A question surely asked at every good introductions conversation, along with favorite dinosaur (mine's the Troodon/Stenonychosaurus/Latenivenatrix tangle). For each movie from the original trilogy separately, these are my picks. Not ranking them against each other or anything, but here are some thoughts on their merits to me. Naturally, the post contains spoilers for these movies in case you haven't seen them.
Jurassic Park
The answer is too obvious, so to not make things too easy for myself, I'm disqualifying both the raptors in the kitchen and the T. rex escape. They're great, but there are a lot of great scenes in this movie. Such as:
Hatching Baby Raptor
Jurassic Park
The answer is too obvious, so to not make things too easy for myself, I'm disqualifying both the raptors in the kitchen and the T. rex escape. They're great, but there are a lot of great scenes in this movie. Such as:
Hatching Baby Raptor
I thought about picking the whole sequence of the hatching, the raptor feeding, and the human feeding conversation over luch that follows, as a lot of thematically very important things are said in that sequence, still relevant four movies later. The overarching theme is control over the animals, and by extension nature - Hammond and Dr. Wu's confidence in it, Doctors Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm, and Muldoon doubting it and even its justification, and of course Gennaro and also Hammond being willing to overlook those tough questions, because money. It's a bit too big of a chunk of the movie to count as one scene instead of three, though, and the first third has the advantage of featuring a baby raptor.
I do like the cute raptor for more than just cuteness, though, as its innocence is such a wonderful contrast to the scariness of the adults. Pet baby tiger is all fun and games until it gets big enough that it could eat you if it wanted to and reminds you it's not actually domesticated. But the raptor hatchling is not just a future monster, either (and neither is a tiger cub; inappropriate handling of dangerous animals is harmful to both humans and the animals, and big cats shouldn't be kept as pets in the first place), and while its adorableness is distracting and a good selling point for Hammond to use to present the park as appealing, it's also too good to be true. The "life finds a way" quote gets taken out of context a lot, but it was about living creatures looking to get to live their lives as they consider best rather than in a way that's convenient to us humans, and finding ways to fulfill their most fundamental instincts (in particular making more of themselves).
That cute baby raptor was made to be exploited, and is a product of irresponsible arrogance over nature. She is a creature that has nothing necessary to contribute to the ecosystem of a time where her species has been extinct for millions of years, but which humans decided should exist in that time anyway to amuse us. Hammond wanting the baby dinosaurs to imprint on him is endearing until you realize it's another example of the animals being denied the chance to express their natural behaviors in favor of entertaining humans.
InGen has seized a monopoly on making dinosaurs over not just their business competitors but over the dinosaurs themselves. The juxtaposition of the miracle of birth the characters are witnessing with their dialogue on how that miracle is restricted to the laboratory by design... well, it's great. Very core Jurassic Park.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Junior's First Kill
Peter Ludlow gets a very karmic villain death, even more so when you take into account the deleted scene revealing that he was the one who broke the baby T. rex's leg, by stumbling while drunk and stepping on it. As satisfying as that comeuppance is, though, that's not really all that relevant to the main reason why I like the scene (for a focus on that aspect, Dieter Stark's death scene is more effective, though the thing about the baby rex's leg does add an extra tinge of irony to the adult rex breaking Ludlow's leg so he can't run away). The person who dies being the villain just makes it less emotionally conflicting.
This movie feels to me like it finds a balance in understanding the scary dinosaurs from their own perspective, while also understanding and treating as justified the humans' fear of them. I've already touched on how the events of the movie must have been quite scary for the rex family, too, when they're really just trying to mind their own rex business. This scene is a great example of those different perspectives.
On one hand, the scene features a human being getting eaten alive - most likely slowly and painfully, as the dinosaur eating him is not only relatively small, but also an infant and as such inexperienced at hunting and killing. Looks like this is literally baby's first self-caught meal. On the other hand... it's baby's first self-caught meal! And the gentle, encouraging nudge from the adult and his adoring head tilt while watching his little one reach a new milestone really says it all. If dinosaurs used social media, you just know this rex dad would be proudly posting photos of this occasion all over his parenting group for his rex friends to shower with likes and congratulations.
It's hilarious, in a pretty gruesome way. Which is basically the tone I enjoy this movie having a lot of the time.
Jurassic Park III
Returning the Raptor Eggs
I like the gradual discovery of how much the raptors are not to be underestimated this movie has. In the original movie there's a similar progression, with every new thing we learn about them making clearer how dangerous and deadly they are, particularly because of their intelligence. This time we already know to expect the danger, but there's more to them, and to particularly their intelligence and social nature.
At the beginning of their first appearance (no, not the one on the plane) it can seem they'll be just a straightforward, secondary threat to run from, but their level of communication and cooperation starts showing them as more complex than that, and then we find out their persistence in pursuing the humans is also due to their social ties to each other. In this final confrontation it turns out their talkativeness and level of awareness makes them not just a force to be reckoned with - they can be reasoned with. And it seems like the raptors come to a similar conclusion about us humans, because they're the ones that initiate negotiations.
Near the beginning of the movie Dr. Grant both speculates that had it not been for the K-Pg extinction event, Velociraptors rather than humans might have become the dominant species on Earth, and dismisses the lab-made Velociraptors as not real enough to count. I think by the end of this last encounter with them he probably feels a bit like the kid he schooled at his introduction scene in the first movie. They may be kind of artificial and not exactly like the originals, but they're now creatures that exist regardless of how and why that came to be, and there's plenty of interesting things about them, things both similar to and different from their Mesozoic DNA donors. So, you know, try to show a little respect.
One could say the raptors' intelligence in this movie goes too far, and to an extent I agree. But since that is the direction the movie takes, I appreciate that it's not just an informed trait and is followed through on showing, and that it also shows there's more to these scary animals than just different ways they can and seek to tear you to pieces. Killing is part of their lives as carnivores, but they do other things, too.
Whether or not that direction is always handled well in the Jurassic World movies, I do think it's an interesting moment of these two intelligent, social species briefly acknowledging each other as something to communicate with and the two different viewpoints of humans and scary dinosaurs meeting in at least some sort of understanding. It's not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though - the raptors have zero need for humans, apparently even as food, and their parting "words" were probably something along the lines of "don't come talk to us or our chicks ever again". Which, considering this moment of communication was to them basically prying their children away from kidnappers holding them hostage - yeah, that's fair.
I do like the cute raptor for more than just cuteness, though, as its innocence is such a wonderful contrast to the scariness of the adults. Pet baby tiger is all fun and games until it gets big enough that it could eat you if it wanted to and reminds you it's not actually domesticated. But the raptor hatchling is not just a future monster, either (and neither is a tiger cub; inappropriate handling of dangerous animals is harmful to both humans and the animals, and big cats shouldn't be kept as pets in the first place), and while its adorableness is distracting and a good selling point for Hammond to use to present the park as appealing, it's also too good to be true. The "life finds a way" quote gets taken out of context a lot, but it was about living creatures looking to get to live their lives as they consider best rather than in a way that's convenient to us humans, and finding ways to fulfill their most fundamental instincts (in particular making more of themselves).
That cute baby raptor was made to be exploited, and is a product of irresponsible arrogance over nature. She is a creature that has nothing necessary to contribute to the ecosystem of a time where her species has been extinct for millions of years, but which humans decided should exist in that time anyway to amuse us. Hammond wanting the baby dinosaurs to imprint on him is endearing until you realize it's another example of the animals being denied the chance to express their natural behaviors in favor of entertaining humans.
InGen has seized a monopoly on making dinosaurs over not just their business competitors but over the dinosaurs themselves. The juxtaposition of the miracle of birth the characters are witnessing with their dialogue on how that miracle is restricted to the laboratory by design... well, it's great. Very core Jurassic Park.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Junior's First Kill
This movie feels to me like it finds a balance in understanding the scary dinosaurs from their own perspective, while also understanding and treating as justified the humans' fear of them. I've already touched on how the events of the movie must have been quite scary for the rex family, too, when they're really just trying to mind their own rex business. This scene is a great example of those different perspectives.
On one hand, the scene features a human being getting eaten alive - most likely slowly and painfully, as the dinosaur eating him is not only relatively small, but also an infant and as such inexperienced at hunting and killing. Looks like this is literally baby's first self-caught meal. On the other hand... it's baby's first self-caught meal! And the gentle, encouraging nudge from the adult and his adoring head tilt while watching his little one reach a new milestone really says it all. If dinosaurs used social media, you just know this rex dad would be proudly posting photos of this occasion all over his parenting group for his rex friends to shower with likes and congratulations.
It's hilarious, in a pretty gruesome way. Which is basically the tone I enjoy this movie having a lot of the time.
Jurassic Park III
Returning the Raptor Eggs
At the beginning of their first appearance (no, not the one on the plane) it can seem they'll be just a straightforward, secondary threat to run from, but their level of communication and cooperation starts showing them as more complex than that, and then we find out their persistence in pursuing the humans is also due to their social ties to each other. In this final confrontation it turns out their talkativeness and level of awareness makes them not just a force to be reckoned with - they can be reasoned with. And it seems like the raptors come to a similar conclusion about us humans, because they're the ones that initiate negotiations.
Near the beginning of the movie Dr. Grant both speculates that had it not been for the K-Pg extinction event, Velociraptors rather than humans might have become the dominant species on Earth, and dismisses the lab-made Velociraptors as not real enough to count. I think by the end of this last encounter with them he probably feels a bit like the kid he schooled at his introduction scene in the first movie. They may be kind of artificial and not exactly like the originals, but they're now creatures that exist regardless of how and why that came to be, and there's plenty of interesting things about them, things both similar to and different from their Mesozoic DNA donors. So, you know, try to show a little respect.
One could say the raptors' intelligence in this movie goes too far, and to an extent I agree. But since that is the direction the movie takes, I appreciate that it's not just an informed trait and is followed through on showing, and that it also shows there's more to these scary animals than just different ways they can and seek to tear you to pieces. Killing is part of their lives as carnivores, but they do other things, too.
Whether or not that direction is always handled well in the Jurassic World movies, I do think it's an interesting moment of these two intelligent, social species briefly acknowledging each other as something to communicate with and the two different viewpoints of humans and scary dinosaurs meeting in at least some sort of understanding. It's not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though - the raptors have zero need for humans, apparently even as food, and their parting "words" were probably something along the lines of "don't come talk to us or our chicks ever again". Which, considering this moment of communication was to them basically prying their children away from kidnappers holding them hostage - yeah, that's fair.
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