Batman: The Long Halloween [review]

This month marks 20 years since the publication of Batman: The Long Halloween.  Printed in monthly issues between October 1996 and 1997, it’s a murder mystery entwined with the transformation of District Attorney Harvey Dent into the villain Two-face.

Nominally a sequel to Batman: Year One, albeit one differing greatly in style, TLH returns us to a Gotham City controlled by mafia boss Carmine “the Roman” Falcone.  Batman, Jim Gordon and Dent join forces against Falcone but things are complicated when a serial killer, known as “Holiday”, starts murdering criminals on special dates of the year.  Alongside this, Batman must deal with the costumed criminals that have appeared in Gotham, as well a certain cat burglar with a particular interest in Falcone.

In shaping Harvey Dent’s downfall in The Dark Knight (2008), Christopher Nolan took inspiration from TLH.  From the mob boss who’s above the law, to Dent, Gordon and Batman uniting against the mafia, even Gordon dismissing Harvey’s surprise at Batman’s disappearing trick (“He does that.”) there’s clear influences.  Even Harvey Dent’s campaign slogan in the film comes from TLH; I believe in Harvey Dent.

TLH was written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale, with colours by Gregory Wright.  They also created Superman for All Seasons and the Marvel ‘colours’ series.  Loeb’s script is framed by narration from Bruce Wayne which, aside from voicing to his concerns and suspicions, explains the story’s concept at the start of each chapter.  While this could feel monotonous when reading the collected volume, the repetition of key phrases (“Carmine Falcone, Gotham City’s untouchable crime-lord…”) gives proceedings a sense of passing time, as events unfold over a year, as well as a certain poetry.

Each issue/ chapter draws us further into the story as we see each twist of the plot, each piece of treachery and wait to discover who Holiday will hit next.  However, the appearances by some of the costumed villains (10 in total) feel a little unnecessary.  It might’ve been better to have fewer and spend a more time developing Catwoman’s character beyond the usual saucy bat-tease.  During the course of TLH, suspicion for the Holiday murders falls on numerous characters, maintaining the mystery to the finale.  As a story that is, in part, a who-dun-it, it would benefit from a more concrete resolution.  As it is we’re left with limited evidence and contradictory confessions.

Tim Sale’s style, exaggerated from much of his other work, could be called “gothic” or “grotesque” and may not satisfy everyone - Batman is a giant with a philtrum you could ski down and the Joker looks like he’s choking on a piano. But the muted palette and the deep blocks of shadows and harsh highlights render Gotham City a melodramatic world of contrasting light and dark, whilst the story tells us things aren’t that simple.

The Long Halloween remains a classic because at its core it’s the story of the fall Harvey Dent.  Although the notion had been explored before (in Eye of the Beholder, by Andrew Helfer, Chris Sprouse et al, 1990) we see the seeds of his madness were there long before the facial scars.  His evident pleasure at the mob’s misfortunes and the things he may or may not have done clearly indicate he was always a little… two-faced.  Opposite this,  Batman’s creeping sense of distrust and then betrayal, prove that in the right hands Dent is one of the most interesting characters in the rogues gallery.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

Watch with Stew: Jurassic Park (1993)

00:00:00               Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) remains the most successful dinosaur movie ever.  The logo, the core idea (of cloning dinosaurs to put them in a zoo) and some of the dialogue, as well as the dinosaurs themselves are imbedded in the popular consciousness.  With the fourth film, Jurassic World coming next summer, I thought I’d take a look at the original.  Now, I know Jurassic Park isn’t scientifically accurate.  Both intentionally and accidently the dinosaurs differ from what you’ll find in modern scientific texts.  But, scientific accuracy is a moving goalpost and not the purpose of a mainstream movie, so I shan’t dwell on that.

I remember this coming out in 1993 and being desperate to see it.  For reasons I can’t recall I got given Michael Crichton’s book and was told I couldn’t see the film until I’d read the book, which I did.  As much as I love it, my view of it the film has always been coloured that.  I won’t say that one is better than the other; they’re very different beasts.

00:00:52               The film opens with this sequence where a mystery animal in a crate is being transported to a high security pen.  It serves to create suspense and also ties in with the end of the film where the animals in question escape.  All three Jurassic Park films have used this opening scene to tease the island and the dinosaurs on it – in the second one it’s the little girl and the Compsognathus and in the third one you don’t actually see the dinosaurs, but something kills the crew of the speed boat.

00:01:08               First Jurassic Park logo.  This film loves reminding you what you’re watching.  There must be a drinking game where you drink each time you see the park logo.  Actually, forget you read that.  Always drink responsibly.

00:01:15               Here’s the late Bob Peck as Robert Muldoon, the park’s game warden.  This is one of his best scenes, as in the middle act of the film he has some really clunky dialogue to contend with – “We should’ve had locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!”

00:01:49               Here’s the graphic letting us know where we are.  On the Blu-ray version I’m watching it says “Isla Nublar 120 miles west of Costa Rica”.  These look like they’ve been redone for high-definition and I’m sure that my old DVD and the original theatrical version said “Isla Nublar 120 miles of Costa Rica”.  If anyone can substantiate, please leave a comment below.

00:02:21               Peck’s delivery here is wonderfully weary. “Loading team, step away.”  It’s almost “Do I have to talk you through this every time?”  It suggests this is something that should be routine by now but these idiots in overalls keep making mistakes.

00:02:44               Not sure why the cage rolls backwards.  It seems like someone forgot to lock something down.  Muldoon didn’t say “Now lock the thing” so maybe it didn’t get done.  Still the whole bit with the cattle prods is great.  Shame they don’t reappear later in the film.

00:03:33               Martin Ferrero as Donald Gennaro or "Exposition Man", which is the primary function of this character.  Here he’s visiting a mine to deliver some exposition.  This amber mine is called Mano de Dios – Hand of God.  Now I’m not from the Dominican Republic so I don’t know how they feel about amber, but that seems like a rather grandiose name for a place where a semi-precious rock is dug out of the ground.

00:04:40               Gennaro should have concussed himself or at least have a bruise from the bang when he hits his head.  It would’ve been sort of funny for him to have a bandage on his head before they even get to the dinosaurs.

00:05:07               This shot of everyone looking at the amber with the mosquito entombed inside has a very Indiana Jones feel.  The way they gather round and the torchlight and the vocals on the soundtrack give the impression of having found an ancient relic with strange powers.

00:05:22               The scene at the dig in Montana.  The velociraptor claw being unearthed is a different colour to the rest of the skeleton and also to the rock the fossil is embedded in.

00:06:17               The sonar machine that maps the skeleton by shooting sound waves into the ground might be based on real science although I’m sure they’d dig them up.  I think it’s based on fact, but I’m not sure.  Google it.

00:07:03               Alan Grant (Sam Neill)’s techno-phobia is an interesting idea but it’s so heavy handed that it detracts from his character rather than adding nuance to it.

00:07:15               Grant suggests an evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds.  This is probably the first time this was said in mainstream media.  However raptor doesn’t mean “bird of prey” in taxonomy, it means “thief”.

00:07:36               “More like a 6 foot turkey.” Grant’s description of raptors hunting is wonderfully gruesome.  I didn’t notice, until I watched the film for this commentary, the vulture noises on this sequence.

00:09:11               Why does Grant hate kids?  Between this and his inability to operate machines, he seems like a bit of an arsehole for the first half of this film.  This is a particular problem as he’s our point of view character.  It’s an ensemble cast, but he’s the one we spend most time with.  We need to relate to him, but these two facets of Grant make him a caricature.  Another issue is that Ellie (Laura Dern) and Grant have very little chemistry.  Clearly they are meant to be a couple as at some point they must’ve had a conversation about starting a family.  But there’s no warmth here and I don’t believe Ellie and Grant ever even got off.

00:10:20               Enter the late great Richard Attenborough as John Hammond.  This Hammond is a much jollier and more likeable character than in the original novel.  The book’s Hammond is a cynical capitalist and seems to be on bad terms with all his employees.  I think this different take on the character was due to Spielberg casting Attenborough.

00:11:26               I said I wasn’t going to dwell on scientific inaccuracies but this is something I’ve not seen picked up on before.  Hammond says that he’s spent 5 years setting up the preserve in Costa Rica.  But when they get there all the dinosaurs in the park are adult sized.  Perhaps we know more about dinosaur growth rates than we did in 1993, but logically after hatching from an ostrich egg, a brachiosaurus could not reach a length of 22 metres in just 5 years.  That’s a growth speed of over four metres a year, not to mention an expediential increase in weight.  Perhaps the scientists developed accelerated growth or something to get round that problem.

00:13:11               Hammond convinces Ellie and Grant to come to the island less than three minutes after they’ve met him.  Obviously they need to go in order for the film to continue, but they’ve only just met and he doesn’t tell them what’s on the island.  Also I’d question whether getting funding for their branch of science is so hard that need to take this kind of dubious offer.

00:13:19               The Dodgson - Nedry scene; it’s not made crystal clear here, but Lewis Dodgson is an high ranking executive in a rival genetic company called Biosyn and is paying Nedry to steal the embryos from Jurassic Park so his company can reverse engineer them and create their own dinosaurs.  He is the main antagonist in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park novel.  You can get an overview of this character here; http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lewis_Dodgson.

This scene, which was very obviously filmed in Hawaii, shows waves crashing in the background but San Jose, Costa Rica is actually nowhere near the sea.  When the film was shown in Costa Rica, this graphic was removed.

00:13:38               Wayne Knight is great as Denis Nedry.  You really buy him as a disgruntled employee and this scene perfectly sets up his story.

00:15:18               Hammond tells Ellie and Grant that he has a jet at Choteau (a city in Montana) but it does look like they’ve taken this little helicopter all the way from Montana to Isla Nublar, i.e. the entire length of the US and central America.

00:15:32               Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm steals most of the scenes he’s in, particularly in this first hour.  All the chaos theory stuff serves to foreshadow what’s going to happen later on.  There’s so much more chemistry between Laura Dern and Goldblum than between her and Sam Neill.  Which wouldn’t be an issue where it not for the fact that Ellie and Grant are apparently discussing starting a family.

00:16:35               Hammond points out the window and says “There it is” but he appears to be sitting facing the back of the helicopter so wouldn’t be able to see the island.

00:17:24               The bit where Grant ties two seatbelts together is dreadful.  Not being au fait with computers is one thing, but not being able to do up a seatbelt is ridiculous.  We’ve established he’s not technology-minded but this makes him look like an idiot.  Also by tying two seat belt ends together not only has he endangered himself in the event of a crash, but left Ellie with no protection at all.  Why would she want to have kids with this guy?

00:18:19               There’s a distractingly large dent in the helicopter door as Hammond etc. are getting out.

00:18:43               Why does the helicopter leave?  Considering the potential risks on the island and apparent lack of medical facilities, they should have a helicopter or some other means of reaching the outside world on hand at all times.  It would certainly save a lot of bother later on.

00:20:10               Ellie is examining a leaf from a species of plant that became extinct in the cretaceous period.  The shot where she picks it was in the trailers but isn’t in the film.  How did they recreate extinct plants?  This is never explained.

00:20:20               Our first full shot of a dinosaur!  The special effects in this film still stand up, even after 20 plus years.  The brachiosaurus in these shots actually looks better than the ones in Jurassic Park 3, which are sluggish, flabby and camouflaged, which makes no sense for the 22 metre long, 35 tonne animal – where’s it going to hide?  Anyway back to this film.  These first shots of the brachiosaurus are great and in 1993 they just blew everyone’s mind.  It really felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Ellie and Grant’s reaction is interesting; immediately debunking outdated assertions about dinosaurs; “this is a warm-blooded animal” and so on.

00:21:32               From seeing the brachiosaurus, Gennaro starts talking about how much money they’ll make.  As a lawyer representing companies or individuals that have invested in Jurassic Park, it’s not clear how he stands to profit from its success.  This is the result of two factors.  The first is Hollywood’s tendency to present lawyers as money-grabbing bastards.  The second is that in the novel and early drafts of the script there was a character called Ed Regis, the park’s PR manager.  In the novel it’s he who pees his pants and runs just before the T. rex escapes.  Seems the characters of Gennaro and Regis were merged, leaving the lawyer with some lines that sound a bit like he’s working for Hammond.

00:21:42               “We have a t. rex!” This is an odd way to introduce the idea of the tyrannosaurus rex being in the park.  It has nothing to do with what they’re talking about and it would have been more of a surprise if saved until they were on the tour.  They say T. rex so many times in this film, I think it popularised the use of the term, in the UK at least.

00:22:13               The wading brachiosaurus in the long shot don’t have any water running off them as they come out of the lake.

00:23:37               The out of a job/ don’t you mean extinct? Exchange is based on something stop-motion effects veteran Phil Tippet said when he saw the first CGI dinosaur test shots and Spielberg had it put into the script.

00:24:02               Would Hammond really have done this acting to the screen every time the film was shown once the park opened?

00:24:53               The Mr DNA film expertly dresses up a lot of exposition in a nice package and in a way that perfectly fits with the context of the film.

00:28:10               As they enter the lab we hear Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) over the tannoy reminding everyone to be on time for the boat.  But why is everyone going home for the weekend?  Plot wise, it reduces the cast to the core characters (something they didn’t bother to do in the sequel) but realistically there should be more people on this island; they’re trying to get the place ready to open and this is the first time the park’s had visitors.  Not only is there the safety issue, there’s also the issue of providing food and room service.

00:28:14               B.D. Wong as Henry Wu.  Like many of the supporting characters, Wu has a much larger role in the novel.  Amongst other things, he argues for engineering more docile versions of some of the dinosaurs.

00:29:21               So here’s our second dinosaur; the hatching baby raptor.  It never blinks.

00:29:39               Malcolm and Wu talk about the dinosaurs breeding.  Again looking at the novel, the issue of the dinosaurs reproducing is much more significant.  There are three conditions for maintaining control of the island; keeping the dinosaurs in their cages, keeping them on the island and preventing them from breeding.  In the book all three of these fail pretty early on.  It might have been nice to have this framework in the film, thus adding a few more threads to the plot.  Once the systems are back online, they could have contacted the boat to get it to turn around, thus delaying the characters’ escape from the control room.

00:31:41               The raptor pen.  I like this location and the way its look contrasts with the white walls and smooth lines of the Visitor Centre.  But if they bred 8 raptors originally, surely this pen is too small; no wonder they were trying to escape.  This is also the first of many enclosures with far too much vegetation - more on that later.

00:32:52               Enter Muldoon.  All this talking about the raptors feels like overkill.  So it’s saying dinosaurs weren’t stupid and that’s a good thing, but the “extreme intelligence” isn’t really born out onscreen.  So they open some doors; cats and dogs can do that.  Also, they don’t need to be this super intelligent ultimate hunter; they just need to be smarter than we think they’re going to be.

00:34:02               The harness that lowered the cow in emerges torn and broken (but not bloodied?) – what a waste of harnesses.

00:34:32               “We can charge anything we like.” – More Ed Regis dialogue from Gennaro.

00:38:08               Enter the kids, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello).  Yes they’re annoying but, as Hammond says, they’re the target audience and actually when they’re not being used very baldly for comic relief they give really good performances.  In the novel the kids’ ages are reversed and Tim is both the dinosaur and computer fanatic.  The 8 year old Lex in the book serves very little purpose.  Here their characters are much better balanced.

00:40:27               The park control room; this is a great set, with the round windows and the fossils in the pillars.  If you watch in the shot where the theatre/ ride revolved to reveal the lab earlier, you can see the control room on the far left.  I imagine that in the full version of the ride Mr. DNA went on to talk about the control room “...where our advanced computer systems keep y’all safe while you’re out in the park” or something.

00:41:42               Malcolm’s line referencing King Kong as they enter the park unnecessarily flagpoles the fact that the gate is based on the one from the 1933 movie.  It’s like they wanted to make sure everyone got that piece of intertextuality, rather than just slipping it into the film quietly.

00:41:57               The tour voice is indeed Richard Kiley, American stage and screen actor who also narrated the Planet Earth documentary series in 1986.  Kiley is the tour voice in the book and it’s nice they got him for the film.

00:43:10               Here we see Nedry on the island and get a bit more of his backstory.  Of all the supporting characters, Nedry is probably the best written.

00:49:01               We see the boat at the east dock.  In the book Tim and Grant see the boat from the tour and see raptors on the deck, leading to a subplot where they have to get the boat to turn around before it reaches the mainland.

00:49:58               50 minutes into the film we see our third dinosaur.  The sick triceratops is the only animatronic dinosaur we see out in the open in broad daylight.  We see it from multiple angles and the actors are touching it and interacting with it.  This takes things to a sense of realism beyond the CGI long shots from earlier and you see the characters getting really taken in too.

00:51:03               Here is Dr Gerry Harding, another supporting character whose part is greatly reduced from the novel.  It’s a shame we don’t get to find out what’s wrong with the triceratops.  Ellie seems to get half way, then the scene stops after the dinosaur poo gag.

00:53:04               The piles of dinosaur poo are ridiculously huge and compacted.  Also I don’t think they check them properly.  This is the beginning of the film’s obsession with dinosaur bodily excretions.

00:54:50               Hammond laments the first tour and here is the problem with this section of the film; the enclosures are so full of plants any dinosaurs would be hidden.  I see why they did this; to build suspense until the fences are shut down and the dinosaurs escape.  Another reason is that in 1993 the effects technology was new, it was expensive and they had to use the shots where it really counted, which is in the second half of the film once the dinosaurs have escaped.  Still, having foliage so dense that a 7 tonne T. rex can disappear, stretches credulity too far.  Maybe they could’ve hinted at the T. rex like with the raptor in the opening sequence or had another herbivore on show just to make for a more plausible zoo experience.

00:55:50               The scene where Grant and Malcolm talk about kids in the car feels so contrived; would you really have that conversation with some you’ve known for a day?  Also Malcolm’s “always looking for a future ex-Mrs Malcolm” line makes him sound like such an arsehole.  All it seems to do is fill in time while Nedry gets to the lab, which is right next door to the control room.

00:57:11               And here Nedry is, stealing the embryos.  He’s told by Dodgson to get all 15 species, but we only see 7 species in the flesh (Brachiosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Dilophosaurus and Gallimimus).  In addition we see Proceratosaurus, Metriacanthosaurus and the misspelt “Stegasaurus” embryos being put in the shaving foam container.  It’s not clear what the other 5 species are but you can probably add dinosaurs from the sequel such as Pachycephalosaurus and Compsognathus.

00:59:47               The guy with the pipe on Nedry’s desk is J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb.  A comment on the misuse of scientific power perhaps?

01:00:46               Conversely to their previous scenes, the exchange between Grant and Malcolm when he gets back in the car is good; it feels natural and it’s kind of funny.

01:01:47               As a piece of action, the T. rex attack on the two cars is practically faultless.  The suspense is built brilliantly in elements such as the vibrations in the water glasses and the snapping cables.  The reveal of the rex is awesome too.  Then we see most of the attack from inside the tour cars which makes it so much scarier because it feels like it’s happening to us.  Also with touches like the dinosaur’s breathing and the contracting pupil the rex is much more like a hunting animal than a movie monster.  This is the longest sustained sequence of dinosaur action in the film.

01:09:12               One slight detractor is that the geography of the scene here is confusing or confused.  The T. rex appears to push the wrecked car back through the fence it broke but now there’s a 100 foot chasm behind it, which wasn’t there a few minutes ago.  It’s like we’ve changed location without moving.  This sequence with Lex and Grant below the car is the first of several where characters are in peril that doesn’t directly relate to dinosaurs.

01:09:41               The wrecked car crashes down into the tree.  I’m unconvinced Tim would survive that.

01:12:04               Nedry and the dilophosaurus; this scene plays out brilliantly, with Nedry not recognising the threat from the dinosaur until it’s too late.  The way the sounds change when the dilophosaurus reveals its true nature is wonderful.  The colour and textures on this dinosaur, particularly the one in the car, is slightly reminiscent of the bad gremlins (Gremlins, 1984).  Nedry’s death could have been more gruesome (it certainly is in the novel) but then this film pushed the boundary of what you could show in a PG as it is.

01:14:23               The can of embryos getting covered over with mud feels like a set up for a sequel (it wasn’t).

01:17:53               As the mangled tour car falls through the tree it should be forced away from the trunk by the branches.  The way it’s falling here is a little neat and convenient.  This is another sequence that ups the danger but doesn’t feature a dinosaur.

01:19:26               Malcolm is found under the wreckage of the restroom, but his shirt is undone and he has a tourniquet on his leg.  I don’t think he could’ve done that whilst under the wreckage, so did he cover himself up again?

01:20:53               The T. rex jeep chase sequence; this must’ve been one of the first digital sequences finished for the film because the shot of the jeep smashing through the fallen tree followed by the rex was one of the few shots using CGI in the trailers and TV spots. I recall that there were no CGI images in the pre-publicity for this film, which is hard to imagine when you look at modern summer blockbusters.

01:21:31               For a film with so many special effects, the back projection behind Malcolm really looks bad.

01:23:41               Grant takes the fossilised raptor claw out of his pocket and throws it away.  Surely it would have broken by now?

01:24:51               The gift shop is full of actual film merchandise.  It also has sabre-tooth cat soft toys, which seems a little off message.  Maybe they came mixed in packs with the dinosaur toys.

01:27:30               Why is Ellie so sure the park in unsalvageable?  As far as they know 1 dinosaur has escaped, 1 person has died and 1 is injured.  Alright Grant and the kids are missing but I not sure this warrants writing the whole thing off.

01:28:34               In the book, Grant and the kids spend the night in a maintenance building in the triceratops paddock, which makes sense; seeking refuge in something man-made.  Also they could’ve dressed their injuries, maybe tried to call for help.  A baby triceratops was made for such a scene before it was cut and the action moved to the tree with the brachiosaurus – and the dinosaur snot.  So we’ve had, poo, spit and snot.  Let’s be grateful they stopped there.

01:30:25               Grant finds the egg shells.  So the dinosaurs are breeding.  In the last shot we see tiny raptor footprints leading away from the nest.  So my question is what about the raptors that laid these eggs?  At this point no raptors have escaped that we know about and we’re at least a mile from the raptor pen.  So we find out that some dinosaurs have bred, but it’s not to the point where there’s an unsustainable population explosion. It seems like there was an obligation to keep some elements from the book in the final film, even though they don’t really have any bearing on the story.  Which brings me to…

01:32:23               The lysine contingency; this feels like exposition left from a previous draft of the script.  It serves no function here because it’s not an answer to the current predicament and it’s the only suggestion in the whole film that dinosaurs could leave the island.

01:33:00               Samuel L. Jackson is of course great and it’s a shame he’s in it so little.  I love the line “hold onto your butts” and it would’ve been nice if it has cropped up in the sequels, like a Jurassic Park equivalent of “I have a bad feeling about this.”

01:34:04               The stampede sequence was filmed on the same location as the scene where Indy is chased by the Hovitos in Raiders of the Lost Ark, according to the Making Of book.

01:36:02               Ellie comes down the stairs muttering “something’s happened” and so on.  People talk to themselves a lot in this film.

01:37:58               The raptors have escaped!  If only the three guards we saw earlier hadn’t left for the weekend.

01:41:50               There’s great cross-cutting between Ellie switching the power on and Grant and the kids on the fence.

01:43:10               Tim’s refusal to jump is a bit silly, but not as daft as his being electrocuted which, let’s face it, should almost certainly have killed him.

01:43:48               After condemning the park to Hammond the previous evening, Ellie uses the phrase “back in business” as soon as the power comes back on.  This line feels like it was put in so it could be used in trailers; what you might call ‘trailer fodder’.

01:44:12               Arnold’s arm drops on Ellie’s shoulder, but where’s the rest of him?  Also you wouldn’t get Samuel L. Jackson killed off-screen in a movie now.

01:44:44               Muldoon hunts the raptors; a great scene and one of the only ones where you see a predatory dinosaur essentially doing nothing.  Like the baby, the adult raptors are rather dead eyed.

01:45:30               “Clever girl.” Classic last line.

01:46:53               The Visitor Centre sets are so lavish and detailed.  The murals were inspired by Charles R. Knight’s natural history murals in the Field Museum in Chicago and have a similar blue-green palette.

01:47:11               Here’s a gratuitous shot of Laura Dern’s bum.  She’s limping in this scene but it’s not clear why.  Also her salmon pink shirt has vanished.

01:47:58               After the t. rex attack, the raptors in the kitchen sequence is the standout set piece in the film.  It’s brilliantly paced, suspenseful and dinosaurs in enclosed spaces hadn’t really been done before this.  The unique threat of the raptors, more than their intelligence, is that they can follow you into more places than a bigger dinosaur.  There's also the sense of the unfamiliar in a familiar place, which is always scary.

01:51:59               Raptors can kill grown men but can’t overpower these two children pushing a door? Hmm.

01:52:50               I like that Lex gets the computer system up and running again because it means she achieves something and makes her seem a bit less like baggage.  Not sure what Tim’s doing in this scene though, except possibly trying to rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time.

01:54:42               Why does Hammond yell down the phone not to shoot the raptor?  Would he rather they ate his grandchildren?

01:55:27               When this shot where Lex nearly falls through the ceiling was filmed, the stunt actor looked into the camera, revealing her face.  Ariana Richard’s face was composited into the shot in post-production.

01:56:06               So we get to the finale in the main hall with the dinosaur skeletons which was teased earlier in the film.  The original ending had Grant killing the raptors with a crane, but Spielberg had it rewritten in order to bring the T. rex back, feeling she was the ‘hero’ of the film.  The climax of the film certainly would have felt a little flat without it.

01:57:10               This is the only time the T. rex doesn’t make a sound before striking.  It even manages not to shake the ground.

01:57:44               Now Hammond has given up on his park, but 3 minutes ago he was telling Grant not to shoot the raptor, which suggests he was still thinking it was salvageable.

01:57:58               The T. rex kills the second raptor and destroys its fossil counterpart.  Yay, dinosaurs are great!

01:59:04               There’s this moment where Ellie is looking at Grant and the kids, like he’s now ready to have kids of his own, but because they’re not a very convincing couple to start with it doesn’t quite ring true.  Besides, it’s like she’s saying “because you got these kids back safely, when we get back to Montana we’re going to pork like crazy”, which is creepy.

01:59:33               Not sure what the pelicans flying alongside the helicopter signify.  Is it representing the return to the modern world or is it affirming the bird-like characteristics of the dinosaurs?  Or maybe it’s just a nice peaceful image to end on - who knows?

02:00:08               End credits roll.  There you have it.  So the movie is a much stripped down version of the novel.  The plot is light; look past the scenes explaining the cloning, the amusement park and the disgruntled employee who causes the shut down and you have the plot of nearly every dinosaur flick since The Lost World (1925), i.e. People get trapped in a place where there are dinosaurs and have to escape.  There are some ‘orphaned’ subplot elements that don’t go anywhere and there’s some clunky characterisation too.  These issues could have been ironed out with a bit more script work.  If Jurassic Park was being made now the script might have had that extra polish.  But ultimately none of that matters.  Few people did or ever will come to this movie for real-life human characters or complex plotting.  The aim of this film was to make the most convincing dinosaur film ever.  It did exactly that.  Read any number of recent reference books and you find writers are still correcting preconceptions from this movie.  That’s a powerful endorsement of its success.  For further proof, note that Jurassic Park did not spawn a wave of other dinosaur movies.  Even its sequels (thus far at least) essentially rework the same plot to diminishing returns.  All of which proves it is quintessential and frankly unbeatable.

The Deer & The Hangman

This story begins in the all too familiar climate of economic downturn.  In 1711, the South Sea Company was set up with monopoly trading rights in South America.  While the company failed to realise any profits from this monopoly, there was huge speculative investment in the company, causing an expediential rise in its stock.   This effect became known as the South Sea Bubble when it inevitably burst in 1720.  What followed was Britain’s first modern economic crisis as investors lost millions of pounds.  Sir Isaac Newton reportedly lost twenty thousand pounds (£2.4 million in today’s terms) in the crash. He was quoted as saying “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

The South Sea Crisis quickly became a target for satire in the press and in engraved prints by artists such as William Hogarth.  It also led to a rise in crime.  Highway robbery increased, although it had declined again by 1724.  There was also a sharp increase in deer poaching.  Furthermore, in the 1720s England had no police force and even the Bow Street Runners would not exist for another thirty years.  Watchmen and parish constables, many of them quite elderly, were meant to keep the peace in towns, but there was little provision for fighting crime in the country.  The primary means of catching criminals was offering rewards for information leading to their capture.  Members of gangs who gave evidence against their cohorts were pardoned.  Land owners armed their game keepers to defend against the deer stealers, leading to violent clashes.

Forests like Waltham Chase were a source of cheap meat, yet only the wealthy land owners were permitted to hunt in them.  The depression inevitably increased social tension and this became apparent in the activities of two particular gangs of deer stealers.  The gangs became famous for covering their faces with gunpowder to disguise their features and frighten people.  Because of this they became known as the ‘Blacks’. 

These gangs, one operating in Windsor, the other in Hampshire, went into forests in daylight armed with pistols and rifles to shoot and take deer.  The Hampshire gang primarily targeted the Bishop of Winchester’s park in Farnham.  The first major incident occurred in October 1721 when 16 poachers raided the park. Five deer were killed, a deer stealer shot (although he recovered) and four other poachers were soon caught.  Two were released and the others made to stand in the stocks, sentenced to a year and a day imprisonment and given a twenty pound fine.

The gang sought revenge.  They broke into the park at Farnham again and shot or stole more than twenty deer.  The deer stealers passed through the nearby town in triumph and without any opposition.  After this attack, rewards were offered for information leading to their capture and soldiers were stationed in Farnham.  So the deer stealers turned the focus of their attacks to Waltham Chase.  It took only two months for them to deplete the deer herds there.  These Waltham Blacks also sent letters to the local gentry, threatening to burn down their houses if there was any opposition to their hunting.

It was widely claimed that the deer stealers were Jacobites - supporters of the Catholic pretender to the throne James Stuart, who were attempting to incite rebellion against the Hanoverian George I.  The gentry and the government stoked public fears over Jacobitism to turn opinion against the Blacks.  However, there is little evidence that the Waltham Blacks supported the Jacobite cause.  Their leader, an unidentified man known as ‘King John’ distributed a pamphlet asserting that the Waltham Blacks were loyal subjects of King George.

That is not to say that they were not politicised. Shortly after the printing of this pamphlet, 16 of the deer stealers - armed, faces blackened, some wearing coats and caps of deerskin - converged on a public house near the Chase.  ‘King John’ appeared and proclaimed that they were loyal to the king and that their aim was justice.  They wished to see that the rich did not oppress the poor.  They were determined to remove the deer from the Chase because the area was intended for grazing cattle, not to fatten deer for the tables of the wealthy.  Three hundred people had gathered to see the Blacks.  No one tried to catch them as they rode away.

Their attacks diversified, often suggesting socio-political motivation.  When an estate owner near Farnham charged poor people for picking small firewood on his estate (customarily free) the Blacks destroyed a stand of trees on his land and warned they would pay him a second visit if the money he had charged was not returned.  Soon afterwards a shipment of venison and wine for the Prince of Wales was intercepted outside Winchester.  Following this, a significant reward was offered for the capture of the Waltham Blacks.  With arrest being a real danger, the deer stealers went to ground.

Almost immediately, a gang of deer stealers began to operate in the royal Windsor Forest.  Maybe some of the Waltham Blacks moved north or perhaps they were copycats, but the attacks they carried out in 1722 and 1723 were as violent, although no proclamations of social justice were made.

The crimes of the Berkshire Blacks reached a peak in spring 1723 when an old poacher was prosecuted for killing game, being fined 10 pounds and his guns deposited with a church warden.  A group of Blacks sought out the church warden and in the ensuing confrontation the warden’s son was shot through the head.  In the wake of such violence, Parliament was spurred to act against the poachers.

The government introduced an Act of Parliament designed specifically to target the poachers.  Formally titled ‘An Act for the more effectual punishing wicked and evil disposed Persons going armed in Disguise and doing Injuries and Violence to the Persons and Properties of His Majesty's Subject, and for the more speedy bringing the Offenders to Justice’ the bill became more widely known as the Waltham Black Act.  It came into effect on the 27 May 1723.  Going into a forest with your face blacked or in any other disguise; wounding, killing or stealing red or fallow deer; and sending a letter without a name or signed with a fictitious name that made monetary demands all became offences punishable with death.  It also made poaching fish or hunting hares in a forest, as well as damaging trees or setting fire to buildings capital offences.  In short, the Blacks could now be hung for most of their actions.

The Secretary of State sent two agents to Berkshire who succeeded in capturing three of the gang’s ringleaders.  A week later 21 other Blacks were arrested and sent to Newgate Prison.  They were returned to Reading for trial on 6 June.  Four of the accused were hanged for murder and six others were transported to the colonies.  The others were discharged due to insufficient evidence.

This put an end to the Berkshire Blacks, but soon the Hampshire deer stealers returned and renewed their actions.  They made numerous attacks in different parts of the county during the summer, including their final attack on Waltham Chase.  On Sunday 1 September 1723, seven men with blackened faces entered the Chase in search of deer.  One of their number, Edward Elliot, an apprentice tailor from Guildford, was captured by armed gamekeepers.  The rest of the gang came to his aid.  Closing to just a few yards, a poacher named Henry Marshall shot one of the keepers ‘unexpectedly in the breast and out the back’.  He died immediately.  More shots were exchanged, during which a keeper received a broken thigh from a shot to the hip and one of the deer stealers was also injured.  Marshall, Elliot and two others were captured in the running battle that ensued.  The remaining three were subsequently caught in their home town of Portsmouth.

Due to the infamy of the gang, they were moved under armed guard to London and kept in the notorious Newgate Prison.  They were tried at the court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall and found guilty of deer stealing and given the death sentence.  They were executed at Tyburn on 4 December 1723.

The Waltham Black Act remained on the statute book for a century, finally repealed in 1823, with the exception of the provisions against arson and shooting a person.  During its time in force, countless people were sent to the gallows for offences that it contained.  However, like many Draconian measures it failed to solve the problem it was devised to address.  The Berkshire and Waltham Blacks orchestrated their own downfall through the audacity of their final raids, while the Act that they had inspired was over-zealously interpreted by the courts to allow them to order the execution of thousands over the next century. But deer-stealing still continued after the law came into force. In the 1730s a large gang began taking the deer from Epping Forest, selling their ill-gotten meat through a butcher named Richard Turpin.  But that’s a different story.

Megalosaurus – the rise and fall of the first dinosaur super star

Megalosaurus is one of those classic dinosaur names that encompass the schoolboy ideal of how dinosaurs have long been regarded by the public; -‘saurus’ suggests reptilian and ‘mega’ pertains to both great size and awe.  The name literally means great lizard.  What is less widely known is that this was the first dinosaur to be described – nearly 200 years before Richard Owen thought up the term.  In 1676, Robert Plot, first curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum described a fragment of leg bone (femur) too large to have come from any living British species, concluding rather that it had belonged to a giant.  This fragment was next described in 1763 by physician and author Richard Brookes, who named it “Scrotum humanum” due to its resemblance to a petrified pair of testicles. The fossil itself has been lost but the drawing of it is sufficiently detailed that it has been identified as coming from a Megalosaurus.

More fragments were discovered in Oxfordshire during the early 19^th century and were acquired by William Buckland, professor of geology and Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford.  Buckland was an eccentric character who, when he wasn’t naming new species spent much of his time eating known ones.  He was fond of mice on toast and kept live badgers in his college rooms.  After the French comparative anatomist Georges Curvier examined the remains and concluded they were from a reptile, Buckland described them in 1924, giving them the name Megalosaurus.  Two years later, geologist Gideon Mantell, who first discovered Iguanodon, gave it the two-part scientific name Megalosaurus Bucklandii in honour of its discoverer.

 

 

With the naming of Iguanodon in 1825 and the discovery of large marine creatures in locations such as Lime Regis, the notion of an age of reptiles before mammals quickly gained scientific credence.  Yet it would several more decades until it caught the popular imagination.  The next major step occurred when Richard Owen collected the giant terrestrial reptiles under the term Dinosauria; terrible lizards.  This was followed by engravings of ferocious Megalosaurus snacking on rhinoceros-like Iguanodon, regardless of the fact that the two species were separated by some 40 million years.  Megalosaurus had arrived!

The first dino-mania hit Britain in 1853, whilst the Crystal Palace was being prepared for its opening in Sydenham.  In the months preceding the opening, great interest grew around the life-sized models of extinct animals, which were the first of their kind.  Inspired by Richard Owen’s monographs and constructed by Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins, the stars of Crystal Palace are the three species of dinosaur; Iguanodon, the spiny Hylaeosaurus and Megalosaurus.  Although unfinished when the Sydenham Crystal Palace opened June 1854, the models were a sensation. They were accompanied by an array of merchandise, including guidebooks written by Owen, small-scale models and engraved prints and posters. They also featured in satirical cartoons, many suggesting that these ‘monsters’ were more terrifying than educational.  Those involved in making them believed the models would be an aid to geology and palaeontology. Others agreed, with The Crystal Palace Herald reporting that the models were: ‘A great visual idea, of much importance to scientific instruction, this portion of the Great Exhibition will be second to none’.

Off the back of this success, Megalosaurus gained the accolade of being the first dinosaur mentioned in a work of fiction.  In the beginning of Bleak House, Charles Dickens, describing the muddy London streets, writes "Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."  The dinosaur has unfortunately never made it into any film or TV adaptations of the book.

In a way, the Crystal Palace Park opened at just the wrong time for Megalosaurus and its other dinosaur stars.  Up until then, dinosaur discoveries were almost entirely confined to Britain and the reconstructions were based on the highly fragmentary known remains.  During the remainder of the 19th century, new finds, many from the western United States, overturned scientific understanding of these animals.  The discovery of Hadrosaurus foulkii (one of the ‘duck-billed’ dinosaurs) in 1858 and the Bernisart Iguanodons in 1882 suggested many dinosaurs were actually bipedal, rather the four-legged behemoths Hawkins depicted.

In 1912, Megalosaurus featured in the original dinosaur adventure story, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.  It is first glimpsed by the explorers in light of a flaming torch in the depth of night.  Conan Doyles describes the sight of “a horrible mask, like a giant toad’s, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood.”

The Megalosaurus of The Lost World is as truly terrifying as it is implausible.  Despite numerous finds of the related Allosaurus showing these animals were bipedal, it walks on either two or four legs and resembles a monster toad, even bounding across the plateau in pursuit of its prey.  Most disturbing of all, when one is killed toward the end of the book, its heart continues to beat for days after the flesh has been carved up!

The Lost World in many respects marks the highpoint of Megalosaurus’ career in popular entertainment.  When the book was adapted for the silver screen in 1925 by Willis O’Brian, the predators were changed to Allosaurus for the benefit of American audiences.  The greatest blow to Megalosaurus’ popularity, (as well as that of most other dinosaur species) came in 1905 when Henry Fairfield Osborn published his description of a new species.  It was a huge carnivore, measuring 12 metres in length and he named it Tyrannosaurus rex.

 

In the unlikely event that you require convincing of the popularity of T. rex, consider this; it is the only organism in all of earth’s history to be widely recognised by its full scientific name.  For much of the hundred and eight years since it was discovered, it has been considered the largest terrestrial predator to have ever lived.  With this kind of prestige, its popularity was guaranteed.  IMDb lists 93 titles featuring T.rex.  Whenever dinosaurs appear on screen, you can bet there’ll be a tyrannosaur amongst them.  In comparison other individual dinosaur species have failed to capture the popular imagination in quite the in the same way.

Meanwhile the poor Megalosaurus fell into cultural and to some extent, scientific obscurity.  No other fossils of it have been accurately identified.  During the 20th century remains of carnivorous dinosaurs found in a variety of places and geological times were attributed to Megalosaurus, so the species became what is known as a taxonomic waste bin; somewhere to shove stuff you’re not sure what to do with.  Research during the late 20^th century and over the last 10 years has corrected this.  The species Megalosaurus bucklandii now only refers to the fossils first described by William Buckland.  These pieces are on permanent display in Oxford’s Natural History Museum.  A fragment of skull, a section of jaw bone, some vertebra, a hip and part of a hind leg, are all we have of the first dinosaur that anyone knew about.