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"Life, um... finds a way."
Ian Malcolm

Jurassic Park is a 1993 science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and the first of its eponymous film franchise, based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton, who was also brought on to pen the screenplay for the film.

Scientists funded by billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) have discovered how to bring extinct animals back to life via a complex cloning process. To make a profit off of this technology, Hammond and his company, InGen, decide to build a theme park featuring living dinosaurs. This in itself would not be such a bad idea — except the organizers are rushing to get it open, have built it on a remote island, and have almost no security personnel, deciding instead to automate the whole thing with unreliable computers — even refusing to tell the software designer what the system is for.

Naturally, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And Hammond's invited guests to this soft opening — paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), and Hammond's own grandchildren Tim and Lex Murphy (Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards) — are caught in the middle of it all.

The film also stars B.D. Wong as Henry Wu, Samuel L. Jackson as Ray Arnold and Wayne Knight as Dennis Nedry.

Beyond being Spielberg's biggest hit since his late 1970s-early 1980s run, the movie was a landmark in cinematic special effects technology. The extremely convincing animatronic dinosaurs created for the film were combined and enhanced with groundbreaking, realistic CGI ones. The results were so spectacular that it rendered virtually all Practical Effects like puppetry and stop motion obsolete overnight, to the point that it's impossible to find any wide-release feature film today which doesn't use digital effects. Meanwhile, in spite of the requisite Hollywood mistakes, many paleontologists and dinosaur fanatics also loved it. The moment where the visitors first come across a dinosaur in full view and are just blown away ("It's... it's a dinosaur!") could be the 1990s equivalent to the Star Destroyer flying overhead from Star Wars: A New Hope. Speaking of which, the highly memorable soundtrack by John Williams also played its part in making the picture iconic.

Perhaps the most enduringly popular blockbuster film of its decade, it cemented dinosaurs as the American Cyclic National Fascination of the time, as it and its source novel rode the wave of the scientific "Dinosaur Renaissance" of the late 1960s onward which overturned earlier conceptions of cold-blooded, slow and Dumb Dinos in favor of agile, fast and intelligent warm-blooded creatures. While it had a few predecessors like The Land Before Time (which Spielberg himself co-produced), Jurassic Park was the biggest factor to date in spreading these concepts to the masses.

It spawned a franchise that includes several film sequels: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022). It also won all three of its Oscar nominations; Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects. On top of that, the film celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2013 with a theatrical re-release that upgraded it into a 3-D Movie.

Character tropes (including dinosaurs) go on to the Characters Sheet.


The article you are reading is proofread by Richard Kiley (we spared no expense)!:

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    A - E 
  • 1-Dimensional Thinking: When Alan is rescuing Tim from the park car caught up a tree, and the car starts to break through the branches above them and fall, how do they escape? By rapidly climbing down the tree. Not, say, around to the opposite side of the tree trunk where the vehicle is not falling.
  • Aborted Arc: The subplot of the sick Triceratops doesn't come to anything (beyond getting Dr. Sattler off the tour) or get mentioned again, while in the book it was revealed the dinosaur got sick because it was swallowing gizzard stones to help with digestion and accidentally ate some poisonous berries with them. The movie leaves out this explanation (in fact it's explicitly stated to be wrong), so it's never made clear why the Triceratops is sick.
  • Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene:
    • In the middle of the first film, when the security measures have failed, the dinosaurs are loose and the park is going to hell in a handbasket, Sattler and Hammond eat melting ice cream and talk about flea circuses. It's really quite touching.
    • The equivalent scene in the book happens with Hammond and Dr. Wu eating ice cream and chatting, right after the chapter where Dennis Nedry's death is described in gruesome detail. The exchange is also a little more sinister, as Hammond monologues about how inventing things that would save mankind could never turn a profit. Crichton's tone vs. Spielberg's, in a nutshell.
    • The scene in which Grant and the kids climb into a tree to rest for the night is a break in the action after the intense T. rex attack from just minutes earlier. The characters are given some time to get to know each other better, and the brachiosaurs show that there are some things in the park that can be beautiful and peaceful.
    • The film also ends on a very quiet note, where the characters silently reflect in their helicopter while it flies away.
  • Action Prologue: The first scene of a Velociraptor being transferred to an enclosure and killing a guard as opposed to the novel, which focused solely on the aftermath of the attack.
  • Action Survivor: For being children, Tim and Lex conduct themselves well in the climax. They manage to distract the raptors that came to hunt them in the kitchen, with Tim managing to lock one in the freezer and Lex luring several away from eating her brother. When the raptors corner them in the control room, Lex successfully reboots the systems and the locks, getting the parks back online.
  • Activation Sequence: As the third act begins, Hammond orders the park's system shut down so it'll reset and stop what Nedry's program did. Once the main breakers are switched on they have to go and activate the breakers for the individual systems. Ray Arnold goes first, but when he doesn't come back, Ellie and Muldoon go to take care of it. Hammond walks Ellie through powering up the breaker switches and she then brings each system back online one by one. Unfortunately, Grant and the kids are at that moment climbing over the perimeter fence to get to the visitors center and Tim is caught on the fence as she activates it. He survives, barely.
  • Adaptational Attractiveness: Mathemetician Malcolm is a skinny balding guy in the books. Here he's portrayed by Jeff Goldblum at peak sexiness and given a shirtless scene.
  • Adaptational Skill: Lex is given Tim's hacking skills, which come in handy during the climax.
  • Adaptation Deviation:
    • In the book, the opening scene is set in a continental Costa Rican hospital and features a mortally wounded worker from the park being brought to the emergency ward after suffering from an unspecified accident, instead of showing the actual incident like the movie's opening.
    • In the movie, Grant understands the dinosaurs are able to breed fairly late, while he's fleeing the park. In the book, the discovery happens before the power is cut and the park goes to hell. The cause of the discovery (Grant finding some broken egg shell) is the same.
  • Adaptation Distillation:
    • Many side plots from the book are written out in the movie and several characters are combined and their fates change. Several of these sequences were revisited in an altered state in the sequel films (such as the pterosaur aviary, riverboat attack, Procompsognathus beach encounter, dinosaurs escaping to the mainland, and hadrosaur stampede).
    • There's also the way the park is viewed as a whole. In the book, it had numerous problems in addition to the dinosaurs finding a way to breed, such as the fact that several of the smaller ones had escaped and were attacking children on the mainland, to the point of where one might think that Nedry's sabotage only sped up the inevitable. In the film, we get the implication that everything would have worked out fine if not for Nedry. Notably in the book the final breakdown of the park isn't Nedry's fault at all, but because Arnold forgot to turn on the main power after the system reboot, leaving it on auxilary power for hours.
  • Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
    • The film is still a very good adaptation, but compressing the book meant removing most of the exposition of the book, which contained some explanations that filled multiple small logic gaps present in the movie, such as why the Triceratops was sick. In the book it's a Stegosaurus, and they figure out that while the animals don't eat the toxic plants on purpose, they inadvertently ingest some of the fallen berries when they periodically take in rocks for their gizzard.note 
    • In the book, Ian Malcolm's criticisms of the park were based on the sheer complacency on display and the fact that the park was completely unequipped to deal with anything unexpected, which would inevitably occur given the dinosaurs were an unknown random element. In the movie this part of the story is downplayed, so he's reduced to vague ideological "You tampered in God's domain" arguments.
  • Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
    • The use of frog DNA is more justified in the book, where it's indicated only a few select species have fragments of frog DNA, and the majority of the DNA used to fix up dinosaur DNA is avian or reptilian; the other justification given is that DNA only has minor genetic differences across all forms of life,note  with the implication that they thought they were patching missing code to parts where it wouldn't matter. The movie removes all this explanation, leaving the use of frog DNA as something of a Voodoo Shark, as you'd wonder why they didn't use DNA of an animal more closely related to dinosaurs.
    • Early on Dr. Sattler is enthusing about an extinct plant she found on the island in a scene absent from the book. There's no explanation on how they could have recreated it or why, and it's never mentioned again.
  • Adaptation Inspiration: The book is very clearly against the idea of Jurassic Park, portraying it as a postmodern simulacrum where a thin veneer of fabricated wonder masks corporate greed and scientific incompetence. Although it follows the same basic plot points, the film goes to the complete opposite end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, presenting Hammond as a benevolent father figure and earnestly reveling in the scientific miracle that's happened, even as chaos theory takes the reins and the park starts breaking down.
  • Adaptational Nationality: Hammond was American in the book, not Scottish.
  • Adaptation Personality Change:
    • In the original book, Gennaro ends up turning into The Lancer for Alan Grant, and he even punches out a Velociraptor! The film turns Gennaro into a Dirty Coward that gets eaten by a T. rex whilst sitting on a toilet. Gennaro's characterization (and manner of death), mirrors Ed Regis, InGen's PR guy from the book, making him more of a Composite Character.
    • John Hammond in the original book is The Scrooge and a tyrant who shortchanges people (giving fat programmer Dennis a reason to betray him), has a Never My Fault mentality, and then suffers a Karmic Death. The film turns Hammond into a kindly old man who truly thinks that what he's doing is a good idea (which it isn't), and one result of the change is that Dennis comes off as more of a Jerkass for betraying him! The film did drop hints that maybe Nedry got the job because he put in an unrealistically low bid (probably in the hopes that he could jack up the price once he had his foot in the door), and is disgruntled because Hammond is holding him to the original bid he tendered (hence the remark about "financial debates"), but it's never made explicit and Nedry could just as easily be a greedy selfish jerk. Hammond's greed was also given to Gennaro.
    • Alan Grant's arc of overcoming his dislike of kids is exclusive to the movie; in the book, he finds children's fascination with dinosaurs endearing and is friendly to Tim and Lex right off the bat.
  • Adaptation Species Change:
    • In the novel, the sick dinosaur was a Stegosaurus instead of a Triceratops (the former of which does not make an appearance in the movie outside of its misspelled name in the embryo tubes).
    • The sauropod that the characters see first when they arrive at the part is changed to a Brachiosaurus from Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus (the former of which does not appear in the book).
    • The dinosaur stampede that Grant and the kids get caught in and ends with the T. rex eating one of the dinosaurs is changed from hadrosaurs to Gallimimus.
  • Adaptational Dumbass: Downplayed. In the book, Muldoon was the one who spotted the raptor ambush, i.e. the classic hunting strategy of an animal he's an expert on. In the film he was the one ambushed by the raptors.
  • Adaptational Heroism:
    • In the film, John Hammond is a kindly old man and loving grandfather who just wants to share the wonder of Jurassic Park with people; he's not even all that interested in the financial benefits, shooting down Gennaro's suggestion that they overprice admission. In the novel, he's a manipulative huckster who really just wants money, and won't listen to anyone's advice about how dangerous the situation is. And he gets eaten by a flock of chicken-sized Procompsognathus. Apparently this change was because Spielberg saw a lot of himself in Hammond.
    • When the T. rex breaks out of her enclosure, the literary version of Ian Malcolm simply jumps out of the car and runs, much like Regis in the novel and Gennaro in the film. Jeff Goldblum suggested that he instead distract the T. rex so that Grant can get the kids to safety (though it ends up being a Stupid Sacrifice since Grant had already succeeded in distracting the T. rex, and gets Gennaro killed). That being said, in the novel, the attack went From Bad to Worse incredibly quickly and was apparently over before either Alan or Ian could help; Malcolm only books it when the T. rex comes for their car.
    • The T. rex itself, to an extent. While still a terrifying presence, the film version acts more like a real animal reacting to noise, movement and new settings, while the book version is a Super-Persistent Predator fixated on killing humans. While the novel rex chases Grant and the kids all around the island, the film version seems content hunting Gallimimus and never directly attacks any humans following the paddock breakout and car chase. It even gets an iconic Big Damn Heroes moment at the climax, whereas the novel version drowns after being tranquilized by Muldoon.
    • Ellie is the character who gets the power turned back on, in the novel, Arnold and Gennaro both try before Alan Grant ends up succeeding.
  • Adaptational Intelligence: The film version of Lex is made older than she was in the book and given knowledge of computer systems. Contrasting, her brother Tim was made younger and loses the computer systems scene, but maintains his knowledge of dinosaurs.
  • Adaptational Jerkass: Grant is a minor example: his character arc involves him starting as a (mild) Child Hater and growing out of it through Character Development. His book version loves children (he finds their curiosity and love of dinosaurs endearing). Steven Spielberg's Author Appeal at work.
  • Adaptational Modesty: Dr. Sattler in the novel was very much Ms. Fanservice, with frequent attention given to her skimpy clothing and how the male characters admire the skin she's showing off. In the film, she dresses much more conservatively and any obvious Male Gaze is absent.
  • Adaptational Villainy:
    • Gennaro, a reasonably fit, brave, and definitely-not-Tyrannosaurus-chow protagonist, is more-or-less turned into Ed Regis from the novel, a spineless lawyer/PR rep who abandons two helpless children and gets eaten soon after. Taking it further, Book!Regis actually has a My God, What Have I Done? reaction when he realizes that he abandoned the children and keeps kicking himself for it afterward (although Gennaro never really gets the chance to reflect, unlike Regis).
    • In the book, Dennis Nedry had a reason for sabotaging the park and stealing the dinosaur DNA beyond sheer greed: InGen had essentially blackmailed him into adding extensive modifications to their already-extensive computer systems for no pay. In the movie, outside of an offhand mention about Hammond "getting cheap" on him, he's given no such justification and is in it for the money.
  • Adaptational Wimp:
    • Gennaro. In the novel, he goes along with Muldoon to catch the Tyrannosaurus, manages to fend off a Velociraptor attack, intimidates a ship captain with Techno Babble, and survives to the end. In the film, he becomes a Dirty Coward who dies a particularly embarrassing death and the scene where he fights off the raptor in the novel gets transferred to Ellie.
    • More downplayed, but the movie's Dilophosaurus compared to the book's version. While both are vicious predators, in the novel, Nedry is terrified of their calls, and tries to flee before he even sees them. It helps that the novel's Dilophosaurus are more accurate to the real animal, described as standing ten feet tall and capable of lifting a man with their jaws, while the version in the film is only about dog-sized and gets treated like an annoying stray puppy...until she literally reveals her true colors. It's implied this one is a baby, though.
  • Adapted Out:
    • Several characters present in the novel are removed in the movie, such as Dr. Marty Gutierrez and Ed Regis (although many of Regis' traits were put into Gennaro's character).
    • In the novel, there were two T. rex, an adult and juvenile, but in the film there's only the adult. The venomous Procompsognathus which actually kill Hammond in the novel as well as the pterosaurs are also entirely absent.note 
    • This is played with for Dr. Henry Wu, Dr. Gerry Harding, and Dr. Ian Malcolm. In the movie, Wu has one scene and leaves the island before the park breaks down, in the novel, he’s one of the main characters. In Harding’s case, he’s a main character who ends up being Malcolm’s primary caregiver after Malcolm’s leg is broken, since he’s the only one with any medical experience. In Malcolm’s case, he’s very vocal after his leg injury, spouting page long monologues from his sick bed, whereas in the film, after he’s brought back from the park, he has a couple of lines of dialogue before the film ends.
  • Admiring the Abomination:
    • Muldoon sees the Velociraptors as Worthy Opponents, to the point his last words are complimenting them for sneaking up on him.
      Muldoon: Clever girl.
    • And when Grant, Tim and Lex see the T. rex hunt down and kill a Gallimimus, Lex is freaked out and immediately wants to leave. Grant and Tim, however, stare utterly fascinated by how the big predator moves and eats its prey.
    • When Grant sees the T. rex for the first time he can't help but smile just slightly, despite the imminent danger.
  • Age Lift: In the novel, Tim was the older sibling and Lex was the younger. Steven Spielberg swapped their ages so Joseph Mazzello, whom he had to reject for Hook for being too young, could play Tim.
  • Air-Vent Passageway: Alan, Ellie, Lex and Tim do a variation of this. They're in the Visitors' Center kitchen, and can't get out the doors because of the raptors running around. So, they make their way to the center's lobby by removing ceiling panels and climbing up inside. Not into the actual air vents, though.
  • All Animals Are Dogs:
    • Nedry assumes this about the Dilophosaurus, and tries to distract her by throwing a stick. It doesn't work, so he figures she's just stupid. Then she eats him. Even dogs will prefer a meaty steak to a bone.
    • In a far less comedic instance, there's Grant luring the T. rex away from the kids by throwing a road flare off of the road, which depends a lot on the rex wanting to chase after something like a dog would in a similar situation. Thankfully it works...and then Malcolm attempts to do the same thing with less success.
  • All-Natural Gem Polish: Someone pulls amber out of a mine, and it's shiny already. All the miners did was grind off some of the rock in which the amber was encased.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: The heroes are about to get eaten by Velociraptors, but the T. rex shows up, trounces the raptors, and saves the day. How it appeared there without anyone noticing, or why the protagonists are now less terrified than they were earlier, remains completely unexplained (there was a barely noticeable hole in the wall it possibly came in through). According to the producers, they were struggling with the ending when they came to the realization that it was really the hero of the movie, and that was when everything fell into place.
  • Ambiguous Situation: Nedry's financial situation. Hammond claims that he is not responsible for Nedry's money problem while Nedry complains that the automated system required to run Jurassic Park is far more expensive and difficult than what he bid for. While it's easy to see Nedry as being greedy, there are several indications throughout the film that Hammond has been cutting corners contrary to his catchphrase "Spare no expense."
  • Amoral Attorney: Donald Gennaro, though much more lacking in morals than in the original novel. Highlighted when he abandons the kids when the T. rex shows up, only to then be eaten by said rex. Hammond even calls him a "blood-sucking lawyer" tongue-in-cheek when the rest of his entourage expresses concerns about the park, which Gennaro is a good sport about.
  • Amusement Park of Doom: Not intended to be one, but thanks to a combination of human pride and treachery mixed with a healthy dose of Nature's wrath, it succeeds in doing so.
  • An Aesop: Humans playing God is a bad idea.
  • Analogy Backfire:
    • John Hammond tries to compare the park's problems to Disneyland not working when it opened. Goldblum's character points out that nothing in Disneyland is as deadly as a dinosaur.
      Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but John, when Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.
    • Hammond compares his bringing back dinosaurs to reviving condors. Dr. Malcolm points out that the bird species went extinct through human meddling, but dinosaurs died out naturally and thus their being brought back was throwing out the natural order of things.
      Dr. Hammond: I simply don't understand this Luddite attitude, especially from a scientist. I mean, how can we stand in the light of discovery and not act?
      Dr. Malcolm: Oh, what's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it observes. What you call discovery... I call the rape of the natural world.
  • Animal Nemesis: "The Big One" to Muldoon, who knows just how monstrous the former is and is determined to stop her. He fails.
  • Animal Stampede: Alan, Lex, and Tim get caught in a stampede of Gallimimus; they survive it by hiding behind a log.
  • Animals Not to Scale: Early in the film Velociraptor is described as resembling a "six-foot turkey". The comparison to turkeys is rather interesting, considering that turkeys are the modern birds most comparable to Velociraptor in size. Yes, the real thing was more of a turkey-sized turkey.
  • Ankle Drag: During the prologue, the gatekeeper gets pulled into a cage by one of his ankles by an enraged Velociraptornote  and is mauled to death.
  • Appeal to Nature: Malcolm states that bringing back dinosaurs is bad partly because that's going against natural selection. The way he phrases it is particularly unfortunate, making it sound like he sees nature as an intelligent God that "decides" which species deserve to live.note 
  • Arc Words: "Life finds a way"
  • Artistic License – Animal Care: The Velociraptor pen is absolutely tiny, only about fifty feet by thirty feet at best, and we're supposed to believe it was meant to contain at least nine tiger-sized predators together. No wonder they kept trying to break out. Probably due to Real Life Budget reasons.
  • Artistic License – History: When John points out that all major theme parks have delays, he mentions that "When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked". In response, Ian replies "Yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists". Disneyland was actually first opened in 1955, and The Pirates of the Caribbean ride was added in 1967.
  • Artistic License – Biology:
    • In-universe. Arnold mentions a "Lysine contingency" as a last-resort method of bringing the park under control. According to him the dinosaurs are genetically engineered to be unable to manufacture the amino acid lysine, and will die in 24 hours if not supplied with it in their food. The thing is there are many organisms alive right now who are incapable of synthesizing lysine and who are dependent on dietary lysine to survive — namely, all living animals, including humans. Fortunately for us, there are plenty of food sources that are lysine-rich, including fish, beef, chicken, and various kinds of beans. As the sequel later points out, there is nothing stopping the escaped dinosaurs from adopting a lysine-rich diet and surviving, too.
    • Also, all vertebrate embryos are not "inherently female" by default. Mammal embryos may look externally more like females than males, but internally the reproductive system of nascent males and females is rudimentary and neuter in its early stages.
    • The dinosaurs have been cloned from blood found in mosquito fossils. The amber-trapped mosquito shown onscreen belongs to the Toxorhynchites rutilus species, which is the only mosquito species which doesn't feed on blood.
  • Artistic License – Geography:
    • The scene where Nedry makes the deal to sell the embryos is supposedly in San Jose, Costa Rica, at a restaurant next to a beach. In reality, San Jose is completely landlocked, surrounded by mountains and isn't near any large bodies of water. With Nublar located in the Pacific, it would have been better to use Puntarenas (the place where the supply boat comes and goes from in the book proper) for that scene, but Puntarenas also doesn't have restaurants that look so rustic so close to the beach (it does have restaurants which are on the beach, just none with buildings made of bamboo).
    • At the end of the movie, the helicopter flies off into the sunset. As in, west and away from the mainland. The fact that doing this should blind the pilots notwithstanding, there's nothing but Pacific Ocean in that direction for about five thousand miles; unless they made an immediate course correction after fading to black or had infinite fuel, they wouldn't see land again until Kiribati.
  • Artistic License – Gun Safety: The very first shot of Muldoon is him standing with his shotgun raised, ostensibly ready in case the raptor in the approaching container breaks out. He does have his finger off the trigger as one should, but there's also at least one security officer standing almost directly in front of him.
  • Artistic License – Linguistics: During his lecture about the relation between dinosaurs and modern birds, Grant states that "raptor" means bird of prey. While "raptor" is indeed a colloquial used to refer to birds of prey, it has nothing to do with "raptor" referring to the kind of dinosaur. The two share the same origin; "raptor" is the Latin word for "robber", itself derived from the word "rapere", which meant "to seize", but this evolving into the names of the dinosaur and the modern bird occurred separately.
  • Artistic License – Paleontology:
    • Dilophosaurus did not spit venom or have frills and Velociraptors were approximately 1.5 feet tall and had feathers.
    • One inexcusable example is that Tyrannosaurus "eyesight is based on movement", since Grant mentioned before he even knew of the park's existence. While at the time, not much research had yet been done on T. rex eyesight, the statement was still pure speculation, and has now long since been debunked (Tyrannosaurus is currently believed to have had exceptional eyesight, better than those of humans or even birds of prey).
    • Grant is seen carrying an actual Velociraptor toe claw around in his pocket for much of the film. Grant, an eminent paleontologist, more than anyone would know how fragile and valuable (both monetarily and for research) something like that is and would not be carrying it like that nor would he casually toss it away halfway through the film, well before the Velociraptors give him a reason to.
    • For that matter, the claw should have been reduced to fragments/dust by the punishment it had gone through from Grant hurriedly climbing down a tree, if not from hitting the ground when he threw it.
    • When the Velociraptor sees Lex's reflection, it snarls and squints its eyes. While the status of lips on dinosaurs is still contentious, there are few that have ever suggested that dinosaurs could bare their teeth like a mammal (never mind that predators usually don't bare their teeth at prey, since it's meant to be a threat display).
    • The film and the park itself is called "Jurassic Park," but save for the Dilophosaurus and the Brachiosaurus from the start, the most memorable dinosaurs are all from the Cretaceous period (although embryos of Jurassic dinosaurs Proceratosaurus, Metriacanthosaurus, and Stegasaurus [sic] can be seen when Nedry steals them from the cryogenic vats). In fact, the Cretaceous period was when dinosaurs truly were the dominant creatures on land, appearing in the largest variety of species ever.
    • Grant, Ellie, and the other paleontologists are shown digging up a Velociraptor in Montana. Even if we assume this is supposed to be Deinonychus (as the franchise largely follows the fringe hypothesis of the 80s/90s that Deinonychus is a synonym of Velociraptor), it's mentioned the dig site is near Choteau. The geological formation of that region is the Two Medicine Formation, which is the Late Cretaceous, while Deinonychus is only known from the Early Cretaceous (the regions where Deinonychus are known from is much further south in Montana). Also, the fossil is a complete skeleton perfectly intact with all the bones still articulated as they were in life just lying flat under a thin layer of loose sand, which is virtually impossible in real life.
  • Artistic License – Physics:
    • Tim getting electrocuted by the fence actually wouldn't happen in real life the way it does in the movie; his entire body was touching the fence at that point, thus he wasn't grounded and the electricity had nowhere to go (this is the same reason birds can perch on a wire). If he had stepped foot on the ground while holding on to the fence as it was on, he would have realistically faced an electrical shock then, but the movie foregoes that in order to create suspense. Additionally, even if he would have been shocked in that position, he would likely not have been blown off the fence as shown, but instead have involuntarily gripped the fence even tighter as the electricity caused his muscles to contract.
    • The scene of the T. rex chasing the Jeep, while awesome and iconic, is physically impossible since (a) it doesn't have anywhere near the required muscle mass in its hindquarters and (b) there's no way an animal heavier than an elephant could keep pace with a speeding car without its legs exploding from the energy being released every time a foot hit the ground.note 
  • As Himself: Actor Richard Kiley provides the voice of the park tour narrator, which Hammond proudly notes. This is a reference to the fact that Kiley was a go-to narrator for nature documentaries during the '80s and '90s. Incidentally, he was specified as the ride's narrator in the original novel, and the film then made it real.
  • Awe-Inspiring Dinosaur Shot: Trope Codifier is the first appearance of the Brachiosaurus, whose appearance is treated as majestic and awe-inspiring the moment the dinosaur is properly revealed. It's also built up by Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler's jaw-dropping reaction, followed by them geeking out about the dinosaur and seeing that they could walk on land just fine after Dr. Sattler muses how it doesn't live in a swamp. A particularly epic piece of music plays out as Grant takes a close look at a lake where a herd of Brachiosaurus and Parasaurolophus are shown together drinking and walking beside the water.
  • Awesome Moment of Crowning: Rexy — after throwing the last Velociraptor into the T. rex skeleton — turns around and roars in triumph while the "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth'' banner falls down as if it's a crown bestowed upon her.
  • Bad Vibrations: The famous "shaking glass" scene when the T. rex realizes the fence is no longer active.
  • Bait-and-Switch: In the opening scene, we see armed guards and Jurassic Park employees watching warily as trees in some kind of jungle are pushed aside by a massive, unseen force... which turns out to be not a beast, but a forklift. Though we quickly learn it's a forklift carrying a cage holding a beast inside — a very vicious beast.
  • Battle in the Rain: The famous T. rex car attack, in which Tim and Lex almost get crushed by the large dinosaur during a rainy night. It takes Alan turning a flare on and calling the T. rex, and then Ian luring it away from the kids while using another, to save them.
  • Beeping Computers: After the protagonists basically reboot the entire park to get the power back up, the computers come on with a "System Ready" prompt and a blinking cursor. A blinking cursor that also beeps. This would get really annoying on a real computer. However, this was the only point where such a contrivance was used in the back-end systems, and was conceivably put in as a "The multi-billion-dollar theme park is ready to go, please get off your butt and get started" reminder for easily distracted computer operators. Or put in by Nedry in one of his less-destructive Jerkass moments.
  • Behind the Black:
    • The big reveal of the Brachiosaurus has a massive dinosaur hiding just off-screen until Grant and the others notice her, whereupon she starts making loud calls and huge, thumping footsteps they couldn't possibly have missed; even if they could, there turns out to be an entire herd of dinosaurs just off to one side they would have to have seen on the drive in.
    • Rexy's Big Damn Heroes moment relies on a huge dinosaur somehow only being noticed when she snatches a lunging raptor.
  • Being Watched: Muldoon notices that there's a Velociraptor waiting for him and Ellie in the bushes near the shed. What he doesn't spot, though, is the other Velociraptor... until it's too late.
  • Big Bad: No, not the Tyrannosaurus rex. The Big One, the alpha Velociraptor is the cause of the film's premise, by killing the worker at the beginning of the film, she made the investors nervous about the park's safety, which causes Hammond to invite experts like Grant and Malcolm to the island in order to quell their fears. Although locked in a cage, her presence is felt throughout the movie, with Muldoon fearing a potential breach at any moment. And when her pack finally breaks out, the rest of the film revolves around the protagonists trying to get the power back on and escape the island before she makes a meal out of them.
  • Big Door: The park has a big, impressive gate whose sole purpose is to look impressive for park visitors. Malcolm jokes about it looking like the gate from King Kong (1933) (which is a joke on how it mimics its design).
  • Big Entrance: The T. rex is introduced this way, starting with her audible footsteps leading up to her tearing through the (no longer) electrified fence and culminating with her Mighty Roar.
  • Big Eyes, Little Eyes: Used with a twist. The dinosaurs have little eyes, like they did in nature. Then the T. rex gets right up next to the jeep and peers in, and that eye that looked so small from a distance turns out to the size of the kids' heads, which re-emphasizes the sense of scale.
  • Bigger on the Inside: When Grant and Sattler enter their trailer, from the outside it's simply a camper that looks like it barely has enough headroom. Once inside, it's as big as a double-wide, and the ceiling extends a good 2-3 feet above their heads.
  • Bilingual Bonus: At the beginning, when Gennaro is being pulled on the raft-thing, the miner says, in Spanish, "I bet you a thousand bucks he falls!" Then he does fall.
  • Bio Punk: The story focuses heavily on the themes of scientific ethics, man's hubris and the force of nature being beyond our control.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, Lex and Tim, Ian Malcolm, and John Hammond manage to escape Jurassic Park alive after the dinosaurs are released, but five other people have died, three of whom were overall decent people, and Hammond's dream has been destroyed. Even Gennaro and Nedry, while both were greedy cowards, didn't truly deserve what they got.
  • Black and Nerdy: Ray Arnold is the park's chief engineer, a nerdy field, though he displays no nerdy characteristics. Contrasting him is Dennis Nedry, who is a standard, fat, white computer nerd.
  • Black Dude Dies First: Played straight right off the bat with the black InGen worker, Jophery, who gets killed in the first scene. Later averted when Arnold is among the last to die after everything goes to hell.
  • Blind Without 'Em: Averted. At one point, Dennis Nedry loses his glasses. He looks for them for about a second before saying "I can afford more glasses", being in a hurry to drop the embryos off and return to the control room. His sight is not drastically affected. However, not having his glasses leaves his eyes vulnerable to the spat venom of the Dilophosaurus.
  • Bloodless Carnage: The goriest death in the whole movie is probably that of the goat eaten by the T. rex, and even that is fairly mild. If the human deaths that occur onscreen have any blood at all, it's far less than one would expect from someone getting ripped apart by teeth and claws.
  • Book Ends:
    • The crisis at Jurassic Park begins with the T. rex breaking loose and attacking the guests. It ends with the T. rex breaking into the Visitors' Center and attacking the Velociraptors that threaten the surviving guests.
    • At the beginning of the tour, the Jurassic Park logo on the Jeep door is proudly displayed and pristine. The logo on the Jeep door at the end of the movie is splattered and stained, symbolizing how badly ruined Hammond's initial idea has become.
  • Break the Scientist: A benign version would be Ellie and Alan's miniature freakout the first time they see a dinosaur. They're more broken by the sense of awe than anything else, and a few minutes later Alan is observing the movement patterns to confirm one of his theories.
    They do move in herds.
  • Brick Joke: Alan at the end:
    Alan: Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration I have decided not to endorse your park.
    Hammond: So have I.
  • Buffy Speak: A very subtle instance, while Nedry is trying to dislodge his Jeep from the log using a winch.
    Nedry: Winch this sucker off the thing, then I ... tie it to the ... that thing there, then I ... pull down this thing here and I pull it back up again...
  • Bullying a Dragon: Dennis comes across a Dilophosaurus while tying a rope to a tree, and proceeds to treat the creature like a dog and mock it. This comes back to bite him in the ass, in more ways than one....
  • By Wall That Is Holey:
    • A car is falling upside-down onto Dr. Grant and Tim, but luckily, they are only covered by the cabin portion of the vehicle, the top of which had previously been removed by a T. rex.
      Tim: Well...we're back...in the car again.
    • Near the end, Tim nearly gets crushed by a dinosaur ribcage, but thankfully, the ribs fall perfectly around him so he ends up unharmed in the middle of the ribcage.
  • Call-Back:
    • When they first encounter the T. rex, Lex inadvertently draws her over to her and Timmy by switching a flashlight on. Later, when they head to the kitchens to escape the raptors, she makes a point of switching all the lights off.
    • Grant’s description of how raptors hunt. Later, Muldoon dies exactly like Grant describes. It’s the raptor Muldoon can’t see that attacks first, not the one in front of him.
  • Camping a Crapper: Gennaro ends up being eaten by Rexy while sitting on a toilet.
  • Capitalism Is Bad: Ian Malcolm sums this up when criticizing Hammond and his Jurassic Park experiment by pointing out how he created something and the first thing he did was turn it into a business venture
    Malcolm: And before you even knew what you had... you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now you're selling it. [pounds table]
  • Captain Obvious:
    • Used after the system reboot to emphasize that things are finally going right for a change.
      Alan Grant: [on the phone] Mr. Hammond? The phones are working.
    • And earlier, when he and Ellie have seen the first Brachiosaurus:
      Alan Grant: [pointing at the Brachiosaurus, barely able to believe what he's seeing] It's... it's a dinosaur.
  • The Cassandra: Malcolm predicts that things will turn wrong and chaotic. His concerns are dismissed by other characters, though Grant and Ellie are willing to listen to him, before they are vindicated by the dinosaurs.
    Malcolm: Boy, do I hate being right all the time!
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: Ian gets one before Rexy's Dynamic Entry:
    Ian: Does anyone feel that? That's an impact tremor, is what it is. I'm fairly alarmed here.
  • Celebrity Paradox: It isn't easy to see in the film, but the cover for Dr. Grant's book shows that the foreword was written by Sir Richard Attenborough, who plays John Hammond.
  • Central Theme: What happens when men play God?
  • Chekhov's Hobby: Lex insists she isn't a computer-nerd, preferring to call herself a hacker. Later in the film, she is the only one not fighting dinosaurs to work the park's security system that is run by computers.
  • Chekhov's Lecture: Early in the film, Grant gives a lecture about Raptor hunting tactics: using one in the open as a distraction while others attack unseen from the sides. He probably should've told Muldoon about that...
  • Chewing the Scenery: How Robert Muldoon is introduced. "SSSSHOOOOOOOOOOOOT HHHHHHEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!"
  • Chromatic Arrangement: The film gives color-coded wardrobes to all of the characters in the initial party. Alan Grant wears blue, Ellie Sattler wears pink, John Hammond wears white, Ian Malcolm wears black, and Donald Gennaro wears grey. In the context of the film, the color choices all clearly fit their roles: Grant and Sattler are the Official Couple who act as parental substitutes to Lex and Tim, Hammond and Malcolm have opposing ideological viewpoints, and Gennaro is a neutral Amoral Attorney whom Hammond and Malcolm both try to sway to their side.
  • Classy Cane: Hammond carries a cane in many scenes (also walking with a slight limp), holding the hardened amber that contains a mosquito. This mosquito carries preserved dinosaur DNA which lead to the creation of the dinosaurs in the park.
  • Closer than They Appear: The Trope Codifier is the view of the charging T. rex in the rear view mirror, with the hilarious lampshading caption "objects in mirror are closer than they appear".
    Malcolm: Must go faster.
  • Color-Coded Characters:
    • Hammond - White
    • Sattler - Pink
    • Grant - Blue
    • Malcolm - Black
    • Muldoon - Beige
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The movie uses certain color conventions, according to a fan analysis on the Jurassic Park Legacy website. Dr. Grant, the hero, wears the "hero colors" of red and blue, while Dr. Sattler wears similar but more feminine shades of pink and purple. Hammond, the park's creator, and the one accused of "playing god", wears all white and has a white beard, while Malcolm wears black to emphasize his opposition to Hammond and his "chaotic" nature.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Dilophosaurus thoroughly blinds her prey before eating them. Nedry found out the hard way.
  • Comfort Food: Hammond and later Ellie indulge in ice cream for stress relief. Later, Tim and Lex dive into junk food since they haven't eaten in a day.
  • Comically Missing the Point:
    • Ellie in one scene when Hammond is explaining the park's appeal:
      Hammond: Our attractions will drive kids out of their minds.
      Alan Grant: What are those? (referring to said attractions)
      Ellie Sattler: Small versions of adults, honey.
    • When a panicking Gennaro runs to the outhouse upon seeing Rexy for the first time, Grant and Malcolm (not seeing what he just did) completely misread his intentions.
      Grant: Now where does he think he's going?
      Malcolm: When you gotta go, you gotta go.
  • Compressed Adaptation: The "Mr. DNA" show/ride compresses many chapters worth of Info Dump on the science behind dinosaur cloning. Amusingly, Grant and Sattler briefly request to see several of the less dramatic parts of the dinosaur development process that are seen in the book, but are skipped in the movie.
  • Composite Character:
    • Gennaro was basically Ed Regis (a Jerkass publicist from the book), with Gennaro's name and law degree. He's also supposed to be muscled, but in the movie, that went to Malcolm. He is also motivated solely by potential profit, as was John Hammond.
    • The movie reduces the number of dinosaurs by combining their parts. For example, in the book the jeeps pass a herd of Triceratops before coming across a sick Stegosaurus; in the film they just find a sick Triceratops (and Malcolm complains that they aren't seeing enough dinosaurs in the dinosaur park). The novel opened with several attacks by unidentified Procompsognathus and Velociraptor while in the film it is just one Velociraptor (implied to be the pack leader). Grant was digging "Velociraptor antirrhopus" (Deinonychus) in Montana but the park had Velociraptor mongoliensis; in the movie they are the same species (called Velociraptor mongoliensis, but modeled after Deinonychus.)
  • Content Warnings: “Jurassic Park has been passed ‘PG’ (Parental Guidance). Parents are warned that this film contains sequences which may be particularly disturbing to younger children or children of a sensitive disposition.”
  • Contrived Coincidence:
    • When the storm hits the island, right at the time Nedry synced—more or less— for his embryo theft, the tour is cut short and the tour vehicles are turned around to return to the Visitors' Center. When the power then goes out, the vehicles stop right in front of the T. rex paddock, the perfect place for the big action scene.
    • Tim, Lex, and Grant just happened to be climbing the giant electric perimeter fence at the exact same time as Ellie was struggling to turn the power for the park back on.
    • During the famously frightening "Raptors In The Kitchen" scene, one of the raptors knocks over some pots and pans with its tail, happening to hit Tim and Lex who are crawling past it one aisle over and they panic, making more noise. Tim hides just around a corner next to a bunch of hanging ladles and other utensils, hitting most of them and barely avoiding detection by the raptor. And then the one ladle that he didn't touch falls off its handle all by itself and clangs on the floor. Improbable? Yes. Scary? You bet it is.
    • The T. rex showing up at the end to bust into the Visitors' Center, kill the raptors and, inadvertently, save Alan, Ellie, Lex, and Tim. In the original script, Grant was going to operate a man lift in the lobby to crush a raptor into the T. rex skeleton while Hammond takes care of the second with a shotgun, but Spielberg felt they needed to bring the T. rex back one more time. And he was right. (As a possible nod to the original climax, the rex does send one of the raptors flying into her skeletonized counterpart.)
  • Cool vs. Awesome: At the end, the Tyrannosaurus rex vs. the particularly large, aggressive, and ruthless Velociraptor known as The Big One. The Big One doesn't make it.
  • Covered in Gunge: Lex, after a Brachiosaurus sneezes on her.
    Tim: God bless you!
  • CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: After Tim is electrocuted by the fence, Dr. Grant spends a few moments trying to bring him back, which works so well that Tim finishes his last sentence. Though they did make some token gestures indicating that he was not completely fine, such as burnt hands, bleeding ears and a limp for the rest of the movie.
  • Creating Life Is Bad: The film initially shows us that Creating Life Is Awesome. But, not all the characters agree. When the dinosaurs are released, the film falls cleanly into Creating Life Is Bad.
  • Critical Staffing Shortage: Most of the usual staff go home for the night/weekend, leaving Hammond and a few others behind, about half of them visitors and away from the main facility. They still expect to be okay, but then the power goes out and all hell breaks loose. In the book the park is intentionally understaffed to save on personnel costs.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Tyrannosaurus rex vs. Velociraptor. Guess who wins.
  • Cutting Corners: Like in the book, Hammond does this by relying on cutting edge automation to cut down on personnel. For another, the dinosaurs are still able to breed, but even that can be attributed more to Dr. Wu's arrogance rather than Hammond being cheap. There's also no locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors.
  • Danger Takes A Back Seat: Well, technically, a passenger seat (the Dilophosaurus with Nedry).
  • Dark Reprise: At the end of the movie, a somber piano reprise of the main theme is heard as John Hammond looks back at the encased mosquito as he reflects on how his entire dream has been completely crushed and shattered. It also fits in with some of the bittersweet elements too though, such as how they all made it off safely and Dr. Grant has warmed up to the grandchildren.
  • Deadpan Snarker:
    • Ian Malcolm.
      Ian: Now eventually you might have dinosaurs on your, on your dinosaur tour, right? Hello? Yes?
      Hammond: [watching on camera feed] I really hate that man.
    • Later:
      Ian: [After surviving being knocked down by a T. rex] Remind me to thank John for a lovely weekend...
      Ian: [after being chased by the T. rex] Do you think they'll have that on the tour?
    • Another one:
      Hammond: I don't blame people for their mistakes, but I do ask that they pay for them.
      Dennis: Thanks, Dad.
  • Dead-Hand Shot:
    • When Jophery the worker is killed at the beginning, his death is signified by a closeup of his slowly relaxing hand slipping free from Muldoon's grasp in dramatic Slow Motion.
    • A much more literal variation is done with Arnold. After being attacked by a raptor, Ellie bumps up against a cabinet, and Arnold's hand comes down and appears to grab her shoulder. She sighs in relief, only to turn and discover it's just his arm.
  • Death by Adaptation:
    • Gennaro and Muldoon survive in the first novel but are killed in the first film.
    • In the book, Tim survives while Lex drowns, and Grant revives her. Tim in the film gets electrocuted, and Grant revives him.
    • More like death before the adaptation, but the park bred eight Velociraptors only to have "The Big One" kill five of them off-screen before the raptors are even introduced. All eight are alive in the book.
  • Death by Irony: Happens less so than in the book, but it does happen:
    • Like in the book, Dennis Nedry gets eaten by a Dilophosaurus sometime after he shut down the park's security systems. Not to mention he had insulted the creature's intelligence just a moment before, saying "no wonder you're extinct".
    • When the T. rex shows up, Gennaro flees the car and leaves Lex and Tim to their fate while he hides in a bathroom stall so as to not get hurt. After Malcolm gets Rexy to chase him, she destroys the bathroom stall, and kills Gennaro.
    • Gennaro's death is doubly-ironic as he was originally sent to the island in the first place to investigate the viability of the park after a worker was killed in an accident handling one of the raptors. The instant he sees a real dinosaur for the first time all that goes out the window and all he can think about is just how much money they're going to make. He allowed the spectacle of the park to blind him to its danger and paid the ultimate price.
  • Death by Pragmatism: Just before the Tyrannosaurus rex breaks out of its paddock, Gennaro panics at the first sight of the beast and flees into a nearby toilet, leaving Hammond's terrified grandchildren in the car by themselves. The giant predator begins attacking the car and ends up flipping it, trapping them inside, and prompting Grant and Malcolm to try and distract it with flares. The T. rex catches on to Malcolm and begins chasing him towards the toilet where Gennaro is hiding, demolishing the straw structure and knocking Malcolm under the bales, leaving Gennaro to face a particularly well-deserved and humiliating death when the T. rex finds him sitting on the can and devours him. He's the only person who doesn't survive the encounter.
  • Deathly Dies Irae: The cue "High Wire Stunts" has a repeated dies irae as Grant and the kids are scrambling over the perimeter fence just as Ellie starts powering them back up, nearly killing Tim as the power surge catches him still on the fence. And then Ellie finds herself confronting a Velociraptor.
  • Decoy Hiding Place: Lex tricks a Velociraptor into charging her reflection in a stainless-steel kitchen counter.
  • Demoted to Extra:
    • Lewis Dodgson's role is reduced to a single scene, while in the book, he was the closest thing to a human Big Bad.
    • Gerry Harding, who is a prominent character in the latter half of the novel and the park's leading veterinarian, is reduced to a single scene.
    • Dr. Henry Wu, who leads Jurassic Park's genetics team in cloning the dinosaurs, only appears in one scene in the first third of the movie, is given a much bigger backstory and lasts until nearly the end of the story in the book. Since the movie had all non-essential staff moved out before the storm and had very little exposition in comparison, Wu's backstory was lost and he ended up Spared by the Adaptation.
  • Dented Iron: Tim repeatedly survives what grown adults would be lucky to survive, but because of this, he has a limp, his hair is singed, one of his ears is bleeding, his arm is bandaged up, and he generally looks dazed. In his brief appearance in the sequel, he still has a bit of a limp, the poor kid. Also, according to this Character Blog, he's also severely, hilariously, traumatised.
  • Description Cut: "We'll be all right as long as they can't open doors."
  • Desk Sweep of Rage: Arnold sweeps a whole lotta crap from Nedry's desk while trying to fix the damage that Nedry's sabotage caused.
    Arnold: Look at this workstation! What a complete slob!
  • Destroy the Product Placement:
    • The film features Ford Explorer XLTs as the park's main vehicles, one of which is destroyed by the Tyrannosaurus rex in its introductory scene.
    • Nedry tries to smuggle various dinosaur embryos with a container disguised as a can of Barbasol shaving cream. When he encounters the Dilophosaurus, the can falls from his jacket pocket, flowing downstream before being buried in mud.
  • Deus ex Machina: It appears the protagonists are about to be killed by the raptors when the T. rex appears and attacks the raptors, allowing them to escape. This in itself isn't that far fetched but what is is the fact that the T. rex appears rather suddenly and is already in the Visitors' Center, despite there being no way she could have appeared by surprise the way she did. The original ending had the characters use their wits to kill the raptors themselves, but Spielberg decided having the T. rex return to kill them would've been a cooler ending, and few would disagree.
  • Developing Doomed Characters: The early scenes — the stuff before the dinosaurs break out — are actually some of the more interesting scenes of the movie, since they focus on the idea of a dinosaur zoo rather than on simple survival. Given how many of the video games have been about managing such a park and ignoring the movie's themes of chaos theory and dinosaur breakouts, it looks like these scenes had a surprising impact.
  • Developing Nations Lack Cities: San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, is portrayed as a coast town rather than the inland metropolis it is in real life.
  • Didn't Think This Through:
    • Grant grabs a road flare to distract the T. rex that is attacking the kids' car. The T. rex roars at Grant in response, which causes him to falter slightly. He recovers quickly when he realizes that the T. rex is seeing the flare and throws it off and watches as she follows the thrown flare. What he didn't think about was Ian grabbing another flare and leading her away. By the time Ian threw his flare away, he was running so the T. rex ignored the smaller moving target to get the larger one (Ian).
    • Hammond and Arnold shuts down the entire park's system for a full manual reboot to bypass Nedry's hacking. Unfortunately, this shut down power over everything that was still online, including the electric fence that was keeping the Velociraptor pack contained.
  • Didn't See That Coming: Two-fold for the same reason; Hammond's tour really goes pear-shaped when a tropical storm hits right as the guests are out, forcing it to be postponed. Meanwhile, Nedry's attempt to steal the embryos is waylaid by the storm when he gets lost trying to drive to the port and the car skids on the slippery road, causing him to crash near the Dilophosaurus enclosure...
  • Digital Head Swap: During an action scene, a stunt double who was suspended over a mat (which later became a raptor's mouth) looked directly up at the camera. Normally this would have ruined the shot, but the effects team were able to splice the normal actress' face over that of the double, turning an otherwise unusable piece of film into a particularly heart-stopping moment.
  • Disaster Dominoes: Nedry's greed inspires him to shut down park security to steal some embryos, which in turn causes an (admittedly already shambolic) tour in progress to grind to a halt right next to one of the most dangerous exhibits, which leads to said exhibit attacking and killing several of the tourists. The deteriorating situation then prompts the only remaining engineer to turn the park's systems off and on again, which causes the park to switch to emergency power, resulting in the total failure of ALL security, including the raptor fences which even Nedry wasn't stupid enough to disable, facilitating the escape of the raptors whom then run amok, killing several more guests, including the aforementioned engineer. Meanwhile, the protagonists discover that other measures put in place to control the park's population are ineffective.
  • Disastrous Demonstration: John Hammond, who boasts that he "spared no expense," invites renowned paleontologists Allan Grant and Ellie Settler to endorse the park on behalf of the paleontological field. Chaotician Ian Malcolm is brought in to oversee/calculate the potential shortcomings and risks of the park. Lawyer Donald Gennaro is sent by the company to reassure investors that the enterprise is not a waste of money or time. Hammond's grandchildren, Timmy and Lex are on the island to test the interest of the parks target demographic. As the story progresses, a monetary dispute results in lead programmer Dennis Nedry shutting off the park's security, which leads to Malcolm, Grant, Lex, Timmy, and Gennaro getting attacked by an escaped T. rex, which seriously wounds Malcolm, and eats Gennaro. A Dilophosaurus then has a chance encounter with Nedry and eats him. The Velociraptors also escape their enclosure and kill another programmer and the park's game warden, and nearly kill the survivors if it wasn't for the T. rex's timely intervention. Grant then tells Hammond he will not be endorsing the park as they flee in a jeep.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: The T. rex causes the first human death and sends Grant and the kids running. However, while she pops up several times after her breakout, the Raptors become the bigger threat to the cast once they break free when the plan to reboot the park's computers ends up cutting power to their paddock's fences; after their escape the focus of the film is the casts' attempts to avoid them.
  • Disconnected by Death: Subverted, but just barely. At the end, when they finally restore power and communications to the park, Grant phones Hammond to tell him that he and the kids are okay and to call in the evac helicopter. At that moment, the raptor that was trying to break in realizes it can smash through the window, and Hammond last hears three shots ring out before the call ends. They manage to survive, but only by a timely Big Damn Heroes moment from the Tyrannosaurus.
  • The Dog Bites Back: Nedry, who has been abused by his boss Hammond (by his own reckoning at least) is able to get his revenge at a time when Hammond's life's work is suddenly rendered vulnerable by the incoming storm.
  • Doomed Contrarian: Gennaro first disagrees with the scientists, then abandons the party.
  • Door Handle Scare: Lex and Tim hide in the kitchen from a pair of velociraptors, which try to peer through the window of the door. The scene cuts to Grant asking Ellie "You sure the third [velociraptor] is contained?", to which she replies "Yes, unless they figure out how to open doors." Cut to a closeup of the kitchen door handle turning... Later, after being chased through the facility by a group of raptors, Grant, Ellie, Tim and Lex run inside the control room and close the door. There still isn't any power to activate the door locks...and then the raptor outside starts pulling the handle down.
  • Door of Doom: John Hammond deliberately invokes this by having the guided tour of the island begin by entering a large, impressive door, but it's more for show than anything.
    Ian Malcolm: What have they got in there, King Kong?
  • Dramatic Irony: Hammond and Arnold are unable to crack the code that Nedry used to compromise the island's security system, so Hammond decides they have reboot the whole system since "it's obvious now he's not coming back". The audience knows he's technically correct in an Exact Words kind of way because one can't come back from death.
  • Draw Aggro:
    • Both Alan and Ian try to get Rexy to go after them when she's attacking the kids. They succeed, but Ian is injured and separated from the rest and Gennaro is killed.
    • Later on, Muldoon tries to draw the raptors away from Ellie when they go to restore power. He succeeds with two (at the cost of his own life) but the third ends up going after Ellie anyway.
  • The Dreaded:
    • Velociraptors are treated as such by Grant and Muldoon. They are also presented that way in the opening scene to drive home to the audience that modern predators have absolutely nothing on ancient predatory dinosaurs. It's even noted that Nedry of all people made sure that the raptor paddock was exempted from his shutdown program.
    • The T. rex is treated this way by Muldoon and Hammond even before she breaks out. Then after she does, everyone and everything quickly learns to run like hell at the first sign of her approach. The raptors are the only things that don't seem to fear her. It doesn't end well for them.
  • Dropped Glasses: Among other bad things that happen to Nedry during his death scene, this is one of them. Partially justifies his failing the spot check of not noticing the Dilophosaurus entering his jeep and also adds to the Karma (if he had been wearing his glasses, they would have saved him from being blinded by the venom spit).
  • Dude, Not Funny!: Lex reacts this way when Grant pretends to get zapped by an electric fence. Tim, however, doesn't.
    Lex: That's not funny.
    Tim: (snickering) That was great!
  • Dumb Dinos: Averted — the human characters often underestimate predatory dinosaurs like the Velociraptor and the Dilophosaurus with fatal results.
  • Dungeon Bypass: After finally getting the lock systems working so they can seal the control room from the raptor trying to kill them, she just jumps through the giant window right by the door.
  • Eaten Alive: Several humans get eaten by dinosaurs and all of the others kept getting threatened to get eaten. Other dinosaurs got eaten as well, including a Velociraptor as the T. rex appeared Just in Time.
    • Donald Gennaro, after abandoning the Hammond children in a car to go hide in the bathroom when the T. rex shows up, gets the ignominious honor of being nommed on the toilet after the T. rex knocks down the building he's in. In the original novel, it was Dirty Coward Ed Regis, the Public Relations manager of InGen, who did this (and got eaten).
    • Worst cases are Robert Muldoon and John Arnold who fall prey to the raptors, of which it was explicitly stated earlier in the film that they don't bother killing their victims first, they just slice them up and start eating them alive.
    • Nedry got eaten by the Dilophosaurus. The book describes this scene with gruesome detail, while the movie gives us a nice discretion shot
  • Escaped Animal Rampage: John Hammond creates a zoo for dinosaurs. He plans it as a tourist attraction, but when a saboteur shuts off the fences, the animals start attacking people.
  • Everybody Owns a Ford: All the tour vehicles are Ford Explorers, due to Steven Spielberg owning one, which he particularly liked.
  • Every Man Has A Price: Dr. Alan Grant is primarily focused on his excavation work, but he can be persuaded to go to the dinosaur islands for the right price. In this film, John Hammond offers to fund his team's digs for the next three years if he goes to Isla Nublar,
  • Everyone Owns a Mac: Dennis Nedry's terminal into the Jurassic Park supercomputer network is a Mac. Although a few Silicon Graphics workstations also exist (the same computers used to render the CGI dinosaurs).
  • Evil Lawyer Joke: During the discussion over dinner, Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm argue against Hammond's plans for the park. He laments that the only one to side with him is the "bloodsucking lawyer" (Gennaro), who's only concerned with the potential profits. Gennaro takes the joke in stride.
  • Exit, Pursued by a Bear: The movie ends with the raptors getting eaten by the T. rex from earlier in the movie. Nedry, who causes the park sabotage, is also killed and eaten by a Dilophosaurus after he accidentally crashes his car into its enclosure.
  • Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Grant and the kids come across a herd of Gallimimus running together across a field.
    Dr. Grant: Look at them, they're changing direction in unison like a flock of birds evading a predator!
    Tim: Uh, they're flocking this way...
    [enter the T. rex, who kills one of the Gallimimus]
  • Extinct Animal Park: Jurassic Park is designed as an open-space zoo stocked with genetically engineered dinosaurs created from samples of ancient blood (plus or minus varying amounts of frog DNA to fill in the gaps), mostly in the form of large Cretaceous species. It falls apart quickly and spectacularly through a combination of sabotage, poor planning and active mismanagement, and the island it was built on is eventually abandoned to its newly feral inhabitants.
  • Extreme Graphical Representation: The film shows a 3D computer interface that is actually a real program — FSN (short for File System Navigator), a proof-of-concept file-system manager included with every SGI. (It's no longer available on SGI's site, but someone has made a similar program called FSV.) However, prior to the system reboot, what we see of the computers is a combination of specialized UIs and plain old command-line.
  • Extremely Short Timespan: The majority of the film, starting with when the helicopter lands on Isla Nublar, takes place from one morning to the next. And even the moments before it are set in that same month.

    F - I 
  • Faint in Shock: Downplayed Alan Grant gets woozy and needs to sit down when Hammond's big reveal of living dinosaurs starts to sink in.
  • Fantastic Diet Requirement: The dinosaurs are deliberately given a genetic tweak that prevents them from producing lysine in order to keep them from spreading outside of InGen's control. Without lysine supplements provided by scientists on the island, they would all die off. At least, that's the plan — in practice, herbivorous dinosaurs adapted to feed on lysine-rich plants, while the predators get their lysine from their prey. Notably, in real life, no animals can actually produce lysine fast enough to meet metabolic demands, and all rely on their diet to supply themselves with it.
  • Fearsome Foot: The approach of Rexy is once shown by her foot coming down into the shot and sinking into the mud.
  • Final Battle: The heroes escaping from the Raptor pack in the Visitor Center, with the T-Rex/Rexy inadvertently taking out the raptors for them.
  • Finger Wag: Nedry's computer is secured by a patchwork animation of himself condescendingly wagging his finger at unauthorized users and repeating the phrase, "Ah-ah-aah... you didn't say the magic word."
    Arnold: PLEASE! Goddammit! I hate this hacker crap!
  • Five Rounds Rapid: The park security staff are armed with tasers, assault rifles, and shotguns, and only the last of these are taken out and used when the park's automated systems fail. This is distinct from the novel, where at least a limited supply of munitions more suitable for taking down rogue dinosaurs is present on the island.
  • Flawed Prototype: Once the power goes out.
    Hammond: When they opened Disneyland in 1955, nothing worked!
    Malcolm: Yeah, but John, when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists!
  • Food Chain of Evil: The T. rex eats a Gallimimus and a Velociraptor.
  • Foreboding Fleeing Flock: Dr. Grant pauses to appreciate how a group of gallimimus move "just like a flock of birds evading a predator". He doesn't know how right he is. Also a rare case where the flock themselves are a threat, as our heroes need to get out of their way to avoid being trampled.
    Tim: They're, uh... they're 'flocking' this way.
  • Foreshadowing: The first half of the movie has moments that hint at serious design flaws in the park, as well as scenes of nature just plainly not cooperating with human control:
    • The very first scene of the movie has what looks like a high-tech, ultra-secure method of transporting dinosaurs which fails with little effort. Mostly because of glaringly obvious design flaws in the crate (it's got wheels on the bottom and has to be opened manually)
    • The amber with the insect trapped inside is shown in a way that suggests to the audience that it's extremely important, but that's not elaborated on any further until the Info Dump about a third of a way through the film that explains how Hammond was able to get viable dinosaur DNA for cloning.
    • The threat that the Velociraptors pose is built up extensively through the course of the film, starting with Grant's description of how they hunt (and the accident at the start, though we don't know that it's a Velociraptor at the time)
    • Hammond landing his helicopter directly upon the paleontologists' dig site seems to hint at the characteristics we see later: good intentions but thoughtless execution without consideration for potential consequences of one's actions.
    • Grant's seat belt in the chopper is made of two female buckles (Grant's resolution of this might be intended as very subtle foreshadowing of the female dinosaurs "finding a way"). Ellie seems to have no problem tying hers on, which means he didn't just grab Ellie's by mistake. It also serves to illustrate a safety system with a glaring flaw in it, our first hint that the park's security isn't as comprehensive as may first appear.
    • Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm, with a little co-ordination, can easily break out of the restraints during the presentation.
    • Ellie points out that one of the species of plant they have in the visitor center lobby is poisonous, indicating that little thought has been put into the park beyond presentation and the dangers posed by the exhibits are not being given their due gravity.
    • The first tour is a complete shambles, illustrating both the glaring design flaws in the park and the unpredictable nature of the exhibits:
      • The vehicles are electrically powered and move on rails instead of being driven manually. Considering the large distance they're expected to travel, any kind of power failure can leave the passengers stranded.
      • The vehicle lights come on automatically, and can't be turned off. This is one of over a hundred bugs discovered on that day alone. This indicates that the park's software is not fit for purpose and can't be relied on for the safety of the guests or employees.
      • The Dilophosaurus and T. rex no-shows, showing that the creatures are wild animals, not performing bears that will appear on demand for tourists.
      • The car doors don't have functioning locks during the tour. This is lampshaded by Muldoon.
      • In a similar vein, there's signs on the Dilophosaurus exhibit telling tourists to keep the windows closed. The fact that they can even open the windows around creatures that spit venom is a pretty serious oversight, one that is merely papered over by putting up a warning sign.
      • The tour is abandoned completely when they come across the sick Triceratops, again indicating what a major unknown quantity the attractions are.
      • The entire tour is rushed to try and beat an approaching tropical storm, rather than waiting for it to pass.
    • The early scene where Grant scares a kid who mocks the Velociraptor fossil has Grant explaining in excruciating details how they hunt in groups, how they kill, how they start eating their prey alive, and the scene ends with Grant asking the kid to show respect for dangerous predator. When the disaster hits the park, Nedry is eaten alive by a Dilophosaurus after mocking it. Also, raptor's hunting behavior is prominently displayed onscreen later.
    • When Ellie finds what little remains of poor Mr. Arnold in the maintenance shed, you might have noticed that the wire mesh door was closed before Ellie went into the small room the raptor apparently killed Arnold in. This quite brilliantly foreshadows the fact that the raptors are smart enough to understand how to use doors.
  • For Science!: Aside from money and dinosaurs being cool Hammond builds the park because he feels obliged to act on recent scientific discoveries and learn how dinosaurs behave in the modern age.
    Hammond: How can we stand in the light of discovery... and NOT act?
  • For the Funnyz: When Grant touches the (inactive) perimeter fence and acts as if he's being electrocuted. Alexis is not amused, but Tim thought it was funny as hell.
  • Fragile Speedster: The Gallimimus are among the fastest dinosaurs in the park, but lack any other defenses against predators and as such are easily killed by the Tyrannosaurus rex (who is a Lightning Bruiser). Similarly, the Velociraptors are speedy killers towards similarly-sized prey, but anything bigger than them are perfectly capable of taking them down.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: If you look closely, Dennis is watching Jaws on his computer.
  • Freudian Trio: With Hammond as the Id, Malcolm as the Superego, and Grant as the Ego.
  • From the Latin "Intro Ducere": Dr. Grant starts describing Velociraptors, mentioning their birdlike qualities. He declares that "Even the word 'raptor' means 'bird of prey'!" That is true.... but only in English. The -raptor in Velociraptor is a Latin word meaning "seizer" or, a bit more colloquially, "thief" (it just happened to evolve into the meaning "bird of prey" in English somewhere down the line, because birds of prey tend to hunt by seizing and carrying off small animals)note  and Velociraptor was so named probably because the scientists describing it thought that they raided nests, stealing eggs and hatchlings. Velociraptors were very birdlike, but the similarity of their name to modern raptors is just a coincidence.
  • Funny Background Event:
    • In his scene with Dennis, Dodgson exits his car he's being driven around in, and neglects to shut his car door. His driver has to get out and shut it for him, throwing him a dirty look and gesture from behind him.
    • Just as the tour begins, Hammond is watching a monitor showing the onboard camera views of the Explorers. Just before he switches over to the car Lex and Tim are in, the monitor shows Ian sitting with his arm on the back of the seat across Alan's shoulders, and Alan turning toward him in a "What the hell?" sort of fashion.
  • Garden of Evil: Isla Nublar. Lush, tropical vegetation, well-kept park infrastructure and lots of dinosaurs. Mostly of the carnivorous kind.
  • Gender Bender: The all-female dinosaur population gradually has some of them turn male. This is due to the fragmented dino DNA that created them being "repaired" with the DNA of a frog species that can change gender.
  • Gender Flip: The film switches the roles of Hammond's grandchildren, making Lex the older one and the computer genius. This was done in order to give Lex more characterization. In the original novel, Tim was a Teen Genius that was both computer savvy and obsessed with dinosaurs, while Lex was just annoying.
  • Gendercide: As they're driving through the park, Malcolm starts in on one of his little monologues, before Ellie commandeers it. Also apparently a Lampshade Hanging on the fact that women and girls tend not to die in Spielberg's work.
    Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs; God destroys dinosaurs; God creates man; man destroys God; man creates dinosaurs.
    Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man ... woman inherits the Earth.
    [Malcolm and Grant give Ellie a vaguely worried look]
  • George Lucas Altered Version: While the film got an authentic transfer in the 2012 Ultimate Trilogy boxset, the version released in 2014 was rife with this. It featured a Blue and Orange Contrast color grade, various odd sizing changes such as the size of Rexy's head and making Muldoon's thighs bigger, removing Rexy chomping on the head of a Gallimimus, or just cleaning up Jeff Goldblum's hair for a specific scene (plus heavy use of Digital Noise Removal, removing a lot of the finer details). On the other hand, various infamous goofs are fixed, such as a light in the back of a shot or the cables used to flip the Jeep in the T. rex breakout scene.
  • Glasses Pull: When Grant sees his first dino, he takes his hat off, followed by his shades. Then, he puts his hand on Sattler's head and turns it in the direction of the dino, and she does the same thing.
  • Go Fetch:
    • Grant is able to stop a pissed T. rex from crushing a stalled jeep (with children inside) with a flare. Unfortunately Malcolm decides he's going to do the same thing... it doesn't go as well for him, as he keeps moving after throwing it. Justified in that the rex's vision is supposed to be so bad in the dark and the rain that all it could follow was the movement of the flare.
    • Dennis Nedry tries it with a Dilophosaurus. It looks at him like he's an idiot before it starts spitting venom at him.
  • Godzilla Threshold: Arnold and the others realize that the only way to wipe out what Nedry did and get the park back online is a total system shutdown, which will wipe out what little electrical power they have left, resulting in the Velociraptors being finally let loose. It was either that or wait seven days for the dinosaurs to die from lysine deficiency (which the dinosaurs had managed to overcome, unbeknownst to anyone).
  • Gone Horribly Right: Hammond's dream of creating dinosaurs did work; he succeeds in creating large, unpredictable wild animals, some of which are deadly alpha predators with no competition in the modern world...
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: ...And then every safety measure designed to contain those alpha predators fails in spectacular fashion, from electrical fences to failsafes built into the very creatures' genes.
  • Gory Discretion Shot:
    • The film opens with a Dead-Hand Shot of Jophery the worker being dragged away by the Velociraptor.
    • When Ellie and Muldoon search for Grant and the kids, they find, off camera, bloody evidence of Gennaro's death.
      Muldoon: [peeks under a palm frond in the background] I think this was Gennaro.
      Ellie: [staring at something at her feet in the foreground] I think this was too.
    • Nedry's death is conveyed by the Jeep he's in shaking wildly, and a shot of the phony shaving cream can containing the stolen embryos being buried in the mud running down the hillside.
    • Although Muldoon's death is mostly obscured through the bushes, there's a Freeze-Frame Bonus wherein you can see that the raptor has his head in her mouth.
  • Great White Hunter: Muldoon is about as close as you'll get to this trope being played straight in the modern day. He was technically a game warden, though, but the look and the 'tude were there; close enough. Muldoon was really something of a subversion in that he leaned more toward the anti-heroic end of the scale. He is not portrayed in a particularly romantic manner, and is in fact an embittered, highly cynical man who hates the raptors and wishes he could kill them all — and considering what happens throughout the course of the film, it's hard to blame him.
  • Green Aesop: The initial emphasis seems to be on mankind's hubris by resurrecting prehistoric lifeforms to exhibit them in a theme park for the sake of crass commercialism, even comparing it to playing God. However, the park only collapses as a result of greed-motivated sabotage by The Mole pulling off an Inside Job. Starting with the sequels, the message is further diminished due to several complex factors.
  • Groin Attack: Between the slash across the chest and stomach, Grant slashes across the kid's crotch with his raptor claw to scare him.
  • Guns Are Worthless: Alan Grant's SPAS-12 loaded with slugs proved unable to even hit Velociraptors behind glass, and the weapon suffered a stovepipe jam in the end. In fact, nobody in this film who has possession of a gun ever benefits from having it, Muldoon's fate being a prime example.
  • Gutted Like a Fish: Dr. Grant gives an impromptu lecture about the possible links in ancestry between the Velociraptor and birds while at an paleontological dig site. He gets interrupted by an obnoxious kid, who quips the raptor, "looks like a big turkey." So Grant, much to the amusement of his students, teaches the boy a lesson in respect by explaining exactly how that "turkey" hunted and killed its prey. Grant shows him the raptor's middle toe claw and swipes it across the boy's belly then down his midsection to illustrate the cutting motion it used to spill the victim's intestines; finishing his tutorial by telling him that, "The point is, you are alive when it starts to eat you."
  • Hacked by a Pirate: Inverted, as the hacker screen came up only after Arnold's attempt at hacking Nedry's computer to restore security.
  • Hall of Mirrors: A Velociraptor runs into a polished metal door whose angle reflected Lex, trying to hide in a different place.
  • Hats Off to the Dead: Seeing the hole in the raptor paddock's fence, Muldoon reflects on how the shutdown allowed the pack to break free. He then takes his hat off for a moment, having apparently realized why Arnold didn't return.
  • Have You Tried Rebooting?: When the operators are locked out of the computer system, they restart it entirely and manage to gain access again. This unwittingly screws things up more by causing the park to switch to auxiliary power, which was insufficient to power the fences - including those protecting the raptor paddock.
  • Hell Is That Noise: The T. rex has two hellish noises. One includes the loud, thunderous footsteps she makes to announce her arrival, which all characters treat with quiet dread when they hear it. The other is her roar, which is shown to be deafening up close and likely to strike terror in any human who hears it.
  • Help, I'm Stuck!: Tim's foot gets stuck under the jeep, preventing him from escaping before the T. rex pushes the car down the slope and into the tree. This gives Grant a chance to rescue the boy.
  • Herbivores Are Friendly: Dr. Grant calms Alex down when she sees nearby Brachiosaurus by reassuring her that they're plant-eaters.
    Tim: Veggie-sauruses!
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Hammond and the whole InGen team, in some way, but Nedry especially. He disables the park fences so that he can pass through the paddocks on the maintenance roads. He succeeds in getting into the Dilophosaurus paddock...
  • Hollywood Hacking: There's an infamous scene in which the kid hero exclaims "It's a UNIX system. I know this." over a screen of what appears to be zooming polygon nonsense. This program actually existed: it's a legitimate UNIX OS derivative from SGI called IRIX that was running a 3D file system navigator, but it never caught on due to being very slow and overly flashy. Then again, "overly flashy" describes half the equipment in the park, so that at least makes some sense why Hammond would insist on using such a system. This scene has become so iconic of all that's wrong about Hollywood depictions of technology that Reddit has a whole "subreddit" (forum) dedicated to "every over-the-top, embarrassing, and downright flat-out incorrect usage of technology found in movies, TV shows, and video games"note  called, you guessed it, r/ItsAUnixSystem.
  • Homage: The face-to-face encounter atop the tree with the Brachiosaur nods to the treetop "encounter" against the Brontosaur sauropod in King Kong (1933), only all the sauropods here are harmless.
  • Hope Sprouts Eternal: Referenced by Ian Malcolm: "If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously. [...] life finds a way."
  • Hostile Weather: Rainfall due to a tropical storm gets Nedry killed who disabled the park's safety system. The plan was to get the power back on after a couple of minutes but without his intervention the electric fences remain without power and an Escaped Animal Rampage ensues.
  • Ignored Expert: Muldoon. He advises that they don't have enough firepower on the island in case the dinosaurs get out of control, that the Velociraptors are too dangerous and should be destroyed, that they need to closely monitor the path of the tropical storm, and repeatedly insists that they put locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors so that guests can't simply jump out of the cars. All of which Hammond ignores.
  • Impeded Communication: Nedry's hacking shuts down the park's telephones and radios, preventing Hammond's group from being able to communicate with Dr. Grant and the kids. This almost leads to their deaths when Dr. Sattler restores power to the park just as the three of them are climbing over the electric perimeter fence.
  • Imprinting: Hammond, the creator of the park, insists on being at every dinosaur's hatching so the baby dinos will imprint on him.
  • Improbable Infant Survival: Lex and Tim go through the most danger of anybody in the movie (that even includes Alan) but survive (although they certainly are in a mess by the end). Other characters face a lot less danger but die. Tim, especially, who falls down a cliff in a half-crushed car and gets shocked by a very powerful electric fence.
  • Improbable Taxonomy Skills:
    • Ellie, a paleobotanist, knows from a cursory glance that a certain plant is an extinct species. In all fairness, the character does have a doctorate in paleobotany, and many high-ranking and distinctive taxonomic groups of plants do have few or no living representatives (for instance, the entire phylum of seed ferns has been extinct since the Eocene at the latest, and the order Ginkgoales is represented by only a single living species, Ginkgo biloba).
    • Grant is able to perfectly describe the exact hunting methods used by raptors, despite only having their bones to work with. And then there's them knowing that Rexy hunts by motion...
  • Infodump: The "Mr. DNA" animated sequence explains to both the characters and the audience how InGen was able to de-extinct dinosaurs in a fast and simplified manner.
  • Informed Attribute: There's one Velociraptor said to be "the big one" that is the boss of the other two, but all three raptors seen are completely physically identical, nor are any depicted as being more aggressive than the others, making it impossible to tell which one is meant to be "the big one" other than just assuming. The Velociraptor are also said to be "cheetah speed", but since most of the raptor scenes only occur indoors, the information never becomes relevant.
  • Inside Job: The plot is kicked off by park employee Dennis Nedry sabotaging the park's security systems in order to facilitate his theft of dinosaur embryos to sell to Biosyn, one of InGen's competitors.
  • Instant Convertible: A small version of this happens to the Jeep when Muldoon, Sattler, and Malcolm are fleeing from the T. rex and hit a tree limb that has fallen across the road. The Jeep was already a convertible and had the roll bars and roof removed, but the branch still breaks the windshield off and would have decapitated everybody if they didn't duck to avoid it.
  • Ironic Echo: Hammond repeatedly tells everybody very proudly "We've spared no expense." After the park goes completely to hell and his beloved grandchildren and Dr. Grant go missing, he talks with Dr. Sattler. He tries to explain the park to her, and she points out that the park was always doomed. Hammond is clearly completely broken, and she tries to make him feel better by complimenting the ice-cream, and he once again says, without any of his previous pride, "We spared no expense..."
  • Irony:
    • Despite Hammond's constant declarations of "We've spared no expense," the park is undone entirely due to the expenses he did skimp on; notably, leaving the security for the incredibly-dangerous animals entirely in the hands of a single IT guy who is explicitly stated to have been the lowest bidder and has financial troubles of his own.
    • Spielberg liked the ending for having the dinosaur bone exhibit getting demolished by the real deal ... and took the irony further by having the T. rex behind a banner that read "When the Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth".
    • Having brought Grant and Sattler to the park intending to have them help assuage the concerns of the lawyer Gennaro, when faced with a meeting wherein the lawyer can see nothing but dollar signs and the scientists are urgently impressing upon him the potential disaster that Jurassic Park is, Hammond can only ruefully reflect:
      Hammond: I don't believe it. I don't believe it! You're meant to come down here and defend me against these characters, and the only one I've got on my side is the blood-sucking lawyer!
      Gennaro:note  Thank you.
    • The obnoxious kid at the dig site technically supports Grant's theory about dinosaurs giving rise to birds with his infamous "six-foot turkey" comment while Tim, who worships Grant, isn't totally on board with said theory.
  • Isle of Giant Horrors: The film is about a soon-to-be-opened dinosaur theme park on a tropical island, inhabited by cloned dinosaurs.

    J - O 
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
    • Ian Malcolm can be described as this. Although he spends most of the movie making critical comments about the park and at one point flirting with Dr. Sattler, he actually nearly sacrificed his life just to allow Dr. Grant save the kids from the T. rex.
    • Dr. Alan Grant, who starts out as a child-disliking grouch when we first meet him. Starting with the T. rex attack, He ends up not only repeatedly risking his life to save Tim and Lex from danger, but goes out of his way to keep them calm by making jokes, reassuring them, etc.
  • Jump Scare:
    • "Where's the goat?" [THUNK]
    • "Mr. Hammond, I think we're back in business—" [Cue Velociraptor attack]
    • The Dilophosaurus's frill that suddenly opens.
  • Just Desserts: Nedry ends up meeting his death at the jaws of one of the creatures he was attempting to steal and sell to Biosyn.
  • Just Think of the Potential!: John Hammond constantly insists that the park will change the world and blow people (as well as science) away. He's right on that account.
    "How can we stand on the brink of discovery, and not act?"
  • Karma Houdini: Dodgson, who essentially set the conflict in motion by bribing Nedry to steal the embryos. However, this finally changes when he returns in Jurassic World: Dominion.
  • Karmic Death:
    • Gennaro leaves the two kids for dead to hide from the T. rex, while Grant and Malcolm risk their lives to save them. Of the five of them, guess who ends up being eaten by the T-Rex.
    • Dennis Nedry is successful in stealing the embryos, resulting in the T. rex, and later the Velociraptors, getting out and going on a rampage, with the raptors killing Ray Arnold and Robert Muldoon. However, he doesn't make it back to Dodgson; he gets lost, his car gets stuck, and he is eaten by a Dilophosaurus.
  • Killed Offscreen: Arnold leaves by himself to switch the power back on and doesn't return. Dr. Sattler later discovers he managed to reach the maintenance shed but was killed and torn to pieces by the Velociraptor.
  • Killer Rabbit:
    • "Squeeeeeeeee-hoo-hoo?" Come on, it's only a stupid spitting Dilophosaurus — ARGH I'M BLIND!
    • wht_rbt.obj (the virus that Nedry inserted into the system) also qualifies.
  • Kubrick Stare: When Grant says, "You've bred raptors...?"
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some of the merchandise in the gift shop is real, including the book The Making of Jurassic Park (though the cover is different). It can't be seen in the movie, but the cover of Grant's book that Tim carries has a forward written by Sir Richard Attenborough. In light of the merchandising juggernaut that this film became upon its release, this line applies just as much to the real world as it does the film's universe.
    Gennaro: We're gonna make a fortune with this place.
  • Leg Focus: Ellie's constantly in shorts, and her legs are the foreground focus of the first shot inside the helicopter on the ride to the island.
  • LEGO Genetics: the dinosaurs had frog DNA spliced in to fill in the gaps in their genomes caused by 65 million years in a mosquito's stomach. This allows them to change sexes like some frogs and breed.
  • Lighter and Softer: The film is much, much tamer than the novel; for one, the book starts off with a man who was the victim of a Velociraptor mauling so brutal, his bones and arteries could be seen through his wounds, and he vomited blood from his mouth like a fire hose as he died. The movie also starts off with a fatal Velociraptor attack, but it cuts away before the actual death. Nedry's death is also much more descriptive and explicit, as he is disemboweled by the Dilophosaurus and later, the other characters come across his partly-eaten remains. Also, Henry Wu gets disemboweled by a Velociraptor in the book, while he survives in the movie.
  • Living Motion Detector: Early in the film, Grant states that the T. rex's vision is based on movement and won't see you if you stand still. He is proven correct when he and Lex freeze in place and the living T. rex seems oblivious to their presence. This has been the subject of ridicule for many scientists as even with a motion-based vision, the T. rex would still have a great sense of smell and find them anyways. Later films downplayed this aspect with characters from the first film advising people to not move when T. rex is present, only for their warning to get ignored.
  • Locked in a Freezer: Lex and Tim shove one of the raptors into the Visitors' Center kitchen’s walk-in freezer and shut the door.
  • Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Hammond could very well be a textbook example. Guy wants to make something of lasting beauty and appeal, accessible to all, and in the process enrich the world. What does he get? Out of control dinosaurs and several instances of "I told you so"'.
  • Major Injury Underreaction: Malcolm's reaction after almost getting killed by the T. rex and getting his leg injured?
  • Male Gaze: Briefly. In the scene where Ellie stumbles out of the power station after fleeing the Velociraptors, the camera is pretty blatantly riveted on her butt before she runs toward Alan. Earlier, on the helicopter ride to the island, her legs are prominently in the foreground.
  • Mighty Roar: After escaping from her paddock, Rexy announces herself quite loudly.
  • Money, Dear Boy: In-Universe. Hammond convinces Grant and Ellie to come to park by offering a very generous grant for their digs.
  • Monster Delay:
    • Occurs a few times. The film keeps the appearance of the dinosaurs relatively hidden until the full reveal of the Brachiosaurus twenty minutes in, and then it takes another forty minutes before the first threatening dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus, appears in full, signalling that it's hit the fan.
    • The Velociraptor in particular are kept hidden until the last fifth of the movie. The movie begins with a worker being killed by a raptor, but it's kept hidden in a cage and only its eye is briefly visible. Later, the raptors are being fed a live cow, but are completely hidden in the brush. Then we see that after the power was turned off, the raptors escaped by gnawing through the steel bars of their pen. The Velociraptor are finally revealed fully in a Jump Scare after Ellie is able to turn the power back on, roughly an hour and forty-five minutes into the film.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • The hatching of the raptor is quite heartwarming at first, but grows ominous once Grant realizes what it actually is.
    • When Nedry gets his jeep stuck, a tiny dinosaur appears and stares at him. Nedry is momentarily relieved that she's small and not attacking, trying to lure her away by tossing a stick. She cocks her head at him with a You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me! expression. The Nedry threatens to run her over, and she spits at him, screeching with her frill up. Cue one of the scariest deaths in the film.
  • Musical Spoiler: Averted. The impressive fanfare kicks in at the exact moment the T. rex enters and kills the Velociraptors, who were about to kill our heroes; there is no musical build-up whatsoever to the climactic fight. This was actually a decision made by Steven Spielberg in post-production; as scored by John Williams, it's more of a case of nature in the raw than an unintended rescue. Listen from 6:53 onwards here.
  • Mr. Exposition: Mr. DNA, who explains to the audience how they were able to clone the dinosaurs from their DNA.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Muldoon says they originally had eight raptors. This is how many they had in the book... well, until the breeding started.
    • Similarly, when Grant, Lex, and Tim discover a nest in the park, proving that the dinosaurs have mutated to breed in spite of the park's designs and intentions, the footprints of the baby dinosaurs are two-toed, showing that they're raptor eggs in particular. In the novel, the raptors were not only one of the species specifically noted to be breeding but also had one of the highest population increases, from eight to thirty-seven.
  • Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: After seeing the live dinosaurs in the park, Grant asks Hammond how he did this and the only answer he gets is "I'll show you" and the scene cuts to them driving up to the lab.
  • Never Work with Children or Animals: In-universe, this happens during the tour. The Dilophosaurus fails to appear during their cue, the Triceratops is sick, and Rexy isn't hungry yet for the goat.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • After Nedry shuts down the fences to steal the embryos and make his escape, the Tyrannosaurus rex gets out and wreaks havoc. In order to undo what Nedry has done, Hammond wants the computers shut down and restarted. When Ray Arnold initially refuses, Hammond insists: "People are dying. Would you please shut down the system." Arnold does so. Nedry was smart enough to program the raptor fences to stay operational during his sabotage; the total system shutdown releases the Velociraptors. Prior to this, the T. rex had only killed one person and likely preferred snacking on its fellow dinosaurs as opposed to stringy, bony humans; the raptors kill two humans for the simple sport of it, and relentlessly pursue the main characters for the rest of the film.
    • When Ellie Sattler turns the power back on it also turns on the electric fence that Dr. Grant and the kids are climbing down. Dr Grant and Lex successfully gets down but Tim gets electrocuted and flies to the ground. Luckily he survives.
    • When the T. rex breaks out and attacks the kids, Dr. Grant gets its attention with a flare and then throws it away, causing the T. rex to forget about the kids and chase after the flare. So far, so good, except Ian Malcolm tries to help with his own flare, which only causes the T. rex's attention to be turned back to the people instead of Grant's flare. Malcolm's own attempt to throw the flare away doesn't work because he's running while doing so, so the T. rex focuses on the larger moving target. The result is that it keeps chasing him, leading to Malcolm being injured and Gennaro killed.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The "Big One" actually does this for herself and her two cohorts before the movie starts, as Muldoon explains that they originally bred eight raptors before she took over the pride and killed all but two of her pack mates. As the sequel shows, an eight-plus strong pack of raptors is a lot harder for a band of humans to escape alive from than a trio of them. For that matter, they probably wouldn't have died—one by freezing, two by T. rex— either.
  • Nice Kitty...: Nedry tries to pacify the Dilophosaurus this way... to no avail.
  • Night-Vision Goggles: Relatively realistic ones, too. Specifically, starlight-scope goggles. Gennaro even tells Tim that he shouldn't grab them due to them being heavy and expensive.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Hammond boasts that he spared no expense on the public parts of the park, but he evidently skimped on the behind-the-scenes matters that keep it functioning.
    • Jurassic Park is woefully understaffed. Even though the park is not officially open for business, the animals are in place and most of the park infrastructure has been built. In spite of this, Hammond's operational and maintenance staff barely seems to exceed a few dozen at most.
    • Animal containment is criminally inept. Herbivores graze near the entrance of the park with no barriers of any kind, allowing the arriving party to walk up to the habitat of a colossal, potentially territorial beast without so much as encountering a sign dissuading them. This is exemplified in the scene where they find the sick Triceratops. Carnivores are kept at bay using electric fences with no backup in case power fails, something even animals in the real world can and do break if they notice they aren't being shocked anymore. The "Keep Windows Up" sign on the Dilophosaurus paddock indicates that there is nothing to prevent the Dilos from spitting in the guests' eyes other than a warning.
    • The only animals in any way reasonably contained are the Velociraptors, but they too have problems. The very first scene of the movie has the staff transferring a raptor into the paddock. As impressive as the system looks, it's defeated by the raptor simply ramming its cage while the door is being opened, causing the unsecured cage to bounce away from the gate and provide an escape route. Had said raptor been more concerned with escape than eating one of the workers, it would have been gone. The cage should have been secured to the gate in some fashion to prevent exactly this scenario. On top of that, the cage must be opened and closed manually by a man standing on top of the cage, resulting in a fatality.
    • There are no armed security teams on standby in case any of the dangerous dinosaurs ever escape, and Robert Muldoon is the only guy on the park with any firearms experience.
    • Nothing prevents guests from getting out of the tour vehicles while they are moving, though Hammond at least has the good sense to note they should add locks after this glaring oversight is made apparent to him. For that matter, once out of the vehicles, there is nothing to prevent the guests from touching the fences, which have lethal levels of electricity running through them. The tour cars are all remotely controlled with no chaperone. If the control system goes down, the visitors are stranded without anybody to get them back to the Visitors' Center.
    • A tropical storm is heading straight for the island. Normally, they should have had days of warning and would have therefore rescheduled the tour. It's as if Hammond kind of just expected the storm to kindly swerve out of the island's path just for his sake. Which is quite fitting for his character, actually.
    • The park has no emergency evacuation plan off the island whether the park breaks down, a tropical storm like one in the movie comes down, or even if someone has a medical emergency. At bare minimum, there should be a helicopter physically on the island for emergency airlifts which would have solved a lot of heartache once the grid went down and the dinosaurs started to get loose.
    • As the fact that the people behind Jurassic Park are shown to be reckless and irresponsible with the untapped power they've unleashed, this is all part of the point. This is discussed in a scene where the scientists basically lecture Hammond at length about the sheer reckless irresponsibility of reviving lifeforms that haven't been seen on the planet for sixty-five million years and shoving them in a theme park to interact with humans without any care for what might possibly happen. As an example, Ellie points out that the flowers used to decorate the Visitors' Center are actually poisonous, but the park operators have scattered them throughout without a care simply because they look exotic and pretty.
  • Not Enough to Bury: Ellie and Muldoon arrive at the scene of a T. rex attack. It's also all Sattler finds of Mr. Arnold after his disappearance is his arm.:
    Muldoon: I think this was Gennaro.
    Ellie: [about fifteen feet away] I think this was too.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: Done exceptionally well throughout with both the big and small (predatory) dinosaurs. Especially the opening scene where the park-worker gets mauled, and later on when Hammond feeds a cow to the Velociraptors. You don't see anything, but the terrified lowing of the bull (and the demonic screeching of the raptors) combined with that shot of the shredded, empty harness being lifted out of the enclosure are absolutely chilling. They even went so far as to have the carnivores all be no-shows during the tour (unlike in the book) so they wouldn't make their first appearances until they became a threat. Clearly Spielberg took the one major lesson he learned from Jaws to heart.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Throughout the movie, the approach of the T. rex is announced by earth-shaking steps. At some point, she apparently takes a few levels in Ninja, since she somehow manages to sneak up on the survivors and the Raptors at the end. The T. rex enters the lobby through the Visitors' Center's unfinished side wall, by the main door, which is visible (partially covered in scaffolding and hanging plastic) in a brief shot earlier in the scene — though there's no corresponding hole on the outside of the building.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Donald Gennaro's reaction to Rexy finding the outhouse he was hiding in was a very memorable one. It also provides the Film sub-page's image.
      Gennaro: (frantically as the outhouse shakes around him) Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with...AAAAAHHHHHH! (closes the door just before Rexy smashes through)
    • And just before that, he and the kids react with horror when what's left of the goat lands on their vehicle's roof. And when Rexy first rears her head, Gennaro looks like he's about to piss himself before running to the outhouse.
      Gennaro: Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!
    • The kids then have this reaction to Gennaro abandoning them.
      Lex: He left us! He left us!
    • "You've bred raptors?"
    • The look on Grant's face when the car starts to slide out of that tree. And the looks on everyone's faces when they realize what happened to the goat...
    • The two kids have gotten back to the main buildings, and are tucking into food... when Lex looks up, and has a classic Oh, Crap! moment when she realizes she's looking at the shadows of raptors in the next room, moving around.
    • Tim realizing that the herd of Gallimimus was suddenly "flocking" into their direction in the first film. "They're, uh... they're flocking this way", indeed.note 
    • Two in the scene where Rexy chases the Jeep: Ian's classically understated "Must go faster," and Ellie seconds later screaming shit several times at the top of her lungs.
    • Stranded right outside the Tyrannosaurus paddock, Tim notices that the cup of water on the dashboard is vibrating...
    • Also happens a few minutes later when Ian notices the vibrating water in the T. rex footprint.
    • Ellie and Muldoon have this reaction when they leave the bunker and realize that the raptors have escaped. And then when Muldoon realizes that the raptors have outflanked him.
      "Clever girl..."
  • Oh, No... Not Again!: When Grant gets ready to troll the kid who mocks Velociraptor, Ellie mutters "Oh, no... here we go..." which suggests that he's done this before.
  • Only Sane Man: Of all of Hammond's staff, only Robert Muldoon seems fully aware of how dangerous the park is, suggesting the Velociraptors all be destroyed (albeit as a cynical introduction to the guests at the raptor pen) and having a brief "I Told You So" moment about the need for locks on the vehicle doors when everyone disembarks upon seeing the sick Triceratops.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
    • Sam Neill's American accent holds up pretty well, except for one line during the scene where he throws the stick at the fence.
    • Richard Attenborough plays Hammond with a Scottish accent that comes and goes in different scenes.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Sattler, Malcolm and Grant show detailed relevant knowledge in areas far outside their specialties: tropical modern botany ("Is this West Indian Lilac?"), veterinary toxicology ("microvesicles", "These are dilated."), amphibian reproductive biology ("Some species of West African frog are known to spontaneously change sex"), cellular biology ("How do you interrupt the cellular mitosis?"), and DNA extraction ("Lloyd extraction hasn't recreated an intact DNA strand." "Not without massive sequence gaps.").
  • Our Clones Are Different: The film lays out its cloning rules in the form of an in-universe cartoon. The dinosaur DNA was retrieved from the blood sucked up by a prehistoric mosquito that was encased inside of amber, but the incomplete nature of the genetic samples necessitated the use of frog DNA as a substitution, which acts as a way to Hand Wave any paleontological inconsistencies present in the franchise on top of giving the all-female dinosaur population Gender Bender powers, allowing them to breed out of control. None of this is possible for numerous reasons, chief among them being the fact that any DNA that old would have expired by the time humanity got their hands on it.
  • Override Command: Justified. The giant gates have a manual override lever so that they can be opened in the event of a power failure. There is also of course Nedry's software backdoor. This is justified too, since he wrote the software in the first place.

    P - R 
  • Pacified Adaptation:
    • While there is still plenty of danger and peril in the film, the human characters usually survive dinosaur encounters with a combination of quick thinking and some incredibly lucky breaks, whereas in the novel several characters proactively fight back against the dinos and even manage to kill a few.
    • There are also a lot more Red Shirt deaths (albeit mostly off screen in the original novel, where the raptors break out much earlier on.
  • Plot-Demanded Manual Mode: In order to manually restore the power that Nedry foolishly shut down, Dr. Sattler must sneak into the utility bunker that routes power to different parts of the park. This provides for a convenient Trapped-with-Monster Plot situation when Dr. Sattler finds herself alone in the bunker with a dinosaur.
  • Predation Is Natural: Alan Grant takes a moment to explain to Lex and Tim that the predatory dinosaurs aren't monsters; they're just animals who "just do what they do". (And this is just an hour or two after they barely escaped a T. rex attack.)
  • Prehistoric Monster:
    • Averted with the herbivores, who are all depicted as peaceful animals, but Played With with the carnivores.
    • Played straight with the Dilophosaurus and Velociraptor. The Dilophosaurus is depicted to have monstrous, fictitious traits such as a neck-frill and a venomous spit to hunt bigger prey while the Velociraptor is far larger than the real-life animal and is intelligent enough to hunt humans for sport.
    • Subverted with Rexy the T. rex. Rexy has a feared reputation that makes even the park management shudder, but she's depicted in the film as a curious but highly territorial animal that just happens to find new land to claim as her territory when the electric fences shut down. She kills only one human in the entire film and spends more time hunting larger and meatier dinosaurs over the human nuggets.
  • Product Placement:
    • The Ford Explorers used on the tour (replacing the Toyota Land Cruisers from the book).
    • Barbasol shaving cream is prominently featured as part of the scheme to steal dinosaur embryos. Notably, Barbasol sold themed cans in 2015 and 2023: the former was for Jurassic World, and the latter was for this film's 30th anniversary! (This is also a change from the book, in which the shaving cream was Gillette.)
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "People — are — dying!"
  • Quaking with Fear: Lex's enjoyment of a spoonful of jelly('jello') is interrupted by the terrifying sight of a Velociraptor. Her shaking in fear is emphasised by the spoonful of dessert consequently jiggling.
  • Quizzical Tilt: Rexy gives Gennaro one just before eating him. The Dilophosaurus gives several to Nedry while it's sizing him up before it strikes. Both times it was probably to show the theropods' bird-likeness.
  • Rapid-Fire Typing: Dennis Nedry is shown typing at a feverish place while he's setting up "White Rabbit Object" to launch. By the time the camera moves so we can see what's on the screen, it only focuses on one button that pops up on the screen: "Execute."
  • Raptor Attack: The Trope Codifier as it's this very film that propelled Velociraptor to mainstream pop culture along with several inaccurate attributes associated with them. They are intelligent, human-sized, reptilian monsters with sickle-like claws on their feet and a taste for killing. Though the film does connect them with birds (and gives them bird-like attributes at least in their sounds and movements), it's not as apparent compared to the sequels starting with Jurassic Park III, which play up the bird connection more so than here.
  • Reality Has No Soundtrack: The film is very strategic in its use of a musical score, and several extended dinosaur encounters, including the T. rex attack, Nedry's encounter with the Dilophosaurus and the Gallimimus stampede, are done entirely without music.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: That program Lex uses to restore the security systems? That's a real UNIX program, used for file system management, called FSN. Try telling that to some people, though.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When Sattler joins Hammond eating in the cafeteria of the Visitors' Center after everything's gone to Hell:
    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!
  • Reckless Gun Usage: In keeping with the general undercurrent of shoddiness about the park, the security personnel in the beginning almost universally use poor trigger discipline. This is made more apparent when compared to Muldoon, who does practice it (though he himself is guilty of some Artistic License – Gun Safety; see above).
  • Redemption Earns Life:
    • Ian isn't a bad guy, but he is a bit of a gruff grump about the park and self-righteous. He then risks his life to save Tim and Lex, even if it wasn't necessary, facing a T. rex for them. This merits him as being one of the survivors, albeit injured.
    • Hammond could have easily been his sociopathic novel counterpart, stubbornly insists on opening the park no matter the consequences. Instead, after getting an earful from Sattler about the illusion of control, he realizes that his dream is not worth endangering people's lives and thus does everything he can to get the power back on and evacuate the survivors, going as far as disowning the park when all is said and done. Thus, he gets to live in the end unlike his novel counterpart who gets eaten by his own dinosaurs.
  • Red Shirt: The poor schmuck who gets eaten by a raptor in the first scene.
  • Reliably Unreliable Guns: Near the end of the film, Grant wields a shotgun against the Velociraptors trying to break into the control room, but it jams after only a couple of shots. He drops it and runs.
  • Roadsign Reversal: Nedry suffers an unintentional version of this while trying to reach the dock — having accidentally knocked down a sign pointing the way, he tries to set it up and find the right direction. Between the inclement weather and the sign being so loosely mounted that it can turn its pole, he can't figure it out. So he gives up and gives the thing one last frustrated spin before wandering off.
  • Roar Before Beating: Done pretty constantly, with the T. rex and the raptors vocalizing a lot when attacking humans.
  • Rotating Protagonist: The main characters are Grant, Ellie, Ian, Hammond, and the kids. Grant was only the main character for the first hour up until he guided the children to safety from the Tyrannosaurus. Ian doesn't do much after getting kicked hard by that Tyrannosaurus but chide Hammond some more about the park's failure. Afterwards, the children get more screen time, Grant and Ellie are just their Big Good physical back-up.
  • Rule of Scary:
    • Many of the dinosaurs were deliberately stylized to be more menacing. The velociraptors are a particularly evident example.
    • Why in blazes would a door lock ever be tied to an electrical grid in such a way that it cannot be manually operated? There's no sane reason for that whatsoever apart from this trope.note  It also explains why Tim and Lex keep a tight grasp on the Idiot Ball several times: if they didn't do incredibly stupid things, the dinosaurs wouldn't be able to menace them constantly and create tension.
  • Run or Die: The only thing anybody can do against the T. rex and the raptors.

    S - Z 
  • Sacrificial Lion: Robert Muldoon, the park's game warden, who is outsmarted and killed by the Velociraptors.
  • Safe Behind the Corner: In the famous kitchen hide & seek scene, the raptors fail to notice the kids repeatedly because they don't care to move their heads around the corners behind which the kids are hiding until Tim starts lagging behind and accidentally knocks a ladle onto the floor and even then, they are easily distracted by Lex.
  • Say Your Prayers: Gennaro frantically babbles the rosary as the T-Rex storms towards the bathroom where he's hiding.
  • Scenery Porn: The panoramic vistas in this movie alone are worth watching the film for. The art direction is incredible. Simply incredible.
  • Science Is Bad: Or reckless science, at least, since most of the problems that happen in the movie stem from the scientists behind Jurassic Park over-confidently plunging ahead and having fun cloning dinosaurs without considering the possible consequences of their actions or stopping to think about the awesome responsibilities and forces they were unleashing.
    Dr. Ian Malcolm: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
  • Schrödinger's Cast: Malcolm died in the novel, but survived the movie, leading to his novel counterpart's death being Retconned and Malcolm being the protagonist of the second book (and thus, film). Hammond likewise survived the film where he died in the book. While the novels show him no such mercy, his survival is important for the second film.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The original teaser for the film states that the first mosquito-containing amber was found in "the spring of 1990". So, we're meant to believe they cloned and aged all those dozens, if not hundreds, of dinosaurs in less than three years? Especially considering that animal cloning (for normal modern day animals at that) has a ludicrously high failure rate.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Gennaro has this reaction when seeing the T. rex next to the car, swallowing a goat.
  • See No Evil, Hear No Evil: The Tyrannosaurus rex —whose footsteps make the earth tremble— appears out of nowhere during the climax, apparently having snuck in. The scene was added late in the production (the book doesn't feature the dinosaur) because the producers were so impressed by the T-Rex model that they wanted to show it off more.
  • Sense-Impaired Monster: The Tyrannosaurus rex has motion-based vision, and will not perceive you if you remain completely motionless and don't make a sound. This is a major case of Artistic License – Paleontology, since T. rex, in fact, had excellent vision, plus also had a great sense of smell, so it would be able to sniff out the humans.
  • Separated by a Common Language: There are a couple of instances where Hammond (a Scot) modifies his language to make himself more understandable to his American guests. He changes his pronunciation of the word "schedule" and replaces "merry-go-round" with "carousel" mid-sentence
  • Shout-Out:
    • The shot of the T. rex wolfing down the goat before looking at the cars is modeled after the shot of the Rancor wolfing down the Gamorrean guard before looking at Luke in Return of the Jedi.
    • Malcolm: "What you got in there, King Kong?"
    • The scene where the T. rex bursts onto screen and snatches one of the Gallimimus is directly modeled on a scene in The Valley of Gwangi.
    • The creepily ominous opening title for this movie seems to have been patterned, fittingly enough, after the equally foreboding opening to the very first Godzilla movie.
    • Muldoon's "Clever girl" comment when the Velociraptors trick him into an ambush is lifted from Total Recall (1990) where Quaid says the same to Lori after she attempts to sexually distract him from noticing the armed forces sneaking into the building.
    • Nedry's wardrobe seems to be patterned after the title characters in The Goonies, which Spielberg produced. He wears a Hawaiian patterned shirt with pink flowers like Chunk in his scene with Dodson, Mouth's gray windbreaker when in the operations room, and a yellow raincoat over a denim button up shirt like Mikey when attempting to flee the island.
    • The scene with the sick Triceratops was patterned on a similar scene in Karel Zeman's A Journey to the Beginning of Time, involving a dead Stegosaurus. Spielberg wanted to recreate that same sense of a dinosaur as something you could reach out and touch, or even climb on.
  • Shown Their Work:
    • One of the largest selling points of the film after the visual effects was that Jurassic Park was one of the standard-bearers of the "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the public consciousness, which began with the discovery of Deinonychus antirrhopusnote  in 1964. Considerable press was focused on Jurassic Park being what was then the most scientifically up-to-date depiction of dinosaurs in film, based on all the most current research.
    • Setting aside the dinosaurs, so much work was put into the set pieces that Jurassic Park truly looks like a real place going through the dust-up to a grand opening but just not quite there yet. Spielberg spared no expense on little details like the half-painted walls, the part in the movie presentation where Hammond forgets he has lines of his own to say in the script while the show carries on, all those little things add up to convey this amazing scenario to people.
  • Signature Line: While taking Sattler and Grant out to see the dinosaurs for the first time, Hammond says "Dr. Grant, my dear Dr. Sattler... welcome to Jurassic Park".
  • Skewed Priorities: When Ellie and Muldoon set out to reboot the generator and find Arnold, Hammond remarks it should be him going instead of Ellie because she's a woman and he's a man. Ellie can barely hide her annoyance but for her part, she manages to avoid mentioning that Hammond is a hobbling old man with a cane.
  • Slasher Smile: The Big One, the leader of the raptors, makes one as she catches sight of the kids escaping the kitchen and gets ready to follow.
  • Slow Electricity: When the main switch is turned back on, the hall lights come on one at a time. (Mocked by "Weird Al" Yankovic in the RiffTrax.)
  • Smarter Than You Look: The little dinosaur that Nedry encounters seems harmless enough; she's just staring at him and observing. Nedry assumes "he" is dumb when she won't run after a stick. She was a baby Dilophosaurus and was evaluating if he was prey or not. Dilophosaurus gets the drop on him by blinding him and figuring out he would go into his vehicle, hiding there to ambush him.
  • Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying: The mosquito in amber from which the dinosaur DNA is allegedly extracted is not only a member of a species that eats only nectar (and thus wouldn't have any dinosaur blood in it), but the individual is male (and thus wouldn't have any dinosaur blood in it anyway). But maybe they were aiming to clone a plant?
  • So Much for Stealth: When the kids are hiding in the kitchen, the raptors are alerted when a soup ladle drops to the floor next to the boy.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The main theme song is a grandiose and adventurous piece fitting for Hammond's vision for the theme park as a whole. Completely ignoring the real horrors that happen such as feeding live animals to the dinosaurs and of course what happens when the power gets switched off.
  • Soundtrack Lullaby: The track "A Tree For My Bed", basically the main theme played on a celesta, plays as Grant and the kids are settling into the (relative) safety of a tree for the night.
  • Sound-Only Death: The goat eaten by the T-rex, the hacker eaten by the Dilophosaurus and, most notably, anything eaten by the Velociraptors, and for good reason- they are all eaten alive.
  • Spanner in the Works: As in the novel, Nedry's scheme — for all its cleverness and preparation — is ultimately undone by an x-factor neither he nor Dodgson could've anticipated: A tropical storm hitting Isla Nublar the night of the heist.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Hammond and Wu die in the first book but survive in the first movie. Also Ian Malcolm, until the second book retconned his death. Wu wasn't a major character in the film, and Hammond wasn't a Jerkass like his literary counterpart. The dinosaurs too; at the end of the first novel, Isla Nublar is napalmed and all the dinosaurs horrifically killed. In the film universe, the napalming apparently doesn't happen, as Rexy survives and is recaptured over a decade later for display in the reopened park, Jurassic World. The ruins of the original Visitors' Center are seen as well, and while it has been reclaimed by the jungle, it is very clearly un-napalmed.
  • Stay in the Kitchen: Discussed and subverted. When it's time to send someone to the bunker to reset the circuit breaker, Hammond suggests that he go with Muldoon instead of Dr. Sattler. Apparently, the fact that he's elderly and needs a cane to get around and she's young, healthy, and athletic hasn't registered with Hammond.
    Dr. Hammond: It ought to be me going, because I'm a... and you're a...
    Dr. Sattler: [gives Hammond a Death Glare] Look, we can discuss sexism in survival situations later.
  • Stealthy Colossus: The T. rex makes its entrance with a series of Bad Vibrations caused by her footsteps. She would later repeat it again during the jeep chase scene. So it's all the more surprising for the audience when the T. rex suddenly ambushes a Velociraptor with no sound cues to tip off either the protagonists or the viewer. Given that she also ambushes a flock of Gallimimus without warning as well, it seems she can be quiet when she wants to be.
  • Stock Sound Effect: A rather inexplicable one too. When Nedry slips down the waterfall after his jeep gets stuck you can clearly hear a cartoonish "slip" sound. Kind of out-of-place in an otherwise serious movie. Spielberg, though, insists it's actually the hook belt on Nedry's jeep that's making the noise.
  • Stress Vomit: Tim has an offscreen one in the tree after the first encounter with the T. rex.
  • Stunned Silence: Alan, Ellie, and Ian all have this reaction to seeing the Brachiosaurus for the first time. It takes about a minute after each of their initial viewings for any of them to say anything coherent.
  • Stupid Sacrifice: Unfortunately, Ian Malcolm's sacrifice was not needed. Dr. Grant had already coerced the Tyrannosaurus into pursuing a flare thrown back into her paddock and away from the scene. Malcolm's sacrifice, while incredibly brave, was unnecessary and ultimately accomplished nothing more than keeping Rexy on the scene, getting himself injured and Gennaro killed in the process.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: This exchange after the tour vehicles get stranded due to the power outage:
    Alan: Their radio's out, too. Gennaro said to stay put.
    Ian: Kids okay?
    Alan: I didn't ask. Why wouldn't they be?
    Ian: Kids get scared.
    Alan: What's to be scared about? It's just a little hiccup in the power—
    Ian: I didn't say I was scared.
    (beat)
    Alan: I didn't say you were scared.
    Ian: I know.
  • Super Spit: The Dilophosaurus that kills Nedry spits poisonous venom in his face to blind him.
  • Sweeping the Table: Arnold sweeps a load of junk off Nedry's desk while trying to undo his sabotage of the power grid, angrily commenting on what a slob Nedry is.
  • Swiss-Cheese Security: Hammond trusts the entire security of his park to mere electric fences, and has no backup plan in place if electricity ever fails. There is also no security force on stand-by for emergencies. Robert Muldoon is the only armed person in the entire island. Lampshaded at the end by Hammond himself when he realizes his mistake.
  • Take Our Word for It: The raptor cow feeding scene. The raptors themselves are completely hidden in the brush, but the sounds of screeching and flesh-rending along with the disturbed expressions of the characters (and the mangled harness that is lifted from the paddock afterwards) leave little to the imagination.
  • Take That!: Dr. Robert T. Bakker is dissed when Tim is pestering Dr. Grant about books that he read written by Bakker and Grant himself. Tim is shut up when he first mentions Bakker by Grant promptly slamming the car door of Tim's car. Some of the sting was probably taken out of all this by the fact that book!Grant is an Expy of Bakker himself. Hardly unexpected. The consulting paleontologist on the Jurassic Park series is Jack Horner, who is Bakker's main rival in the field.
  • Tech Marches On: Nicely averted by the movie. The original novels described the Jurassic Park computer network as consisting of multiple Cray X-MP machines. By the time of the movie, those machines weren't the computing behemoths they were considered to be back in the day, and they decided to replace them with Connection Machine CM-5 supercomputers instead. This makes sense in-universe as that's the kind of machine a business that needed ridiculous amounts of computing power at the time would have plumped for, and it made sense visually because the CM-5 computers were utterly festooned with blinkenlights, making them the ideal movie prop.
  • Technology Porn: The Macs and the SGI workstations in the film.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • Says Nedry to the Dilophosaurus, "You're not so bad." Also, figuring that she's hungry, "I have no food on me." Um, about that...
    • The raptors are contained, right? "Unless they figure out how to open doors." Guess what happens. Taken to ridiculous extremes in the RiffTrax.
  • Terrifying Tyrannosaur: It's expected that Jurassic Park would have a T. rex as the star attraction for guests (especially kids) to enjoy. And this film reminds us of why T. rex has a terrifying reputation, with Rexy breaking out of her paddock and attacking a jeep in an attempt to eat the kids inside. It redefined the T. rex species for generations to come, giving the king of the dinosaurs iconic attributes such as an agile body, thundering footsteps, Mighty Roar, and bad eyesights. However, it also caused T. rex to be seen in a noble or heroic light, after years of it being portrayed as the Big Bad, with the scene where Rexy unwittingly saves Grant and the others from the raptors about to kill them.
  • That Came Out Wrong: At one point Gennaro asks "are these characters auto-erotic?" (he was presumably trying to say "automated" or "animatronic" and mixed the words together by mistake). Hammond just says "there's no animatronics here" but is clearly struggling to maintain his composure.
  • Theme Music Power-Up: The Jurassic Park theme kicks in for the T. rex herself, who proceeds to kick raptor ass and save the day.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich:
    • The commissary scene, where the main characters are debating the ethics of dinosaur cloning. Did any of them even touch the food that was in front of them? Justified for Ellie, who seems to have utterly lost her appetite after seeing the raptors feed.
    • After the kids are dropped off at the restaurant to eat something, and they load their plates with goodies from the buffet, a raptor suddenly shows up, sniffing for them from behind a decorative screen just as they wolf down some food. Whatever hunger pangs they have go completely ignored from then on to the end of the movie.
  • Toilet Humour:
    • "Dino... droppings?"
    • "That is one big pile of shit." Said by Ian as Ellie Sattler goes arm-deep in a gigantic pile of Triceratops feces, looking for traces of poisonous berries. (Laura Dern said that every day since 1993 there are children asking if she was "the woman who put her hand in dino poop".)
      Ian Malcolm: She's, uh... tenacious.
      Grant: You have no idea.
      Malcolm: (to Sattler) You will remember to wash your hands before you eat anything!
    • Gennaro dying sitting on a toilet.
  • Too Clever by Half: Ian Malcolm accuses Hammond and his team of genetic scientists of being so focused on whether or not it was possible to artificially create new dinosaurs that they never stopped to consider whether it was ethical.
    Ian Malcolm: I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now, you're selling it. You wanna sell it. Well...
    John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before...
    Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should!
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • It doesn't occur to Muldoon that the reboot may have shut off the raptor fences, despite that being his first concern earlier.
      Robert Muldoon: Damn it, even Nedry knew better than to mess with the raptor fences!
    • If Nedry had enough time to use the winch to get his Jeep unstuck after taking a wrong turn and getting lost on the way to meet his contact at the docks, he should have had enough time to drive a little slower and not crash it in the first place.
  • To Serve Man: Played both ways by the two predators, the Tyrannosaurus and the raptors. The former doesn't appear to be specifically hunting humans, and in fact generally appears to be attacking the cars they travel in — which are in fact of a similar size to hadrosaurs or ceratopsids, which would have been prey in real life. The one person she does nom on is more of less spat out afterward as opposed to being swallowed whole, which she could easily have done (and had just done to a goat). The velociraptors on the other hand very much do seem to have a hankering for human meat, but then a human would make a pretty decent meal for a raptor and they've learned that humans are easy prey...
  • Touché: Muldoon's famous "Clever girl" line when he see the raptors Out-Gambitted him.
  • Toxic Dinosaur: The black, tar-like spit of the Dilophosaurus is toxic, being able to cause blindness and eventually paralysis. The only mercy Nedry gets after being hit by such a substance in the eyes is that the Dilophosaurus immediately kills him before he can feel the paralysis effect.
    Richard Kiley: One of the earliest carnivores, we now know Dilophosaurus is actually poisonous, spitting its venom at its prey, causing blindness and paralysis, allowing the carnivore to eat at its leisure.
  • Trapped-with-Monster Plot:
    • Hostile Weather ensures that the group is trapped with the dinos in the park.
    • Nedry and Muldoon both encounter dangerous dinosaurs alone. They don't make it.
    • After restoring power to the park systems, Dr. Sattler is startled to discover that a Velociraptor is inside the bunker with her.
  • Trauma Conga Line: Lex and Tim. Let's see, their parents are having a rocky relationship, so their grandpa, Hammond, invites them to Jurassic Park to get away from the fighting. Expecting a fun time there, they arrive only to find that Grant doesn't like them (at first); the T. rex breaks out and nearly eats them, while Gennaro leaves them; Tim, trapped in a car, is pushed down into a tree; Lex is traumatized after Gennaro left them; Grant saves Tim from the tree but they have to out-climb the falling car; they then have to outrun more dinosaurs; Tim gets shocked by the fence as his sister watches in tears; once they make it to a building and finally eat something on their own, two Velociraptors show up and try to hunt them down; and by the end of the movie, they're both physically a mess.
  • Two-Donor Clone: The dinosaurs were cloned from degraded DNA samples that were spliced with frog DNA to fill in the gaps. This turns out to allow the all-female population to reproduce as some frogs can change sexes.
  • Uncovering Relationship Status: Malcolm asks Grant if Dr. Sattler is available. Grant asks why and Malcolm apologizes as he understands that Grant himself is dating her.
  • Understatement: "Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your park." Hammond agrees.
  • Undignified Death: Gennaro dies cowering on the toilet when Rexy knocks over the hut while pursuing Malcolm and uncovers him. She picks him up off the seat and shakes him around like a terrier with a rat.
  • Un-Paused: When Tim is stuck on the fence, he gets ready to jump on "three". He gets thrown off on two. When he comes to, he finishes the countdown.
  • Villainous Rescue: Grant, Sattler, and the kids are cornered by the Velociraptors, who are about to attack when Rexy comes out of nowhere and slaughters them.
  • Villainous Valour: The last raptor attacks the T. rex despite the Tyrannosaurus killing her remaining partner with a single bite and outweighing the raptor by several tons.
  • Walking Techbane: Characters joke that paleontologist Alan Grant is one when he seems to cause a computer monitor to burst into static whenever he points to it. Lampshaded later when the park shuts down for reasons unrelated to him, and he immediately asks what (presumably crucial component) he just touched.
  • Wham Line: A light-hearted scene in which the protagonists witness the birth of a newborn dinosaur takes a sharp turn for terrifying with the identification of its species.
    Dr. Grant: You bred raptors!?
  • Wham Shot:
    • The Brachiosaurus, the first dinosaur we see in all her glory onscreen.
    • During the storm, when the characters see that the chained-up goat used to bait the T. rex out is no longer there.
    • When Ellie and Muldoon walk to the maintenance shed to find Arnold and complete the startup routine, they walk past the raptor paddock... and see the hole in the fence...
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • We never hear of the sick Triceratops after her scene, nor do we find out why she got sick in the first place. The novel explained that while the Stegosaurus wasn't actively eating the poisonous berries, she was swallowing pebbles (to aid digestion, they're called gastroliths); the berries which fell off their bushes left enough residue to sicken her. This was dropped from the film (possibly due to time constraints). Instead you hear that it was NOT the poisonous plants, which leaves the poor Triceratops' fate unknown.
    • The entire workforce of the park just disappeared once the dinosaurs escape. The last we ever get is one employee serving Ellie and Hammond in the restaurant/gift shop if not the helicopter pilot at the very end. Granted, this is because most of them left on the ship at the East Dock when the storm hit, leaving behind only the tiny skeleton crew in the control room.
    • During the cloning lab scene, a baby raptor hatches from its synthetic egg as Hammond coos delightedly over its birth. None of the adult raptors survive the movie, but the chick's fate is never shown.
  • What the Hell, Hero?
    • Hammond spends much of the movie on the receiving end of these. The dinner scene in particular has him facing a barrage of them from Malcolm, Sattler, and Grant. To be fair, most of Malcolm's dialogue with Hammond throughout the movie are these.
      Malcolm: Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet has ever seen, and you wield it like a kid who found his dad's gun. [...] Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

      Dr. Sattler: Well, the question is, how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it? I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in, and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary.

      Dr. Grant: The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look... 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?
    • Later, Ellie nails him with a particularly poignant one over ice cream.
      Dr. Sattler: It's still just the flea circus. It's all an illusion.
      Hammond: But when we have control—
      Dr. 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. The only thing that matters now are the people we love.
  • Whoosh in Front of the Camera: The Dilophosaurus that kills Nedry is first seen whooshing in front of the camera. He turns around to see what the sound was but the dilophosaur is already gone and appears behind a tree in the next scene.
  • The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): Muldoon is said to know more about the Velociraptor than anyone, and gives a lot of exposition about how dangerous they are, but is quickly outsmarted and killed by said raptors after they get loose. Even two injured kids managed to outsmart the raptors where he failed. This is in contrast to his original depiction in the novel, where he actually kills several raptors and survives to the end.


Hammond: Yes... well... who's hungry?

 
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Chasing a Reflection

Lex tricks a velociraptor into charging her reflection in a stainless-steel kitchen counter.

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4.85 (13 votes)

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Main / DecoyHidingPlace

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