The Thematic Heart of Jurassic Park
There are a thousand reasons why fictional stories can fall apart, and twice as many solutions for each case. In film, you can take those numbers and multiply them by ten. However, time and again I’ve seen that it can all be traced back to a common denominator. I work as a storyboard artist in animation, which differs from live-action storyboarding in the sense that animation artists sometimes enjoy a greater involvement in shaping up the narrative side of projects. We put together what essentially amounts to rough cuts of films, working from script to editing, and half of the job focuses on exposing issues with the movie before two hundred people come in to start working on individual scenes and there is no turning back. These issues can be minor, sequence-specific, or major, with larger structural implications. In my experience, the latter are the most common. Scenes play out showing no internal consistency with each other, the story gets tangled up in itself, and the audience loses track of what’s being told to them. When this happens, the surest way to identify the root of the problem is to figure out what the film really is about.
Anyone who has ever attempted to write fiction is probably familiar with how frustratingly similar the process can feel to detective work, with much of the time devoted to locating and connecting dots that help you navigate a storm of seemingly random ideas, in order to find the common ground among them. This common ground is the most basic element of a narrative, and often the most elusive: the theme of the story. Some call it message, others call it moral or main takeaway, but it all comes down to the same fundamental concept. An idea that anchors everything in place and works as a guiding light so the rest of the pieces can all point in the same direction.
Finding a theme, if you don’t begin with one already, can be tricky. But then again, having one in mind from the start isn’t strictly necessary nor all that common. Creative thinking works in mysterious ways, and one part of an incomplete story can inform the next step at any given point in the development process. Still, figuring out the thematic goal of the narrative becomes critical sooner or later, since a story without a point is about as purposeful as a bow without arrows. When speaking to students, I tend to paint all this as a sailboat crossing the seas. The boat itself is the main character, with whom we navigate an ocean of endless possibility. The water in that ocean would be the plot, which by itself can take us to any conceivable destination. What helps us pick a destination is the wind, pushing the boat in a specific direction. In this case, that wind is our theme.
I find blockbuster movies to be particularly good examples to deconstruct this correlation between plot, theme and character for their simplicity. They can be a bit of a double edged sword, because when they don’t work they invariably devolve into shallow, jumbled up gobbledygook that barely exists to justify some sort of empty spectacle. And yet, quality popcorn entertainment has offered some of the cleanest looks at how to marry material content and thematic intent. Back to the Future, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens or The Thing are some early tentpoles where the filmmakers’ thirst for flashiness came paired with a strong set of storytelling skills. And if you combine those two, not only do you craft better movies, but you also provide your spectacle with a soul. In other words, your spaceship takeoff scene or dragon roaring shot don’t just look cool, they also matter because they belong in a greater whole and affect the characters. They mean something.
Nowadays, we can still find the same approach being put to good use in films big and small like It Follows, Ex Machina, The Witch or Mad Max: Fury Road. All of those and many others have transcended their humble genre origins because they used their high concepts to support an actual story. Any of them can make a good thesis of how to handle themes, but my personal favorite remains Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
I like to use Jurassic Park to break down the components of story structure during meetings, talks and presentations because it’s a film everybody has seen, it’s a pivotal reference for a generation, and it has one of the most straightforward uses of a theme that I can remember from any motion picture. As an adaptation, it took a largely philosophical book and repurposed its contents in a way that presented a hopeful perspective on life without ever abandoning the cautionary aspects of the original story. It intertwines plot, character and theme clearer than most movies, and it does so to such a successful extent that people keep discovering subtle messaging scattered along the narrative decades after its release.
Jurassic Park could well be the mother of all high concept movies. It’s such a bold idea that it sounds alluring from the start: an old philanthropist resurrects dinosaurs via genetic engineering and puts them in a zoo, from which they promptly escape and begin eating people. That’s the plot, the mechanics of the story, and what piques the interest of the audience to begin with. It’s the surface, and a pretty good one, but like any other surface, it requires a solid core to stay in place. That’s where characters come into play.
The characters are what will drive the audience through the plot, allowing them to experience it. And ultimately, they are what gives that experience some significance so the thematic message can be delivered. In Jurassic Park, the main character is Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist who is invited to Isla Nublar as part of a group of experts to endorse a cutting-edge dinosaur theme park. But that’s not who he is, that’s just what he is: a scientist, which justifies his presence in the park so he can run away from dinosaurs. If we actually take a real look at who he is, we will find out that he is a middle aged guy in a seemingly problematic relationship because his partner Ellie wants to have children while he happens to hate them.
The fact that Grant dislikes children is crucial to Jurassic Park because that’s the reason the whole movie works at a structural level. It’s the element that ties plot, theme and character together and, ultimately, provides the story with a beating heart. Spielberg has built half of his career around stories about troubled or absent fathers, and Grant fits right in the mould. Indeed, it’s common for filmmakers to have interests they keep revisiting film after film, but what makes Spielberg particularly interesting is the effortless way in which he elevates the conventional mechanics of his crowd-pleaser movies by imbuing them with meaning.
Think of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and its UFO sightings to signify the role obsession can play over artistic vision. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade uses the Holy Grail as a proxy to symbolize the quest to reunite father and son. And Minority Report depicts a futuristic police force able to stop criminals before they have even committed their crime as a comment on preventive war measures and the rise of mass surveillance. Like them, Jurassic Park could have simply been a movie about dinosaurs crushing cars and chomping down people in a modern world setting, but instead it used that concept to develop an optimistic tale about the indomitable nature of life.
Atypically for a film built on allegory, the characters themselves spell everything out. “Life finds a way”, as chaos theorist Ian Malcolm eloquently puts it early on in the story. This is literally the movie’s whole point and message, which reveals itself in a plethora of manners throughout the narrative. The fact that Malcolm utters his words in the middle of a larger conversation about natural reproduction is all but accidental. The concept of dinosaurs escaping their enclosures, in turn, speaks of freedom and liberation as well. Later on, as a mutation in their genetic code allows them to breed, this becomes the physical representation of life thriving, as much as the Tyrannosaurus Rex breaking through its paddock fence was a metaphorical one. There is some beauty in the inevitability of it all, a series of ideas so simple that it almost feels like they could have occurred to anyone. Yet it’s not so much about the ideas themselves, but how they systematically build upon each other and enrich the film altogether.
Experiencing the story through the eyes of Alan Grant, Jurassic Park hits each of its narrative milestones in ways that mirror and support his character transformation. After spending a whole opening act feeling various degrees of discomfort around children, the T-Rex attack flips his world upside down as he faces a situation where two kids’ lives suddenly depend on him. He steps in to rescue them from certain death, and as a direct consequence, ends up stuck in the jungle as the sole adult responsible for their safety. This sets up Grant’s journey as a reluctant parent, just as the Rex escaping from its paddock establishes nature’s first deliberate step toward breaking free of human control. Without realizing it, an audience watching Jurassic Park is being fed a story within a story whose foundations go back to the scene where Grant casually terrorized an impertinent kid in the Montana badlands.
Needless to say, the child-averse side of Grant fades away the more time he invests traversing the park as a surrogate dad, a role he fully embraces on his first night out in the wild. Having found a tree tall enough to keep himself and the kids safely above the dinosaur bite line, he retrieves an old raptor claw from his pocket that echoes his past in the desert as a grumpy bone digger. On the page, this leads to a conversation about his future as a paleontologist now that there is no need to unearth fossils anymore. But figuratively, the claw means much more. When Grant throws it away moments later, the action is meant to represent him leaving behind not just his former profession, but his entire former-self. From that point onward, he is finally ready to be a father.
By the time he and the kids reunite with Ellie, the group have become a family unit in everything but name. As they fly home together at the film’s closure, a cutaway shot to a flock of birds gliding above the ocean neatly wraps its two principal storylines by reminding us that dinosaurs never really went fully extinct, they simply evolved into something else. Life did find a way once in the past, and for Alan and Ellie, it will find it again in the future.
Besides Grant’s journey, the movie features several other characters with their personal starting points and particular destinations. The story could be looked at from the perspective of Dennis Nedry’s untimely betrayal or John Hammond’s tragedy as a dreamer blinded by naive optimism. At the end of the day, Jurassic Park touches on a lot of stuff, from corporate greed to wildlife conservation. But many of these additional thematic ideas are built into subplots that are tailored to support the main narrative all the same. Take the demise of Donald Gennaro, the lawyer that one minute doubts the viability of the park and the next dreams of its profits, who gets rightly punished for his avarice by becoming the first casualty of the tour. He is also the first adult to forsake Hammond’s grandchildren. When Lex Murphy starts crying in a panic “he left us! he left us!” she means Gennaro as much as her own father, a thinly veiled callback to an earlier scene where we are told that her parents are going through a divorce.
Divorces are a recurring motif in Spielberg movies, and often the source of his characters’ conflicts. When asked whether he’s married, Ian Malcolm wryly confesses to be “always on the lookout for the future ex Mrs. Malcolm.” He is also revealed to be the father of three children, although similar to Gennaro, he is unable to provide Lex and Tim with any help when the need arises. That makes him the opposite of both Hammond and Grant as a cynical realist in the first case, and as a failed father in the second. Malcolm’s flawed character got further explored in Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World, a story that reversed the original movie’s premise by focusing on the dinosaurs themselves as parental figures and framed its human leads as a dysfunctional family. The Lost World was and still is a maligned film in the eyes of many, yet it stayed true to its predecessor’s themes and by doing so it managed to build a perfectly coherent continuation of its internal messaging.
Demanding viewers may argue that while all this is fine and good, movies like Jurassic Park still make poor examples for character development and thematic exploration because they don’t spend enough time honing those elements. To be fair, Grant pretty much changes from jaded grouch to concerned parent in the lapse of a Tyrannosaur footstep. Ellie’s view on feminism seemingly limits itself to a couple of well-placed, witty lines. And Hammond’s disillusionment gets mostly resolved in a single conversation over a few cups of expensive ice-cream. But here is the thing: all that is just right. Filmmaking is all about concision and clarity. Crafting individual scenes that can deliver an idea clearly within two minutes is far from easy. Grouping those ideas under a common theme can be a creatively exhausting task.
It’s also worth noting that the concept of telling a story about parenting within the same movie a pack of velociraptors hunt two children in a restaurant kitchen is nothing short of extraordinary. Big entertainment films can be an entry door for people who might later come to enjoy Embrace of the Serpent or binge through sixty hours of The Wire. They are by no means lesser art than any other competently produced movie when built upon a confident vision, and they bring along a sense of fun and discovery that can make millions fall in love with the medium. They can also be learning tools, teaching us about craft from an early age. Because we all may have come to Jurassic Park for the thrill of witnessing dinosaurs walk the earth again, but what we actually responded to was its story. We remember it for its heart.
• Expanded and edited on February 14, 2021.
