Life Finds a Way: The Jurassic Park Trivia Quiz

Trivia Quizzes Movies

The helicopter lands on Isla Nublar, a volcanic island off Costa Rica, carrying a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, a mathematician and a lawyer, all flown in to sign off on a park that has not been described to any of them. John Hammond, the industrialist who built it, presents the science as a tour: mosquitoes trapped in amber, blood drawn from their stomachs, gaps in the recovered sequences filled with frog DNA, and animals grown in an incubator that visitors watch through glass. Alan Grant spends the first part of the tour unable to speak. The ride through the paddocks then finds nothing at all, because the animals are not on a schedule, and by nightfall a tropical storm has taken out the power along with the fences.

Steven Spielberg hired Phil Tippett, whose stop motion work had animated the walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, to shoot the dinosaurs in go motion, a refined version of the same technique. Partway through preproduction, Dennis Muren's team at Industrial Light and Magic assembled a test of a full digital Tyrannosaurus running across a plain, and the plan changed. Tippett stayed on as dinosaur supervisor and his animators moved to computers, driving the digital models through a physical armature rigged with encoders so that stop motion training still applied. Stan Winston's shop supplied everything tangible, including a hydraulic Tyrannosaurus built at full size that soaked up rainwater on the wet stage and had to be dried between takes. Fewer than a hundred shots in the finished film contain a digital animal.

The Tyrannosaurus arrives in the rain, announced by rings spreading across a cup of water on a dashboard, and takes a few minutes of screen time to destroy two vehicles and the entire tour. The raptors get the kitchen, a sequence built almost entirely out of sightlines and reflections in steel. Wayne Knight plays Dennis Nedry, the underpaid programmer who shuts down the security system to smuggle embryos off the island in a shaving cream can and does not get far before a Dilophosaurus finds his jeep. Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm supplies the argument the film keeps circling back to, that the staff were so preoccupied with the question of their own capability that nobody stopped to ask if they should, and that life finds a way.

Michael Crichton published the novel in 1990 and Universal bought the rights before it reached shops, with Spielberg attached. The film opened in June 1993, took three Academy Awards for visual effects, sound and sound effect editing, and held the record for the highest worldwide gross until Titanic. John Williams wrote the score while Spielberg was already in Poland filming Schindler's List, and the director supervised the final stages of post production from there. The animals themselves are looser with the evidence than the film lets on. The Dilophosaurus that kills Nedry was shrunk, frilled and given venom for reasons of plot, none of which the fossil record supports, and the raptors were scaled far past the real Velociraptor, an animal closer in size to a turkey.