Jurassic Park, and I’d be kind of surprised if you didn’t know this just from the title, is a film about a park. A theme park, not a park where you go to walk the dog. Oh, and… it’s filled with genetically engineered all-female dinosaurs that are thought to be safe, but obviously they get out of their enclosures and attack people and eat people and stuff, otherwise the film would be REALLY BORING.
Is it a feminist film? Laura Dern’s character gets a rather cool piece of dialogue (“woman inherits the Earth”) after Jeff Goldblum’s (creepy and sexist) character makes his “man-creates-dinosaurs-dinosaurs-eat-man” speech. He also uses a very thin disguise (he’s explaining “chaos theory” to her) to touch her hand, and she doesn’t really get enough scope as a character. Out of the two kids, it is the younger boy rather than his sister who knows about dinosaurs and such, and when she does actually get up enough courage to touch one, it sneezes in her face. Rude. However, she’s very brave, to the extent of distracting a huge, completely unrealistic velociraptor from eating her brother by making a loud noise, and she knows computer code well enough to basically save the whole park.
Is it disturbing? A bit. A giant dinosaur eats an incredibly irritating character. I promise you won’t be sad to see them go. Also, a smaller dinosaur eats another almost equally irritating character. There is no gore or anything like that. There is one bit with a severed limb, if you want to skip this just move on from the bit where Laura Dern is navigating the dark tunnels. Probably the creepiest bit in a different way is the whole chaos theory thing, but then again this character is quite funny.
And… does it pass the Bechdel test? No. Sorry, no, I don’t think it does. Because, even though all the dinosaurs are female, you can’t really have a conversation with a dinosaur.
A young person's guide to feminist films 