Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jurassic Park
1993 · Steven Spielberg · Jurassic Park on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the cup of water on the Jeep dashboard. (setting)
Spielberg teaches you one chain in a single shot: the surface shivers, therefore something enormous is coming. He then collects on that lesson for two hours.
Payoff: You supply the monster yourself, which is why it frightens you more than any image could. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the cup a mark: an object that means something only because of the chain it belongs to.
Notice how often the camera looks up at the animals. (camera)
Cundey shoots in wide anamorphic and keeps the lens at human height, tilting up. When Grant first sees the brachiosaurus, the camera stands where he stands.
Payoff: Scale is earned by putting you on the ground with the people, not by tricking the frame. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). Grant's stalled, open-mouthed face is what the reading calls a qualisign: a face holding one pure quality, here wonder.
Look for two or three things happening at different distances at once. (staging)
Spielberg stacks the frame with depth. Something in the background can turn terrifying while the foreground still holds your attention. The Jeep side mirror is the clearest case.
Payoff: You learn to scan the whole image, which means the film can scare you without cutting. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls this frame a closed set: a dense box of information where only one layer reads as danger.
Listen for what the dinosaurs sound like, not what they look like. (sound)
Rydstrom built the roars from elephant, tiger, alligator, penguin, and tortoise recordings. Nothing sounds like a movie monster. The rain sequence adds sub-bass you feel in your chest.
Payoff: The animals register as real animals, unfamiliar and indifferent, rather than villains with a grudge.
Watch Goldblum's posture. He plays most scenes slightly sideways. (performance)
Goldblum angles his body away from whoever he's addressing, hands and head running ahead of his sentences. He arrives in a scene already skeptical of it.
Payoff: His physical habit sells the argument he keeps making: this system is less stable than the people inside it think.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Don't watch the dinosaur. Watch the cup, the mirror, and the faces looking up.