Jurassic Park [1993 film]

I re-watched this a few months ago and should have reviewed it back then. But I kept putting it off because I wanted to include comments about the extras, but then I dragged my feet and eventually ran into problems. So I'm finally just going ahead and reviewing it.

A synopsis feels a little unnecessary, but I'll include a short one anyway: A billionaire invites several people to his not-yet-open theme park (or is forced to invite them – the lawyer is there because a worker's family is suing and there are now questions being asked about how safe the park really is). Amazingly, the park includes real, live dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the park's tech geek decides to make a little extra money by stealing and selling some of the park's show more dinosaur embryos. Things go wrong, and a bunch of the dinosaurs accidentally get free, putting the lives of everyone on the island in danger.

Listening to the audiobook version of Jurassic Park made me want to re-watch this movie. The overall framework was very similar to the book, but in a lot of ways it was very different. Hammond was portrayed less like a slick salesman and more like a naive idealist – a good deal more likeable than he was in the book. Malcolm and Lex were both less annoying (although still annoying). Grant and Ellie were turned into a couple, and Grant was portrayed as being much less comfortable with kids than he was in the book. The story was streamlined and, after a certain point, completely changed. To my mind, it was all for the better – the movie was much more enjoyable than the book and had aged significantly better.

This even applied to the special effects. For the first time that I could recall, I noticed the slight jerkiness in the larger dinosaurs' movements but, overall, the movie looked really good. There was still that sense of wonder when Grant and Ellie saw their first dinosaurs on the island, and the T. rex and Velociraptors looked great. And I still want to own an animatronic Velociraptor, even though I have no idea where I'd keep it.

The movie was, overall, simpler than the book, but that wasn't a bad thing. I enjoyed re-watching it, and I smiled a little, thinking of how much it scared me when I was younger – it was the first “scary” movie my parents let me watch, primarily because I was a wannabe paleontologist who was fascinated by Spielberg's dinosaurs. It's now over 20 years old, and its dinosaur scenes still make me feel like an excited kid, even knowing that the T. rex's mouth is probably wrong and that at least some of the dinosaurs probably would have had feathers. I'd still recommend it over Jurassic World.

The extras were almost all interesting, but there was so much to watch that my attention wandered. Then my player forgot where I'd last paused, and I just gave up. Even so, it was nice seeing the planning that went into creating the dinosaurs (the animatronics, models, and CGI elements) and making them believable.

Extras:

- "The Making of Jurassic Park"

- Early pre-production meetings

- Location scouting

- Phil Tippett Animatics: Raptors in the kitchen - I watched this before attempting to watch any of the other extras. This made for a bizarre experience, because it included absolutely no context - it looked like some kid's weird low-budget Jurassic Park scene. The thing I found most interesting was that, at this point in the planning stages, the Velociraptors were going to have flickering forked tongues, like snakes.

- And apparently some DVD-ROM features that I had no interest in trying to look at. Anything I have to stick the disc into my computer to see might as well not exist.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

The first and still the best. Very enjoyable film. The bits I love is the sheer pleasure of the main characters as they see for real creatures they have only ever imagined - even if it all goes wrong. And of course the iconic roar of the T Rex over the bones at the end. I can still remember my horror when Bob Peck dies the first time I watched it. Loved him in "Edge of Darkness".

The big-screen film scared one of our kids when we saw it with them, probably when it came out; he was maybe 8 or 9. We made him stay through to the end to show him that it did, in fact, end, with none of the dinosaurs loose in the theater.

I watched it most recently (nearly 30 years later) with our 11-year-old granddaughter, who decided on her own that she was old enough to see it without being frightened; she must have been, because she wasn't - not anymore than all of us were at the really scary parts.

I think the story and cinematography held up well.

Acting: 4.0; Theme: 4.5; Content: 4.0; Language: 3.5; Overall: 4.5

Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) are paleontologists who meet the InGen creator, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who has created a world where genetically-cloned dinosaurs rule his "Jurassic" park. The adventure begins when Alan, Ellie, John and several others become trapped in their powered-vehicles inside the park when the power grid shuts down. Highly recommend.

There was a lot of dinosaur violence and at least 10 or so uses of vulgarity, with at least one use of God's name in vain.

***January 1, 2026***

A dinosaur theme park has real dinosaurs, and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Fun. You have to turn your brain off, but that's okay; you don't need your brain to enjoy watching people get eaten by dinosaurs.

Concept: B
Story: C
Characters: C
Dialog: C
Pacing: B
Cinematography: B
Special effects/design: B
Acting: B
Music: C

Enjoyment: B

GPA: 2.6/4

(Jun. 2012)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt107290/ http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31210613

A blockbuster with some considerable violence and enough disembowelment to satisfy any kid who just cannot get along with the rest of his world. I see Spíelberg's underlying message. His philosophy is that when man tries to imitate a complex, chaotic system such as nature, man is relinquishing all control of that system. Here the eccentric millionaire has created a park for dinosaurs for all the rich kids of the world. He and his colleagues are not trying to create a Zoo with cages; they are trying to duplicate, as best they can, the systems of nature in compliance to how it all was millions of years ago… And control it. Here is where the preaching begins, the beef against science and those that use science to make loads of money show more rather than to better humanity and society. Humans are destroying themselves. I can appreciate Spíelberg's passion and his statements about complex systems and utter lack of control over them. Anyway, it's a good flick aside from the message-for-kiddies aspect. show less