image upload no compressionHere's a pointless fact I never get to tell anyone: I didn't see Jurassic Park in English until my mid-teens. I was six when the film came out, living in Germany, in the days when subtitles and language tracks were up there with warp drives and teleporters on the list of things that would have sounded like comic book futurism to little me. Perhaps Buck Rogers could one day enjoy a German VHS of Jurassic Park in English, but I had to make do with what limited language I'd picked up from Die Schluempfe.
Jurassic Park 3D - Life Finds a Way
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Turns out, there's not a lot of language crossover between Jurassic Park and the Smurfs. But in spite of that, Jurassic Park (which, disappointingly, is just called 'Jurassic Park' in German) was my favourite film. I watched it over and over. I could quote bits of it (still can) in German before I understood what they even meant (still don't). To this day, it still sounds weird to me when I hear any of the characters speaking English. John Hammond was Scottish? That was like finding out Bagpuss was Jamaican, or that Mickey Mouse was a breathy Welshman with a lisp who spoke in couplets.
But I never felt like I was missing anything, and I still don't. And I think, perhaps a bit snootily, that that's because there's a divide – a kind of perceptual chasm – between what people think they remember Jurassic Park being about, and what it was, you know, actually about. And I also think that this is the reason that every Jurassic Park game I've ever played has been a disaster.
It's Not About Guns
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The first Jurassic Park games I remember playing – dimly in the first case and vividly in the second – were Trespasser and the old Jurassic Park arcade cabinet.
The former was horrible: a pink pipe cleaner puppet (with feet-obscuring breasts you could look down and ogle at, for some reason) running around an island shooting what might have been dinosaurs. Strewn about were machine pistols, revolvers and assault rifles, and naturally, raptors were the main adversaries. Not smart or particularly dangerous adversaries, but there they were: vaguely raptor-shaped poly-golems wobbling about in broad daylight while the jaggedly-busted heroine bravely gunned them down. Take that nature.
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Trespasser – You told us to shoot her.
The second game took scenes like the Jeep chase with the T-Rex and added lightguns. The undisputed king of the dinosaurs thundered along, snapping its jaws, and your job was to shoot highlighted weakspots on its body to slow it down while you made good your escape. Actually, your job was to miss so the machine ate all your twenty pence pieces and bankrupted your parents. But nominally that was what it was about.
Guns in videogames are great: a neat way for a person playing on a 2D screen to reach into the world and experience the illusion of three dimensions by making something that looks far away explode, bleed or fall over. But in a Jurassic Park game they're worse than a mistake: their inclusion is out-and-out series blasphemy.
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The First Ever Model 3 3D Shooter, No Less!
Guns appear in the first film twice: once in the hands of the doomed Muldoon, who thinks he's stalking a raptor in the jungle before one pops out of a bush and growls in his ear, and a second time when the raptors have the main characters cornered in the control room. Alan Grant is on the phone with Hammond when a raptor appears at one of the windows. You don't even see Grant fire: you hear three shots over the phone, see the three sets of spider cracks that the shells have ineffectively punched into the glass, then the shotgun lying abandoned.
That's the point that the developers of both early games missed so heroically: Jurassic Park includes guns for a false sense of security. When Muldoon or Grant have a beefy SPAS-12 shotgun in their hands, they look confident and in control. But of course, they aren't. In both cases (and to its credit, the third film in the trilogy plays the same card with its team of heavily armed dino-hunters that all end up eaten), the point is that this force of nature that InGen has unleashed is far too powerful to control. They're the physical embodiment of Hammond's arrogance. Even in the very last dinosaur encounter - the raptors finally cornering Grant, Saddler and the kids in the visitor's centre – it's not the humans' intelligence, preparedness or weapons that save them – only a bigger, hungrier dinosaur.
It's Not About Characters
Not that anyone would, really, have minded too much if the characters had been eaten. Before I sat down to rewatch the first film, there were humans involved in the scenes I remembered most clearly – but they aren't the stars. Like silent protagonists in videogames, the tension doesn't stem from the deep feelings of attachment you have towards the cast, but from putting yourself in their shoes and realising how hopelessly doomed you would be.
It's also – and I mean this with the greatest respect possible – not a very well written film, in terms of character and dialogue. The bits you remember might be the tagline about life finding a way, or Muldoon's chilling (and, OK, awesome) monologue about the raptors' intelligence ("when she looks at you, you can see she's working things out"). But here are the bits you forget: Lex's made-up hacker prattle, Tim's snotty needling of his sister, Dr. Malcolm's impossibly awkward attempt to seduce Dr. Sattler with some red hot chaos theory demonstrations. Or what about this line, shouted by Dr. Grant himself when they're taking the seated laboratory tour?
Jurassic Park - Video Review
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The game's dinosaurs aren't living creatures: they're enemies to be dodged, fled or whacked off rollercoasters with metal pipes (genuinely)."
"Wait a minute!" He yells, waving his arm at the screen. "How do you stop the cellular mitosis?!" Because he's a scientist, see? And when you don't explain how you stop cellular mitosis to scientists, they storm off your tour cart and break into your laboratory to find out.
It's hokum – precisely why I didn't miss anything at all of value when I watched the film in German as a cowering six-year-old. And that's where Telltale's approach to its Jurassic Park game went so wrong: it focused almost entirely on characters in a series for which, historically, characters aren't important. The game's dinosaurs aren't living creatures: they're enemies to be dodged, fled or whacked off rollercoasters with metal pipes (genuinely). If not, they're puzzles to be herded about with clicks and button presses. It's a complete reversal of what the films are about: humans aren't the creatures that are important in Jurassic Park: the dinosaurs are. That every single character in Telltale's game was as likable as being scalped also didn't help.
It's Not About Dinosaurs
But the emphasis on characters wasn't the first warning flag in Telltale's interpretation of Jurassic Park. That actually came before I'd even started the game, when the very first menu conjured up a T-Rex that lumbered right into the centre of the screen to do its trademark roar. Talk about blowing your load early. I hadn't even clicked New Game, and already here was the game's biggest (figuratively and literally) star, well lit, performing for me while I considered an options menu. Ironically, it felt a bit like an attraction at an animal park.
Compare that to the opening shot of the film. Everyone remembers the first scene: the raptor being transported in the cage, the cage slipping, the poor site worker being clawed in by the raptor, the tasers going off while Muldoon yells "shoot her!" (another example of guns pointedly not saving a life in the Jurassic Park universe). But the first shot is actually of trees rustling in the night. That's all you're shown, just trees – and its totally deliberate. What's making the trees move? Is it a dinosaur? The wind? A massive squirrel? You don't know, because the film isn't telling you. It wants to make you use some imagination, not wheel out a dinosaur before you've found your seat and poke it 'til it goes ‘raargh'.
Jurassic Park 3D - T-Rex Attack
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In fact, the dinosaurs are barely on-screen in the film at all. Instead, their terrible power is shown almost entirely by reference. When the two tour Jeeps first pull up outside the T-Rex enclosure, it's in a wide shot pulled way back to show the fence for scale. The cars are tiny. That massive fence, with lights on top that show it's electrified, towers five times the cars' height. And the characters stare up into the trees and complain that there's nothing to see. Not for them, it's true, but as the audience – as people who know we're watching a disaster – it shows us everything. Whatever's in those trees isn't like any animal we've ever seen: whatever's in those trees is a monster.
The raptor feeding scene does the same trick to show a whole other kind of danger. Their enclosure is small, but its fences are different to those on the T-Rex enclosure: they go up and then fold part way over the top, like a barbed wire security fence. We can't see what these creatures look like – but we know immediately they can jump a regular fence, or maybe even climb one.
New Dinosaurs and New Characters in Jurassic Park The Game
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When the cow is lowered in, the sound and rustling fauna comes from different directions. We know raptors are small, fast, hunt in packs and tear prey to shreds before Muldoon even begins his speech. One of the reasons it's so chilling is because he's confirming the terrible picture of these creatures we've already put together in our heads.
Back to the game again. There's little clever camera work – just the occasional stolen shot of something running past the lens lifted straight from the film. Telltale's dinosaurs are well lit (and when they aren't, they have great big glowing eyes, for some evolutionarily improbable reason), and get whole camera shots to themselves to inform the player they're about to do some quick-time-event-ing. Their appearances couldn't be more clearly telegraphed if they were flown into each scene by helicopter and announced by a bugler.
Jurassic Park - Action Montage
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By comparison, the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park film are on screen for less than a total of fifteen minutes. The T-Rex doesn't appear until – to the minute – halfway through the film. And the raptors? The first full body shot of a raptor – in the kitchen scene – doesn't happen until 20 minutes before the end of the film. It's your head doing the grunt work of the scares, not CGI or animatronics.
Except When It Is About Dinosaurs
But the most critical omission in any Jurassic Park game is wonder. The majesty of the creatures. In the gun games, dinosaurs are moving targets dressed up in costumes – obstacles of different sizes and speeds for you to shoot at, no different really from Space Invaders. In Telltale's game they're a little better, but still obstacles of a different kind: ones that only exist in their relation to humans. It's true that not every encounter in Telltale's game is a violent one (although the herding puzzles were head-on-desk-thumpingly dull – just drive over the stupid Triceratops if it loves that leaf so much) – but the Triceratops that's escaped its pen and the Parasaurolophus group that need chasing out of their paddock are still not much more than button-and-switch puzzles that grunt.
"I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion. Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit."
"I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion. Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit."
Jurassic Park is a nature documentary in every way that matters, and to differentiate a Jurassic Park game from one that's just about dinosaurs, you need the shots of the baby penguin at play as much as the ones of it being eaten by a polar bear. Tenderness along with cruelty, awe along with terror.
Jurassic Park: First Brachiosaurus Reveal
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You need that first scene with the Brachiosaurus, in which Drs. Grant and Sattler see a real live dinosaur for the first time, rearing up on its hind legs to tear leaves from an impossibly tall tree and then coming back down with force enough to shake the ground. You need the sick Triceratops, with lungs so big that when Grant lies against its side and it lifts him up he starts smiling like a child in a zoo. You need the scene with Grant and the kids in the treetop, when another curious Brachiosaurus pokes its nose into their hiding place and sneezes over Lex.
Of course you need raptors and T-Rexs, too. There's surely a great open-world game to be made of Isla Nublar – part The Forest, part Zoo Tycoon. There's just as surely a great Alien: Isolation-a-like to be made as you creep around a park building trying not to alert a nearby Velociraptor. But without the moments that made everyone, characters and audience members alike, gawp like toddlers it won't be Jurassic Park – just another game about monsters.
