How The Therizinosaurus Hunting Claire Scene Was Classic Jurassic Park

The Jurassic World movies are well known for being action packed and filling much more screen time with dinosaurs and other ancient, resurrected animals than Jurassic Park and the JP sequels.

There is even some flack from hardcore Jurassic fans (of both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies) for seemingly more docile or “trainable” Velociraptors and then other dinosaur species which are held at bay with a hand held up in some tense moments. This worked well when the Raptor Squad was introduced in the early part of Jurassic World, in a moment when Raptor trainer Owen Grady ends up saving a park keeper’s life.

Then it continues, which works well when the audience doesn’t know if Blue will attack Owen once free and somewhat under the influence of the escaped hybrid Indominus Rex. Then it continues some more and then in Dominion it’s even used on a juvenile Allosaurus and Carnotaurus which are released in the chaos of the Malta underground black market during Dominion.

With Blue constantly saving the day and behaving like an aggressive dog, as opposed to the original and utterly savage Velociraptors from the original Jurassic Park, and even Rexy – the very same Tyrannosaurus Rex from the original movie, defeating the Indominus Rex and then in Fallen Kingdom saving the human characters from a Carnotaurus and then eating the main villain, Eli Mills, it does seem like the dinosaurs are less of a threat than they were before.

This is of course partly down to plot armour and fan service, but also a way of giving the dinosaurs themselves some character.

And this is where we come to that scene with Claire and the Therizinosaurus.

Once Claire ejects from the plane that’s about to crash due to the Quetzalcoatlus suddenly given free reign of the skies by Biosyn, she seems to land in relative safety. Relative being the key word as she lands in a valley populated by many dinosaur species from both Jurassic World Isla Nublar (and Isla Sorna) and recreated dinosaurs created since the fall of Jurassic World.

How is This Classic Jurassic Park?

There are a couple of ways this scene has classic Jurassic Park vibes.

The Therizinosaurus was Acting Like an Animal

Much like the original trilogy, where the dinosaurs were portrayed as living, breathing, creatures, this scene took it’s time to show the creature stalking, carefully sensing its surroundings and using scare tactics to try and make Claire show herself. Luckily, she has a vast amount of experience in dealing with scary dinosaurs by this point…

The main comparison I have to Jurassic Park is the Velociraptor kitchen scene.

In Jurassic World Dominion, Claire is thrust into a natural habitat that could easily fit in the Mesozoic era, having to carefully escape this huge keystone species and absolute tank of an animal. In the Jurassic Park kitchen scene, the two children Lex & Tim are trying to survive the disaster unfolding that was supposed to be a routine Jurassic Park tour. Much like Claire reaching safety before realising the predicament she is in, Lex and Tim are taking a break and eating desert before sensing that danger was nearby.

In both situations, Claire has just survived being hunted down by Atrociraptors in Malta and the attack on the plane, before ending up alone and confronted by a dangerous dinosaur, and the kids Lex & Tim have just survived the T Rex breakout, the incident with the car and an electric shock, before thinking they’re safe now they’re back in the Visitor Centre.

Highlighting the intelligence foreshadowed earlier in the movie, the two Velociraptors carefully negotiate their alien environment, moving from naturalistic, if not small, holding pen to outdoors in the Isla Nublar jungle and decide to enter the human domain and work out the door handles to find their prey.

Once in the kitchen, the raptors carefully and methodically check their surroundings and try to hunt down their human prey.

Another comparison is the dinosaur pathology…

The Therizinosaurus is Blind.

This is also a good call back to the Jurassic Park novel, something all the Jurassic movies draw from heavily in both themes and concepts.

If you remember back to before the chaos of Jurassic Park when the power goes out and the storm hits, the guests decide to leave the tour cars and investigate the Triceratops that lies in a field, appearing to be sick. This was a cool way of showing how InGen may have recreated extinct animals from the past, but it wasn’t as simple as throwing them in enclosures and treating them like modern day zoo animals. They would need to adapt.

In the novel the sick animal is a Stegosaurus, and although not solved in the movie, it turns out the reason for the sickness is the animals routinely come back every six weeks to eat stones to help break up and digest their food. It just so happens they accidentally ingest West Indian Lilac Berries which are toxic.

This highlights both the animals not adapting too well to modern environments but also the fact that humans have managed a huge technological feat of biological engineering but can’t figure out why the animals are getting routinely sick.

Ian Malcolm makes a point in the novel as to how the animals have not evolved to live in our world, with less oxygen and other factors they have to deal with (including us people).

Up until Jurassic World Dominion, the dinosaurs in the Jurassic World movies all seem perfectly healthy and well adapted to the modern world, even after being released into the world at large with all its different habitats and climates.

But one factor in Claire’s favour when she faces off against this bizarre creature, weird even for a dinosaur, is that the animal is blind and appears to have a cataract-like condition, so it hunts and navigates its surroundings by sound, smell and echolocation.

Jurassic Park Tension

Another reason the Therizinosaurus scene was great for a Jurassic Park movie was the tension build up. It took it’s time to establish the scenery, Claire was stuck in a tree, up high but had survived being ejected into the sky and being bombarded by flying reptiles. But as she tries to get free of the ejected plane seat, the terrifying and weird Therizinosaurus comes into view.

Then following Claire carefully work out the danger she is in how she quietly, carefully gets away was more akin to the Spielberg storytelling dynamic than the more recent action movie aesthetic of the Jurassic World movies.