Ian Malcolm

Donald Gennaro, the investors' lawyer, needs experts to sign off on the park before it opens. He brings Malcolm; Hammond invites paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler. Malcolm spends the trip flirting with Ellie and explaining chaos theory with drops of water on her hand.

In the lab, the scientists insist every dinosaur is female and can't breed. Malcolm isn't buying it: life finds a way. At lunch he accuses Hammond of using science without respecting what it took to get there: his scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

During the storm, Dennis Nedry shuts down park security and the electric fences go dead. The Tyrannosaurus breaks out and attacks the tour cars. Grant lights a flare to distract it; Malcolm grabs another and runs, drawing the T. rex away from the kids. He gets hit, thrown into a restroom, and hurts his leg.

Ellie and game warden Robert Muldoon rescue him. Malcolm spends the rest of the night lying shirtless in the control center, still cracking jokes. In the end he boards the helicopter with the other survivors. Making Malcolm heroic in that scene was Goldblum's own idea.

Four years later, Malcolm's reputation is wrecked for telling what he saw, and InGen now belongs to Peter Ludlow, Hammond's nephew. Hammond reveals there's a second island, Isla Sorna, where dinosaurs roam free, and wants them documented so they'll be left alone. Malcolm only goes because his girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding, is already there.

With him are Eddie Carr and photographer Nick Van Owen; his daughter Kelly stows away in the trailer. On the island they run into Ludlow's hunters, led by Roland Tembo, and a pair of T. rexes looking for their baby. Eddie dies saving the group. One of the tyrannosaurs ends up in San Diego and gets loose in the city. Malcolm and Sarah use the baby to lure the adult back to the ship.

Three years after Jurassic World fell, the volcano on Isla Nublar threatens to wipe out the dinosaurs left there. Malcolm testifies before a U.S. Senate committee and argues for doing nothing: those animals exist because of Hammond's mistake, and nature is correcting it.

He shows up again only at the end, at another Senate hearing, after dinosaurs have reached the mainland. Now the message is different: a new age has begun, and humans will have to share the planet with them. Welcome to Jurassic World.

Malcolm now works as the in-house philosopher at Biosyn, Lewis Dodgson's company, which runs a dinosaur sanctuary in Italy's Dolomites. Warned by communications chief Ramsay Cole that Dodgson is up to something illegal, he calls Ellie Sattler in to investigate. She arrives with Alan Grant, and the 1993 trio is back together.

Malcolm helps the two of them get into the lab and ends up fired by Dodgson. When a fire sweeps the valley, he helps bring the group together with Owen, Claire and Maisie. In the end he testifies against Biosyn alongside Grant, Ellie and Ramsay.

Michael Crichton drew on journalist James Gleick and mathematician Ivar Ekeland to create Malcolm. In the 1990 novel his fate is much darker than in the movie, and Crichton had to find a way to bring him back as the lead of the novel The Lost World (1995). Jim Carrey auditioned for the part before Jeff Goldblum got it.