In ‘Jurassic Park’, what happened to the stolen embryos?
In the wild array of Steven Spielberg classics, including the horror of marine-based thriller Jaws, the emotional drama of Schindler’s List and the visceral war epic Saving Private Ryan, it’s easy to forget about some of his other bonafide classics. Whilst his 1993 film Jurassic Park has long been adored in the industry, we don’t think it gets the credit it deserves, pioneering special effects in the contemporary world of Hollywood.
Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, Jurassic Park tells the story of an ambitious entrepreneur named John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who decides to open a new theme park where dinosaurs are the main attraction. Re-animating the creatures from beyond the grave after extracting their DNA from the blood of a mosquito encased in amber, Hammond is able to make embryos for the T-Rex, Diplodocus and Brontosaurus, among many others.
In Spielberg’s movie, everything is going swimmingly for Hammond and the special guests he’s giving a preview tour of the theme park to, until the disgruntled lead computer programmer, Dennis Nedry, who doesn’t believe he is paid enough for his work, causes chaos. Earlier in the film, we’d seen Dennis, played by Wayne Knight, meet with a businessman, who he’d agreed to steal some dinosaur embryos for him in exchange for a tidy sum of money, causing him to breach the security of the park in order for him to escape later in the film.
This causes the dinosaurs to escape and wreak havoc, but also leads Wayne to his own demise, being killed by a pesky dilophosaurus, leaving the all-important embryos out in the wilderness, unattended to.
What happened to the embryos in Jurassic Park?
So, what exactly happened to these embryos that were last seen falling from the hand of Wayne, bouncing down a rocky stream in the forests of Jurassic Park? Well, despite Spielberg and screenwriters Michael Crichton and David Koepp initially putting Wayne’s sub-plot at the centre of the movie, once he is dispatched by the dilophosaurus, no focus at all is given to the stolen embryos.
The man, who tasked Wayne with stealing the embryos at the start of the movie, Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Cameron Thor), is never seen again and his unknown grand master plan of what he was intending to do with the dino-DNA is never explored. Indeed, such could be seen as a significant flaw of Spielberg’s otherwise spotless science fiction flick, especially as the character appears in Crichton’s sequel novel The Lost World, but isn’t mentioned in Spielberg’s own 1997 cinematic follow-up.
When you consider how great of a plot it is to set up a sequel, it’s a wonder why Universal has never seen the potential in the totally unexplored lost embryos. At the moment they are probably being smelled and studied by a curious camarasaurus in the forests of the fictional theme park.
