In the original Jurassic Park film after Nedry steals the dino embryo’s via his Barbasol can once he crashes his jeep and gets attacked by the dino there, there’s a scene of the Barbasol can falling out of his jacket pocket and rolling down the small hill, and then after he’s finished off the scene concludes with showing the can at the bottom of the hill slowly covered in mud.
I’ve always wondered what the point of the scene was . Did we really need closure on the fate of the can and it’s contents? There’s no way for anybody else to get the can because the coolant only lasted 24 hours and everybody left on the island was either dead, evacuated or in the process of evacuating. We couldn’t just assume the can died with him in his jeep they had to show it getting away from him and subsequently buried?
I think the idea was to express the irony of the situation - that all this was for nothing. He shut down the park in order to steal the embryos, killing multiple people, and in the end, his precious billion-dollar prize was buried in the mud like a piece of trash, forgotten forever.
I always thought it was funny. It was a bit like the ending of Raiders - all that, just for another box in a warehouse.
Steven Spielberg has been accused of many things, but subtlety has never been one of them. Remember when, at the end of the movie, when the t-rex bursts into the room and eats the raptors, a huge banner drapes itself on top of it, saying “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth”? He lives for that stuff.
Well, of course. I’m agreeing with you that this is an ironic (and not subtle) reversal; I’m just adding another possible interpretation.
My main point, though, is to note, in reply to the OP, that a question about why we “need” to know something from a superficial narrative perspective is frequently misplaced. Look beyond the plot.
The film came out when I was a kid and I am pretty sure my reaction was ‘ooh, that’s gonna come back later in the story, or maybe a sequel’. Perhaps because I was so young I missed it was probably meant to be a bit of symbolism for what a waste the whole botched robbery was.
Spielberg does that all the time. In Jaws he has a close up of the air tank that’s going to be responsible for Quint’s demise and then Brody’s saving/the shark’s demise. What a brave little air tank.
That’s the idea, the undignified end. Here’s your sidequest McGuffin, hope you like chemical burns to the face and being eaten alive by umbrella monsters.
Or the Grail clattering away into the bottomless chasm.
I think that served more purpose. It established tht the grail is truly gone, the Knight will die, and the grail story is now over. If it had been left with the Knight, it would only be a matter of time before someone tries to get it again.
When asked about the air tank sequence, Jacques Cousteau said if the tank was shot, the shark would stand on its tail and backward dance till the air was gone. I’d’ve paid big money to see that.
Not only do we apparently need closure on the can, it has come up in two of the sequels/spinoff media.
In Jurassic World Dominion, the rusted remains of the can are in Dodgson’s Biosyn office.
And in the animated Netflix show Camp Cretaceous* Dodgson and some mercenaries are on the island, and right before they get attacked by Dilophosaurs Dodgson finds the can, recognizes it, and puts it in his bag, explaining how it got to his office.
*actually a pretty good show for a kid’s show, I watched it with my daughter and we are part way through Chaos Theory.
Also, am I the only one who finds the 24 hour idea very odd? Like, ok, after 24 hours (or even 20 years or whatever for when Dodgson found it), the embryos have rotted away. But… Wouldn’t there still be some DNA fragments? Certainly more than there would be in fossils and amber after 65 or 120 million years?
I feel like I should post this in the ‘obvious things you only just realised’ thread. How did I miss that after watching the film about 25 times?! Of course it’s the same air tank! How have I not made that connection before?!
