Gonna analyze the JP rex’s behavior because fuck it
Okay for my first post on Tumblr I decided I’m gonna go on an analysis of Rexy’s behavior during the first Jurassic Park’s breakout scene because why the hell not. Don’t worry I’m a biologist in training, I know what I’m talking about (not really).
Okay, first a dumb nitpick. The iconic scene with the water tremors is… Really not what would happen. The T.rex is big, but not so big to make the ground literally shake. Elephants are well known to sneak up on people with ease and they’re just a bit smaller than a T.rex.
With that out of the way, the actual breakout scene: She rips out the wires, steps out and gives us the money shot with a cool pose and a mighty roar… Except not quite. She first takes a look around, THEN she lets out that iconic roar we all love. If you ask me, I think she’s probably announcing her presence. She’s knowingly leaving her territory and entering an area she doesn’t know, so she checks if that spot is already taken by telling any other potential Tyrannosaurs she’s coming through.
Oh, but then the mayhem starts! Nope, she just… Leaves. There’s no immediate response, so she’s got green light to just explore this new environment. Really, she didn’t actually want anything to do with humans, at most she nudged the car out of curiosity. Everyone would have made it safe and sound…
Until Lex turns the god damn light on. I guess she was trying to catch Alan and Ian’s attention? Which good job girl, you also caught the attention of a 7 ton predator. Way to gp.
So good old Rexy decides to investigate, and curiously she just seems to be generally aware that the light is coming from somewhere around the area since she’s not really looking at the car.
That is until Tim closes the door.
Well kids, you got her full attention now. So she starts inspecting the car. Like, really inspecting it, sniffing it around to try and get a good sense of what this weird, shiny thing is.
And that’s when she sees there’s something inside. I don’t think she fully understands there’s food in there yet, she’s probably still seeing the car as a whole, but there’s definitely something weird about it, so she roars and tries to get a reaction.
Then she sees the kids moving inside, and she nudges the car. That’s when the kids start screaming and moving all erratically, with Tim trying to wrestle the light out of his sister’s hands and screaming at her to turn it off.
Of course Rexy is seeing and hearing all of it, and that’s when she realizes there’s definitely food in there, plus all that sudden movement and screaming must be sending her predatory instincts into overdrive.
And have you ever seen any video or photo of a big cat in a zoo trying to get a treat out of one of those enrichment balls?
Luckily for the kids there’s a thick enough panel of glass between them and those banana sized teeth, so she can’t get them that way. But that’s fine of course, because there’s always plan B. What’s plan B you ask?
Well flip the car over of course. The top of the thing is armored, so maybe its underside will be softer? That’s how a lot of animals work, there’s a reason predators start eating their prey’s guts a lot of the time, so the logic is sound.
She then bites the tire too, I’m guessing out of curiosity or trying to test different spots. Of course the tire gets completely pierced by the teeth, freeing a lot of air… And making noise, which catches Rexy’s attention… And makes her bite it again.
She gets completely side tracked by the tire and starts trying to tear it off, and I honestly think here she’s just playing and has completely forgotten about the snack.
Not that the kids are in any less peril anyways, with an animal the size of an elephant crushing the car they’re currently trapped in with its sheer size alone. Thankfully Alan’s quick thinking and knowledge of animal behavior are here to save the day!
He grabs a flare and lights it on. This catches Rexy’s attention, because new weird sparkly thing. Then, he throws the flare back into the paddock, and Rexy follows it because she really wants to check out what the hell that new weird thing is. That’s it folks, the day is saved!
Right. For some reason, Ian decides to grab another flare and light it up too. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention because hey, another weird sparkly thing! Then Ian starts running with the flare, and throws the flare while running. The thing is, the point of the flare is giving Rexy a new target to check out, but if you start running and screaming then you become a target. A target that acts an awful lot like prey at that.
So Ian runs straight to the toilet for some reason, and Rexy lunges at him, running her head straight into the small hut because let’s be real, that thing wouldn’t be able to withstand a full charge of something that big lol.
Anyways, the whole thing comes crashing down, leaving poor Gennaro exposed. Now something that’s interesting here is that she doesn’t instantly eat him, she actually checks him out at first! She’s actually curious about him, tilting her head like a quizzical dog.
And eats him. So long for the whole “won’t see you if you don’t move” thing I guess.
Fortunately Gennaro being eaten alive gives Grant enough time to get Lex out of the car (which he would have had even if Ian hadn’t tried to be a hero anyways but I digress), but before he can get Tim, Lex screams. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention, who must be having the time of her life with all this stimulation and she comes back to the car.
We get this scene where she’s supposedly not seeing Grant and Lex because they’re not moving, but IIRC the Lost World novel retconned that to her just not being hungry anymore and honestly I’m gonna roll with that because even if she didn’t see them there’s no way she didn’t smell them. I think she just lost interest in humans after eating a goat and a lawyer, especially when she has a much bigger toy right there!
I honestly think she’s not even trying to get Tim out and eat him anymore, the way I see it she’s just playing around with the car, pushing it around and generally just dicking around with it for the hell of it.
Then she pushes it off a magically appearing cliff like your cat knocking over that one glass at the edge of your kitchen table, either because she wants to get rid of the used toy or simply because she thinks it’s funny. Or because Spielberg didn’t tell her there was suddenly a cliff where she had just walked off. Then she gives one final roar to the camera, which is probably just for cinematic effect tbh.
So… Yeah, that’s all. As you can see, one of the best things of the scene is that the T.rex is… Just an animal. It’s not a movie monster going on a rampage, everything it does is completely normal animal behavior. This is big part of what makes the scene just so good and tense. It just feels real, you can actually believe the protagonists are being put in danger by a wild animal. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what dinosaurs are. Just animals.
Unlike mister “wants to watch the world burn” over here.
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