a well-known Hollywood... Sion at that time, but maybe not as in the culture as she

is now. She'd been in David Lynch movies essentially before this. And you know, this is Richard Attenborough's first performance since 1979. He's wonderful in this movie. He's wonderful. The kids are great. Was Goldman the biggest star going in? Probably. I think so. Probably.

That would be my memory. Again, we were kids when this movie came out, but I don't think I'd ever seen any of these actors before. Maybe I was familiar with who Laura Dern was. Just in some, like, I'd seen her on the Tonight show or something, but like I don't, I mean, Jeff Goldblum was the only one that I would have recognized from, you know, not being allowed to watch the fly. I was going to say, I probably had seen the fly. But it is, this is a very formulating movie

and formative movie for me. Like, it kind of reveals to you that there's like a whole world of actors and possibility and storytelling. So it's kind of a fun, it's not the what if so much is just the way that it's constructed. I think you're right. It's kind of Peaks Spielberg in that way. What's aged the best? I'm going to throw some more nominees. that you guys. Sure. Just the stuff we've already talked about, the kind of ILM, CGI stuff

plus the dinosaur design and all the stuff that Stan Winston and Phil Tippett did in this movie, you know, pretty incredible. Right? I mean, you've heard about this a bunch, Brian. Yeah, no, I mean, it's like, you know, the great backstory writers,

they didn't know if they could do it. They sent Phil Tippett, who was a great practical effect. Guy worked on the rancor monster in Return of the Jedi and said, you make practical dinosaurs for us. Right? You are you, or I think it was, you know, sort of like what we would now think of as like essentially very high level, you know, models, right, that you move slightly.

And is that going to look good? And then we're going to take Dennis Muran of ILM and you go down another track and you just go full on CGI. Right. And let's see what happens. And then Dennis Muran comes. They show him a test. George Lucas famously cries when they show footage of this. And Phil Tippett gives the line that Stevens Pilberg put in the movie, which is I think I'm extinct because I think the world is about to change.

And in fact, it turns out to be a happy marriage of both, right? They both stay on the movie. There's practical effects. There's great creature effects, but there's great stuff, too. To me, that's the stuff that holds up the best. Yeah, the last... And it's an accident. I mean, it's sort of like, it's great effort,

but it's just arriving right at the right moment in history for it all to work. The most heartwarming thing from the Wikipedia in the entire... Wikipedia page that I saw on this was that Tippett's stop motion animators were retrained as digital... as computer animators. There's something about that. So they're some lineage there. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. But like after they did it, there's a great clip of that scene, I think, at the ILM test shoot

in the Spielberg documentary that's on HBO. And you hear them, I've read this before, but you hear Spielberg, like building up, you know, creating, setting the scene. And he's like, we didn't know how we were going to do it. You know, we saw the stop motion. It wasn't there. You know, like we saw the practical effects. We knew we couldn't pull off what the script had.

And then they saw. and they tell the story about Lucas crying and everything else. But you actually see the clip. And first of all, it's a computer that's like, you know, the size of a, I mean, it's like, I don't know, it's like eight inches squared. It's like an Apple 2. It's an Apple 2. The screen is so small.

The computer generated walk cycle, they call it, at least that's what they refer to it as here, whatever it is. It's like little green lines moving. I mean, it's, it's, there is, like, I could create something better than this on a, you know, that calculator from 1990. But you're an elite art director. But it was so basic. And the idea that you would see this and be able to...

That's one of the most amazing things is that's what they saw. And from that they said, okay, we can do what's in Jurassic... What ends up being in Jurassic Park. It's sort of crazy. I got another one for what's age the best. The idea of the super rich technological dreamer. So John Hammond, imagine as kind of an Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg type figure.

You know, big ideas can all... only see the upside of the idea and never the downside. I feel like that has become an oddly prescient view of successful people. And wants to create a theme park. I mean, where could it? I can't quite put my finger on it. It just sounds so familiar in a way. Yeah.

There's a lot of callbacks to Disney here and the idea of what Walt Disney wanted and the upsides and the downsides of that stuff. Yeah. And also maybe a particular Western theme park that is now that Michael Crichton created it is now part of our culture. Most certainly. Which is essentially what the story is, right? And it's Michael Crichton saying,

here's this movie I made. And now I'm going to get dinosaurs and rewrite the story with dinosaurs. So the dinosaurs killed the tourists instead of the cowboys killed the tourists. Pretty nifty how he was able to recycle his own IP. Any other what's age the best? Do you guys want to nominate? No, just to piggyback off that. And to aid in your segue,

I agree with that. There's a lot of very interesting parallels to the musks and the Zuckerbergs and whatever else of the world right now. his age did not age very well. I don't think there was any way to foresee at that point in time that the most rich and powerful people in the world would all be like 28. Yeah, we didn't anticipate that in any way.

They get, Jurassic World starts to kind of amend some of those things, but, okay, that's all I really have. I mean, what's age of the best is this movie is fantastic. It's still fantastic. And to parse out whether Sam Neal's performance was better or worse than Harrison Ford's kind of undermines the fact that they made a movie that felt like dinosaurs were there. And that's just an amazing accomplishment.

This is kind of a heat check moment for Brian, so I'm going to see the floor to him. But what's age the worst? I'm going to nominate, and you tell me if I'm wrong, just Michael Crichton's science and the whole possibility of this actually happening. Because when I was a 12-year-old kid or 11 or whatever I was when this movie came out, I was like, well, we're getting dinosaurs soon.

This all checks out to me. And I'm not. I'm not sure that that's actually the case. So I think if we went out to Sunset Boulevard and did a poll, how do you bring dinosaurs back? I think like 85% of people would say, well, you would find the mosquito in the amber. Like even today, right? Yeah. I think that's kind of.

Absolutely. So as a joke, as a fanciful notion, I think it probably does hold up. It was something that was real in, I think it was like 1983 when these studies were published in nature or science. I can't remember. It was a big media moment. Like you would open your local newspaper and it was like this new study has published. This is interesting. He sees that.

Michael Crichton. And then he actually wound up showing up at the office of this guy, George Poinard, who is the scientist who was working on this with his wife and introduced himself as Dr. Crichton, which he was a medical doctor. Incredible. Interviewed the guy at some length. And the guy said, the guy was getting a lot of media attention. So I didn't mean to think much of it. And then five or six years later, the novel comes out.

And the guy goes, oh, my God. There's my idea. Yeah. And he's taking it and run with it. Totally fairly. This is how these things work. Yeah. Is there no.

He thanked him in the acknowledgments of the novel, but, like, that's how it works. I guess the scientific discovery is public use. Yeah, that was the Dan Brown-Navichicoat thing, too. You can take nonfiction and convert it into fiction and don't really have to pay anybody off. Interesting. We should do that here at The Ringer. I have some ideas about burner accounts. Okay.

What's age of the worst? Anything else you guys want to nominate? Any performances? Do we want to think about Dennis Nedry at all? In Wayne Knight? I mean, it's, I remember Roger Ebert criticizing that when the movie came out. I don't know, look, stick. Extit.

Stick, stupid. Back to stick, Paul. You like your stick? No wonder you're extinct. I don't hate it, but it's a little goofy. It is. I could use him not hitting his head right before he is killed by the Dolophisor. You know, it's almost in the Dolophisors.

I think it's like that moment to me is a little silly. Yeah. He's a little, like, he does seem like a credible hacker. He does seem like an internet goofball. pushing 1993. Well, I would also, I would say that since we had so little information about, like, what a hacker was at that time, he kind of set the mold in some ways. I mean, I think a lot of people, you know, the sort of, you're just a kid in your basement blogging in your mom's basement. Vision comes from seeing people who look like Wayne Knight in movies as the, like, loser hacker.

So it did kind of set the temple there. It is pretty goofy. The movie does have, like, laugh lines, though. I mean, gold bloom is gold blooming, you know. He's still, he's riffing. He's doing motor mouth schick that then became a part of like action movie storytelling. I'm not sure if, I mean, I don't think I dislike this, but you can put the lawyer in that same category too. It's just being a little, I mean, first of all, if you actually...

It's kind of a blah performance. Yeah, but if you actually invest, I mean, think about the plot, the lawyer was a good guy. I mean, and he was he was representing the board of directors who were worried about the park safety, right? So basically his only sin was that he was a lawyer. And that was an easy punchline. I would love the cue ratings for us to go back to 1993 and see how these professions ranked in the American life. Lawyer, paleontologist, hacker.

You know, it's like, I feel it's a slightly different world now. Maybe all jobs that 11-year-old me aspired to, though, at one point or another. Okay. Any other age the worst? I'm with you on Nedri. It is the goofiest part of it. It's the only part that draws me out of the movie a little bit. Yeah.

But I'm okay with it. What was his plan here was to sell the DNA of dinosaurs that they could be developed elsewhere by another company? To a rival biological services company. Yeah, they left that pretty vague. Yeah. The assumption there was that there would be that there's a kind of a one-to-one rival in every industry, which we've seen, which is a premise in a million other movies. And this one, we just kind of take it at face value.

And this is also how do you light the fuse of the plot, right? Yeah. How do you get those fences shut down? Right. How do you cause a problem at the island, even though he doesn't really matter? At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter, right? But how do you set the plot in motion that things are going wrong? Yeah, I think that the real, yeah, yes, the real takeaway, it is, it's because of the plot.

I mean, it was a necessary turn. And I think that the big answer to this question is that it holds up so well. Like the whole movie holds up so well. Yeah, two things about it. One, I thought the Barbersalcan in general is just an ingenious construction. It's such a beautiful, like Spielbergian object. And it's so well made, and it was fun to watch in that documentary. They showed the production designer kind of showed how it was created and how it worked.

But in addition to that, it is a testament, I think, to the David Kep's script that I usually on this show talk about movie bullshit when a character or something happens that is an engine to push the story forward. And in this case, as you identify, Brian, like, NEDRI is the character who's doing that. But it doesn't really bother you that the machinations of the story. You're just kind of going with it all the time. you're not really interrogating it because it's so fun and it's so well-made. And the last hour is just like set piece after set piece that you're so locked in. Sure. You never really worry about like is there a rival biological company that also wants to create a dinosaur island.

And the entire scheme is ridiculous. Yes. I mean, but it's that's all second. I mean, there's no one would have come up with that plan. Okay. But the barbersall can was awesome. It is awesome. Half-assed Internet Research Corner.

Excellent. I'm going to throw a few out. I suspect you guys have your own fair share. I thought this was pretty interesting. Warner Brothers and Tim Burton, Columbia Pictures in Richard Donner, 20th Century Fox and Joe Dante all bid for the rights to this movie

before Universal acquired it for Spielberg. I have also heard Paul Verhoeven's name on that list. They were trying to get it for him. But kind of all the action directors of the 90s. Is that right on the heels of basic instinct? Right around that time? Were these kind of dog and pony shows where the studios all had major directors attached

sort of more conventional, more normal back then? Or should this speak to how big of a deal this property was? I think the latter. Of us, it was really fun. I remember having a childhood or a college-age conversation with Harry Knowles now. Just somewhat disgraced. But he was talking about how he was upset that those guys didn't direct the movie because they thought it would have been a lot more violent

and it would have done a lot more justice to, like, terror of the dinosaurs. Interesting. Where Spielberg was certainly a very scary, exciting movie. But Spielberg was still Spielberg, excuse me, was still Spielberg. he was still took the edge off it a little bit. I'm not sure I really want the Tim Burton version of Jurassic Park. I think I'd be very interested to see him, maybe, I mean, above all the other names on this list.

I think Joe Dante probably makes a much different kind of like cheaper and faster version of the movie that is probably a lot of fun. I would love to see him do something that's just about dinosaurs. Richard Donner probably just makes like a lower rent Spielberg movie. I mean, no disrespect to Richard Donner. 100%. Well, I mean, with Tim Burton have just made a claymation movie?

Like, I wonder what the idea would have been. I don't know. Yeah, I can do anything from public's to claimation. It's not like ILM, I mean, was just sitting there waiting for the winning bid to go, like, offer their services. I mean, at least that's not the narrative that we've been told. I think Danny Glover would say I'm too old for this shit in the Richard Donner version. Exactly. Yeah.

He plays Arnold, yeah. I think the T-Rex might have said, I'm too old for this shit. Another piece of internet research. After completing hooks, Spielberg wanted to film Schindler's list. But the Music Corporation of America and then Universal Pictures, parent company, President Sid Scheinberg, gave a green light to the film on the condition that Spielberg make Jurassic Park first.

The director later declared that by choosing a creature-driven thriller, I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws on land. I'm amazed, whenever I hear that story, and he was editing it from Poland if right or monitoring edits over seeing edits, and I think

maybe Lucas or somebody came in and helped at the end with it. I'm just amazed at his bandwidth at that point in his life. It's amazing. Like, how in the hell? Both those movies came out the same year. I'm having a hard time recording this podcast with you guys and like editing a blog post in an hour from now. And he made two movies that are burned into the brains of like three generations at the same

time. One of the great most successful, you know, a movie that made a billion dollars more or less. And then the movie that finally got him all the Oscars and the creative acclaim that he desired for so long. It's an incredible. You know, Bill often talks about the idea of the run, you know, when people are kind of in the midst of having a great moment where they have two or three years there where they're just doing everything.

I think you could make the case that this is the single greatest contained year for a filmmaker ever. I would not have any problem with that. Yeah. Because nobody made two, no who made two movies. I mean, how many people can we ever find who made two of anything in a year? I don't know, his drive. And he wasn't even that young when he made this. I mean, he's in his late 40s at this point, I think.

That sounds right. So it's really impressive. The film in the book generated so much interest in dinosaurs that the study of paleontology has had a record. increase in students. I don't know how it could get bigger than when we were kids. That's what I felt like every kid wanted to be a paleontologist. But I think this is like Woodward and Bernstein. Like this is the moment that you changed your major.

Right. You know, sort of the... By the way, I would... Did the Spielberg list ER debut the next year? Oh, yeah. He and Crichton were producers of. That's right. And Cricht was Crichton's idea.

That's how they became engaged right before that. They talked about it way back of in. Yeah. But if you're talking about the run, ER then winds up just throwing off hundreds of millions of dollars for everybody involved. Yeah, he drives into the skid with Amistad, though. You know, things go bad eventually. Okay, although called Jurassic Park,

many of the dinosaurs within the park are not from this era. However, brociosaurus and dilaphasaurus are from this era, though its name only appeared in the scene with Dennis Nedry, stealing the dinosaur embryos, Matriacanathosaurus and Stegosaurus, improperly labeled Stegasoruses are also from the Jurassic era. So the science is bad here, guys. I remember that from childhood.

That was like the first, like, complaint. But it was a complaint amongst kids. Like people were, like, it was that, it was that aha moment. Like, I'm smarter than the movie. It's not, this isn't, Mesozoic Park doesn't sound good. That's it. It's just a title. That's like a place you go for like cancer research, honestly. So I'm just picturing the terrible Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet about what, you know, what really happened in the Jurassic era versus the Mesozoic, it's not good. Universal paid Crichton $2 million. So the rights to his novel before was even published.

We noted that before. 1.5 million for the rights and half a million for him to write the script. Is that what it was? Yeah, he wrote the first draft. It was like two separate, yeah, two separate kind of agreements. Which did not quite work, and then that's Kepp gets called in and making a new movie. Makes sense. David Kep, interesting career, maybe a different rewatchables podcast, but he's made some interesting movies and very different movies from Jurassic.

He did a few with Spielberg, though, right? Spielberg seems to have these kind of symbiotic relationships for like five years and then moves on. There's a comfort. He's one of his comfort guys. Yes, yes. I'm sure he's been in the room on a lot of movies that he's not credited on.

The Tyrannosaurus's roars were a combination of dog, penguin, tiger, alligator, and elephant sounds. Yeah, and that's a Spielberg trademark. Is the sound and the effects are always going to be great, right? Yes. And different and interesting and not cheap.

It would never feel cheap. Yes. We had this conversation a month ago, totally separately, but there's a documentary about the shower scene in Psycho at how when they were trying to figure out the appropriate sound for like the knife stabbing into flesh or whatever that the sound tech brought in,

had just like a giant folding table covered in every melon that he could get his hands on and they just stabbed them each one by one as Ichcock just sat in complete silence and then at the end just stood up and said like cassaba and walked out of the room but I love but just that but the legend there whether or not it's true I mean, it's just the meticulous attention to detail, right?

Do you think Spielberg lined up like a penguin and a tiger in a room and said roar for me? We wouldn't know this story about dogs, penguins, tigers. I mean, it's the, now we're in an era of layering sound, right? It's not just like, it's not borrowing sound. That's right. But I do think that it's, you know, the attention to detail is part of the, you know, internal narrative here too. We mentioned the glass of water,

and the glass of water sitting on the dash of the Fort Explorer was made to ripple using a guitar string that was attached to the underside of the dash beneath the glass. That's incredible. Very clever. Very clever. Cool. Again, back to that practical. There's something so, so touchable and visceral about the whole movie.

This could be, yeah, this could be the last guitar string ever used to affect some sort of on-screen effect, what I just double affected there. But, like, ever in film. All ripples are CGI now. God, I've got so many of these. This is a movie that is just, like, chock full of tidbits. I mean, is there anything you wanted to point out that you've written about over the years? Just in terms of like stuff that it's notable for. Yeah, it's just neat shit that happened.

Yeah, I think those are the big things. I think also just like it probably starts a new kind of mini series of creature features. You know, Godzilla, right, comes a couple of years. There's a weird Godzilla lost world moment, right, where they're kind of competing with each other. Yes. I think that there's a, there's also a case to be made that this is the first true modern blockbuster. And then a lot of the things that we are obsessed with, those of us, who think about the movies and read about the movies, particularly.

You know, this had a record-shattering $50 million opening weekend in 1993, and it is like not quite the dawn of IP, but close. You know, Lost World comes out a few years later, and then there's the misbegotten Jurassic Park 3, and then it is ultimately revived. But it created like a level of competition at the box office. And box office watching became even more aggressive than it had been in the 80s with the advent of this movie.

I'm trying to think of other examples from our, of movies that were not designed to be IP in the sort of way that we think about them today. So, like, not Star Wars, right? Not something that was built to be a series, but something that had such resonance that it, like, forced itself into that. The weapon is kind of in that zone, you know,

where it's like, I don't think I would have guessed after seeing the first lethal weapon, that there would be four lethal weapon movies. And that Hollywood will have been trying breathlessly to make a fifth for 20 years, but they are. I mean, I guess Jaws kind of fits into that category, too. Absolutely. I will say just my own personal interest tidbit

is that the the cover of this novel was designed by Chip Kidd and he was one of the many legends that became more legendary in the making of this movie I mean that's his sort of resume but just the simple silhouette of the T.R.X. Skeleton on the white background it's a very bold

and yet somehow at the same time sort of demure cover. I remember in 1990 when that cover came out when the cover came out for the cover came out for the book. I went to a bookstore and they had like upcoming releases pamphlet and I got it. I didn't know Michael Crichton was. I didn't know what the book was about. I read the little thing and I carried that pamphlet around me for weeks because it was so arresting and so cool. Have these things imprint on you. I know. And I was like this, I don't know what this is, but this looks like exactly like something I will love. I saw that cover on so many blankets of Robert Moses Beach that summer

a lot of people reading that book. It's so amazing that like I feel like we, in 2018, we exhaust every possible. Anything that a kid, that any kid anywhere in America has, like, express an interest in, there has been like a Cartoon Network cartoon already, like within 24 hours. There's like, you know, there's some kids book about it. There's websites, everything else. It's so hard to believe that there was something so obvious sitting there. Everybody is interested in dinosaurs. Let's make this big movie, write this big book about it, that you would see that and, like you said, carry it around for months. So that's some interesting throwaways from this movie. I think in,

They were going to film the kids riding around on a Tyrannosaur when they're walking around the park with Grant. And they couldn't quite get it to look credible. I think they built it if memory serves. Right. Kids kind of rode on it and they're like, this looks like crap. And we can't do this. Yeah, it's as much what they didn't do is what they did do in the movie. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, it goes to David's larger point about it, essentially being Jaws, you know, two in that respect. Yeah. You know, it's like there were all these other ideas and they just didn't quite work. And they're like, okay, let's just, we got the movie, right? Yes. I'll do a couple of more, and then we'll go to the next category. All right.

Alan Grant is modeled after paleontologist Jack Horner, who like Grant Diggs and teaches in Montana and was also a technical advisor on this film. I guess there's some credibility there. Here's a good one. Steven Spielberg received $250 million from the film's gross and profit participations. Guess what? He was underpaid. Yeah, totally.

The movie made more than a billion, so. It made more than a billion. It also created a series of movies now, too, that I've been. We're on the eve of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, which will make a billion dollars inevitably. And that is like the true power of creativity. He really made something that created a multi-billion dollar empire of story. That's crazy. Which is crazy.

Because maybe we'll talk about sequels later, but the novel and the movie ends, nothing can happen anymore, right? The island they go, like, it's over. And so the whole thing is like, this is such an amazing idea that we have to figure out ways to get back or we have to. I figure out ways to have more islands or, you know, there's no logical sequel. This is not Superman, right? There's no logical sequel for this movie. I don't want to go too far down the sequel, Rabbit Hole, but is there both a more negligible sequel and a more negligible Spielberg movie than The Lost World?

Like, I didn't even watch it to prepare for this. I don't even really know how it starts. It's just one of those which is like, yeah, I don't care. I don't care at all. It's good and it holds up. No, it doesn't. Does it? No, it doesn't.

It doesn't hold up in the way that this is not a try. transcendent movie or anything. The acting performances are all over the place, but it's a fine movie. I wasn't like laughing my way through it or anything. I think it would be in my bottom five Spielberg. I remember also just the intense like letdown of being 18 or whenever I was. When the movie came out and going that, certainly being like, awesome. You might have been the wrong age.

You're so excited. And then I was just like, oh, this sucks. That was one of my first movies like, I was truly disappointed in theater. Like, this is awful. I just have no memories of it, which is, I guess that's notable. That's right. Let's go to the Dion Waiters Award for the best heat check performance by a role player.

I wrote down one name. The name is Wayne Knight. Ah, ah, ah, you didn't say the magic word. Now, you can make the case that Wayne Knight is terrible in this movie, or you can make the case that he is doing something in an entirely different movie. Maybe it's the construction of the character. But the, like, ah, ah, ah, ah, like all that stuff that's kind of burned into my brain as well.

Any other nominees? I would like to depict the Dearly, departed Bob Peck for this role. Oh, yeah. As Muldoon, Robert Muldoon. They should all be destroyed. Ah, Robert. Robert Muldoon, my gay warden from Kenya.

A bit of an alarmist, I'm afraid, but knows more about raptors than anyone. What kind of metabolism is they have? What's their growth rate? They're lethal at eight months, and I do mean lethal. I'm hunting most things that can hunt you, but the way these things move. I fast for a bypass. Cheater speed? Because I think when you make a movie like this, which is pulp, right?

You must have a couple of people that are absolutely. Absolutely devoted to pulp. Richard Attenborough is all the way that a baby. He's going for him to Jurassic Bar. And so is Bob Peck when he strides in with those muscular calves and those shorts, you know, shoot her. Shoot her. I mean, he looks like he's straight out of the 1940s jungle adventure movies. Yeah, he's out of the Arthur Conan Doyle story.

Yeah. He's out of the Arthur Conan Doyle novel. Absolutely. This continues to this day, but it's funny, like one of the greatest fantasies that this movie and so many others like it have put forth. is that there is a like a group of professional like jungle security

like jungle security experts in the world I'm sure that like Blackwater has these people available now don't get me wrong but this was that's one of my favorite archetypes just like he's the he knows he knows what's going on in the park What would be in special forces? Like am I six?

And even if you were what would how would that translate that would translate half of this you know a little bit of this stuff And it's a great character of pulp which is the great white hunter Yes you know from King Solomon's minds to everything, right? This is something in the... All Crichton is doing is rewriting all stories, right?

He wants said in his life, all I've tried to do in my whole career is rewrite Conan Doyle. He actually said that. And this is him pulling this character from Polp, modernizing it slightly and going, here you go, baby. I love that.

You've convinced me. Sam Jackson, it's easy to look, it's easy to watch this movie and feel like he's being, like, restrained because he became such a different thing. But this was the beginning of Samuel L. Jackson, as we know him. Yep.

And, you know, just how, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was emoting for what was expected of him or probably, or at least what was written for him. He was, he was acting. He was, he was, he was, he was hamming it up in a lot of ways. But he was restrained by the chair he was sitting in. And the amount that he was able to do with that cigarette dangling out of his mouth and just the, the relative calm of, you know, hold on to your butts and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that was, that was a good performance. I was shocked by the smoking, by the way. Yeah.

Steven Spielberg would not put smoking in a motion. movie like that today. Nobody would. So Sam Neal actually talked about this in the documentary and said, the minute I saw on the script that Sam's character was chewing on a cigarette throughout the whole movie, I knew he was going to die. There was no way he was making it out of the movie because smokers do not make it out of these movies. That's great. Funny joke. Yeah, man, that image of him just chewing on the cigarette, that card close-up. It's people who doesn't do close-ups like that. It's very, very memorable. Okay, Apex Mountain. This is a tricky one. It's Jeff Goldblum for me. Yeah, he's nominated. And here's why. Here's why.

He's a Hans Solo of this movie. Look at this. See? See, I'm right again. Nobody could have predicted that Dr. Grant would suddenly jump out of a moving vehicle. There's another example. See, here I'm now by myself talking to myself. That's chaos. If you have the guys devoted to Pulp, this is the Star Wars rule, right? Then you must also have the guy with a hip modern sensibility who can make jokes and pull you out of Pulp 13-year-old boy universe.

Who can tell the audience. it's okay to like this movie because this isn't going to be, you know, Gandalf running around the forest, right? This is for you world. Absolutely. And he is so good at that. He is. And really, by the way, the novel, his device, and we talk about plot devices, his device in the novel is Michael Cright and say, I want to take all this complicated chaos theory and feather it through the novel. And I need this ponderous guy to talk about it.

Totally different in the movie. He's Mr. Humor. That's one big pile of shit, right? He's the guy to come in there and say all this dinosaur stuff, I'm going to raise an eyebrow. Yeah, I mean, as much as I love this as a kid, this is another kind of thing the thing I reconsidered as an adult

was I don't think I really got him, I didn't read him as cool when I was a kid. Like, sort of, he just seemed a little, like, I didn't think he was like a geek or something, but I didn't quite get the gold bloom charm. Well, he gets a couple, there's a couple of interesting choices they make with that character, right? One, he's an all black. He's got the black horn rooms before that's

cool, and he's got the black button down. And then he gets the kind of the beef cake shot, the cheesecake shot, he's got a shirt open and he's laying down after he's his leg. He just lived on so much longer. I didn't even remember that from the movie when it became an internet thing. It's just such a funny thing. And it actually just explains

who Goldblum is now. You know, Goldblum is very sort of spelt and muscular in the fly, but that's a, that's kind of a body horror movie. This is like him just being like, I'm a nerd hunk. He kind of invents an archetype. I remember logging onto the prodigy network

to see him talk about where you could buy those glasses in 1993, four, somewhere in there. It was an awesome early internet moment. Dr. Ian Malcolm is very aspirational. He definitely is. He was very cool. I just want to make that clear. He was.

When we go through best quotes, I mean, half of them are Malcolm quotes. He just got so many great lines in this movie. Any other Apex Mountain nominees, Spielberg? Would you say Spielberg? If we're forced to talk about other people, sure. But, I mean, he's scaling the mountain but has not reached the summit. Well, he's now, he's going down. I mean, his summits are so high.

Tune in July 4th for the Jaws. He's already been on K2, right? And this is like, you know, him just doing a smaller mountain, right? One controversial entry into this one, the T-Rex. He went on to bigger and better things in a lot of people's minds, but I think this was peak. This was peak Tyrannosaurus. I love it.

I would agree. Let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. If you love scoring amazing deals and incredible hotels, you'll love Hotel Tonight. Hotel Tonight partners with Hotel. to help them sell their unsold rooms, helping you find sweet deals at cool top-rated hotels. Hotel Tonight shows you the best deals at hotels you actually want to stay at.

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like, it just kind of works. It doesn't really have that dopey-90 stuff that doesn't work usually. I would only say, and I find the technology in this movie to be very, cool and still very credible, even though it's what we now recognize as prehistoric, as David said, computers. But like, you know, it's a Unix system. I mean, that stuff is

in terms of having attention to comment, that's pretty awesome. Oh, yeah. Yes, that's absolutely right. When, um, when, what's your name? When Lexi, when Lex is like, I know computers. I, like, I know what hacking is. That sequence at the end, that's a little bit laughworthy. I honestly don't know

how I was supposed to take it because again, if this scene were in, in, Indiana Jones, I think it would have been clearly played as a laugh, but Sam Jackson or Arnold, when his arm is discovered, is a little bit like of a, it's, I can't. The wrong shade?

Huh? Is it the wrong? Yes, it's confusing, but also just the door swinging with an arm on it. Like, that whole thing seems a little bit campy. Yes. It is kind of a Vincent Price movie kind of thing. Yeah, and like I said, in another Spielberg movie, you would have read it clearly as one thing or as a

ridiculous thing, as a mistake. But yeah, there's not a lot. I like the arm suggestion. Let's pick some nits. Here's a weird one for me on the rewatch. And I felt this way ever since I saw it in 1993. Half of the punchlines, the volume feels like it was turned down to like nearly zero. There's a lot of under the breath punch lines in this movie, which you can barely hear.

Why do you think that is? I don't know. I don't know if there's like Spielberg was like, he does a lot of first takes. Right. He's like just do it and great. Don't overthink this. Even to David's point about it's kind of underselling hold on to your butts,

which is very memorable line. But like, if Sam Jackson were to read that line in 2018, it would be at quite a volume, you know? Yeah. But there's a lot of muffled like, you know, when they're talking about babies in Montana at the beginning, and Laura Derns says, it's a small-sized adult, Alan.

Like, there's a lot of just little aside that if you don't actually just sit there and really pay attention, you sort of miss. It's kind of funny to me. Any nits for you, David? I mean, we talked a little bit about the science earlier. And I go back and forth on it. I actually think Mr. D.N.A. Was that his name?

That was his name. Was amazing. It really works. That worked really well. Perfect exposition device. Yeah. And I think in terms of exposition, the science was, I think it's easy to look back and pick nits about the science behind the movie.

because like Brian said, it has become such a meme that it's, it's not just that it's become part of the popular imagination and we laugh at ourselves when things like that happen, but also because this raised the stakes for how technology was going to exist in pop culture and in movies. And, you know, that there was any coherent science at all, I think was an accomplishment in a lot of ways. And then everything that came after it was like,

now we actually have to have scientific advisors and we got to really make this thing hold together. All of that said, the science is pretty laughable in retrospect. Yeah, it's kind of, it's pie-eyed to say this, but like I don't think Marvel's Avengers movies are inspiring anybody to learn more about science. No.

That's just not. And this movie, in its weird wonder way that Spielberg tends to have, I think obviously pushed people to either reconsider their childhoods in a way and the things that fascinated them, I suspect we were all dinosaur kids. Yeah. And also younger kids seeing it for the first time are like,

paleontologist is a badass job, and I'm going to look into that. And obviously, you may learn that, You don't get to save the day necessarily when you're a paleontologist, but you get to do interesting things. So that's kind of sweet. We should have more scientist heroes. Yes. Best quotes.

God, there's a bunch. I don't want to overdo it here. I'll read a couple of you guys tell me if you like a couple. God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.

That's Dr. Ian Malcolm, followed closely by Dr. Ellie Sattler. Dinosaurs eat man, woman, inherits the earth. So there is a whole feminist reading of Jurassic Park, which I have written about a little bit, but there's this whole, like, you know, all the dinosaurs are female. That's right. It's a matriarchal society. And things only go badly when the male species isn't introduced. Right.

There are people who have read it way too closely up to Grant when they're landing on the helicopter having to tie his seatbelt and he picks two female ends of the seatbelt, you'll notice, and ties them together. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's a very deep and not quite trustworthy reading in the movie. I just say, by the way, in terms of best quotes, there's a lot of funny. There's just a lot of funny in this movie. There's actually more funny than I remembered.

Yeah. It's very entertaining. It's like, you know, all these movies feels like you have to have this many jokes. And it feels like it has that many times like three. Yeah, they're not, and they're not. And it doesn't feel like joke goes here. That's it. Exactly.

It's like, yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists. I love that line. That's such a great movie script line. And it also doesn't, it is something that someone could credibly say if they said to you, like, I have a dinosaur amusement park. I really like that a lot. Well, and that it was able to be said. I mean, Westworld, the movie obviously came before this, but that is the premise of Westworld, right?

I mean, it's also the premise of, I mean, there were other pirates of the Caribbean movies. It was not the premise of those. It was, you know, I mean, they weren't about the theme park, you know. But it is amazing that you could make that joke. And like the 100 examples of movies that Jurassic Park has spawned since then. I mean, it really throws into relief how influential this movie is that that joke could just be told. Absolutely. One line that I didn't really think worked when I rewatched it is, you know, it's kind of the park is coming apart right at the end.

And Hammond pulls up in the Jeep to pick up the kids and Laura Dern and Sam Neal. And Grant says, Hammond, after careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your park. And then Hammond says, so have I. Yeah. Which like that. Just like we don't, we didn't need that. The novel works better when he gets eaten. Hammond deserves to be eaten, right?

Hammond should die on the island. He's not punished. He's not. And I think that's Uncle Stephen. Right, you know, saying like, you know, I can't kill off the old guy because the audience would hate me. That's probably true. Also, doesn't want to kill off one of his heroes who he famously beat him at the Oscars for Best Director when he won for Gandhi. I was going to say, is this like LeBron picking KD for the All-Star team?

Like, he just, he wanted to just bury any perceived beef, even if there was no beef. There's a little bit of that. Yeah. There's a little bit of that. He's embracing him. I love that. Any other lines you guys want to point out? No, I mean, they're all good.

I was just going to say a blanket yes to everything that you have noted. but like I think that the first two I think that Pirates the Caribbean I think actually the first one The guy creates dinosaur sequence is the best It's really cool It's dramatic and clever So it's like such a hand

I mean it's like it could so easily have been played The wrong way It could have felt over the top A lot of the ones that run through the movie too We spare no expense That are now just part of popular culture Right They just again they're not great

You know beautiful etched in stone lines But they just work so beautiful Clever girl I think More than anything It's a beautiful one I'm very fun. I'm always on the lookout for a future ex-Mrs. His lechery is also funny in this movie.

I don't know if you could get away with that. Maybe only Goldblum could get away with that in 2018. Yeah, maybe. Probably unanswerable questions. So, you know, we've talked a lot about the science of this movie and the ridiculous nature of it. I did read, and I don't know how true this is. It could be apocryphal.

And in 2005, there was a discovery of DNA strands, the likes of which we hadn't seen before, on a T-Rex fossil that indicated we might be able to replicate the genome of dinosaurs. I don't know where we've gotten in the last 13 years since they discovered that, but the probably unanswerable question to me is, is there anything plausible about this movie? Well, I think David and I are the right ones to ask about the future of genetics.

Two of our highest-formed humans. Yeah, I was wondering, I guess I was wondering, like, if this actually existed or if, you know, would we know about it? it. Probably not. There's probably Elon Musk might. But don't you think the more realistic, I mean, I'm not like saying this was, I'm going to argue about the realism of this film, but it seems like the more

realistic version of this is someone's creating dinosaurs in a lab and killing them when they're one day old or something over and over again until they get it right. Like they don't need the T-Rex to start attacking people to figure out whether they've cracked the code or not. It just reminds me the 90s when you would look at Time Magazine and feel like Dolly the sheep or DNA would be on

the cover every other week. And it was just like, it wasn't just that there was a lot of news, but our fascination with DNA was like a thing. That just so 90s to me. That's so true. Now we only use it for like true crime podcasts. You know, it's the only. Right.

The CSI. Exactly. Yeah. The OJ trial, 1994, right? And it's like DNA was a thing. That was such a big thing. Yeah, that's true. You have any more unanswerable questions?

Would this movie, could it possibly have been better if it were made by different people? I think that there's a, I think that the other directors we talked about earlier are, I mean, you could make a somewhat compelling case that they would make a more interesting movie in some ways. I mean, this is all depends on definitions of words. It would be cool if the, I mean, I've said the same thing about Batman over and over again. It would be, I would love a world in which like the current Batman and Jurassic Park universes where like every movie was dramatic, was deliberately different and made by a different director and deliberately leaning on a. different genre and just trying out very different visual experiences? This is something that is pitched in the marketing

and sort of the promotional campaign for movies where he's like, oh, this is the three days of the Condor version of a Marvel movie. But we never actually get it. You never get it. We never get a movie with the style of an otore who has a unique point of view. And Spielberg obviously has basically created

the visual language of movies in the last 40 years. So for him, this is actually kind of as amazing as it is, it is basic. straightforward is like great popcorn storytelling. And it would be cool to see like the Burton version probably sucks. But I'm curious. I would like to see it. I don't know if modern Tim Burton.

I mean, I don't know exactly where Tim is in his career right now. But there's definitely like a point where he fully embraced CGI and understood how to use it where he, I'd be interested to see what his dinosaur movie looks like, but I don't know. Related unanswerable question. Is it an apex movie for Spielberg that ultimately winds up being a terrible thing for him? And here's what I mean by that. He unleashes CGI on the world.

The whole world gets the toolbox. Two parts of that. Spielberg movies and CGII, not as good. He's not as comfortable in that world as he was in the old practical world, right? In the year of Ready Player 1. Yeah. And in one of his more effective fully kind of CGIed movies. But the other thing is like 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s, there were certain directors that when you went, you knew the special effects were going to be really special.

Like a James Cameron movie, Stevens. But you was like, this is going to be cool. I'll see something I've never seen. All of a sudden, you don't feel that anymore. And Spielberg makes a movie. And you go, well, that was kind of good and it was a lot smarter and had more flourishes. But everybody's movies look like that. Yeah.

Yeah. And I just think it made him less special as a director. It's not, it's the CGI is one big thing. But I, you know, I've talked about this in terms of Marvel movies, too, is that all of every big movie, all of the CGI, all of these super major movies look the same. And a lot of that is Spielberg's visual vocabulary that he established in this movie. And yeah, it makes it really hard to appreciate anything. And it makes it really hard for anyone

to have any moment that feels important because it's all sort of, it's all referencing the same vocabulary. And the Ian Mal, I mean, the John Hammond, Cheapo metaphor is, is, you can't suppress it here, right? Like he built something, he built this great creation that then ate him. You know, I mean, that was, that's what happened.

And to me, that's Jurassic Park. away because he is he made good like I'll put in Minority Port after this you know I'll put in World World I'll go for a lot of his movies after that after this but there wasn't an action movie that hit this high and is to me this rewatchable also I'd argue is this the last

maybe if Catch Me if you can is on I would watch that at any point but is this the last really not great Spielberg because lots of good ones after this but this is this the last like really rewatchable Spielberg movie you and I differ on Minority Report I'm very pro Minority Report and I find it very watchable. So there's maybe one or two more after this?

It's not that many, yeah. Catch me if you can, and mine are reporter, probably future rewatchables candidates, so I don't want to be smirch them too much. But after that, you're right. I mean,

there's a lot of historical drama that isn't as effective. There's a lot of popcorn that is somehow out of touch with where popcorn movies are. He loses a little something. And part of it, I think,

is a testament to the kind of frozen, amber perfection of this movie. There we go. Another irresistible metaphor. I couldn't get away from it. And it is kind of, of a mosquito, you know, and it's sucking the blood of Hollywood going forward. Okay. The Spotlight, they knew, overacting award. We've gone through, I think, most of the candidates here.

Is it Wayne Knight? Is it Sam Jackson? Probably not. Is there anybody who's up for this? For the, just a self-conscious overacting performance? Yeah, just go, just, maybe it's John Hammond. Maybe it's, I was going to say, Edinburgh. He knew what he was doing. Yeah. He's really, he's non on the, on the scenery. He looks like he's having so much fun. Definitely. I mean, what a great thing for him. You have his career, one of the most beloved people filmmaking on multiple continents, right? And then all of a sudden you have this thing where you're like the beloved old man of a giant dinosaur blockbuster. Yeah, okay.

So we'll go, we'll say firmly that it's Attenborough. Would this movie be better with Danny Trejo? Guys? Doesn't it anything machete versus the dinosaurs is a different movie? Let's make it. Someone called Robert Rodriguez right now. He's not busy. He would green.

he would green light this tomorrow. Imagine him toe to toe of the Raptor. Last but not least, who won the movie? Jeff Goldblum for me, and Malcolm. I mean, to me, re-watching it,

I could pick, a Tyrannosaur probably is 1A. There's a lot of winners of this movie. But to me, like, the thing that's special is, I'm not sure I've found Jeff Goldblum to be this fun and have a part

that is this, that sort of, you know, dignifies him and puts him puts him in a position to win as I say in sports, quite like this movie. He's so good. David?

Sticking with the dinosaur theme, I think that, first of all, I mean, it wasn't some revelation, but how great was it that the T-Rex got to be the hero at the end after being the villain of the whole movie? I mean, it's just like that was, that was in the way that you expected this movie to go, the way this construct, because it was so simple in so many ways, that was fantastic. So give it to the, I would say give it to the T-Rex, Except, I mean, Velociraptors went from not existing in the popular consciousness to having an NBA team named after them in a pretty short span of time. That's huge.

That's a great call. We didn't really talk about the staging of that last scene, but holy shit, it's so good, it's so smart. It's such perfect action movie storytelling. Yeah, it's so great. If the velociraptors weren't smart, none of that makes sense. But the way they constructed that they're actually kind of taking time to stalk their prey. I love it. It's great. I had been planning to say that the winner of this movie was Steven Spielberg

because of the $250 million he acquired, this entire universe he launched. And his like affirmation of being a Titan for the third consecutive decade, right? This is the moment when we say, wow, he's able to do it now in the 90s, too. We saw it in the 70s with Jaws. We saw it in the 80s with, you know, E.T. and number of other movies is Indiana Jones. And now in the 90s, he's still, still he rises. But one, Brian made a very compelling case that he kind of fucked up movies going forward

with not just the CGI But the way he does some of this stuff And then also, essentially a year later He decides to launch DreamWorks Which is one of the most complicated Crypto failures in Hollywood history And so maybe I can't credibly say Spielberg I'll go since you're going Raptor

I'll go T-Rex David Guys, any last notes? That's a good zag. Yeah, exactly It's all about the Zag I'm amazed how we watch most movies. I'm just amazed about it. It's one of mine that's truly not just for the artifice of this podcast, but like I could just put it in and watch any point.

Oh, yeah. And I could pick up at any point, too, right? It's not one where you're like, oh, this is the boring part. Fast forward. I was just blown away by the last hour. I was like, this is an engine. It is going. I would say one last note, too, the colors of this movie are wild.

By the way, maybe should have been the nitpick section. Spielberg was very neon at this point. It was crew with Hook and this. Oh, yeah. There's some just loud late 80s and 90s problematic colors going on. I was part of the era as much it was just the Spielberg thing, but just the way that, yeah, that the SUVs were painted, all the logos and everything like that. Yeah, there is a lot of interesting color combos going on. There's also just a genius of merchandising happening in the movie where we actually see a scene of a gift shop full of stuff that ultimately would be sold to people.

Very controversial at the time. If I remember correctly, people got mad at him because it was. like he was, they were pissed off because they want to go to their blockbuster without remembering that this is like a giant commercial vehicle. I was okay being sold to. Yeah, me too. I hope you guys were being okay sold to. This has been the rewatchables.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. Yeah, this has been great.