Hold On To Your Butts: How Jurassic Park Can Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Storytelling

It doesn’t always take long-winded speeches or epic drama to showcase your characters and their qualities. Something as simple as how they put on a seatbelt can tell the audience almost everything they need to know about

It’s simply not essential. This—ladies, gentlemen, and hermaphrodite dinosaurs—is cinematic exposition of the highest order: giving the audience the maximum amount of necessary information in the least amount of possible time. And these rules of thumb aren’t just arbitrary instructions; this is how the film establishes pacing. We’re getting just en

Gennaro is going to panic (and pay for it), Malcolm is going to stay aloof and pretentious (for the most part) and Grant is going to have to overcome unforeseen obstacles.

benchmark, even for you mystery writers out there. So, we’ve now reached the first milestone of the movie, and we have the basic marching orders of who is involved and why. But beneath that lies a tension sustained by what we don’t know. We know there’s something dangerous about the park (re: minor inciting incident) and we know that Hammond’s mora

And the audience should be up to speed on those objectives by the time we reach the inciting incident so that everyone’s involvement makes sense. How this can be achieved will vary widely from film to film, of course. For example in an espionage thriller or mystery, there’s a little more room for ambiguity given the confines of the genre. But Juras

I’m not saying characters themselves shouldn’t be complex. In fact, lead characters should be at least a little complex, which is where Grant’s dislike for kids and computers comes into play. But their motivations, their goals, and their reasons for taking part in the narrative should be as simple and unambiguous as possible.

Imagine if Hammond had invited Alan and Ellie to a restaurant and made his proposal there. Sure, we could have them explain how much their work means to them and why it’s important for their dig to have funding. We could possibly even have a scene where some kid bumps into Grant, giving us our first taste of his kid-phobia. But a lot of its impact

As the scene stands in the movie, it conveys everything the audience needs to know about the characters and then some. Part of it emerges in dialogue, just as much (if not more) emerges from the staging of the scene and organic interaction amongst everyone involved. And we’re not even 15 minutes into the movie.

But this moment in the film, whether major or minor, is undoubtedly an inciting incident because it marks the moment where our leads accept their part in the narrative.