A triumph. A joke. A scare. A thrill. These were at the core of each of the previous posts in this series. (Those scenes and this week’s can be found in 36 Of The Greatest Movie Scenes Ever Made.) Most people can easily think of times when stories have led them to cheer, laugh, shiver, and sit on the edge of their seats. It’s harder to come up with examples of wonder. It’s difficult to get audiences to move outside of themselves. Even introducing dinosaurs, skillfully rendered with CGI is not enough. Cinematically, this scene from Jurassic Park leans heavily on camera work (zooming in on faces five times, plus getting to faces in clever ways like bringing others into the close-ups), lighting (especially sunlight), acting (physical reactions), blocking (movement and placement of characters), and elevated music (Williams’s take on Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto).
Beat 1 Grant looks. It takes a moment for what he sees to register.
Beat 2 Grant’s face shows awe. He stands.
Beat 3 Grant pulls Sattler into the experience, literally.
Beat 4 Sattler reacts with awe and standing.
Beat 5 What they see is revealed. Not all at once, but slowly. A dinosaur.
Beat 6 The scientist exit the car and go toward the dinosaur as if drawn to it.
Beat 7 Grants techno-babble grounds the experience with information that is dwarfed by the audience experience.
Beat 8 Grant (endearingly) stutters out the obvious, “It’s a dinosaur.”
Beat 9 Hammond heads over, chuckling. He provides a new perspective—pride.
Beat 10 Malcolm provides another point of view, seeing this as madness.
Beat 11 The scientists look up, as we do, at the gigantic dinosaur. An awe-inspiring perspective.
Beat 12 Grants techno-babble grounds the experience with information that is dwarfed by the audience experience.
Beat 13 The dinosaur bellows. It drops its forelegs, creating thunder and shaking the earth. This adds to the sensual experience, which had been mostly just visual.
Beat 14 Gennaro provides another perspective. This means money. He misses the wonder.
Beat 15 Malcolm seems to abandon his concerns, caught up by the wonder.
Beat 16 Hammond slips in new information as data. Yes, top speeds. But… another escalation with the casual reveal of the existence of a T. Rex.
Beat 17 Sattler is stunned. Grant is overwhelmed.
Beat 18 More dinosaurs. (12 dinosaurs are shown). This is not just a zoo. It is a new world.
Beat 19 It’s subtle, but Grant shares the implication of social behaviors (moving in herds).
Beat 20 Hammond moves from pride to awe.
Beat 21 Grant asks how did you do this?
Beat 22 Hammond says, “I’ll show you.” A promise.
Note: This could have been played for horror. That’s hinted at by Malcolm’s initial reaction. But Spielberg holds very much to wonder, with only Malcolm and the clueless Gennaro as the dissonant notes.
The plot would have been served by seeing one dinosaur and having Grant ask, “How did you do it?” Given the quality of the CGI, the audience would have felt some of the awe, especially with our look at how Grant takes it in. But the film provides almost three and a half minutes of rising emotions to reach an apex of wonder.
This great scene:
• Gently and organically reveals.
• Gives us a character who experiences the wonder, so we can share it.
• Grounds the fantastic with mundane techno-babble. This makes the experience more believable.
• Provides scale (human-dinosaur).
• Endears us to Grant by making this brainy guy into a kid again, stating the obvious.
• Provides contrasting points of view (pride, concern, greed).
• Literally provides perspective, with a shot looking up at the dinosaur.
• Creates a varied and appealing sensual experience.
• Escalates with another popular dinosaur and more dinosaurs and the society of dinosaurs.
• Turns emotionally. Even the guy who knows (Hammond) is moved to awe. This further pulls the audience toward wonder.
• Through Grant, raises a question for the audience.
• Ends with a promise, “I’ll show you.”
The art, perhaps unteachable, is the pacing and balance of this scene. And it’s an extraordinary accomplishment because wonder here depends on correctly using a variety of brilliant scene tricks. We’ve seen many of these before: escalation and going to extremes, a viewpoint character, contrasts, a powerful sensual experience, bringing in more characters to make the experience less private and more public, and revelations. Conflict is present (suggesting future developments), but it is soft-pedaled so it doesn’t distract from the wonder. I’d argue that there is also a power shift here. Humans, imagining they are in control, describing and predicting. But even Hammond, who thinks he created this world, ends up in awe of it. Jurassic Park is bigger than his imagination, and this almost foreshadows how it is not in his control.
There are a few more elements I haven’t explored earlier. Anticipation, based on hints, plays a major role in the emotions this scene creates. In particular, things are withheld and emerge relatively slowly. There is a deliberate use of scale and perspective. (Think of how BIG the destroyer is at the very beginning of Star Wars. Think of how alone and tiny Bowman is when he is locked out of the Odyssey by HAL in 2001.) Grounding makes it much harder to dismiss what is shown, and that’s essential in a scene that pushes the limits of willful suspension of disbelief. And I particularly like how thoroughly this scene explores different human responses and how it draws us in, bit by bit (more and more of a dinosaur, more and more kinds of dinosaurs, more and more dinosaurs, more and more dinosaur behavior), to a new world.
It takes a lot to keep an audience engaged so they experience wonder instead of mere spectacle. A lot of tools need to be mastered. Talent, experience, and great collaborators help. My posts can’t guarantee success like this. Nonetheless, I’ll try to pull together elements of brilliant scenes into a guide to creation. Next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment