“We have to go back, Stefan!”
That’s what I told FOG! chief Stefan Blitz when pitching a look back at Jurassic Park in anticipation of the upcoming Jurassic World. Not really, but he said, “go for it”, so hold onto your butts, we’re about to dive into a retro review 65 million years in the making.
I consider myself a pretty big JP fan, especially the first one.
Big enough that I plunked down money to revisit the park for its 20th anniversary in 3D and loved every minute of it. Man, Mr. DNA looked AMAZING in 3D. The dinos looked pretty cool too not to mention Goldblum’s waxed chest.
As with any big budget blockbuster, you can pick apart the logic of the plot and characters all you want, but one thing that remains pretty untouchable is the ambitious scope of the project and the feeling of wonderment at seeing these convincing depictions of dinosaurs up on the screen for the first time.
We’ve come a long way since Gertie the Dinosaur.
As is typical with most Spielberg movies, we kick it off with some action to get us into the right frame of mind of the movie and foreshadow the terror that is yet to come. The intro here is similar to Jaws in a lot of ways. A victim is claimed and then the plot kicks in the very next scene, slowly building towards the next death.
Also in Jaws-like fashion, Spielberg holds back and doesn’t reveal the beasts until he’s good and ready, ramping up the suspense for a significant chunk of the movie.
But unlike your typical monster movie, at its core it’s about the characters and their relationships using the dinosaur park as a backdrop. John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) is the idealist who can’t see beyond the big picture while doctors Grant (Sam Neill), Sattler (Laura Dern), and Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) play the part of the skeptics. Throw in some annoying kids (another Spielberg staple, here played by Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello), and you’ve got your core cast of survivors with the rest of the ancillary characters serving as snacks.
Not to downplay the supporting players as Samuel L. Jackson and Wayne Knight are both pretty memorable, specifically Knight who is more-or-less Newman here but slightly more devious. Or slightly more depending on the episode.
Sam Neill here is the stand out performance. He’s by far the most well-rounded, fleshed out character whose initial gruff exterior slowly begins to melt away throughout. His distaste of children plays out nicely as he become the caretaker of Tim and Lex and makes for a nice arc.
A stand out scene is when he pretends to be electrocuted by the fence and shows off his playful side. It’s a natural progression and one of the best things about the movie, giving us human moments amongst the chaos.
Like many, I always held up JP as the gold standard to which all future CG spectacles would be compared to. Some of the effects hold up better than others while some of them are beginning to show their age, but I’m not going to hold that against a movie more than two decades old. The magic is still intact in not just the effects but in the execution in which Spielberg mastered with Jaws and brought in full force here.
Iconic scenes like the water tremors signaling a T-Rex’s impending approach and the jeep chase scene making brilliant use of the “objects are closer than they appear” side view mirror still work wonders.
Plus the raptors in the kitchen scene is better than all of Jurassic Park 3 (not that that’s difficult).
While the raptors definitely make their mark, it’s the T-Rex that steals the show.
The first scene with the T-Rex is not only one of the stand-outs from the movie, but also one of the best things Spielberg has ever brought to the screen. It’s a hard one to top, and he attempts to do so in the sequel, but this is flawless filmmaking. Special shout out to the late, great Stan Winston who made us believe that dinosaurs could be brought back to life.
Not to say that the entire movie is without its problems.
For example, how did they allow Sam Jackson to just wander off by himself to turn the power back on with zero protection? And why the hell didn’t the kid Tim help hand Ellie the gun when they were desperately trying to keep the door shut with a raptor on the other side. Did slapping the back of the chair really serve any purpose?
Also why so much focus on the sick Triceratops if they were just going to abandon the mystery with no resolution. Was it just so they could insert a dino droppings sight gag?
Just minor quibbles, but it’s not enough to overshadow the entire experience. Few could have done it better and up until now, no one has (sorry Joe Johnston).
I couldn’t wait to read the Michael Crichton novel the movie was based on after having seen this to see how it compared. Unlike most of my experiences having read the book and seen the movie and concluded that the book was a better, richer experience, JP is one of the few movies I’ve seen where I can say that the movie improves on the source material.
Not only do I like how some of the characters are portrayed better in the movie (John Hammond, specifically), nothing beats the spectacle of actually seeing the dinosaurs up on the screen while John Williams score punctuates the scene.
Spielberg raises the bar and launched a franchise, which has had a lasting impact and isn’t going extinct anytime soon as evidenced by this summer’s Jurassic World.
