Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is an all-time dinosaur movie classic, but there’s one plot hole in the movie that has eluded fans for thirty years. Now though, some fans think they’ve found an explanation. Based upon Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel of the same name, Jurassic Park centers on a group of scientists and kids brought in as the first test audience for a theme park populated by dinosaurs, brought back to life in modern times through cloning technology. Unfortunately, a power mishap shuts down the park’s electrified fences, allowing the dinos to escape, including the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex in one of the most iconic dinosaur movie scenes of all time.
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While the T-Rex’s escape scene still thrills and scares with the same power today as it did in 1993, many audiences have noticed one issue with the environment it takes place in. When the scene begins, the ground inside of the T-Rex’s paddock looks to be level with the ground outside of it, yet the scene culminates in the T-Rex pushing one of the two tour cars over a cliff inside of the paddock that was previously not there. Naturally, that has only left the fan theory mill to churn endlessly on where the cliff inside of the T-Rex paddock came from, and in a recent post by user Specialist-Ad-5300 on the official Jurassic Park subreddit, some fans seemingly have come up with the perfect explanation. The question is, are they on the money? Or is it one big pile of…
Fans Think They’ve Figured Out Where The T-Rex Paddock Cliff Came From In Jurassic Park
The fan theory of the cliffside’s sudden arrival inside of the T-Rex paddock posits that there may have been a built-in cliffside inside of the area all along. In the post, a bird’s eye view blueprint of the T-Rex paddock lays out both the location of the two Jurassic Park tour cars when they stop in front of the paddock, and the section inside of the paddock that the T-Rex pushed the first car into. As seen in this blueprint, there is a large concrete moat on the far side of the paddock, with a deep drop to its right. This indicates that in pushing the car over, spinning it in on its top, and eventually pushing it over the edge, the T-Rex also inadvertently shoved the car right in front of the section of the paddock where the cliff was located.
As an added outline of the scene, the Reddit post also includes aerial artwork from inside the paddock, showing the two cars on their side of the fence, the T-Rex approaching the area of the fence she broke through, and the concrete moat and cliffside to her right. With these two outlines, many Jurassic Park fans believe it is now possible to account for the cliff’s sudden appearance in the movie’s T-Rex escape scene, with the T-Rex simply exiting the paddock in an area where the ground was flush with the outside of the paddock, and pushing the car into the section with a huge drop. However, this doesn’t mean that the makers of Jurassic Park were thinking along these lines while making the movie.
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Jurassic Park Photos Debunk This Fan Theory As Being Official (But It’s Still A Good Explanation)
While it’s a compelling and decidedly persuasive explanation for why there is a cliff inside of the T-Rex paddock that didn’t seem to be there before, footage from Jurassic Park itself unfortunately rules the idea out. When the two Jurassic Park tours cars first arrive at the T-Rex paddock (seen in another Reddit post made by user waber_mattie), the area of the T-Rex’s paddock referenced in the two aerial outlines is visible. In this image, it can clearly be seen that the ground throughout the T-Rex paddock is flush with the ground outside of the paddock, including in the area where the cliffside and concrete moat would have ostensibly been situated.
Additionally, either of the two blueprints being official concept art for Jurassic Park has already been officially debunked by Jurassic Park visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett. The aerial photo of the T-Rex inside of the paddock was circulating on Twitter/X as far back as 2023, with Tippet quote-tweeting a user claiming that animatics were created of the T-Rex dragging the car through the mud, with the shot specifically inserted in the animatic by Tippet to account for the cliff’s presence in the scene, but that this part of the scene itself was never filmed. In his quote tweet, Tippett responded “Re: The image below. I never saw it and dealt a lot with Rick Carter the Production Designer. 99.9% sure it a fan thing.” While Tippett’s .01 margin of error might leave the slimmest of possibilities of the aerial artwork being official, it’s about as official a debunking as one can get.
In the end, the blueprint and the fan art of the T-Rex paddock might not be officially sanctioned as canon to the movie by the makers of Jurassic Park, but they are nonetheless impressive layouts to account for the continuity discrepancy of the cliff only being inside of the paddock when the T-Rex pushes the car over. In all, it’s pretty easy for fans to head canon the two aerial layouts to explain the plot hole, even if it does mean attributing the view of the ground inside of the paddock level with the ground outside as being a minor continuity gaffe. Steven Spielberg, however, has another arguably much better explanation.
Steven Spielberg Had The Perfect Response To The Cliff Continuity Error In Jurassic Park
Fans aren’t the only ones to have noticed the cliff inside of the T-Rex paddock appearing out of nowhere. Per Jurassic Park‘s official Making Of Book, co-writer David Koepp actually asked Spielberg directly “Aren’t we going to wonder where the cliff came from?” Spielberg then replied to Koepp “There’s a T-Rex right there!”, indicating Spielberg’s belief that the presence of a towering pre-historic predator like the Tyrannosaurus Rex would be where the audience’s attention would be locked for the duration of the scene. In essence, Spielberg prioritized believability over realism in this scene, and with the T-Rex escape scene still standing as the most iconic Jurassic Park T-Rex scene of all time, it’s hard to argue he was wrong.
This wasn’t the first time Spielberg had determined that believability was of greater importance than plausibility. In the 1995 Making of Jaws documentary, Jaws author Peter Benchley described when Spielberg laid out his plans to give Jaws a “big, rousing ending.” The shark’s demise in Benchley’s novel comes after the shark finally dies of its mortal wounds just before being able to eat Sherriff Martin Brody and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, with Spielberg changing it to the ending of Brody shooting an oxygen tank inside the shark’s mouth, causing it to explode. Despite Benchley feeling that Spielberg’s ending was “completely unbelievable,” Spielberg told Benchley “I don’t care. If I’ve got them for two hours, they will believe whatever I do for the next three minutes, because I’ve got them in my hands, and I want the audience on their feet screaming at the end ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! This is what should happen to this animal!” In the end, Benchley conceded “He was right, I was wrong in this entire argument” regarding the ending of Jaws.
As with Jurassic Park 18 years later, Jaws became the highest-grossing movie ever made at the time, and both are testimony to Spielberg’s skill as popcorn moviemaking and storytelling. In some cases, a writer and director may need to sacrifice some amount of logic or realism in order to tell a compelling story or deliver the most dynamic and exciting action sequence possible for the audience. The cliff inside of the T-Rex’s paddock simply appearing out of thin air falls into this category. It might be a hiccup in the geography presented on-screen previously, but the T-Rex’s escape is that much more terrifying when Dr. Grant and Lex dodge the falling Jurassic Park tour car by mere inches as it falls sixty feet into a tree below with Tim still inside. The efforts of fans to account for the cliff’s presence in Jurassic Park‘s T-Rex escape demonstrate the talent that devoted fans have for fan art and analysis of their favorite movies, but for Steven Spielberg, all that ever mattered was making the T-Rex as scary a monster as possible, an endeavor he and Jurassic Park unequivocally succeeded at.
Jurassic Park is available to stream on Starz.
