Not many other people were as excited, and I set out to figure out why. Why was I so enthusiastic? Why weren't other people?
The main reason, as far as I see it, is the audience surrogate in Jurassic Park. I've long held the belief that Jurassic Park is terrifying, and it's more terrifying to me than it is to my mother because when we went to see it in theaters, I was the same age as the little boy and all the traumatic things happen to the little boy, Tim. No, really. Think about it. A bunch of adults die, but they are mostly attacked and eaten suddenly. They have time to think, "Oh no" and maybe scream and then they're gone. With the kids, it's strung out. The T-rex terrorizes them in the car before throwing the car over a cliff and into a tree. Tim then has to escape the tree with the car falling on him. He then gets electrocuted. Then the kids are chased through a kitchen and then through the ceiling by velociraptors. Even though Dr. Grant is with them through most of this, fewer traumatizing things happen to him.
Additionally, the kids act terrified, while the adults manage to keep it together a bit better. As a kid, I reacted to their fear.
People who were older than eight-years-old when the film came out, didn't relate to the kids in the same way. They had audience surrogates like Dr. Grant or Dr. Sattler or Dr. Malcom. How boring. They see some rough things, but they aren't as traumatized, so neither are the people relating to them.
It also, of course, has a lot to do with how, as a kid, this movie is just more scary than it is for an adult. There were scenes I couldn't watch except from behind my fingers until I was in high school, at which point I got over it. I was thinking when I came out of Jurassic World that I wasn't worried for the kids in that movie at all, because--Come on!--they're not going to kill a kid. This is not that kind of movie. There's an unspoken agreement between the film makers and the audience that this movie is going to be fun, action packed, have dinosaurs, and not kill children and puppies. They're not going to violate that contract. Which got me thinking (and I feel kinda stupid now for not realizing it sooner): they were never going to kill Lex and Tim in Jurassic Park either. As a kid, I wasn't familiar enough with narrative tropes to realize this, but as an adult, I'm intuitively aware of it.
So this explains why Jurassic Park had such an impact on me and was just an okay movie to other people. It explains why other people wouldn't be as excited about it, since the first film didnt have as big of an emotional impact.
But why was I so excited? It's not just because I love the first movie, because I didn't care about The Lost World or Jurassic Park III. The less said about them the better.
It's because I was terrified of velociraptors for years, and this movie--when I now relate more to Chris Pratt than to the little boy--has my audience surrogate clicker training the velociraptors. Now that I'm an adult, my fear has been conquered, not just by my more mature brain that no longer needs to sleep with the light on and won't eat green jell-o, but by the movie itself. The movie has taken these terrifying monsters, and put them under a measure of control, and done it while respecting that the velociraptors are still dangerous and still deserve respect. It's a victory.
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