The Best Part of Jurassic Park Is Its Music
Jurassic Park is 25 years old today, and aging better than any of us ever will. It's about as unassailable as summer blockbusters get, a movie that works just as well now as it did in 1993, a fact that has allowed a parade of truly bad sequels to be among the highest-grossing movies in Hollywood, because you always remember your first hit of that green Jell-O, if you catch my drift.
I could easily spend many hours talking about any number of things in Jurassic Park that are truly amazing—Sam Neill's gruff/rugged I-don't-want-to-be-a-dad performance as Dr. Alan Grant, its introduction of Laura Dern to an entire generation, that one scene where the T-Rex roars and the WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH banner falls to the ground. But more than anything, I believe that it's the music music that made Jurassic Park what it is.
I love Jurassic Park's score because I am a human being who enjoys feeling things, but I also appreciate it as an achievement in storytelling. Composer John Williams, who has achieved the singular accomplishment of reprogramming an entire lobe of the human brain, is (rightly) celebrated for being a master of motif: the musical version of having a catch phrase, only for places and things as well as people. A Williams score will attach these little musical licks to things the movie wants you to have feelings about, and then flesh them out with themes that guide those feelings. Motifs are a big part of what make "themes" work—and while plenty of movie scores have these things, few possess the level of pure primary-color feeling that a Williams score does.
Consider the main theme for Jurassic Park, one of the loveliest pieces of music ever made for a summer blockbuster, and how it's introduced in the movie. You first hear it in a moment of pure awe, when Doctors Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, who have no idea what they're in for, first see dinosaurs—the first time you see dinosaurs in the movie. It's a moment perfectly keyed to forever associate all these things in your brain—the five-note "it's Jur-as-sic Park" motif, the majesty of freaking dinosaurs in real life, and your total willingness to mirror everything Sam Neill and Laura Dern are feeling on-screen. It's a theme so well-wrought that it works in a way that's nigh-impossible to mess up or extricate yourself from. All you've got to do is hear that theme again and you'll catch those feelings all over. It doesn't matter if it's played by a professional orchestra or a middle school band, it just works. It sounds like a sunset.
It's also why this is one of the funniest videos on the Internet:
The Jurassic Park score rules because it, much like the original Jurassic Park film (and unlike just about every sequel), understands that dinosaurs, while rad as hell, aren't the point. You don't make a better Jurassic Park movies by adding more dinosaurs. You make a good one by making those dinosaurs mean things. In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park is a metaphor for parenthood, and the reason any of that lands is because each dinosaur makes you feel something specific that you don't really get around any of the other dinosaurs. And the music is vital for that: I want to gape at brachiosaurs, to hug a sick stegosaurus, and to watch a T-Rex wreck raptors from afar. And I want to hear some jubilant trumpets playing while it happens.
