Chaos In Jurassic Park

In the movie Jurassic Park there are many new and interesting concepts. Everything it did, it did well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do quite enough. There are parts missing, little bits of the story that are needed to complete the chain. One example is when the T-Rex is seen to escape from his habitat by removing the unpowered electrical cables and walking towards the road. But later, the flat terrain he walked on transformed as he is able to push a car down a huge crevasse that wasn't there when he went through the fences. In fact, the crevasse is so big that it would have been impossible for the T-Rex to reach or even see the fences. These problems largely result from the faithful adherence to the narrative structure and dynamics of the book

The message of the logical side of the argument is that the more you try to control something, the more you actually open yourself up to the effects of chaos. Since order is actually the problem, the chaos must be the solution. This is vaguely alluded to in the movie when the Tyrannosaurus wipes out the Raptors, unknowingly saving the humans. Although the point is not strongly stated, it is sort of there. The important concept at the moment is that as far as it goes, the objective storyline is fairly close to what it should be, which is true of most action oriented stories. It is the subjective storyline that fails to fulfill its dramatic mandate in Jurassic Park. At the beginning of the film the main character, Dr. Grant contains the crucial element, we would expect him to intersect the objective story’s problem by representing order or

He contains the problem element, and as such must change in order to succeed. The entire first scene with Grant at the dig should have illustrated his love of order. All the elements were there: a disruptive boy, a randomly sensitive computer, a helicopter that comes out of nowhere and ruins the dig. All of these things could have illustrated Grant’s hatred of chaos and his quest for order. Using the same events and incidents the point might have been made in any number of ways, the easiest being a simple comment by Dr. Grant himself. Without any direct allusion to order being his primary concern, Dr. Grant comes off simply as finding disruptions inconvenient, faulty equipment annoying, and kids as both. Why is it so important to set up the nature of the problem so early? Well, one of the major problems with the Jurassic Park story form is that we really don’t know what the problem is until near the end of the first act. Every moviegoer must have been aware that this was a picture about an island where they cloned dinosaurs back to life, and they run amok wreaking havoc. But that doesn’t say why. If the point of contention had been established up front, the whole thrust of the picture would have been given direction from scene one. Just stating that Dr. Grant shares the problem with the story is obviously not enough. The relationship between his view of the problem and the objective view of the problem is what explores the