Jurassic Park explained

Welcome to our Colossus Movie Guide for Jurassic Park. This guide contains our detailed library of content covering key aspects of the movie’s plot, ending, meaning, and more. We encourage your comments to help us create the best possible guide. Thank you!

What is Jurassic Park about?

Jurassic Park uses the idea of chaos theory—unpredictability in complex systems—to make a point about cutting edge science, emerging technology, and capitalism. Malcolm sums this up with the famous line “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Greed is the film’s major villain; the dinosaurs are just hungry. The capitalistic urge is to think about money before morality and responsibility. When you do that with forces you can’t possibly understand, the results can be disastrous. Because it’s a Spielberg movie, there’s a father-figure who has a complicated relationship with kids. Other themes include showmanship, the act of creation, and life’s penchant to find a way to survive.   

Movie Guide table of contents

Cast

• Dr. Alan Grant – Sam Neill
• Dr. Ellie Sattler – Laura Dern
• Dr. Ian Malcolm – Jeff Goldblum
• Dr. John Hammond – Richard Attenborough
• Tim Murphy – Joseph Mazzello
• Lex Murphy – Ariana Richards
• Ray Arnold – Samuel L. Jackson
• Denis Nedry – Wayne Knight
• Robert Muldoon – Bob Peck
• Donald Gennaro (the lawyer) – Martin Ferrero
• Dr. Henry Wu – B.D. Wong
• Dr. Hardin – Jerry Molen
• Dr. Lewis Dodgson – Cameron Thor
• Based on – the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
• Written by – Michael Crichton | David Koepp
• Directed by – Steven Spielberg

The ending of Jurassic Park explained

Recap

The end of Jurassic Park is simple enough. Alan, Ellie, Ian, Hammond, Tim, and Lex manage to dodge, dip, dive, and dodge their way around all the dinosaurs, restore power to the park, take a jeep to the helipad, then fly the hell away from Isla Nublar. 

Before getting on the helicopter, Hammond takes a last, longing look back towards Jurassic Park. You can hear dinosaurs roaring. On the helicopter, Hammond stares at the mosquito in amber that he keeps on his walking stick. Ian Malcom is, for once, quiet. Tim and Lex don’t sit with their grandfather. Instead, the grandchildren both nap on Alan. He and Ellie share a moment, as both recognize that Grant has gone from someone who wanted nothing to do with kids to a full-on father-figure. They both turn their attention out the window. A flock of pelicans fly above the ocean. We cut from a shot of a single pelican to a similar shot of the helicopter. It flies off toward the horizon. 

One thing of note is the last scene in the visitor center. The two velociraptors, finally with the upper hand on Grant, Sattler, Tim, and Lex, close in and are just about to pounce when out of nowhere the Tyrannosaurus appears. It chomps one raptor. The second attacks but can’t compete. The T-Rex manages to chomp down then fling the raptor across the room—it happens to collide with the T-Rex display skeleton. As the skeleton falls, the real Tyrannosaur roars in triumph.  

Meaning

I hopefully don’t have to explain to you what happened at the end of Jurassic Park. It’s pretty straightforward. Instead, we’re going to get into the themes because, thematically, Jurassic Park is incredibly dense. You have themes within themes within themes. And they all come together at the end. 

So what I’m going to do is give you a bullet-point overview, then dive into the specifics of each topic. This will give you a framework for what Jurassic Park is doing so that when you go back to the movie you’ll have a much better understanding of why things happened how they did. Especially why the end focuses so much on pelicans. 

Away we go. 

The key themes to understand the end of Jurassic Park 

• Chaos theory
• Science, Technology, and Capitalism
• The power of nature
• Showmanship 
• Life finding a way
• Evolution

Chaos theory

Ian Malcolm delivers dialogue that provides context for chaos theory. First, in his explanation to Dr. Sattler.  

Malcolm: Oh, oh, it simply deals with, uh, unpredictability in complex systems. The shorthand is the, the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine…. Give me that glass of water. We’re going to conduct an experiment. Now put your hand flat like a hieroglyphic. 

Now, let’s say a drop of water falls on your hand. Which way is the drop going to fall off? Which finger? Or thumb? Or the other [unintelligible]? Aha. Okay. Now freeze your hand, freeze your hand. Don’t move. I’m going to do the same thing, start with the same place again. Which way is it going to roll off? Same way? Back the same way. [Gasps]. It changed. It changed. Why? Because tin variations, uh, the orientation of the hairs on your hands, um, the amount of blood distending your vessels, imperfections in the skin…never repeat and vastly affect the outcome.  

[Grant gets out of the car]. There. Look at this. See? See? I’m right again. Nobody could’ve predicted that Dr. Grant would suddenly, suddenly jump out of a moving vehicle. [Sattler gets out of the car]. There’s, uh, another example. See, here I am now by myself, talking to myself. That’s chaos theory. 

Grant then Sattler leaving the car is played for a laugh but it’s an important demonstration. The film goes from telling us “This is what chaos theory is” to “This is how it works in this movie. Whenever you see people do things they aren’t supposed to do, like get out of a moving car, to the degree it changes how events “would” have or “should” have gone, that’s chaos theory.” 

Think about it in terms of the Butterfly Effect. Because Grant got out of the car, it means both cars stop. That delays the end of the tour. They would have been back at the visitor center before the storm, before Nedry’s heist. Instead, they’re still deep into the park. Which is why they end up stuck by the T-Rex pen. Grant getting out of the car is the film’s version of a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking and causing rain in Central Park. 

But it’s not just Grant’s decision. It’s the entire cascade of things. Like Hammond not wanting to pay Nedry, so Nedry becomes disgruntled and decides to do some corporate espionage for a huge check. The decision to breed velociraptors leads to the death of the employee that triggers the need for professionals to sign off on the park, which is why Grant, Sattler, Malcolm, and the kids are there in the first place. Had anyone deemed the raptors too dangerous, who knows if anything bad would have happened (probably, but the odds would have been less).

So much of what happens in Jurassic Park, scene to scene, is based on chain reactions and unpredictability. The embodiment of that is the sudden arrival of the T-Rex at the visitor center. It’s a moment that might seem cheesy, or even unbelievable, but it’s the culmination of chaos theory. Malcolm even has that line earlier in the film: You see? The tyrannosaur doesn’t obey set patterns or park schedules. It’s the essence of Chaos.

Inherent to chaos theory is the notion that control is often an illusion because the world is so complex and variable that we can’t account for everything. For example, Dr. Wu believed it was impossible for the dinosaurs to breed because they’re all female. Except they didn’t account for the fact that the bit of frog DNA used to resurrect the dinosaurus means they have the capacity for spontaneous gender change.

Science, Technology, and Capitalism

As we explained, chaos theory deals with unpredictability in systems. It’s important to note that systems become more predictable the more data you have. If you move to a new city, you might have no idea when and where there will be traffic. As you drive around at various times of day, over the course of weeks, months, and years—you begin to have a much more accurate model of the city’s traffic patterns. 

Science and technology have a similar learning curve. The newer something is, the more unknowns there are. Time and experience resolve the mysteries and bring us a degree of order. A pharmaceutical company may think they have a cure for a disease but they can’t rush it out to the world because they still don’t know the potential side effects. That’s why we have rigorous testing standards before a human can trial a drug. 

The Wright brothers had the first successful powered airplane flight on December 17th, 1903. The first passenger flight wasn’t until 1908. And the first commercial flight didn’t happen until January 1st, 1914. Even then, that was a local jaunt from St. Petersburg to Tampa. 17 total miles. The more modern era of commercial flights started in the 1920s. It took decades for people to understand the science, improve the technology, and scale it out. But it paid off. Commercial air travel is unbelievably safe. Between 2010 and 2021, the United States had a total of 2 on board fatalities. The country averages 45,000 flights daily.

Compare that to Jurassic Park. In the novel, InGen cloned a dinosaur in 1986. They started construction on the park in 1987. The story takes place in 1993. You have cutting edge science that’s not even a decade old and barely studied because it’s privatized. Combined with cutting edge systems tech that only a few people know how to use. 

Now keep all that in mind, along with the previous talk of chaos theory, as we review the conversation at the dinner table, before the park tour. 

Despite Malcolm’s big line about “they didn’t stop to think if they should,” the problem isn’t that Hammond has brought dinosaurs back to life. It’s that he has jumped to the commercialization part when so much is still unknown. When ignorance is still dangerously high. And even though he “spared no expense” on so much of the park, Hammond went cheap with the lead computer programmer who managed the entire system. The park is only as good as the system that controls it. When that fails, so does everything else. 

The power of nature

So we’ve talked about the concept of chaos theory in the film and how the narrative demonstrates it through cause-and-effect chains that drive the story forward. But in the big conversation between Hammond, Malcolm, Ellie, and Grant, they note the unknowns about nature. The power of nature. 

These are the forces that make a system like Jurassic Park so unpredictable. The forces that lead to its failure.  

First. Dennis Nedry shutting down the system so he can steal dino DNA for Biosyn. Why? Because he wanted money. That’s human nature. 

Second. The hellacious storm that hits the island. It throws off normal operations—most of the staff that’s usually there leave. It causes the main group to split up. And it causes Nedry to drive off the road and have that fatal encounter with the dilophosaurus. That’s mother nature. 

Third. The nature of carnivorous dinosaurs. You can’t blame them for it. But it’s terrifying to actually encounter, because they are so perfectly evolved to do what they do—hunt and eat. [I don’t have a cool end to this paragraph. That’s dino nature? Just nature?]

All of that is predictable. But at the same time, it’s powerful. As Alan says: Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect? Even when you know people will be greedy and dinosaurs will eat you if they can, you can’t always control what comes of it. 

Showmanship

In the novel, Hammond is a more villainous figure, driven by profit. Spielberg wanted him to be more of a showman. It positions Hammond less as an entrepreneur and more like a filmmaker. 

Before everyone gets on the helicopter to escape, Hammond has that moment where he stares back at the park. It would be silly to say the financial failure meant nothing to him. It had to mean something. But Hammond’s more upset about the lost experience. That gets back to his earlier speech about the flea circus. “But with this place, I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something that they could…see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.” 

That’s what Hammonds coming to terms with as they leave. Especially when he looks at the mosquito in amber on his walking stick. It was the key to unlocking dinosaurs. To potentially the greatest attraction ever created. Even though the dinosaurs were real, the illusion was still there. The illusion of control over such natural power. 

Life finding a way

The idea that life finds a way is used by Malcolm in response to Wu’s statement that the dinosaurs can’t procreate because they’re all female. Later, we find out the dinosaur can, indeed, procreate, thanks to bits of frog DNA that allows for spontaneous gender change in single-gender environments.

When you zoom out a little bit, the idea that life finds a way doesn’t have to apply only to dinosaurs. It can be any animal. Including people. 

That’s at the core of Alan Grant’s story arc. When we first meet him, he dislikes kids. He uses a raptor claw to bully the kid at the dig. Then tries to keep Tim and Lex at a distance. But chaos makes him their guide through the park. That experience completely flips his stance. On the helicopter, he has no qualms when the kids nap on him. He’s completely comfortable. Which causes a look between him and Ellie.

While it never comes up in the movie, you can imagine that one of the hangups in their relationship is that Sattler wants kids and Grant doesn’t. Which is why Ellie tells the kids to ride with Alan. And why she seems so happy to see how he is on the helicopter. There’s an unspoken acknowledgement that he might be ready to have kids. That they could have a family together. That life has, uh, found a way. 

Fun side note. In 2024, a stingray at an aquarium in Hendersonville, North Carolina, became pregnant through parthenogenesis, quote, “a type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male.” Dan Hensley notes that “Parthenogenesis has been observed in more than 80 vertebrate species, about half of which are fish or lizards.” 

Evolution

This is one of my favorite details. The pelicans at the end seem random, right? “No, Chris. Because Grant says at the beginning that dinosaurs have more in common with birds than reptiles. And it’s common knowledge now that birds evolved from dinosaurs.” I love that you know that, reader. Birds did evolve from theropods. So when Grant looks at the pelicans, he doesn’t see “birds” but the dinosaurs that survived the meteor.

But that’s not why I love the detail. It’s because the shot of the single pelican cuts to a shot of the helicopter. That creates a graphic match between the bird and the chopper. So much of Jurassic Park is about the vanguard of science and technology. The world keeps changing. Advancing. And it’s a constant battle between the natural, human, and artificial. Our homes went from caves to huts made of branches, stones, and animal skins, to the incredible fabricated dwellings of the 21st century. We used to drink from cupped hands, now we have temperature-controlling Yeti mugs.

It’s an open-ended point. The glass-half-full reading is simply thinking it’s neat how so many of the artificial things we have connect back to nature. There’s a word for this: biomimicry. For example, the Japanese bullet train, the Shinkansen, was designed after the beak of a Kingfisher bird. 

Another cool example comes from MIT Technology Review: Marine scientists have long suspected that humpback whales’ incredible agility comes from the bumps on the leading edges of their flippers. Now Harvard University researchers have come up with a mathematical model that helps explain this hydrodynamic edge. The work gives theoretical weight to a growing body of empirical evidence that similar bumps could lead to more-stable airplane designs, submarines with greater agility, and turbine blades that can capture more energy from the wind and water.

The glass-half-empty reading gets back to Malcolm’s statement about the pillaging of the natural world. Viewed this way, it’s not simply that the bird inspired the helicopter. It’s that humans will, if we’re not careful, replace what’s natural with the artificial. The same way that birds are all that’s left of dinosaurs, our biomimicry will be what remains of flora and fauna long forgotten. And this will be a product not of our maliciousness but because we never stopped to think about the consequences of pushing science and technology forward. 

The themes, meaning, and message of Jurassic Park

Many of the major themes we talked about in the explanation of the ending. 

The dangers of early implementation of science and technology

Jurassic Park examines the danger of early implementation of science and technology. This had been a major topic ever since the discovery of the atomic bomb and the ushering in of the atomic age. Mass destruction was suddenly a very real thing. Just because we could build that kind of bomb, should we have? And what about the next weapon after that? Or one that’s more destructive than those? At what point do we say enough is enough?

If you think that’s a bit of a stretch, Nedry has a photo of Oppenheimer taped to his computer. That’s not a detail from the novel but something Spielberg and team decided to include. Why? Because it resonated thematically. 

The 2023 movie about J. Robert, called Oppenheimer, dedicates a good part of the story to Oppenheimer’s struggle with the consequences of the bomb. He wonders if he started a chain reaction that will result in the end of the world. He was in control of the creation of this thing, but not the application of it. How others will use it is beyond him. 

It’s the same thing with InGen and the dinosaurs. They aren’t a weapon, but they are a force of nature. If you bring them back then you can’t account for what happens next. Ideally, you limit the potential for disaster by slow-rolling the cloning process. Make one dinosaur. Follow it from birth to death. Create a second. Gather data. Form hypotheses. Test the hypotheses. Create a third. Scientific method again. Preferably, you start only with herbivores. Once they feel “predictable”, make a park of only herbivores. Clone a single carnivore. Carefully gather data. Do that for several iterations. Once you understand it, add it to the park. Or don’t. 

Hammond and InGen didn’t pace themselves. They implemented everything right away because they were overconfident. And wanted the money, the renown, etc.

It’s similar to the current debate around self-driving cars. How quickly should we let technology like that on the road? The United States has over 7 million car crashes a year. For people to feel okay with the ubiquitous use of self-driving cars, how many crashes would self-driving cars have to prevent relative to how many they cause? 2:1? 3:1? 1,000:1? More? There are companies that would and will rush the technology because it’s in their best financial interest. 

What about tech-based human enhancement? Elective upgrades like embedding a chip into your hand that has all your credit card information. Elon Musk has a company called Neuralink that has a brain implant that could, according to Nature, help paralyzed people “control a computer, robotic arm, wheelchair or other device through thought alone.” But what are the long-term effects of having a human-made object embedded into the brain? Does it cause infection? Blood clots? Does it heat up from use? Can it lose grip? The eventual benefits of a fully-functional brain-computer interface are tremendous. But what will the road there look like? And what happens when it’s not a medical tool? When a perfectly healthy person wants a chip in their brain so they don’t have to type on their phone? When do we allow that? When does that go from rare to normal to a requirement? 

Even though Jurassic Park has nothing to do with that kind of thing. It has everything to do with that kind of thing. “Cloning dinosaurs and putting them in a theme park” is just a variable that you can swap out for any advancement in science or tech. 

Why is the movie called Jurassic Park?

Titles often refer to a character, a setting, concept, or theme. Donnie Darko, Dune, Dumb Money, Do the Right Thing. Each has a different energy. Donnie Darko emphasizes the individual and even has some superhero vibes to it. Dune summons up visions of a desert. Dumb Money lets you know you’ll be watching something that deals with wealth and maybe some idiots. While Do the Right Thing is esoteric. It implies morality. But it’s open-ended as to who will be involved, where, etc. 

Jurassic Park implies a dinosaur-centric theme park or zoo. It tells us that the concept of a place like this is the film’s focus. Which sets up all the ethical issues surrounding the existence of the park. 

Why Jurassic Park and not Dinosaur Park? People associate dinosaurs with the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. So the use of “Jurassic” immediately makes that connection. Dinosaur Park is a little less elegant. More direct. It also implies that you’re stepping into a world. You won’t only see dinosaurs, you’ll be transported to 100 million years ago. It implies that immersive quality. 

It’s nerdy, but Tyrannosaurs were Cretaceous period beings, not Jurassic. Same is true for the Triceratops and Velociraptors. But no one wants to go somewhere called Cretaceous Park. Likewise, Triassic Park is kind of funky. There’s something far more appealing about the “Jur”. You can make it more dramatic, too. “Welcome to Jurrrrrrrrrrrrrassic Park!” Versus “Welcome to Triiiiiiiiiiiiiiassic Park.” It’s just not as cool. 

So we get Jurassic Park because it entices people with dinosaurs and also comes to represent everything that happens at the park. It’s similar to how people still refer to the Hindenburg disaster or Titanic. You can say something will be a Titanic or Hidenburg and people know what you mean—that disaster awaits. It’s the same thing for Jurassic Park. It’s a doomed prospect. Something that sounds good, looks good, would be awesome, but is ultimately untenable. 

Important motifs in Jurassic Park

The dinosaurs and storm represent chaos theory

Malcolm tells us that chaos theory is essentially the study of unpredictability in a system. Say you live two miles away from the grocery store. It should be an easy drive. But it becomes unpredictable due to other drivers and traffic lights. Sometimes it takes you three minutes to drive there, other times ten minutes. 

Jurassic Park is similar. There is an ideal way the park should run. But a disgruntled employee compromises that. It shouldn’t be difficult to reboot the system, except the dinosaurs complicate it. Nedry’s drive from the visitor center to the docks should have been simple. Except the storm made it challenging. Then a dinosaur ate him. 

These are unpredictable elements in a system that needs predictability. And, so, disaster occurs. 

“Spared no expense”

Hammond says “spared no expense” over and over again. It conveys a sense of confidence. An idea that “it’s expensive, so it must be good.” Human nature tends to equate cost with quality. But money does not guarantee quality or safety. 

It also leads into Hammond’s fatal flaw. He spared no expense on the science and park experience. But he bid out important jobs like the head computer person. That’s how he ended up with someone like Dennis Nedry. And what ultimately drives Nedry to work with Biosyn. If Hammond truly spared no expense, he would have paid Nedry more or paid for someone better than Nedry. But he thought that because he had spent so much everywhere else, that the system was stable. We know from Jenga, though, that one block can cause the entire tower to crash. 

Dinosaurs “becoming real”

Two examples of this jump out. The best example is in the visitor center. Lex and Tim are in the dining room, chowing down. On the wall behind them is an illustrated Velociraptor. But then you see the shadow of a real raptor. It moves over top of the illustration. One is static, the other is quite alive. 

A similar thing happens earlier in the film. The first time we see the Tyrannosaur is through the car window. It’s an animal on the other side of glass. That’s how zoos operate, right? We feel safe because it can’t get through the glass. But the camera moves upward, past the glass, meaning there’s nothing between us and the T-Rex. That movement captures the film’s sudden change in tone. The park is no longer a “ride”. It’s real. This becomes very apparent when the T-Rex comes through the fence. And again when it puts its muzzle through the glass roof of the car. 

So you have this nice sequence of the camera showing the T-Rex through glass then not through the glass. The T-Rex coming through the fence. Then the glass being the only thing between the kids and getting devoured. It’s a little micro-narrative that deconstructs Hammond’s showmanship with the visceral, feral force of the Tyrannosaur. 

The end of the movie even emphasizes this. As the final fight between the T-Rex and Velociraptors happens in the lobby of the visitor center, amidst the fossils. The T-Rex throws the raptor through the skeleton and then stands in the visual space the fossil had been and roars. 

Broadly speaking, this gets at the disconnect between concept and reality. “This is my idea of dinosaurs and how I want them to behave” vs “this is how dinosaurs actually behave.” It’s in the same ballpark as Mike Tyson’s now famous line “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You can plan and plot and idealize, but the reality is very different. 

The ripples in the cup of water

We’re told over and over again that dinosaurs are a force of nature. Before we see the Tyrannosaurus Rex for the first time, we hear it. Its footfalls sound like thunder. And the ripples it causes in the puddles and glass of water give it the sense of an earthquake. This lends the creature a sense of the sublime. It sounds huge. Its approach shakes you. Then, when we finally see it, it’s terrifying. All of that combines to establish the dinosaurs as something more than just zoo animals but as powerful entities that we should very much respect. 

Questions & answers about Jurassic Park

Why did Lex turn on the flashlight?

It doesn’t happen in the novel. In the novel, the T-Rex smells that there were people by the car, can see the kids moving inside the car, so attacks the car. That’s it. 

In the script, all we get is this line: Lex is rummaging around in the back cargo area, looking for something, anything. She finds a flashlight.

So you could try and justify it that she’s so afraid that she looks for something that might help her feel safe, secure, in some control. Like if you thought you heard someone breaking into your house, you might grab whatever is in reach, because holding something as a weapon is better than being empty-handed. 

Ultimately, though, Jurassic Park kind of has a get out of jail free card in that chaos theory is its major theme. Unpredictability. It doesn’t make sense for Lex to turn on a flashlight. 99 out of 100 people probably don’t turn on the flashlight. But a flashlight is in the car. And there’s going to be that person who irrationally turns it on.

It’s funny because as much as Jurassic Park is about chaos theory, it sometimes dips into Murphy’s Law. The idea that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. 

How did the Dilophosaur get into the jeep?

Great question. Movie magic! In the scene, Nedry only opens the driver door. So it wasn’t his fault. We do see that the Velociraptors know how to open doors. But we’re told they’re incredibly smart. The Dilophosaurus could be just as smart? 

22 seconds pass between the spit hitting Nedry’s eyes and Nedry getting into the jeep. That’s not a long time for the spitter to go up the ridge, open the door, then settle into the passenger seat.

In the novel, we’re told multiple times that there were multiple Dilophosaurs. So it’s possible that when Nedry went down the hill that the second Dilophosaur had gotten into the car. Maybe to stay dry? Maybe to be curious? Maybe because it smelled Nedry’s snacks? Maybe to attack? But once Nedry’s in, it attacks for two reasons. One, the presence of this person scares it. Two, because the spit on Nedry’s face tells it Nedry’s been marked as prey. 

How did the T-Rex get over the drop in Jurassic Park?

This always bothered me. I spent decades of my life thinking this was a huge plot hole and an example of “just don’t worry about it.” But in writing this explanation, I checked out the script for the first time. Lo and behold, there’s an answer.

From the script: the T-rex starts to nudge the Explorer toward the barrier. Over the barrier, there is a gentle terraced area at one side where the rex emerged from, but the car isn’t next to that, it’s next to a sharp precipice, representing a fifty or sixty foot drop. 

So a terraced area is essentially the natural equivalent of stadium seating. From Wikipedia: a terrace is a piece of sloped plane that has been cut into a series of successively receding flat surfaces or platforms, which resemble steps… 

That means there is a hill that leads up from the lowest point to the fence. Specifically where the goat was. This would also explain the earlier dialogue between Hammond and the lawyer about there being moats. A lot of zoos will have moats to create distance between the fence and the animal. 

The hill also explains how Ellie and Muldoon get from the road to the dropped car so quickly. They just went through the fence at the level ground and walked down. But then why didn’t Alan, Tim, and Lex go back up the hill? Because the T-Rex had just tried to eat them. They ran deeper into the park in order to gain some distance. 

How did the T-Rex get into the visitor center?

The script answers this too. The other raptor goes up in the air now, twenty feet off  of the lobby floor, held fast in the mouth of the Rex. It stands in the entrance to the lobby in front of the massive hole it ripped through the Visqueen wall. 

So it ripped a hole in a Visqueen wall. But what is Visqueen? It’s the plastic you see around construction sites. In this case, the visitor center was unfinished so the Visqueen was used as a kind of tarp to keep out the elements. If you freeze frame the scene, you can see the torn plastic wall. 

Okay, but then how didn’t they hear the Tyrannosaur approach?

Remember the scene with the Gallimimus? The T-Rex comes crashing through the trees but we never heard its approach. That could just be a continuity error. Or a detail we shouldn’t obsess over. Practically speaking, you could argue there’s a difference in the location. That the road was more susceptible to tremors while other areas of the park aren’t? Another theory is that a hunting Tyrannosaur can have a bit of stealth. That would mean it has a regular, heavy walk that is quite different from its “let’s get to work” ninja walk. 

Regardless, the scene with the Gallimimus set up the idea that the T-Rex doesn’t already rattle the earth. 

Also, Alan said that the visitor center was only a mile from where they saw the Gallimimus. So it’s also possible the T-Rex caught a scent and went in that direction. And that’s why she went through the Visqueen. 

Now it’s your turn

Have more unanswered questions about Jurassic Park? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!