Hello welcome back to my Jurassic Park Ted Talk. Today we are discussing why this is the most perfect monologue in modern cinema no don’t at me with any of your Scorsese Tarantino bullshit I’m serious.

Let’s start off with the obvious: it is a gorgeous piece of exposition. We see, in 90 seconds, that Dr Grant has no fucking clue how to deal with children. He has no ability to moderate himself. He gives the same speech to this child he’s given to adults. He doesn’t care.

How do we know? Because Laura Dern has one simple line: Here we go. She’s heard this speech before. Dozens of times. Lack of raptor respect is Alan’s pet peeve and she’s definitely heard him deliver this same monologue to the Sinclair gas station attendant.

The entire inner arc of the main character is set up in one perfectly delivered monologue. What’s the arc? I’ll let my friend Kevin explain: https://twitter.com/kevinbrettauer/status/1015828699860488192?s=21

2) But the more brilliant thing is how beautifully it exposits exactly why we should care about raptors.

Remember, it’s 1993. Google won’t exist for another 5 years. It’s a movie about dinosaurs. The T.rex is the leading lady. Only real nerds know what a raptor is.

But, much as I may love @SUEtheTrex, the T.rex isn’t the Big Bad of Jurassic Park. If anything, she’s the red herring and deus ex machina. The real threat is the raptors, and the audience doesn’t know what a raptor is.

So we get 90 seconds of bloody exposition. And then we get to watch it happen, and we believe it can happen because we’ve been told it can.

The tall grass scene cannot exist without this monologue.

3) This gets us used to the idea of children in danger. A huge part of the tension of this movie is “will the kids get out alive” because somehow the kids are likable so we don’t want them to die.

We watch this monologue of Dr Grant pretending to disembowel an 11 year old and then we watch two kids face those exact creatures.

We’ve been told what can happen and now, consciously or unconsciously, we associate a raptor attack with a kid. We lose the sense of safety we’d normally have that the kid or the dog always survives because the hero’s already said they won’t.

And demonstrated using a claw.

4) It sets up that Ellie loves this crotchety insane man. Which is a necessary setup because otherwise her character makes no sense. She gets hit on by 90s Jeff Goldblum and she doesn’t even blink. The only way that’s believable is if she’s deeply, insanely in love with Alan.

I mean seriously. Her character rejects this. It only works if we know that she loves Alan. And when she shakes her head and laughs as Alan turns a preteen into a bedwetter, we learn something about Ellie: she loves that sociopath.

In sum:

Within 90 seconds we learn about the main character’s character arc, a secondary character’s motivations, critical information about the antagonist, AND we learn the stakes and dangers of the world we are about to enter.

That’s some efficient fucking exposition.