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Jurassic Park (1993)– Dir Steven Spielberg
based on the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

A film review (2020)





Around 130 million years ago, right about the time when the first flowering plants started to emerge, a weevil that lived alongside dinosaurs died a sticky death caught up in the unabating trap of tree-resin. Present day researchers were lucky enough to discover this naturally preserved weevil and extract what would be called the oldest DNA ever recovered through this. ‘Nature’, the science journal was one of the first to cover this phenomenal discovery in June 1993, right before the release of the age-old classic ‘Jurassic Park.’ While no-one could entirely tell if this was a coincidence or planned, it proved to be an amazing stroke of luck for Steven Spielberg, the director of Jurassic Park and the field and study of Ancient DNA as well for a science that most people were unaware of suddenly came to light and caught people’s attention. The original source for Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller was a book by Michael Crichton also named Jurassic Park. Upon being asked, Crichton attributed real-scientists as his inspiration for they were the ones who really were digging deep into the past in search of the truths of Life on earth before the existence of Homo Sapiens. 

This was a prime example of how science and science fiction can collide in the real world—each can boost the other, and one realm can often nudge another in a different direction. While Jurassic Park may not have existed without prior scientific hypotheses, it also pushed that nascent science into the spotlight before it had withstood the necessary scrutiny by the rest of the scientific community.


Eccentric millionaire John Hammond transforms an island called Isla Nublar into an exotic animal theme park by recreating the extinct ecosystems that existed during the Jurassic age, the park’s main attraction being cloned, living- breathing Dinosaurs. Following an accident where a Velociraptor gate-keeper is killed, Lawyer Donald Gennaro, representing Hammond’s investors raises some serious concerns about the safety of the park. He convinces Hammond to get an expert to certify and endorse the park. Subsequently, Hammond approaches  palaeontologist Dr. Alan Grant and palaeobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler with an offer that they cannot decline and they agree to pay the park a visit. The lawyer Gennaro brings with him a renowned mathematician, Ian Malcolm who is seemingly obsessed with Chaos theory. Hammond endeavours to take everyone to the park for a visit. Upon arriving they are shocked to see living dinosaurs, welcomed by a breath-taking sight of Brachiosaurs. Hammond then reveals to them a team of geneticists cloned these dinosaurs into being through DNA extracted from mosquitoes that lived alongside them in the Jurassic age with present-day frog DNA being used to fill in for missing gene sequences. Chief geneticist Dr. Henry Wu points out that breeding is prevented by having all dinosaurs genetically engineered as females, but Malcolm theorizes that nature will overcome this obstacle in time. Following a bit of a debate on the subject, Hammond sends the group on a tour of the Park in electrically powered vehicles and his own grand-children to keep the scientists company while he over-sees their tour from a control room. But as a tropical storm hits the island, knocking out the power supply, and an unscrupulous lead computer programmer, Dennis Nedry, sabotages the system so that he can smuggle dinosaur embryos out of the park, the dinosaurs start to rage out of control. Dr. Grant then has to bring Hammond's grandchildren back to safety as the group is pursued by the gigantic man-eating beasts


The film starts with giving us a sense of space and the island in which this is set. They begin by saying how the entire perimeter is guarded by a 50-mile electrical fence. To understand the space/ ecosystem, they heavily depended on how the information was flowing. The interconnectedness through electronic system is what gave Hammond and the scientists under him a distance. “To be a solar Eye, looking down on this multi-layered ecosystem from the past like a god. The control room being the all-seeing eye to the entire island, the entire amusement park’s safety is grounded on the idea that there is a state-of-the-art control room which can handle every adversary. A vast amount of capital has been used to mobilise the thought that nature can and will be controlled through advances in technology. Something which is not a far of dream or an illusion anymore but a discovery that will “capture the imagination of the entire planet”. All this points to a strengthening of the hierarchical structure of command-and-control functions and the resulting exchange of information We encounter this idea first when they just reach the island and we hear Mr. Hammond say, “I am the concrete moats, I am the motion sensor tracking systems”. 

The film is free and scientists indifferent to the duplication of effort and messy involvement of the state. A genetic manufacturing and at this scale are no small feat. The state’s gaze was conveniently averted in the film. A depoliticized version of science and its relation to time and space. At the start of the film we see all three scientists with them watching a show about how they made this amazing feat possible by drawing dinosaur blood from a mosquito preserved in resin/amber and filled the gaps in the DNA sequence/genomes (genetic code) with amphibian DNA. We eventually encounter a lab with the protagonists of the film. Here, we see them enter a lab environment without any worry of how it might affect the conditions and protocols of the lab. A lab which is supposedly a controlled environment so that no contaminants can come in is casually accessed by the group of three. Here, we see them handling and casually chatting with the chief geneticist Dr. Henry Wu. These actions seem to have no real repercussions in the cloning process. I am reminded of a phrase from the movie where Mr Hammond calls what he has achieved as “living biological attractions”. The three scientists are constantly shown to have exciting encounters, free from what we deficient understanding we have of the apparent mundane parts of the scientist’s job, which mostly consists of working and spending an ample chunk of their lives in the lab. Another example that I can think of is when they find the sick triceratops and the palaeobotanist is quick to dig into the dinosaur excreta and without even a second guess is able to tell if the dinosaur had ingested poisonous berries or not.

Here’s a small excerpt from the movie that I found on IMDB:

Dr. 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.

John Hammond : Condors. Condors are on the verge of extinction...

Dr. Ian Malcolm : [shaking his head]  No...

John Hammond : If I was to create a flock of condors on this island, you wouldn't have anything to say.

Dr. Ian Malcolm : No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.

John 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. Ian Malcolm : What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.

Dr. Ellie 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.

John Hammond : Dr. Grant, if there's one person here who could appreciate what I'm trying to do...

Dr. Alan 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?

John Hammond : [laughing]  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!



“The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a view point and nothing more.” (DeCerteau)

Hearing these exchanges of words between the protagonists, I am reminded of an article in National Geographic’s April 2013 issue, ‘Of Mammoths and Men’ by Brook Larmer. The article that eventually got made into a documentary film follows the lives of tusk hunters in the arctic Siberia and the Mammoth tusk trade. In one such expedition, they happen to find an intact Woolly Mammoth preserved in ice and while chipping away the ice suddenly they hit a spot from which blood starts to ooze out. We then not only learn of the Woolly Mammoth tusk trade but also come face to face with the political discourse rooted in synthetic biology – of creating life itself. It is in these few lines is when we as viewers realise or face the fact when it is addressed that nature and science is political. An urge to synthetically manufacture plants and animals from a time that is unknown to us is a world apart from cloning Condors (a kind of vulture like bird).

In the film there are at the least two instances where the scientists are portrayed to be technologically inept and unsure about technological progress. One is when the film starts and Dr. Alan Grants first sentence is how he doesn’t get along well with computers and appears to be jinxed with technology. He is shown to touch a monitor which starts glitching the moment he comes near it. The second instance is when Mr. Hammond replies to Dr. Ian Malcolm’s apprehension about the park by remarking that he has a luddite attitude. This is further impressed upon when the group of scientists don’t agree with his ideals of what it means to be modern.

In the movie, the collage of two time produces a specific kind of space by bringing two historically, geographically, spatially distinct time and space. The “transformation of time under the information technology paradigm ,… is one of the foundations of the new society we have entered, inextricably linked to the emergence of the space of flows.” A kind of modernity that is fuelled by the idea that “"the fashionable mind is the time-denying mind," and that this new "time regime" is linked to the development of communication technologies.” Here I would like to elucidate that it is not only communication technologies but also advances in the field of synthetic biology has pushed us into adopting “a contextual notion of human time.” Or, as Barbara Adam puts it - “all time, in nature as in society, seems to be specific to a given context”; which in this case is being placed in an island with plants and animals from the Pleistocene. Biological research seems to converge with social sciences in adopting these ideas. Time is local or even ‘glocal’ in a broader sense.

Toni Morrison in one his interviews with Paul Gilroy argues that, “the African subjects that experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern.” The disappearance or the dehumanization of the technological structure is brought into light by David Berry’s essay where he speaks of today’s systems built on computational principles that reduce thinking to calculation and instrumental rationality. 

As Deleuze puts it, “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society-not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines-levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses.  This sense of alienation that the system functioning and malfunctioning produces for both humans and dinosaurs alike, is a product of the modern condition. The modern condition being both the synthetically constructed reptiles and the technological system that governed it.  

The world we live in today is a dream like pervasive and persuasive sense of linearity that governs us. The modern condition like Harry.F Dahms in his essay on the matrix trilogy puts is the prevalent sense of alienation that comes with it. While advances in technology maybe synchronous with development in today’s digital age, there is an invisible prevalence of taking over us with unprecedented difficulties that accompany attempts to overcome it. It’s like a “neural-interactive simulation . . . a dream world built to keep us under control.” this linearity that is brought about by how technological society is rendering our world computational. A computational park.

So, in that sense. Are the dinosaurs modern? The dinosaur game that we come across when there is no internet connection is a reference to the fact that we’ve been pushed back into the prehistoric era where the dinosaurs are luddite in nature and against the modern way of the world. Perhaps that could be rethought.

The park tries to produce the sense of natural by Mr Hammond locating himself as an inert entity in this production of this new natural he calls discovery.

Thinking of the Dinosaurs as subjects of an institution of the modern world created by the modern man. In a sudden turn of events I remembered the parts where they constantly keep talking about how dinosaurs were wiped out because of natural conditions and not something human induced. These dinosaurs which learn which fence is electrified through trial and error until they eventually figure it out are the first moderns. 

The roles are reversed when industrial sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the park's power facilities and security precautions. Hammond's grandchildren and the three scientists struggle to survive and escape the perilous island. The humans become subjects on the island of control expressways they built. Now, they’re the ones who are pushed to the peripheries rendering everyone on the island with a perpetual sense of ‘alienation’. 

As the film progresses we realise that to fix the control room problem there are different parts of the park they need to approach to bring the power back to the control room, What is significant about this spatial system is neither their concentration nor decentralization, since both processes are indeed taking place at the same time throughout the island. Both the humans and dinosaurs almost take turn in both these processes. “The hierarchy of their geography keeps shifting. The park in some senses becomes a tributary to the variable information flows.” (Castell) 



This picture illustrates the points that I am trying to make really well. How, throughout the entire film the creature is mediated through, as merely bits of information put together. I am actually fondly reminded of two things. One where Wendy Chun in her essay ‘Enduring Emphermeral’ speaks of how we treat data as memory and vice versa and how in the American television show ‘Breaking Bad’, the protagonists start cleaning the remains of a dead person and one of them starts reminiscing his days as a chemistry professor where he notes down the chemical composition of humans. This is succeeded by a rhetorical question about how “there must be something more to the human than their chemical composition”. 





References:

Castell, Manuel, The Rise of the network Society – The Information age, Economy, Society and Culture

Eshun, Kodwo, Further considerations on Afrofuturism

Chun, Wendy, Enduring Ephemeral

Berry, David, Critical Theory and the Digital

Jen Jack Gieseking, People, Place and Space