This gets a laugh out of me every time! That at 12 year old could plop herself down and promptly glide through an operating system as obscure (in 1993, at least) as UNIX is even less believable than the resurrection of dinosaurs from prehistoric DNA. It's one of the few things about the film that feels dated, and yet it's a delightful imperfection.
As Weird Al Yankovic once astutely sang in his 'MacArthur Park' song parody, “A huge tyrannosaurus ate our lawyer, well I suppose that proves they're really not all bad”. And who doesn't love seeing the cowardly cad collect his comeuppance? Frozen in terror atop the toilet he chose to make his hiding place... a fitting tombstone for a lawyer, no?
The calm after the storm. When there are no words to say, Spielberg leaves us with a moment of serene epiphany for Sam Neill's rattled paleontologist. As he contemplates the birds he so often likens the beasts he had only ever studied through bones and fossils, we can only imagine what' going through his mind, and how this ordeal has changed him.
After being startled by one of those nasty velociraptors (a genuine scare for the audience too), Laura Dern discovers, in macabre fashion, Samuel L. Jackson's fate. For a blockbuster as finely produced as this one is, not only can we forgive Spielberg this moment of hokeyness, but actually embrace it for its offbeat B-movie morbidity.
6. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear...
... and that dinosaur looks close enough in this quick reprise of the first T-Rex attack. It's not a very long or elaborate chase (the tyrannosaurus wasn't exactly nature's ideal long-distance runner), but it's still riveting in its brevity, and gave rise to this memorable sight gag, along with a couple of terrific frightened reactions from Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum.
This is the line from Jurassic Park I quote most frequently, usually when I've been bested by somebody in some way, which probably explains why I reference it so often. I love how instead of wasting his final seconds screaming in terror, the hunter-turned-huntee actually congratulates his crafty stalker before she proceeds to tear him to bite-sized shreds.
Nothing quite equals the specific sensation of awe incurred by seeing a lifelike dinosaur for the first time on a huge movie screen, and Spielberg knew it deserved a certain degree of majesty. The low camera angle, the persuasiveness of the digital illusion, and John Williams' memorable scoring meld together to hair-raising effect.
It's tempting for me to include the entire terrifying kitchen scene, but it's not really a “moment”. What does make my list is this unnerving shot that sets the tone for the whole sequence, as one of Stan Winston's exceptional raptor puppets exhales threateningly on the window through its probing nostril. Sends shivers down my spine every time.
“... God destroys dinosaurs, God creates man, man destroys God, man creates dinosaurs.” Just when Jeff Goldblum thinks he's onto something profound, Laura Dern nonchalantly retaliates with the continuation, “dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth.” It never fails to crack me up. Goldblum and Sam Neill's reactions are simply priceless.
Spielberg uses multiple layers of tension-building to set us up for the film's greatest set piece; the pouring rain, the malfunctioning fence, the ominously missing goat, but what really puts me on pins and needles is the barely-audible low rumble of T-Rex's footsteps which trigger those concentric ripples in a glass of water. This effect looks simple, but it actually took special effects supervisor Mike Lantieri a long time to design. He finally achieved it, ingeniously, by plucking a guitar string concealed beneath the dashboard of the jeep.
