YMMV / Jurassic Park (1993)

This page is for YMMV regarding the first Jurassic Park film specifically. For YMMV for the franchise as a whole, see here.

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• Adorkable:
  • Grant whenever he geeks out over dinosaurs.
  • Tim's straight-away endearing due to his unbridled enthusiasm for, and extensive knowledge of, dinosaurs.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Ostensibly the film (and book) have the moral "Be careful about playing God with nature." A Reddit meme humorously observes that part of the problem at the park was caused by the geneticists not realizing they were giving the cloned dinosaurs the ability to switch sexes, resulting in the Space Whale Aesop "Support trans rights or get eaten by dinosaurs."
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Whether Nedry's beef with Hammond about his pay is legitimate comes down to how you interpreted Nedry's line "If you can find someone else to do all that I did for what I bid for this job..." Either Nedry (who is said to have financial problems that may or may not be his own doing) underbid in a desperate attempt to land the gig without knowing the full scope of the work he'd been asked to accomplish, or the contract up for bid was purposefully missing several of the aspects of what needed to be done in order to get people to bid lower and save money. The former is Nedry getting in over his head, the latter is Hammond trying to cut corners, which is within his character even in the movie (as evidenced by the fact that he went with the lowest bidder for the security programs). Alternatively, it's possible that both reads of this situation are true, which would explain why they're both quick to blame each other.
• Angst? What Angst?: Tim takes the hardest hits throughout the film, from being inside a car as it falls into a tree canopy, getting nearly crushed by it while he climbs down, and being electrocuted by a fence. Despite all this, he's able to handle the horrors of the park pretty well and never once loses his enthusiasm for dinosaurs, including the T. rex that very nearly killed him. It stands out in comparison to Lex, who is more visibly traumatized from the tyrannosaur's attack and treats every dinosaur she sees afterward with open fear. This is pretty accurate for children who love animals: for example, a dog-lover child will usually still like dogs after being bitten.
• Base-Breaking Character: Lex and Tim. They're either woobies for suffering so much during the course of the film, or they're rather annoying for both being mostly The Load and Kid-Appeal Characters. Tim is seen even worse, since he doesn't do anything (majorly) beneficial for the main characters while Lex at least has mad hacking skills.^note This is actually switched around from the book, where Lex is much younger and purely The Load.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • While the Dilophosaurus killing Nedry is pure Nightmare Fuel, it was his fault that the T. rex got loose and endangered the guests, including Hammond's grandchildren who were innocent of his misdeeds, if any. Thus, it's utterly karmic and Too Dumb to Live that he doesn't know what the dino is, tries to lure it away with a stick, and threatens to run it over because she goes on the rampage and curbstomps him.
  • After the raptors kill Arnold and Muldoon, it is beyond satisfying when Tim and Lex trap one girl in the freezer and more so when Rexy goes on the rampage to grab the other two.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Gennaro gets eaten by the T. rex. It actually just rips him in half; Ellie and Muldoon find the pieces later.^*Some materials say that he was eaten, just messily with Ellie and Muldoon finding the remains.
  • The T. rex had no way of getting into the visitor's center to eat the raptors and save the heroes. In reality, visible in multiple shots is a large pathway to outside the center, covered only by plastic sheeting, which was either part of the building's design, or a result of it still being under construction. Of course, this just downgrades the creature's sudden appearance from Offscreen Teleportation to Behind the Black, because the humans and second raptor were looking right at that entrance, and the rex shakes the earth with its footsteps.
  • The T. rex shown in the film, while likely faster than future paleontology would determine real Rexes to be, is never shown or stated to be capable of keeping pace with a speeding jeep. Hammond states early on that it's top speed is clocked around 35 mph, and it only maintains pursuit of the jeep later on because it started out running while the jeep needed to accelerate from a stop, and Malcolm accidentally knocks the jeep into a lower gear.
• Complete Monster: For Lewis Dodgson, see here.
• Critical Dissonance: While few viewers of any kind would claim this is a bad movie, many critics regarded it at the time as over-reliant on spectacle and a step down compared to Spielberg's earlier major blockbusters, while general audiences widely regard it as a masterpiece and one of the greatest blockbusters of all time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ray Arnold is played by Samuel L. Mother-@#$%ing Jackson. The sheer amount of "Arnold survives/returns" entries on the Wild Mass Guessing page are proof.
  • The One-Scene Wonder Dilophosaurus is pretty popular for its unique traits, like venom spitting, frill, and hissing, even if they aren't exactly realistic.
  • Robert Muldoon is popular for his badass Great White Hunter personality, even though in the movie itself he's The World's Expert (on Getting Killed). It's probably not a coincidence Roland Tembo in the sequel is a rather similar character. Bob Peck's performance is a big contributor. If it had been anyone else, he would not have been nearly as memorable.
• Fan Nickname: "Clever Girl" for the lead Velociraptor. It's a reference to Muldoon's last words before being killed by her.
• Fanon: It is actually unclear as to which of the three Velociraptors is officially considered to be the Big One since they all have the same model and the film, along with its tie-in material, treats all of them as equally intelligent and dangerous. Due to this, fans have decided that the Velociraptor who wasn't locked in the maintenance shed or freezer must be the Big One, as it's the only raptor that has the most screen time and the last raptor standing against the T. rex. In addition to this, fans also assume that the Big One is the very raptor who killed the worker at the beginning of film (even though that one was implied to have been shot and killed as the scene fades out), ambushed Muldoon (and earning the name "Clever Girl"), and opened the kitchen door.
• First Installment Wins: For the first three films, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who considers the two sequels to be better (or even on par) with the first one. Even Jurassic World, though more well-received than the previous sequels and its own two sequels, still didn't reach the acclaim of the first film. Financially speaking, it's still the most successful domestically when adjusted for ticket price inflation, though World came close.
• Fridge Logic: Grant only discovers the existence of Velociraptors because one of them hatches in front of him. At this point, Hammond knows that the raptors are far too dangerous to use as an exhibit so he's confined them to a special isolation pen. Now, it's logical that they created the raptors not knowing how dangerous they were because no one had ever seen one before, it's also logical that Hammond being a big softie wouldn't have a dangerous animal put down, but WHY were they still hatching MORE?
• Genius Bonus: When the raptor jumps after the characters who've fled through the hatch in the ceiling and it falls to the floor, we see it land with its head flung back almost double and its limbs folded up. This is a very typical pose for such small, lightly-built theropod fossils to be found in.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the early scenes before the tour, Hammond's guests eat Chilean sea bass, a fish that was considered new and trendy in fine dining in the early 90s. Later in the decade, the increasing popularity of Chilean sea bass would lead to overfishing and the need for regulations to prevent the fish from becoming endangered. Another small unintended wrinkle to have in a film about extinction.
  • The fate of the park itself is this when thinking about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Even if Nedry hadn't caused it to collapse, in twenty-five years time it would have been destroyed by the eruption anyway.
  • Sattler's speech when she joins Hammond eating in the cafeteria of the Visitor Center after everything's gone to Hell takes it in an even more depressing light when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom shows the dinosaurs that so many people worked so hard to bring back are once again threatened with total extinction thanks to environmental factors beyond anyone's control. All the humans can do is try and save as many as they can without getting themselves killed in the process.
    Dr. Sattler: It's still the flea circus. It's all an illusion.
    Hammond: When we have control again—
    Sattler: You never had control, that's the illusion! I was overwhelmed by the power of this place! But I made a mistake too, I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now!
  • Grant's opinion to Hammond eerily foreshadows the ending of Fallen Kingdom:
    "Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?"
  • Dodgson advising Nedry not to use his name and acting covert became this when his actor was sentenced for child molestation.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Since Samuel L. Jackson has become a Memetic Badass, fans like to assume his character Ray Arnold is still alive and kicking dinosaur butt. Without his right arm, apparently... sometimes still with it.
  • Robert Muldoon. The comics even retconned his death and kept him alive like the novel, explaining the Velociraptor was only playing with him instead of eating him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the dinner scene where Hammond and Malcolm argue over the ethics of cloning dinosaurs, Malcolm draws a clear line between cloning animals such as condors which have become endangered thanks to humans (a good idea to him) and cloning animals such as dinosaurs which nature had selected to go extinct (a bad idea to him). In the novel The Lost World (1995), that version of Malcolm considers anthropogenic extinction to be a necessary thing as well.
    Malcolm: Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.
  • When the tour begins and the jeep rolls through the Jurassic Park gates, Malcolm quips "What do they got in there? King Kong?" (which is a tip of the hat to the design of the gates, taken from the original King Kong (1933)). In 2016, Universal Studios would open up Skull Island: Reign of Kong on Islands of Adventure, next door to the island devoted to the Jurassic Park River Adventure ride.
  • One behind the scenes story tells of how a crew member had to crawl inside of the animatronic T. rex to glue its skin on. The power cut out and the animatronic's hydraulics nearly sliced the worker to ribbons. Fast forward 21 years, and a horror game franchise would use that exact fate for multiple characters, including the main antagonist.
  • It seems that Sam Neill, like Alan Grant, is also "not machine-compatible." He was apparently unable to figure out how to promote Jurassic World Dominion on social media and had to text Laura Dern for help.
  • Whit Hertford, the actor who plays the volunteer kid who annoys Alan by calling the Velociraptor fossil a "six-foot turkey", later voiced an animated dinosaur himself in The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving. Better yet, he has a musical number in that film called "When You're Big". Aside from the absence of feathers (which was not really common knowledge at the time the first JP was made) what's the biggest difference between the actual Velociraptor and the JP franchise's raptors?
• Love to Hate: Dennis Nedry is a fat slob whose greed ends up endangering the lives of the cast. But Wayne Knight's performance makes him Laughably Evil that provides much of the film's funnier moments.
• Magnificent Bitch: The Velociraptor alpha is a terrifyingly intelligent predator and one of the most dangerous dinosaurs in the park. Introduced killing one of the park's crew, the alpha killed all but two of her pack to assert her dominance, using her remaining pack to constantly check their old pen for flaws so they could make their escape. When the power finally goes out, the raptors bust out of their new pen and go on the hunt, with the alpha setting up a trap for Robert Muldoon when he tries to take them out. Learning how to open doors, the alpha and one of her pack bust into the visitor centre and relentlessly chase the heroes, nearly killing them were it not for the surprise interference of the Tyrannosaurus rex. The alpha and her pack are some of the most iconic dinosaurs in all of fiction, and stand as one of the most shining examples of surprisingly clever creatures in cinema.
• Mandela Effect: There's a longstanding rumor that one version of the film includes a shot of the T. rex's head crashing through the wall of the visitor's center during the climax. There's no evidence this ever existed, and in the comments for this video Steve Williams (who designed the T. rex animatronic) says no such shot was ever filmed. The only place where such a moment occurs is in the Sega Genesis video game adaptation, which may cause some fans to misremember it as being a scene recreated from the film.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "That is one big pile of shit" makes for a popular reaction gif.
  • "Well, there it is" as a summation of the impact of Mic Drop-worthy moments.
  • The following "Boy, do I hate being right all the time." is a popular internet answer to say "I told you".
  • The shot of Malcolm posing with his shirt unbuttoned as a summation of Jeff Goldblum's Estrogen Brigade, as well as fuel for manips (such as this memorable one combining it with the scene with Grant rests his head on a Triceratops).
  • "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." ^note Ian Malcolm objecting to recreating dinosaurs. Used in response for when an idea or creation (science related or not) is deemed a bad idea by the poster
  • "Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word!" ^note Nedry's message when Arnold attempts to hack into Nedry's computer
  • "Hey look, it’s [x]! See, nobody cares!" from the scene where Nedry talks to his boss.
  • Malcolm's line to the car camera where he asks the people back at the visitor's center if they're eventually going to see "dinosaurs" on their "dinosaur Tour" (due to the dinosaurs being complete no-shows so far during the tour) makes for a really common mad-lib line where people will fill in the two mentions of dinosaurs with other words to joke about something.
    Uh, now eventually you do plan to have "superheroes" in your "superhero movie" right?
• Moe: Mr. D.N.A. himself, thanks to his endearing character design and voice courtesy of Greg Burson.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The utterly unique and alien hooting noise made by the Dilophosaurus as it closes in to give Nedry his just deserts.
  • Rexy's iconic roar is both awesome and bloodcurdling in equal measure.
• Narm: When Hammond is talking to Grant on the telephone and suddenly hears gunshots as Grant tries to keep the raptors away, he yells out Alan's surname. However, the way Richard Attenborough delivers it sounds more like he's yelling "cunt" or "clowns". Listen to it here.
• Narm Charm: "They're moving in herds. They do move in herds." In any other movie, this line would be utter Narm, but since the line is delivered by a teary-eyed Grant in one of the most beautifully iconic scenes in film history, we are too busy feeling amazed by the scene to really laugh.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Robert Muldoon's "clever girl" comment has basically achieved meme status. Doesn't help that it occurred the moment prior to his death where some argue that he was better off trying to shoot the raptor rather than shoehorning an epic one-liner.
  • The VFX supervisor (credited as "Dinosaur Supervisor") Phil Tippett has since achieved meme status for his in-universe incompetence.
  • Laura Dern has declared that she's always met by children who recognize her as "the woman who put her arm into dinosaur poop".
• One-Scene Wonder: The Dilophosaurus, which pops up briefly to spit its venom at and eat Nedry, has become so iconic through this scene that it has become a staple element of the Expanded Universe and has influenced the portrayal of its species in other dinosaur-related media.
• Signature Scene:
  • The initial Awe-Inspiring Dinosaur Shot, showing the majesty of these resurrected creatures.
  • The scene where the "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" banner falls down in front of Rexy as she sounds off her Mighty Roar has been parodied countless times because of how awesomely memorable it is, and is guaranteed to appear in trailers.
  • Rexy creating Bad Vibrations as she approaches the visitors' cars. Almost every parody of the film features the famous water cups shaking as a sign of the imminent danger. And, of course, her escape from her paddock, punctuated with a Mighty Roar.
  • The Dilophosaurus revealing its crest as it prepares to spit poison was so shocking it shaped the way general audiences came to remember the species, despite such depiction being scientifically inaccurate.
  • The T. rex chase, in which she is seen from a rear-view mirror with the caption "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear", has become so iconic it codified a trope.
    Malcolm: Must go faster.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • There are many spectacular and highly convincing visual effects in this movie. Ray Arnold's severed arm that looks like a fake prop is not one of them.
  • The Digital Head Swap for Lex during the climactic air vent chase; it was done out of necessity after the stunt double had accidentally looked up during the shot.
  • During Nedry's conversation with the man at the docks, you can see a playback progress bar scrolling underneath the computer feed, making it quite blatant they're using a video file for the scene.
  • Nedry has his money bag "magic trick," which disappears between shots when he's talking with Dodgson.
  • The Brachiosaurus scene, where the head of one appears while Grant, and the kids, are resting in the tree was one of the weaker animatronic effects even for its time and has not aged well. The texturing on the Brachi in the reveal scene hasn't exactly held up over time either.
  • When the heroes first arrive to the island, there's a moment when Grant and Sattler first witness a Brachiosaurus where it's quite obvious that they're standing in front of a green-screen.
  • The strings the prop guy pulls to activate the Dilophosaurus' attack can be seen on film (corrected for the 3D release), as well as the smoke of the gun shooting the poison at Nedry, who then clearly proceeds to smear more goo on himself with his hand.
  • The infamous stagehand holding the raptor's tail to keep it from tipping over before it enters the kitchen.
  • When Jophery falls off the raptor cage, a hand from the camera crewman can be seen in the bottom right corner blocking the falling worker from hitting the camera that's currently filming.
  • The Tyrannosaurus is moving too robotically to be a convincing animal right before it smashes into the car roof.
  • A stage light, a random potted plant, and the wires attached to the car are clearly visible when Rexy rolls it over. These have also been digitally erased for the 3D release.
  • Keen eyes will notice that the characters in the Tyrannosaurus chase scene pass the same foliage multiple times along the same slightly curved route. This is because the scene was filmed on a backlot set at Warner Bros. that wasn't nearly as long as the film suggests. During the same scene, when Ian first hears the footsteps the jeep is still by the fence and the other green jeep. When we cut to Muldoon, Ellie, and the Tyrannosaurus emerging from the bushes, we're suddenly in the middle of the jungle with the fence and the other jeep nowhere to be found.
  • Reused footage appears when Sattler makes a run for the circuit breaker maintenance shed. The moment where Sattler jumps over a downed log is used twice almost back-to-back.
  • Near the end, when Rexy appears in the Visitor's Center to (unintentionally) save the main characters, the Velociraptor disappears for a few frames while it's being chomped on in Rexy's mouth.
  • The real life technology switch to 16:9 widescreen television has caused several errors to appear along the edges of the screen that weren't visible in the old 4:3 ratio. The prime example being the Jurassic Park electric fences that just look like they come to an end after several feet, and look as if they can be simply walked around.
  • The infamous terrain switch where the ground that Rexy broke out of from her paddock mysteriously transforms into a high cliff.
  • When Tim gets electrocuted, he falls in an unnatural trajectory, clearly done with sped-up footage of Joseph Mazzello being lowered down with wiring.
• Spiritual Adaptation: With its plot about a scientist's hubris driving him to tamper with nature and bring life to something that shouldn't have been given it, resulting in his creations attacking and killing numerous acquaintances of his, and its focus on the dangers of hubris & over-ambition and how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, this movie could very well be the closest we'll ever get to a true-to-intention adaptation of Frankenstein.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The opening orchestral to "Welcome to Jurassic Park" sounds an awful lot like the beginning melody of "The End" by The Doors.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Robert Muldoon is hyped up as a badass hunter and one of the Park's most competent employees, but we never get to see his prowess in action, as he is ambushed and killed by the Big One as soon as he sets sight on one of the Velociraptors.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The first film for the most part does a good job avoiding references that would tend to date these kinds of films, but the bulky computer monitor technology and the prevalence of Thinking Machines computers grounds it to the 1990s. As does Sattler's attire.
  • Lex and Tim massively geek out over the concept of an "interactive CD-ROM" when going on the tour, being especially impressed by the concept of a touch screen display.
  • This applies to the dinosaurs as well, thanks to Science Marches On. In 1993 they were the most up-to-date depiction of dinosaurs in film. Now they're nearly as dated as the "old" dinosaurs they once displaced. Jurassic World justifies the continued use of the outdated designs by making them explicitly an In-Universe case of Artistic License – Paleontology for the sake of marketability.
  • The main point of the story is to an extent a product of its time. Jurassic Park is based upon Michael Crichton's misgivings about the scientific community researching gene sequencing in the 1980s, which lead to the then-ongoing Human Genome Project and the predictions at the time that it could lead to things like human cloning and genetically modifying babies in the womb. Thus, Crichton wanted to provide a story akin to Frankenstein or War of the Worlds to again drive home the point that nature is the way it is for a reason and man can not be God, even if we develop technology that ostensibly can allow us to do so. Now that DNA sequencing technology is established and has so far only lead to benign things like DNA matching to solve crimes or genetically modified food (which itself is controversial), Crichton may seem rather hysterical in retrospect, but his fears were more reasonable in the early 1990s.
• Values Dissonance: Laura Dern commented in 2022 that she considers Grant and Sattler's romantic relationship to have been completely inappropriate as they were coworkers and there was a 19 year age gap between them (she was depicted as being 23 while he was 42).^note This was an element added by the movie, their relationship was strictly professional in the book. For the time the movie came out though, nobody would have seen it as strange that the two primary leads of a big blockbuster were romantically together despite the age gap and working together.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • This movie is the milestone that popularized CGI in The '90s. The special effects team actually had to invent entirely new technology to get the job done. Made more awesome because the effects have held up better than most of Jurassic Park's 1990s CGI-riddled contemporaries, and even some films now, including its own sequels. And even with all the new CGI, it might surprise that many of the dinos were still shot with traditional animation techniques, such as animatronics and puppets.
  • The 3D re-release looks better than several modern 3D movies.
  • Most folks find even the special effects of Jurassic World (released nearly a quarter of a century later!) lacking when compared with those of Jurassic Park.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Kids Love Dinosaurs! Yet, as the film's entry here shows, bringing them to Jurassic Park is prime Nightmare Fuel as the film still takes inspiration from the horrifying events of the novel. The PG-13 rating hardly stopped kids from seeing the first movie, as it was marketed to children through toys and other merchandise despite being fairly violent and scary. That the movie was responsible for trouncing the animated film Once Upon a Forest in the box office is particularly telling, given that there was so little competition from Disney that summer (Super Mario Bros. (1993), a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reissue, and Hocus Pocus were all they served up over May-August, and only Snow White did much business).

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