Let’s be honest with this one, Ray Arnold’s death scene in Jurassic Park would have been kind of grisly considering how little was left of him when Ellie Sattler came upon the unfortunate engineer while attempting to turn the power back on. But then again his whole death scene was kind of the pointless type that makes no sense considering that every single fence in the park was shut off and there was no way anyone could have missed the fact that the velociraptors were likely running loose just like every other critter on the island. In a sense this was just another plot to get rid of another character it feels like, but there was a death scene lined up for Arnold that Samuel Jackson was set to film when a very natural disaster came in and derailed that idea. As Natasha Lavender of Looper reminds us, Hurricane Iniki hit the island of Kauai hard back in 1992 and made it impossible for Jackson to shoot his scene. The hurricane actually left the island in massive disarray and ended up costing six people their lives unfortunately, along with a damage toll that ended up costing well over three billion dollars. This was more than a good reason to cut the scene since by the time everything was back on an even keel, as much as it could be, things had progressed in a way that made it easier to just shoot Arnold’s severed arm and move forward. That was pretty gruesome in and of itself to be sure, but Jackson did manage to comment on the moment:
“I was actually supposed to go to Hawaii, to shoot my death scene,” Jackson explained. “But there was a hurricane that destroyed all the sets. So I didn’t get to go to Hawaii… All you see [in the movie] is the residue of my body, my arm. But yeah, I was supposed to be on set.”
The great thing is that Jackson did enjoy his time on set and had a blast shooting the movie along with Jeff Goldblum and the others, but he was looking forward to shooting his death scene. When a hurricane hits for real though it’s just time to stand back and let nature do her thing. It still feels like a death scene that shouldn’t have been so simple since even back in the early 90s Samuel Jackson was a great actor and kind of deserved a better character that might have been smart enough to say something like “I ain’t goin’ in the jungle with mutha******* dinosaurs!” You just imagined him saying that or something like it, didn’t you?
What’s great is that we can all imagine him saying something along those lines as of now, but he still had to grow into this persona since even by the early 90s it was something people were getting used to and hadn’t embraced quite as much yet. That’s not to say he wasn’t great then as he is now, but his characters definitely changed throughout the years, getting tougher and tougher and smarter of course as he had the chance to bring a little extra something to each role that made him so likable to so many. As Ray Arnold he was more or less just another guy that was trying to survive a desperate situation along with the rest of those that were stuck on the island. In other words he wasn’t a tough guy, he wasn’t a hitman or a military man and he certainly wasn’t Shaft. Can you imagine Jackson trying to pistol whip a velociraptor and saying “What’s my name?!”. Admit it, that kind of image is hilarious but Shaft would still get his ass torn up in the next second since a leather coat isn’t that much protection against claws and teeth that are naturally sharpened and have that kind of force behind them. Let’s just say that Jackson was given a prolonged throwaway role that wasn’t meant to advance beyond the parameters of the first movie and call it good.
That being said it’s kind of easy to assume that a lot of people tend to forget that he was even in this movie since Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neil, Sir Richard Attenborough, and even Laura Dern kind of dominated the screen for a good portion of time. Even the kids were a bit of a bigger draw in this movie than he was since they received a great deal of screen time in comparison. Ray Arnold was an important character, but overall he was deemed as expendable at some point since it not only left the group, supposedly, without a chief engineer but it made life harder since Arnold knew his way around the system without fail. Lex of course, being a hacker, was able to figure things out quickly thanks to movie magic and reasons, so in the end he was a needed character until wasn’t, if that makes sense.
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