THE LOST WORLD Can’t Capture The Magic of JURASSIC PARK

The JURASSIC PARK franchise is one of the more vexing modern movie series I can think of.

Assuming we’re only focusing on the motion pictures, and ignoring the bevy of animated series associated with everyone’s favorite dinosaur theme park, the JURASSIC PARK franchise is now seven movies deep, with no less than three distinct sets of casts and characters.  They just keep cranking them out, and have been since the mid-90’s.  The odd part is, the movies just keep making billions of dollars, even as you look around and realize…nobody really likes the JURASSIC PARK sequels that much?

I mean, yes, the first JURASSIC WORLD seemed to have a brief foothold in pop culture, and did as much to confirm the idea of Chris Pratt* as a 2010s action star as GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY did to introduce it.  I’ve always had a soft spot for that one, not so much for any of its plot turns or character dynamics (all of which felt rote and by-the-book), but for its honest depiction of Jurassic World as a genuine theme park, complete with its own CityWalk and celebrity tie-ins.  A lot of people rolled their eyes at the prominence of a Margaritaville and a pre-ride video starring Jimmy Fallon in it, but to be frank, all of that was the most believable world-building I’d seen in a long time.

*Yes, there really was a time when Chris Pratt was more or less universally beloved.

As time went on, though, JURASSIC WORLD started gaining an admittedly earned reputation for being cynical, mean, and nostalgia-baity (it all climaxes with the T-Rex from the first movie making a big superhero entrance, which is a really weird thing to do if you think about it).  The other two JURASSIC WORLDs never even curried that much favor in the first place; FALLEN KINGDOM largely eschewed islands and parks and mostly took place in an old mansion, while DOMINION remains one of the most baffling blockbusters I’ve ever seen, with two generations of JURASSIC actors mostly just standing around staring at locusts, looking embarrassed to be there.  The less said about the most recent offering, JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH the better.

Of course, strange and slightly sad JURASSIC PARK sequels are not a modern plague.  In 2001, Sam Neill returned for JURASSIC PARK III, a Joe Johnston romp that actually gets off to an okay start, with a “family tries to recover their son from the dormant island” plot line.  It even has some goofy energy to it; Honest Trailers and Reddit have made much mirth out of the raptor saying “Alan!” to Dr. Grant, but everyone seems to have forgotten the context (for the record, it’s a dream sequence; there isn’t actually a dinosaur that speaks English in JURASSIC PARK III).  

The movie’s main issue is that, after a fairly okay first and second act, it just…kinda stops dead in its tracks.  Seriously, put JURASSIC PARK III on again sometime.  The climactic battle starts to gear up, then the army just shows up and the movie is over.  It’s one of the most abrupt endings I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood production, a sure sign that the whole thing just couldn’t come together behind the scenes.  Plus, JURASSIC PARK III runs into the same issue future sequels would; how do you do this without Steven Spielberg?  Hell, even Spielberg himself couldn’t capture the magic a second time.  

This brings us to the awkwardly titled THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, which served as both Spielberg’s return to the world of dinosaurs, as well as the silver screen itself.  It had been four years since his Oscars night triumph, and in the interim, he went ahead and founded a whole movie studio.

So, was the wait worth it?  Upon review…maybe?  Kind of?  Not really?

THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite, Vanessa Chester, Peter Stormare

Written by: David Koepp

Released: May 23, 1997

Length: 129 minutes

In this go-around, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) reluctantly returns to the world of Jurassic Park when John Hammond recruits him on a rescue mission.  The location?  A previously-undisclosed second island, where the dinosaurs were originally cloned and left to mingle until they got (hypothetically) transported to the park.  The target?  Ian’s girlfriend, Dr. Sarah Harding (Moore).  Joining him on this mission is documentarian Nick Van Owen (Vaughn), engineer Eddie Carr, and (stowing away) Ian’s estranged daughter Kelly (Chester).  Place all of these folks, as well as a team of big-game hunters led by the amazingly named Roland Tembo (Postlethwaite), onto a dinosaur-infested island and what do you get?  Well, if you’re Universal, you’re hoping for a shit-ton of money and merchandise.

THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK was not a sequel that was ever supposed to be; the ending of the first film felt fairly definitive, with everyone realizing the idea of a theme park with real dinosaurs is a terrible idea and leaving it all behind.  Yet, the success of the initial 1990 Michael Crichton novel, as well as that of Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation, made a second JURASSIC PARK adventure all but inevitable.  As Crichton got to work on a second novel, which would go on to be titled THE LOST WORLD, the only real question was who would end up directing the movie.

For a long time, Spielberg wasn’t going to do it.  He actually hadn’t made a film in a couple of years, instead making himself busy launching DreamWorks Studios with his colleagues Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.  He genuinely wasn’t sure if his life could accommodate doing this film.  At one point, Joe Johnston had made himself available for the director’s chair, and he would eventually helm JURASSIC PARK III, but at a certain point, the pressure became too much for him to ignore.  By 1995, Spielberg had officially returned and they were off to the races.

Whether or not he should have returned is somewhat of a touchy subject.  For Spielberg, he’s gone on record as kind of regretting it.  He would go on to say in a 2016 interview with the New York Times:

My sequels aren’t as good as my originals because I go onto every sequel I’ve made and I’m too confident [...] This movie made a ka-zillion dollars, which justifies the sequel, so I come in like it’s going to be a slam dunk and I wind up making an inferior movie to the one before. I’m talking about The Lost World and Jurassic Park”.

I will say I think he’s not giving quite enough implied credit to INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, but…it’s hard not to blame him for calling out THE LOST WORLD.  I don’t really think it’s a bad movie; it has its fun charms, and the idea of seeing realistic dinosaurs onscreen still has a bit of novelty.  But it’s hard to shake the feeling of malaise hanging over the entire picture.

The biggest change from JURASSIC PARK 1 to JURASSIC PARK 2 is the cast.  Although a few cast members from the first one make brief appearances, including the aforementioned John Hammond, as well as his now-grown grandchildren.  But as far as the main ensemble goes, the sole returning link between the first two installments is Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm.  And, look, he has a ton of great stuff in this.  He isn’t quite in his “buying into his own shit” era, so the quirky, stammering line reads still feel somewhat natural, as opposed to nowadays where he often feels like he’s playing a Jeff Goldblum walk-around character at Disneyland.  My favorite moment of his in THE LOST WORLD is probably his reaction to someone in the initial search party yelling out Sarah’s full name (“How…many Sarahs do you think there are on this island?”).

The problem there, though, is that upgrading Ian Malcolm from a memorable ensemble piece to the lead is that the increased screen time saps what makes him stand out in the first place.  In JURASSIC PARK, he’s the bad boy genius, the man who recognizes the chaos inherent to the premise for what it is. He doesn’t have an arc, per se, but he so joyously helps facilitate the themes of the plot.  In THE LOST WORLD, he must now have a journey, complete with an estranged girlfriend and child that he has to figure out how to reconnect with.  It’s all classically Spielbergian, but it makes Malcolm feel like a completely different guy.  Because of that, what’s the point?

The other issue is that, well…the rest of the cast just isn’t all that compelling.  Again, I like Posthlewaite’s alpha male hunter guy, it’s interesting seeing a young Vince Vaughn basically play it straight, and Arliss Howard is effectively slimy as Hammond’s nephew, a company man with sinister plans for the dinosaurs on this abandoned island.  But Julianne Moore, as game as she is to throw herself into the action sequences, and as good as she is at expressing wide-eyed wonder and joy at the existence of dinosaurs, doesn’t really have a character to play here.  As for Vanessa Chester, since she gives a fairly limp and precocious child performance, I think she became an easy target for the ire of those who didn’t like this movie.  I don’t really think that that’s fair, but it does feel fairly obvious that Kelly is a real missed opportunity of a character*.  

(The good news is that Vanessa has since grown into a fairly prolific actor, and an elite Doughboys guest!)

*And, yes, before you bring up the “gymnastics” action scene, where Kelly is able to swing on the pipes of a warehouse to such a degree that she kicks a raptor out a window, I agree that it’s silly.  But given the goofy bullshit that goes on in the next five movies, this practically seems like a grounded, Bresson-esque construct in retrospect.

As for the regretful guy in the director’s chair, the good news is that pedestrian Spielberg work is still okay.  One of the best things to recommend about THE LOST WORLD is that its action sequences all feel unique and distinct from the first movie.  The scene with the raptors taking people out in the tall grass in particular has such a simple visual horror to it that it makes you wonder why they didn’t do it in the first movie.  The final act with a T-Rex running roughshod in downtown San Diego feels tacked on, but it also kind of saves THE LOST WORLD entirely, a perfect escalation of the initial concept; instead of people coming to a dinosaur island, what if dinosaur left the island to come to the people?

Because the big old question surrounding this movie, and all others that come after it, is why the fuck anybody would ever go back to the big scary dinosaur island?  The impetus in this one isn’t all that great, in my opinion, and feels extremely “sequel-y”.  I don’t love the idea of there being this secret second island that nobody ever knew about, if only because it feels like someone’s first idea in THE LOST WORLD’s “blue-sky” session, and it just stuck.  And Dr. Malcolm being motivated to rescue Sarah, a character we’ve never heard of before and, in fact, don’t even yet know the face of, and who turns out to not even be in danger…it’s dramatically impotent.  Neither David Koepp’s script or Spielberg’s direction are able to wring much emotion out of this premise.

It all speaks to the inherent contradiction of successful filmmaking.  You take a compelling premise, assemble a top-notch director, screenwriter, cast and visual team, and through the power of alchemy and luck, you end up with a zeitgeist-y hit like JURASSIC PARK, the kind of movie that most creatives go their entire careers unable to make, the kind of situation that is almost impossible to recreate.  And then it makes a shit-ton of money because it’s so good, and everyone spends the rest of their lives trying to recreate it.  

So, no, it turns out, you can’t just take one cast member from JURASSIC PARK, fill in the other slots with other equivalents and hope for the best.  JURASSIC PARK III tried the same playbook a few years later, to similar results.  Maybe this is why JURASSIC WORLD fared a bit better in this regard; the character types were different.  But…look, people love that first movie so much that generations of people are willing to keep letting Hollywood try.  Maybe eighth time’s the charm?  But THE LOST WORLD should have probably been a signal to leave well enough alone.

All that said.

Despite all of these flaws, and with full recognition that those flaws run deep enough to keep the movie from being a misunderstood classic or something like that, I do have to say that THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK will still always have a special place in my heart.

This is because it’s the earliest moment I can think of where I sat in a theater and started putting together how movies actually worked.  I first saw it when I was nine, which means it was, um, a long time ago now.  Yet I still remember the specific scene.

It’s the scene where our characters are all huddled behind a waterfall, being pursued by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.  As the Rex sticks its snout through the water, one of the hunter characters finds a snake on his shoulder, freaks out, and winds up as T-Rex food.  It’s a moment of high drama.  The John Williams score is blaring, there’s blood going through the water and everything.  Cool shit.  

For a moment, everything’s calm.  Then, more commotion around the waterfall.  “It’s coming back!” someone else.  Thank god, though, it’s not the T-Rex, it’s Dr. Ian Malcolm himself, who had previously separated from the group.  Big relief from the audience.  Everything’s going to be okay!

Except, I already knew everything was going to be okay.  I knew not to be scared.  Because, right before Goldblum stuck his face through the water, I realized “oh, the music isn’t playing!  Something’s up!”  I managed to make the connection of “score in scary scene = dinosaur, no score = fakeout”.  I wasn’t trying to be smarter than everybody else, nor was I trying to “beat” the movie.  Nine-year-old me just made a connection he hadn’t before.

Then I noticed how the room full of adults were still swept away, terrified of the peril being wrought on our human characters.  The calculation behind the movie, which was obvious enough to a child, was still able to enchant a theater full of strangers.  It wasn’t even that good of a movie.  Yet it still got an emotional reaction out of everyone.

I thought that was cool.

So, even though JURASSIC PARK absolutely never needed a sequel, let alone six, I’m glad they made one, if only for that memory.  And, hell, what do I know, maybe JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM or REBIRTH or whatever had the same effect on some other nine year old.  So, who am I to say these movies are bad?  That’s the power of movies.

Sam Neill Is The Heart and Soul of JURASSIC PARK

We recently lost another pillar of popular culture as we currently understand it.

Sam Neill (whose full name was the extremely badass Sir Nigel John Dermott Neill) was one of those guys who we were just kind of used to having around. Besides starring in almost 100 films before his passing, part of what provided him a sense of longevity was the fact that he always looked roughly 45 years old, even when he was young.  And, of course, when you star in a movie as beloved and ubiquitous as JURASSIC PARK, well…you’re just always going to feel present.

Of course, Neill was so, so, so, so much more than just JURASSIC PARK.  Decades before that tale of a dinosaur theme park gone wrong, he starred in a wide range of movies, including thrillers, period dramas, an Omen sequel, and horror films (none more bone-chilling, IMO, than 1981’s POSSESSION).  Post-JURASSIC PARK, he continued to work with heavy hitters like John Carpenter, Chris Columbus, Jane Campion and Robert Redford, all the while cranking out noteworthy works like EVENT HORIZON and the TV miniseries MERLIN (in a world where JURASSIC PARK never existed, MERLIN would stand as the most beloved Sam Neill movie among millennials, and I don’t think it would be particularly close).  He even got to fuck around in the MCU, having leveraged his work on Taika Waititi’s HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE into a pair of hilarious and unexpected camoes in THOR: RAGNAROK and THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER.

Yet, as the slurry of obituaries proved, Dr. Alan Grant will remain Neill’s defining role, so much so that he’d return to it twice; once in the profoundly mediocre JURASSIC PARK III and again in the absolutely abysmal JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION.  The man and his character are so linked at this point that, frankly, it would seem a little silly to focus on it too terribly much.  What more is there to be said that hasn’t been said about Dr. Grant in the three decades since?

Anyway, this week for Spielberg Summer, let’s focus on Sam Neill’s portrayal of Dr. Alan Grant and how it centers one of the greatest summer blockbusters ever made.

JURASSIC PARK (1993)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Bob Peck, Martin Ferrero, Samuel L. Jackson, Wayne Knight

Written by: Michael Crichton, David Koepp

Length: 127 minutes

Released: June 11, 1993

I’m assuming you don’t need the story or premise of JURASSIC PARK explained to you.  Even if you had never heard of a movie before, I suspect you’d grok the whole thing upon hearing the title.  “Ooh, is that a theme park with dinosaurs?  Cool!”

And cool it was!  JURASSIC PARK was a phenomenon almost instantly.  It raked in $47 mill its first weekend, and ended up earning about a billion worldwide against a frankly astonishing $63 mil budget.  Adjusted for inflation, it remains a top-twenty box-office champ to this day, and has spawned six live-action sequels, several animated TV series, and an arcade game that still lives in my dreams and memories (yes, there was a day when a friend and I managed to have enough quarters, will, and free time to eventually beat the LOST WORLD iteration of this game, and it stands as one of the proudest days of my life, up there with my wedding).

But, lots of movies generate sequels .  Many movies capture the imagination of a generation of kids.  How did this particular Michael Crichton book adaptation do it?  How did JURASSIC PARK manage to become one of the core tenants of American pop culture?

Well, as it almost alwsy turns out, there are a lot of factors, starting with that fact that, again, it’s one of the all-time ideas for a story.  Even if the rest of the script had been a turd, a movie set in a theme park filled with dinosaurs was almost assured to become a point of fascination for children across a generation.  And JURASSIC PARK crucially gets right all the little elements of what makes theme parks so fun.  The logo. The chintzy gift shop (that features a giant T-Rex skeleton as its centerpiece, which is such a cute choice for a theme park that already has real life dinosaurs).  The slow-moving cars on rails.  The disembodied guide voice.  

And then there’s my favorite theme-parky detail of all: the pre-show starring Jurassic Park’s very own mascot, Mr. DNA.  To be honest, if Sam Neill hadn’t passed away right before I started writing this, there’s a decent chance this entire article would have been about Mr. DNA.  There’s so much to love about him.  His buck teeth.  His humongous floating eyebrows.  His voice, oh my goodness, his voice.  As played by Greg Burson, Mr. DNA is the reason I pronounce it “dino-SAWRS” to this day.  I love him so much.  If the Republicans said they were nominating Mr. DNA as the 2028 candidate for President of the United States, I would be forced to vote for him.  All hail our future king, Mr. DNA.

But, at the end of the day, it’s (probably) not fully Mr. DNA that makes JURASSIC PARK an all-timer.  Maybe it’s the script!  It’s an amazingly efficient one, the type of screenplay where, for as fantastical and vaguely nonsensical as the story itself probably is, it all more or else hangs out perfectly in the moment.  The science behind cloning dinosaurs as presented to us probably isn’t based in any sort of reality (or else, we’d have a real life Jurassic Park already), but the concept of pulling prehistoric DNA out of amber-preserved mosquitos and splicing it with frog DNA (the closest match to dinosaurs) makes emotional sense, so therefore, we never question it even once when watching it. 

It’s also the kind of screenplay where nothing ends up being arbitrary.  Yes, we’re charmed by Jeff Goldblum waxing on about chaos theory, the idea that small variables can have immense consequences, so perfectly illustrated by Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm teaching/flirting with Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler via tracking water drops on her hand.  As children of the 90s, we’re also thrilled by SEINFLED/3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN’S very own Wayne Knight being featured so prominently throughout, as a disgruntled employee of John Hammond who is working to smuggle embryos to a higher bidder.  But the fact that they end up being inextricably linked (Knight’s character is the illustration of chaos theory; had Hammond addressed his issue with pay, the whole movie may not have even happened)?  It’s beautiful storytelling, expressed with a script made all the more impressive by the fact that it’s written by David Koepp.

To be clear, Koepp is one of the more accomplished writers in modern Hollywood history.  The scripts to his name include: DEATH BECOMES HER, 1996’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, 2002’s SPIDER-MAN, PANIC ROOM, PRESENCE and BLACK BAG.  It’s a wide array of successes spanning thirty years (and I’m not even including the first two JURASSIC PARK movies).  But…he also wrote that one Indiana Jones movie everybody hates, 2017’s THE MUMMY, ZATHURA, fucking MORTDECAI (which he also directed), fucking JURASSIC PARK REBIRTH, and DISCLOSURE DAY*.

*I actually really liked DISCLOSURE DAY.  Thankfully, given the nature of the “Spielberg Summer” decades project, I don’t need to explain myself in this space for another three years. 

My point being: Koepp is maybe the most up-and-down, unpredictable high-profile writer we have now.  But stuff like JURASSIC PARK proves why guys like Spielberg keep taking a chance on him.  His good work is transcendent!  So it goes with this, a story that effectively maps out the moral quandaries of playing god, and why the beauty of recreating life where it doesn’t belong can override all the things that make it a really, really bad idea.

To that end, maybe it’s really the groundbreaking special effects that make JURASSIC PARK so legendary.  Obviously, CGI creations are par for the course now in Hollywood, to the point where studios can now alter entire plot points via its usage.  But JURASSIC PARK really does make you believe in its magic.  After thirty years, some of the CGI dinosaurs are starting to show their age; if you focus too much on the brachiosaurus in that famous “let me show you” scene, you can take yourself out of the proceedings.  But most of it still holds up beautifully (the Gallimimus flocking scene being a prime example), supplemented by the fact that many of the dinosaurs are practical animatronics, up to and including that T-Rex.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to believe that T-Rex being animatronic, or anything less than an actual fucking dinosaur being captured on camera.  It seems too articulate, too tactile, too real.  And that’s the point.  JURASSIC PARK presents to your eyes something that cannot exist.  Yet your brain accepts it as such.  This has always been the point of special effects, yet it’s a test that movies fail over and over, both then and new.  It’s a total victory for Stan Winston and crew, as well as for Industrial Light and Magic.

But, special effects alone rarely make a movie all by themselves.  They usually require a master storyteller to put them in their proper contexts, and it just so happens that JURASSIC PARK has just such a storyteller in Steven Spielberg.  Besides maybe 1982*, 1993 would stand as the most important year of his career.  The movie that would eventually snag Spielberg his first Best Director Oscar would be coming later in 1993 (and we’ll talk about it next week), but JURASSIC PARK is probably the most valuable movie he would ever helm.  Compared to INDIANA JONES, it’s proven to have spawned the more enduring franchise, possibly because its stars are the immortal dinosaurs, not the mortal Harrison Ford.

*With the dual release of the Spielberg-directed E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL and the Spielberg-produced POLTERGEIST.

But, also, it’s possible its value comes from the fact that Spielberg directs the hell of this thing.  There’s something like a dozen major action setpieces throughout JURASSIC PARK, and they all work, thanks to Spielberg’s unrivaled eye and instinct for building and escalating a scene (consider the ratcheting tension of Grant and the kids climbing the electric fence, cut between Ellie slowly turning the power back on).  Even a moment as relatively lower-stakes as the death of Dennis Nedry really sings, as we watch a cocky and conniving techie try to assess this little raptor that’s entered his space (and the raptor realizing how easy his dinner is about to be).

More than anything else, though, Spielberg’s instinct for wonder and awe serves the movie perfectly.  Even the “scary dinosaur” scenes have humor baked into its horror (who could forget the classic “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear” shot?).  But, frankly, most of the moments that endure in my memory are quieter, deceptively simple ones, the ultimate being the aforementioned moment where Ellie and Alan see a brachiosaurus for the first time.  Yes, Laura Dern and Sam Neill are acting their asses off, and John Williams’ score hits a tender crescendo, but it’s all sold by Spielberg’s sense of scale.  The big close-ups of Ellie and Alan’s gobsmacked faces, followed by a David Lean-esque shot of the giant brachiosaurs (making our human characters seem impossibly small), is just one of those “Spielberg moments” that’ll stick with me forever.

Speaking of Dern and Neill, I think the most famous thing about JURASSIC PARK is its elite cast, with all of the major players unleashed to do their thing.  Laura Dern serves as the smart, calming voice of reason, a figure you just inherently trust.  Richard Attenborough, with his lovely and sweet portrayal of John Hammond, perfectly embodies the themes of this movie; it turns out no capitalist can ever control nature, even if it’s the noble pursuit of sharing incredible scientific advances with the public.  As for Jeff Goldblum, he will make you believe that a rock star mathematician could ever possibly exist in the modern world.  He had been doing all the little stutters and tics and noises for decades before JURASSIC PARK, but this is the moment where the “Goldblum” persona got unleashed onto the public.  He’s since become one of those guys who has bought into his own shit in order to sell you apartments, but in 1993, it felt transcendent, allowing him to walk away with the whole damn movie.

Even the smaller roles are so well cast!  There’s the aforementioned Wayne Knight as Nedry (who’s in the movie way, way more than I had remembered!  He dies with 40 minutes left!), there’s Samuel L. Jackson with his famous “hold on to your butts” quip, and BD Wong as the chief geneticist, and Martin Ferrero as the slimiest lawyer in the park.  I even think Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards are pretty good as the Hammond grandchildren.  Kid characters in these types of flicks often run the risk of being precocious and saccharine.  But here, they act and react like actual kids with personalities, and thus, you fear for them when they’re being chased around a kitchen by a raptor.  And, frankly, you cheer for Lex saving the day by “hacking” the power grid, rather than roll your eyes.  Nice work!

But, at the end of the day, the thing that ties the whole damn thing together is Sam Neill.  Was there ever any doubt?  His gruff-yet-sweet portrayal of Dr. Alan Grant is what makes the movie feel so “Spielberg-ian” in my opinion.  Here’s a man who is so flippant about children that he makes one practically crap his pants when explaining how raptors kill his prey.  When he meets one at the park tour (Tim), one who absolutely idolizes him and wants nothing more than to trade dinosaur facts with him, Dr. Grant tries hard to avoid him at all costs.

And, yet, when push comes to shove, when the lawyer hides in the bathroom from a T-Rex, and Hammond is too blinded by his ideals and ambition to jump to timely action, it’s Grant who saves the day, who (along with Ian Malcolm) puts himself in danger to save the children, who sits in a tree with them and listens to Tim’s lousy jokes, and teaches Lex about herbivores.  If the big “Steven Spielberg” thematic throughline is “lost children”, then JURASSIC PARK is about children who are ultimately found.  And Alan Grant is the beautiful soul that finds them.

And nobody could have embodied him the way that Sam Neill did. There were other options for the role; Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Robbins, William Hurt and Harrison Ford were all looked at for the male lead here, but for various reasons (either turning it down entirely, or looked at as too expensive) it wasn’t to be. And they’re all great! But Neill specifically nails the wonder of being surrounded by a thought-lost creation of God that it’s genuinely hard to imagine anybody else doing it the way he did.

There are so, so, so many elements that came together exactly right in order for JURASSIC PARK to become the phenomenon that it was, and arguably Spielberg’s finest creation.  The plot.  The score.  The cast.  The dino-sawrs.  Spielberg himself.  Mr. DNA.  All of them give the movie verve, and style, and skill, and technological wonder.  

But without Sam Neill, JURASSIC PARK would be missing its soul.