Jurassic Park is a simplistic popcorn spectacle that dumbs down Crichton’s cerebral novel with a cartoony account of chaos theory and a literal cartoon explanation of the dinosaur-cloning scheme. Of course, Jaws is an intelligent, mature thriller with complex characters and thoughtful dialogue-one that many consider an improvement on the misanthropic novel by Peter Benchley.
And the scary thrills of an island full of ancient predators are like a theme-park funhouse-mirror version of the primal terror of shark-haunted Amity Island. Grant bears more than a passing resemblance to a better-known brainy, fedora-wearing action hero who does field work digging up old stuff.
Jurassic Park plays like a lightweight hybrid of the two prior Spielberg films to spawn sequels: Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s in the same league as his best movies. Loosely based on Michael Crichton’s cautionary novel about an ill-fated project to clone dinosaurs from DNA recovered from bloodsucking insects preserved in amber, Jurassic Park showcases Spielberg’s mastery of visual storytelling and audience manipulation about as well as any movie he’s made. ( Avatar and perhaps Interstellar are the best candidates I can think of.)
Yet in all that time, it’s hard to think of a single blockbuster spectacle that uses computer imagery to achieve a similar sense of awe and grandeur. In the twenty-odd years since Jurassic Park pioneered the use of photorealistic computer-animated living creatures integrated into a live-action film, computer animation has become even more prevalent. Rarer is the sense of awe and wonder inspired by Jurassic Park’s unprecedented vision of the most mythologized creatures ever to walk the earth, brought to life by a still-convincing blend of early computer imagery and animatronics. Making viewers scream and jump is one of the movie’s oldest and most familiar tricks. The other is my brother-in-law, Dave, getting a bit misty when Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, witnessing Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs for the first time, murmurs in awed astonishment, “They’re moving in herds. One is my wife, Suzanne, screaming and reflexively whipping up her legs onto her theater seat when the velociraptor leaps up toward the camera at a young girl’s dangling legs as she tries to climb into an air duct. I saw Jurassic Park three times in theaters back in 1993, and I vividly recall two things from that time. The theatrical release of Jurassic World attests the enduring appeal of Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking 1993 blockbuster.
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