“A giant sponge”: the bizarre problem with the T-rex in ‘Jurassic Park’
When it was released in 1993, Jurassic Park seemed like a miracle in motion picture technology. Steven Spielberg and his various designers and special effects teams had brought a group of species that had been extinct for 65million years back to life on the silver screen.
With astonishing visual realism, you could almost touch (in fact, many of the actors could and did touch) the film’s dinosaurs are still the benchmark for big blockbuster CGI and animatronics today. And living up to its billing as the king of the dinosaurs, no creature in Jurassic Park is more terrifying or formidable in its realism than the tyrannosaurus rex.
In one famous scene, the park’s resident T-rex escapes its enclosure and bears down on the film’s protagonists as they cower helplessly in their safari jeep. To make the scene feel even more dramatic, it takes place under a torrent of rain.
Unfortunately, this little detail almost spelt disaster for the entire scene and was even close to killing off the movie’s biggest star, our friendly dinosaur king. Unbelievably, during the scene’s shooting, the giant animatronic T-rex puppet being used for close-up shots wasn’t supposed to get wet.
As the film’s design team explains in Netflix’s Movies That Made Us episode on Jurassic Park, the puppet’s skin was made out of foam latex. This made it effectively “a giant sponge” ready to absorb any water raining down on it, which weighed more than a tonne.
The plan was to spray rainwater on either side of the T-rex, averting this potential problem. But it didn’t quite go that way. Artificial rain was sprayed all over the latex-covered dinosaur throughout the scene’s shooting, most of which it absorbed. According to the film’s cinematographer, Dean Cundey, this made the gigantic puppet at least “three or four times heavier”.
Collapsing under its own weight, the animatronic beast started to shake and shudder as if cold or frightened – the last thing you’d want the scariest monster in movie history to be! Shots had to be redone over and over so that any shaking could be edited out, and the unbalanced beast was putting the cast beneath it in danger.
As well as the shaking, absorbing so much water had made the T-rex more than a little podgy around the midriff. It was hardly an ideal situation, but to remedy it as best they could, the CG animators working on the distance shots for the scene had to fatten the dinosaur up. This way, at least the tyrannosaurus would be consistently rotund, whether at close quarters or further away from the camera.
In the end, both design teams managed to make the scene work to enormous public and critical acclaim. Jurassic Park broke all box office records at the time, and the T-rex was undoubtedly its biggest draw.
Still, if you rewatch the storm scene closely, you do get the impression that the king of the dinosaurs could do with a gym session or two.
If only they had the benefit of hindsight. Using the latest scientific knowledge about what the T-rex probably looked like, the puppet designers could have fitted their creation with some waterproof feathers.
It wasn’t to be, and they had to continue explaining away this problem in later Jurassic Park movies, too.
