plot.fyi — Find your next favorite film. Film discovery for film lovers.

Jurassic Park (1993) Jurassic Park (1993)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Jurassic Park) | Backbeats (Jurassic Park)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Steven Spielberg
  • Screenplay: Michael Crichton and David Koepp (from the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton)
  • Starring: Sam Neill (Dr. Alan Grant, paleontologist), Laura Dern (Dr. Ellie Sattler, paleobotanist), Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm, chaos theorist), Richard Attenborough (John Hammond, park founder), Bob Peck (Robert Muldoon, game warden), Martin Ferrero (Donald Gennaro, lawyer), B.D. Wong (Dr. Henry Wu, geneticist), Wayne Knight (Dennis Nedry, programmer/saboteur), Samuel L. Jackson (Ray Arnold, chief engineer), Joseph Mazzello (Tim Murphy), Ariana Richards (Lex Murphy)
  • Cinematography: Dean Cundey
  • Editor: Michael Kahn
  • Music: John Williams
  • Visual Effects: Dennis Muren (ILM, CGI), Stan Winston (animatronics), Phil Tippett (dinosaur supervisor), Michael Lantieri (live action effects)
  • Runtime: 127 minutes
  • Budget: approximately $63 million
  • Worldwide Box Office: approximately $1.046 billion (original release)
  • Release Date: June 11, 1993 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: PG-13
  • Distributor: Universal Pictures

Overview

A billionaire entrepreneur invites a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, and a chaos theorist to vet his new island park before opening day, and the vetting becomes a survival ordeal when the park's hand-built control system collapses under one disgruntled programmer's sabotage and one tropical storm. Sam Neill's Alan Grant — a field scientist who pointedly dislikes children at the start — spends the back half of the film alone with John Hammond's two grandchildren in a jungle full of escaped predators, and the structural test of his post-midpoint approach is whether a man who reads bones can keep two living children alive long enough to reach a phone. The film is widely read as a parable about the limits of control — Ian Malcolm's chaos-theory monologues frame the argument out loud — and about the gap between the spectacle Hammond paid for and the ecosystem he actually built. The signature beats (the brachiosaur reveal, the T-Rex paddock attack in the rain, the velociraptors in the kitchen, "hold onto your butts," "life finds a way") have become the genre's reference points for the next thirty years of creature features.