Daily Dialogue — February 10, 2019

Hammond: Well! Mr. DNA! Where did you come from?

Mr. DNA: From your blood. Just one drop of your blood contains billions of strands of DNA, the building blocks of life. A DNA strand like me is a blueprint for building a living thing. And sometimes animals that went extinct millions of years ago, like dinosaurs, left their blueprints behind for us to find. We just had to know where to look. One hundred million years ago, there were mosquitoes just like today. And just like today, they fed on the blood of animals. Even dinosaurs. Sometimes after biting a dinosaur, the mosquito would land on the branch of a tree and get stuck in the sap. After a long time, the sap would get hard, and become fossilized just like a dinosaur bone, preserving the mosquito inside. This fossilized tree sap, which we call “amber,” waited for millions of years with the mosquito inside until Jurassic Park scientists came along. Using sophisticated techniques, they extracted the preserved blood from the mosquito, and bingo: Dino DNA!

— Jurassic Park (1994), screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, novel by Michael Crichton

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Science.

Trivia: David Koepp trimmed much of the characters’ excessive details, because he felt that whenever they started talking about their personal lives, he couldn’t care less, and neither would the audience. He instead substituted individual moments like Malcolm flirting with Ellie, making Grant jealous, or Lex’s adolescent crush on Grant, who fails to notice.

Dialogue On Dialogue: One of the best movie scenes ever in handling complex scientific exposition. Efficient and entertaining.