Actor Jeff Goldblum recently appeared as a guest host for the Jimmy Kimmel Live! TV show. Kimmel was on vacation. As part of his first-night monologue, Goldblum played piano (he’s an accomplished jazz pianist) and sang a song with references to several of the movies that he’s appeared in over the last four decades. While he was singing, I realized that Goldblum’s comedic and acting talents have been go-to material for Hollywood when it needs a quirky engineer or scientist. Goldblum can spout technical bafflegab with authentic fluency, and some of the things he’s said make sense. That’s in spite of the fact that Goldblum has no engineering degree and started acting at the age of 17.

I’ve seen and been amused by a large number of Goldblum’s films, and it occurred to me that I might compile a partial filmography with Goldblum’s engineer/scientist roles. Here it is:

Threshold (1981)

In this obscure Canadian film stars Donald Sutherland as Dr. Thomas Vrain, a heart surgeon facing a dilemma: one of his patients is about to die of heart failure. A very young Goldblum plays Dr. Aldo Gehring, a scientist/engineer who’s developing an artificial heart. (According to IMDB.com, Goldblum’s character is an “offbeat scientist.”) Sutherland’s dilemma is whether or not to experimentally implant Goldblum’s untested mechanical heart in his patient, Carol Severance, before she dies.

The film was released in Canada in 1981 and the first real artificial heart transplant took place on December 2, 1982. Dentist Dr. Barney Clark received that heart, a Jarvik 7 developed by Dr. Robert Jarvik at the University of Utah. Dr. Clark’s heart had been damaged by years of steroid treatments, which had caused the tissues of his heart to become paper thin. He was close to complete heart failure. Dr. Clark knew that the Jarvik 7 artificial heart was highly experimental, and he expected to live for only a few days after receiving the artificial heart. He’d consciously chosen to dedicate the last days of his life to the advancement of medical science. Dr. Clark lived for another 112 days after the Jarvik 7 heart was implanted. He died on March 24, 1983. Threshold was released in the US that same year.

Since then, more than 350 people have received the Jarvik 7 heart, which serves as a bridge to a human heart transplant when a suitable organ is not available. Since then, Jarvik and other researchers have continued to develop artificial hearts and a newer and smaller device, the ventricular assist device (VAD), that can be powered by lithium-ion batteries. Threshold is so obscure that it appeared in theaters and on VHS videotape, but it’s not available on DVD, Blu-ray, or a streaming service. I’ve not seen this film, but I’d like to have the opportunity.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

This adorable mess of a film chronicles the adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, a neurosurgeon/physicist/test pilot/rock-and-roll star played by Peter Weller. Dr. Banzai has a team of specialists versed in science, engineering, and combat who also serve as his backup band named the Hong Kong Cavaliers. At the start of the movie, we see Dr. Banzai assisting Dr. Sidney Zweibel and helping him to remove a brain tumor from an Eskimo youth using a laser. This scene allows Goldblum to use some of those verbal technology chops he’s started to develop for his acting career:

Dr. Zweibel:

“See, this is the point, for me, where it started to look like a problem. You know, I wanted to sacrifice the procentral vein in order to get some exposure, but because of this guy’s normal variation, I got excited, and all of a sudden I didn’t know whether I was looking at the procentral vein, or one of the internal cerebral veins, or the vein of Galen, or the vascular vein of Rosenthal.  So, on my own, to me, at this point, I was ready to say that’s it, let’s get out.”

Dr. Banzai:

“You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when you get right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same.          

“No, no, no, no.  Don’t tug on that.  You never know what it might be attached to.”

All of Dr. Banzai’s specialists have nicknames, and his lead sidekick, Rawhide, narrates the operation:

Rawhide:

“Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize the pineal tumor without damaging the quadrigeminal plate.  Subcutaneous microphones are gonna allow the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain.”

After the operation, Banzai invites Dr. Zweibel to join the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Zweibel agrees and shows up in some outrageous shearling chaps. He swiftly gets the nickname “New Jersey,” and very few additional lines in the movie.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension also became a comedy vehicle for John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd, who appear as Red Lectroids from Planet 10 who are accidentally trapped on earth. Banzai has become a cult film, and, unlike Threshold, bears no resemblance to reality.

The Fly (1986)

In this remake of the classic Vincent Price science fiction thriller from 1958, Goldblum plays eccentric scientist Seth Brundle, who is developing a teleportation machine called the “telepod.” He says he’s a systems engineer and he’s outsourced the various modules of the telepod. Brundle meets science journalist Ronnie Quaife, played by Geena Davis, and eventually takes her back to his apartment to demonstrate his telepods. At that point, the telepods can teleport inorganic matter successfully, but living organisms don’t fare well and die when teleported. A subsequent tryst with Quaife inspires Brundle to reprogram the telepods and they’re now able to transport living things without killing them.

Brundle decides to test the reprogrammed telepod on himself. Unfortunately, a housefly enters the chamber with him and the DNA for the two living beings becomes intermixed. Although no damage to Brundle is immediately visible, he gradually becomes more and more insectoid. Fiddling with the telepod programming simply makes things worse and the movie does not end well, just as the 1958 movie didn’t end well for Vincent Price. Like Banzai, this movie is a bit ahead of its time. We have no teleporters or Star Trek transporters, yet.

Earth Girls are Easy (1988)

In this science fiction fantasy film, Goldblum plays the fur-covered alien captain of a spaceship that accidentally crash lands in a suburban swimming pool in the San Fernando valley. The movie closely tracks the Julie Brown EP record album titled Goddess in Progress, which was released in 1984. The swimming pool belongs to Valerie Gail, again played by Geena Davis, who works as a manicurist at the Curl Up & Dye beauty salon. At first repelled by the creatures emerging from the crashed spaceship, Gail takes the aliens to the beauty shop for a makeover and transforms them into presentable humans with the help of the beauty shop’s owner, Candy Pink, played by Julie Brown.

Although the film’s dialog is silly beyond belief, once again Goldblum reveals his Hollywood on-screen engineering chops by rebuilding his spaceship’s interstellar drive in Gail’s drained swimming pool. This film also served as a comedic star vehicle for Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans. This film is also ahead of its time. We have no interstellar drives, yet.

Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Jurassic world Dominion (2022)

In this quartet of films based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, Goldblum plays Dr. Ian Malcom, a mathematician specializing in chaos theory. Industrialist John Hammond has created a theme park on a remote Pacific Island, and he’s populating the park with lab-grown dinosaurs that have been revived using DNA recovered from the undigested contents of mosquito stomachs trapped for millions of years in fossilized amber. As always happens in Crichton novels, the technology goes badly awry, the dinosaurs take over Jurassic Park, and few escape alive. Somehow, people keep trying, however, which gave us the second and third films in the series. Meanwhile, Goldblum tries to raise red flags, ending with a line in the first film (and the second and third films) that’s destined to stay with him forever:

“If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh… well, there it is… Life, uh, finds a way.”

Jurassic Park also starred several computers that represented the latest and greatest at the time: an Apple Macintosh Quadra 700, an Apple Powerbook 100, a Motorola Envoy, a Silicon Graphics Crimson, a Silicon Graphics R4000 Indigo Elan, and a Thinking Machines CM-5. Meanwhile there are serious efforts to revive the wooly mammoth using DNA samples sequenced from specimens that were found frozen in the Alaskan and Siberian tundra. The name of the company attempting this feat is Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences.

Independence Day (1996), Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

In this pair of alien-invasion films, Goldblum plays a satellite engineer named David Levinson who decodes transmissions from alien ships that have arrived and positioned themselves around the Earth. Levinson realizes that the aliens are coordinating an attack through these transmissions. When the attack starts, the combined forces of Earth are no match for the alien technology and it becomes clear that the aliens plan on wiping humans off the face of the planet. Even nuclear weapons cannot penetrate the shields surrounding the alien ships. Levinson manages to write a computer virus that will infect the alien computers and cause their shields to drop. The only problem is that the virus must be delivered at short range, so US Marine Captain Steven Hiller, played by Will Smith, volunteers to deliver Levinson and his virus to the alien mothership using a refurbished alien fighter captured during the Roswell incident in 1947. Of course, the mission is successful. Hiller delivers Levinson, the virus, and a nuclear weapon to the mothership, and the aliens are defeated. In the second movie, the aliens come back for another try, with similar results. This movie was prescient, but the aliens turned out to be us and Goldblum’s role was, in reality, CrowdStrike.

Lately, Goldblum has been playing more godlike creatures such as the Grandmaster in a couple of Marvel Thor films and Zeus in a new Netflix series called Kaos. Perhaps we’ll see more of Goldblum as Hollywood’s quirky engineer of choice. Perhaps not. Either way, he’s left a bevy of zany engineering characters to enjoy.

How many of these films have you seen?