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jurassic park reviews

• jurassic park
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spielberg in the 80s

• raiders of the lost ark
• e.t.
• indiana jones and the temple of doom
• indiana jones and the last crusade

spielberg in the 90s

• jurassic park
• schindler's list
• the lost world: jurassic park
• saving private ryan

spielberg in the 00s

• a.i.: artificial intelligence
• minority report
• catch me if you can
• the terminal
• war of the worlds
• munich
• indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull

spielberg in the 10s

• the adventures of tintin: the secret of the unicorn
• war horse

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Behold summer; behold Jurassic Park. They're one and the same for me. The entire concept of the "summer event movie" is entirely predicated upon Jurassic in my mind; it started the trend, and it can still bury everything that's come along since.

Sure, critics bitched. But compared to Spider-Man, Jurassic Park looks like Shakespeare - a summer event movie that never fails to satisfy, and in a delightful variety of ways, rather than just banging away on the same note over and over again like an A.D.D.-addled four-year-old who's just found the grand piano. It was no surprise to me that Jurassic went on to define blockbuster success for years to come, after that champion run in the summer of 1993. The film (to paraphrase another critic) combines the wonder of Close Encounters, the thrills of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the chills of Jaws, into a perfect Saturday afternoon at the movies. Like all great film mega-successes, Jurassic crosses genre boundaries with reckless abandon, and comes out the better for it. For a man about to go in a completely different direction with his career, Jurassic Park is Steven Spielberg's graduate thesis from the school of whiz-bang fantasy filmmaking.

To deliver on the goods of that thesis, of course, Spielberg had to take the next Big Step in the world of visual effects, although ol' Jim Cameron had been laying the appropriate groundwork for years at that point. The first time I read Jurassic's special effects crew list - Dennis Muren on full-motion digital, Phil Tippett as animation director, Stan Winston on live-action animatronics, and Michael Lantieri for special effects - I just about fell over. The four living masters of modern movie magic, coming together in one project? It was an alliance of unaparalleled scope.

Even so, I don't think I had any real understanding of what I was going to see in the theatre that night, until all of our friendly palaeontologists were gaping at something off-camera, and we cut to the shot - a really, really, really big Brachiosaur wandering lazily through a glade, nibbling on a nearby tree.

For those of us living in the 21st century, it almost becomes difficult to remember the time in our lives before digital 3D animation existed, and equally difficult to remember, therefore, the quantum leap we all took on that day. This damn thing was real, the first time I'd ever seen a visual effect that was literally indistinguishable from (my imagination of) the real thing. If someone had told me that Spielberg and company had just managed to snap off a few shots of an actual prehistoric beast when they were shooting that afternoon in Kuaui, I would have believed it. Jurassic Park, then, gave me something I had been waiting for since before I could form words: two hours in the jungle with real dinosaurs. It remains one of the most transportative filmgoing events of my entire life.

Well, fine. But is it all just a trick, then, an entire movie based on a gimmick? I don't think so. Jurassic Park may be a theme park ride, a circus of attractions, but it's a damn tasty one. It's the height of Spielberg's art of creating attractive fables about the need for the good old American nuclear family - cobbled together out of two orphans and a pair of reluctant scientists, sure, but family nonetheless. Spielberg is wise in reversing the age relationship between the two kids, Lex and Tim, from the one in the book, making Lex (the girl) the older - this allows for pathos without paranoia, thrills without threat. It gives us something to root for when Dr. Grant (Sam Neill, busting out all over) has to shepherd the youngins safely through this manufactured Paleolithic era, and fun to be had as the doctor we've seen carefully studying 65-million-years-dead creatures has to match wits against their unnaturally-selected great-grandchildren.

Jurassic Park is terribly good at setting up these kinds of dilemmas in unobtrusive ways - the "Mr. DNA" animated sequence being one of the all-time least-annoying bits of exposition in any film of this type - planting seeds of knowledge in the audience's mind that pay off in great suspense sequences later. Watch how Spielberg masterfully orchestrates Nedry's sabotage scene, where everything we know about how the park works collides directly with everything we know about how things have fucked up. This parallels nicely with the later electric fence sequence, where the opposite happens: everything we know about how things have fucked up comes roaring down the throat of how the park works.

There's a playfulness to the visual style, especially in each and every reveal of the various breeds of dinosaurs that we meet on our journeys, that show Spielberg to be at the top of his game. Time and time again, the camera delights the eye to move the story, providing rich pleasures in watching a cinematic master unfold this world. And in my experience, the film is a complete and utter success. I have never in my life seen an audience react to a film with as much enthusiasm and glee as my audience did on June 11th, 1993. During the T-Rex attack on the main road, I literally felt as though the theatre were on a gimbal, and we were all rocking and rolling with the film. It still works.