Jurassic Park: Characstravaganzabrationpaloozaness

                Mhhhhhh, I love the characters in this movie so much. They are all so great. This may just be a symptom of seeing a movie a few dozen times but I just feel like even the minor characters are full of depth and personality. I going to run through my favorites one at a time starting with the more minor ones and moving up to the major one.  This mean no Alan Grant or Ian Malcolm this time, because anticipation.

                I don’t even know the name of the first character I want to look at. I don’t want to know his name, and all I can say about him can be captured in a single frame, so here it is.

 

You could have pulled a gun on him

                Now for one of my personal favorites, Lewis Dodgson. Basically Dodgson works for a rival genetics company and he want to steal some (viable) embryos from Jurassic Park. He is basically the person that creates the human against human conflict of the movie. I really like how he is in no way the stereotypical dark and sinister evil businessman, and he actually come across as a dork. He is nervous and uneasy during his clandestine meeting, and only looks comfortable when he gets to bust out his shaving cream / embryo storage gadget. Nedry has to call him over, which makes me think he has poor facial recognition, which is a sign or poor social skills. I just imagine him as being the head of a department at his company, and nobody there likes him. I also notice for the first time while watching the movie for this post that he stiffs the cabbie that delivers him to the scene, which is just one of those little details that I enjoy.

 

Dodgson, Dodgson, we've got Dodgson here

                Ray Arnold is the coolest engineer in a movie ever (not that he has a lot of competition). This is in my opinion, Sam Jackson’s best role. He really nails the master computer nerd who can use a mouse and keyboard to solve problems with aplomb. He never loses his cool when the situations get out of control, because fixing things is his job and he doesn’t believe that any dilemma is bigger than he can handle. He gets move disheveled as the plot progresses, but I see this not as someone falling apart, but someone getting comfortable and into their element. Arnold is the one who drives all the conflict resolution. I am pretty sure they had to have him get eaten just so some of the other characters could get a change to fix stuff (they had to kill him off-screen because any scene of him losing was just too unbelievable). He knows the answers to all the questions, smokes cigarettes into the filters, and has a stupendous catch phrase, what more could you want?

 

I wish I was half the engineer as this guy

                I’m not supposed to like Donald Gennaro, but I still do. I don’t think the audience was meant to sympathize with this character. Mainly because he is a lawyer, and not the cool courtroom type of lawyer but the lame one who works for a corporation and his job is telling people what they aren’t allowed to do. He spends most of his time being mocked by the other characters, and then gets the most violent death of the film. Donald is relegated to the background in most scenes and almost all of his lines are whiny or incompetent. I don’t care about all that and I like him for that moment when he slips on the rocks outside the amber mine.

 

Can't pull off shots

                Dennis Nedry is the primary human antagonist of the movie. He is greedy (for both money and candy), and misanthropic (as clued by his Oppenheimer photo and programming booby-traps). I also get the feeling that he is a bit of a victim as a private programming contractor who gets stuck in a bad contract with an unsympathetic corporation (although it is really hard to say who is at fault in disputes like that). Nedry is the kind of person who is good at planning (“I’ve got an 18 minute window”), but rubbish in the execution. He is also a terrible liar, as seen in the whole “Does anybody want a soda” monolog. By far my favorite Nedry scene is when he is out in the rain after crashing his Jeep, because he just has one classic line after another. “I can afford more glasses” (not new but more, so I get the idea of him buying a hundred pairs just because he’s rich), “You can do it, come on Dennis” (because self-motivation in a crisis situation is important), “I have no food on me” (I suspect that he actually does but he is keeping it for himself), and “I’m going to run you over when I come back down” (revealing his dark nature). In the end Nedry is an example of why you should always pay programmers well, because they can make your life hell.

 

This was a slick move regardless of his other blunders

                Lex Murphy is the good hacker (interactive CD-ROM are cool) of the film, showing that hackers aren’t necessarily evil and it is more a matter of how power is wielded (which I think could use some more emphasis in the media). Sure she only navigates a file structure, but it was a crazy 3-D interface and in the early 90’s computer skills were more of a big deal. She and her younger brother Tim were sent to visit their grandfather (Hammond) at the park while their parents went through a divorce. She is probably the least interested in dinosaurs of anyone in the movie and I get the feeling that she only went along to look after Tim. She may tease him a lot but in the end she saves his life by distracting one raptor, and again by helping him lock another in the freezer. She also helps fill the quota for romantic subplots in the film, since she clearly is in love with Alan Grant (and who could blame her). Lex is one of only two named female characters in the movie, but she fails to have a conversation with Sattler, so Jurassic Park only passes one third of the Bechdel Test. All in all, I really respect her for sticking to her vegetarianism in a stressful situation, but I also think that a vegetarian should know what an herbivore is (I think she was in it for animal sympathy reasons though due to the “I like cows” line).

 

Young love

                If I was inserted into this movie I would be Tim Murphy. He was the only character around my age, and he had a boyish love of dinosaurs and adventure. Ironically, being the youngest character, Tim endures more hardship in this movie than anyone else. First he is rudely snubbed by his idol Dr. Grant, abandoned by Gennaro during a crisis, trapped in a vehicle that gets thrown over a cliff by a Tyrannosaurs Rex, nearly crushed as that vehicle crashes down a tree (enacting the classic movie trope of running straight away from something instead of to the side and out of danger), witnesses the violent devouring of a gallimimus (“Look how much blood”), dies for a little while after an electric shock launches him to fall about 20 feet, has to outrun a cheetah speed predator on ice while suffering from a case of Ankylosaurus, and on top of all that his parents are getting divorced. The next sequel should just be adult Tim dealing with his post-traumatic stress disorder.

 

He also made poor nutrition choices, just like me at that age

                Robert Muldoon steals every single scene that he is in. His line delivery is so intense that basically everything he says is a classic quote. He is a grizzled big game hunter who has “hunted most things that can hunt you”, and rocks the khaki accordingly (dude probably shaves with a Bowie Knife). The person who understands the dinosaurs best, and has the most respect for how dangerous they are, Muldoon is disregarded as “an alarmist” by Hammond, who happens to be his boss.  He is also the person that Hammond sends to bring back his grandchildren when things go wrong, and Muldoon goes out with nary an “I told you so”. He is the man of action, out there driving Jeeps, shooting guns, and tranquilizing Triceratops. I have an attraction to shotgun in movies and video games, and Muldoon is clearly a fan of the SPAS-12, which happens to be one of the coolest shotguns ever, so I’m a fan of that too. His main character trait is probably his hatred for the Velociraptors, which is understandable after Jophery was killed in his arms during the intro. This eventually drives him to go out to face the raptors mano-a-mano, but the raptors fail to fall for his hat on a log trick, and using group tactics eat him. I think that he understood this to be the probable outcome, and was only trying to provide Sattler with enough time to reset the breakers, which he did, so it was a noble sacrifice.

 

Can pull off shorts

                Take an out of touch billionaire idealist and combine him with a doting grandfather and you have John Hammond. Jurassic Park is his life’s work, and likely his last chance to create something that captures the world’s imagination. He has an all-consuming desire to create something magical, and has to watch as his creation falls apart with him and people he cares about trapped inside. This is the character with the most meaningful development in the film, and is carried by Richard Attenborough, who is the most legitimate actor in the cast. His “melting ice-cream” scene with Laura Dern (second best actor in the film) is such a powerfully executed non-action scene that it seems a bit out of place in this movie. It is the point where Hammond realizes that his work is a failure and all he can do now is try to get everyone out alive. His reach exceeded his grasp, and in his rush to “spare no expense” his creation turned into a monster. Certainly a tragic character.

 

He really loves the dinosaurs

                I recently developed the habit of analyzing female characters more critically, but I think Ellie Sattler continues to hold up. She is strong (physically and emotionally as seen in her survival of the raptor attack), competent (top of her field in paleobotany), and has an important role in the plot (finds Malcolm, restarts the power, kind of helps Grant hold the door). She may not be the main character but I still think that she is a good character. She is portrayed as being a feminist with lines like “Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth” and “we can discuss sexism in survival situation when I get back”, but I don’t feel qualified to say if this was a good thing or a bad thing. She did get stuck with the stereotype of trying to manipulate Grant into liking children, and they didn’t follow up on her storyline of figuring out why the triceratops was sick, so not an uncontested victory for women in film. All I know is that she pulls off the scariest scene in the movie (in the bunker with the velociraptors) very well.

Can definitely pull off shorts

                Ten down, two to go. I have a hard time thinking of many other movies that have this many memorable characters. Next time I will examine the eternal grudge match between Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant.