S.S. Venture

"Skipper S.S. Venture, This is InGen harbor master. Do you copy? over."

—The Harbor Master trying to connect to S.S. Venture^(src)

The S.S. Venture was an InGen cargo vessel. In the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park the ship is used to bring a Tyrannosaurus rex to the mainland from the island Isla Sorna. After a breakout, the ship is used to bring the adult and baby T. rex back to island.

The S.S. Venture is also an area in the video games The Lost World: Jurassic Park, LEGO Jurassic World, and Warpath: Jurassic Park (known in game as "Freighter deck").

Story

Following the capture of the male Tyrannosaurus rex on Isla Sorna, Peter Ludlow had the tranquilized animal loaded into a framed harness and transferred by helicopter to the deck of the Venture. The ship left the island bound for San Diego.

At some point during the voyage, the Tyrannosaur began going into arrest due to the tranquilizers he'd been given. The crew, fearing he would die, administered an amphetamine to save him. Unfortunately, they didn't know the correct dosage and gave him too much. What happened after this is uncertain, but evidence suggests the Tyrannosaurus broke free of his harness and attacked and killed most of the crew before being locked in the hold by one of the final men, who was fatally wounded. After sealing the dinosaur below decks, the crewman died of his injuries still clutching the controls for the cargo hold doors.

Since the crew was all dead, no one was piloting the ship, the Venture barreled headlong towards the InGen Waterfront Complex. All efforts by the harbor master to make contact with Thompson failed and the vessel crashed violently into the dock. Peter Ludlow went aboard along with Ian Malcolm, Sarah Harding and several security guards to investigate the ship. They found the empty harness on deck, the hold doors stuck in a neverending cycle of partially opening and closing, due to the dead crewman's hand still on the controls with fingers still clamped down on the button to shut the cargo hold doors.

Thinking there might be survivors in the cargo hold, Ludlow ordered guard Jerry Randall to open it. Malcolm, realizing that the T. rex must be in the hold, yelled for everyone to run and made a futile attempt to stop Jerry, but he was too late. The guard opened the hold doors, unleashing the Tyrannosaur. Still fueled by the amphetamine overdose, the dinosaur promptly made his way off of the ship and headed towards San Diego.

Ludlow was shocked to find the entire crew ripped to shreds and was even more shocked to see the T. rex escape the cargo hold and rampage through the streets of San Diego, which later became known as the San Diego Incident.

Malcolm and Sarah brought the baby Tyrannosaurus to the boat hoping his father would follow. He did. Ludlow was killed in an attempt to stop them. As police arrived under orders to kill the adult, Sarah used a tranquilizer rifle to shoot him in the neck, and as he began to fall asleep from the effects of the dart, Malcolm resealed him in the hold. Because the Venture was still seaworthy, it was used to take the two dinosaurs back to Isla Sorna under heavy escort by Navy warships.

Crew

• D. Thompson - Captain (former)
• Jim Sovin - Captain (end of The Lost World: Jurassic Park)

Gallery

Pictures

LEGO Jurassic World

Behind the scenes

The Venture is a likely reference to King Kong, as both films have a ship called Venture that take a large, prehistoric animal from an island filled with dinosaurs to a major city.

According to the video game that accompanied the movie, the Captain of the ship was D. Thompson.

There is a popular theory that Velociraptors may have killed the crew, but this is born out of a necessity to explain a poorly executed scene rather than based on verifiable evidence. Auctioned storyboards by Phil Tippett revealed that there was to be a sequence aboard the Venture during its voyage where the Tyrannosaurus awakened in his harness on deck. It also showed in more detail how the crew kept him restrained. In addition to the reinforced harness, his muzzled head and tail are being held in place by two bulldozers fitted with crane arms. A catastrophic series of errors ends with the rex getting free of his muzzle and injured by the tines of a forklift attempting to help wrangle him and finally biting the front wheel of the bulldozer holding his head. When the panicked driver reverses, he accidentally pulls the dinosaur partially out of the harness, giving him the leverage he needs to use his powerful leg muscles to get himself free the rest of the way. The movie would've then presumably cut to the sequence at the waterfront complex.

An eighth-scale dock and boat were built by Lorne Peterson, aided by Rob Edwards, Mike Lynch, and Giovanni Donovan. The dock measured twenty by thirty feet, and the boat measured twenty-six feet (making it 208 feet when fully scaled).