Jurassic Park Meme ∞ Favorite Female: Ellie Sattler
“She’s tenacious”. “You have no idea".No, let’s chat about Ellie.
Ellie is fucking awesome. Ellie is incredibly smart- she’s a paleobotanist, and separates from the men and the kids in the movie in order to solve a mystery about animal illness- animals who have been extinct for 65 million years, btw, and in the books she solves the mystery (the answer, for those of us who were frustrated that the movie NEVER ANSWERED THE DAMN QUESTION, is that the stegosaurus [it’s a stego in the books] uses gizzard stones to grind the plant matter up, and in swallowing stones, it was scooping up some of those poisonous plant materials, causing the toxic reaction). Not only is she damn smart in that regard, but in some ways she figures out before Grant and the others that they are on an island with extinct creatures- by grabbing a fucking plant while driving by and going ‘oh, hey, that ain’t right’.
Also, hey, she’s an action hero. She takes on Velociraptors and wins, man, how fucking awesome is that? She gets the power back on, thus saving all their asses.
But even before that, she totally saved the kid’s lives by forcing Grant into situations with the kids to bond with them a little bit, which then enabled him to WANT to save them, not just feel like he had to because it’s probably sorta crappy to use kids as bait for dinosaurs while you run away.
She’s also allowed to be terrified out of her mind- VELOCIRAPTORS, MAN, SCARY AS SHIT- which is awesome, because we don’t often get to see action heroes, brainy women, who take on situations and get to be scared, get to cry, because hey, these situations SUCK and if you were there, you’d probably be crying a lot too.
And she’s also the emotional center of them all. “People are dying” is best remembered as Hammond’s line, because of his delivery, but it’s Ellie who plants the line in his head, reminds him of what’s important, reminds him that people trump dinosaurs every time, especially dinosaurs that aren’t even real because they were created by people.
Ellie is also awesome because she takes no shit from anyone. She calls the men out on their sexism multiple times, as witnessed above. You’re going to use exclusively male pronouns? She’s going to give you a pithy little quote that trumps all y’all. You’re going to say that you, little old white dude, should be running around while the woman stays behind and works as a healer (which, btw, she did already, she took care of Malcolm initially, giving him morphine, splinting his leg, etc)? She’s going to snort in derision and put you back in your place. And she won’t even yell at you when you fail to read a schematic map correctly while she’s evading FUCKING VELOCIRAPTORS.
Also, hey, by the third movie? Happily married to a different dude, with a kid, clearly showing that she has a life of her own, separate from Grant- because Grant is clearly still a bit lost in JP, no matter how badly he wants to forget it, and Ellie moved on. Ellie got on with her life, because Ellie is smart, brave, kind, generous, and a fucking survivor. All of the characters who lived are, obviously, but Ellie didn’t end up staying at the survival level. She moved on to thrive.
And she saved Grant’s ass again! She listened to Grant’s waterlogged phone call and called in the fucking military to get them out. She wasted no time, didn’t let any barriers stop her, probably got into several arguments about appropriate responses- AND WON- and got them all out of there. She probably had a grand total of fifteen minutes of screentime in JP3, if that, and she still managed to be the hero of the entire film.
That’s how awesome Ellie is.
I remember as a tomboy little girl whose favorite characters were all men (Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Robin Hood, the Artful Dodger…) Ellie FASCINATED ME. The line in the jeep, about “Dinosaurs eat man… Woman inherits the earth!” was like a freaking revelation? I ran around saying that line to all my friends (who were all boys) a MILLION times because it was just like… holy shit!! Because I never realized ladies were this whole other class that were like, getting excluded, I guess. I just inserted myself into the boys’ club, because boys were doing all the cool things, and never realized that it was a BOYS’ club, that there was only ONE of the genders that were being allowed to do the cool things.
I mean, I still wanted to be Ian Malcolm with a fiery passion, but Ellie was really the first female character that opened my eyes to the fact that there WAS this dividing line between the genders, and the awesomeness was being disproportionality placed on one side of that line.
Then I watched Terminator 2 right around this time period and finally managed to increase my pantheon of ladies who kick ass from “Marion in Indiana Jones” to “More than Marion”.
I cannot explain to you how important Ellie was to me (and still is). I was three when I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, and some of my earliest memories are of that movie, and specifically, her. “Woman inherits the Earth” may be the first movie quote I ever remember. She was doing almost exactly what I wanted to do (3 yr old me wanted to be a paleontologist yes i was a huge nerd child), and she was smart and did important, badass things and dressed like a lady doing field work would dress (her salmon shirt and boots and that hat in the first gif juxtaposed with other ladies my 3 yr old mind had been exposed to, namely disney princesses). I only realized recently how formative that was for me, to see a female character holding her own and being really fucking smart, and still being scared, and caring.
Moral of the story is: show your girl-children Jurassic Park. Actually, just show your children Jurassic Park.