Jurassic Park gave the whole world the Spielberg Face
Image: Graphic: Jimmy HasseScreenshot: Universal Pictures Film Features The Popcorn Champs
About 20 minutes into Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg captures perhaps the greatest Spielberg Face ever put on film. You know the Spielberg Face. As outlined in Kevin B. Lee’s 2011 video essay, it’s the sudden look of awestruck rapture on characters’ faces—always in close-up, often framed in dolly shots—when their worlds are flipped upside down, when they see things they never could’ve dreamed possible. In that Jurassic Park moment, we actually get two Spielberg Faces: one from Sam Neill, one from Laura Dern, both reduced to wordless open-mouthed wonder at the sight of living, breathing dinosaurs.
It really is a spectacular moment. Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant and Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sattler, two scientists who have studied dinosaurs for their entire adult lives, are briefly struck dumb by the real-life manifestations of these creatures. Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond, the genial grandfatherly showman who came up with the whole place, takes visible delight in showing them the unimaginable. John Williams’ main theme, appearing in the film for the first time, rises and rises and then booms out, as we see a whole green vista full of extinct reptiles. And all of it works because Spielberg delivers on the spectacle of the dinosaurs themselves—special-effects creations that would’ve been unthinkable only a few years before. Watching in the theater, some of us probably had Spielberg Faces in that moment, too.
In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park marks a truly magical moment in the history of cinematic illusion. Computer-generated images had only just started to appear in big, mainstream films, and often clumsily, as in the psychedelic virtual-reality gimmickry of The Lawnmower Man, or even to enhance the hand-drawn animation in Aladdin. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had made computer imagery seem spectacular, in part by limiting it to brief flashes of screen time and by using it to render something truly alien. But in Jurassic Park, Spielberg uses those computers to illustrate things that every kid in the audience had imagined a million times, transforming them into something tangible.
Not all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are computer-animated. Spielberg uses animatronics and puppetry whenever possible, and he captures that technology at its absolute apex. Spielberg also hired Phil Tippett, the stop-motion artist who’d animated the ED-209 for RoboCop; when Tippett’s dinosaurs weren’t convincing enough, Spielberg had Tippett choreograph the CGI dinosaurs. (Tippett made the CGI artists take mime classes.) Ultimately, in two hours of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are only on screen for 14 minutes, and only six of those minutes have CGI dinosaurs. But Spielberg makes those minutes count.
Before Michael Crichton even published the novel Jurassic Park in 1990, he’d sold the film rights. The novel was a phenomenon. Spielberg, already the most successful filmmaker of all time, was coming off of Hook, a big movie that was also a disappointment. Spielberg had been hoping to make his big Oscar movie for his entire career, and Universal made a deal with him: He could direct Schindler’s List, his black-and-white Holocaust epic, if he’d also make Jurassic Park for the same studio. Spielberg agreed, and he rushed to finish both, working on Jurassic Park post-production while he was filming Schindler’s List.
Famously, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List opened less than six months apart in 1993. Jurassic Park earned a record-breaking $50 million in its first weekend, and it went on to take in $357 domestic and more than half a billion worldwide. For a few years, it was the highest-grossing film of all time—the third time Spielberg had earned that distinction, after Jaws and E.T. Schindler’s List, meanwhile, won Spielberg the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars that he’d been coveting. The film enshrined him as part of the Hollywood pantheon. Just as impressively, Schindler’s List also turned out to be a box office success, pulling in nearly $100 million and ending up as one of 1993’s 10 highest grossers. Spielberg’s 1993 might be the best year that any mainstream filmmaker has ever had.
Seen from a certain angle, Spielberg’s monster year represents the duality of an artist—the spectacle-first showman on one side, the soulful empath on the other. In some ways, though, I think that sells Jurassic Park short. It isn’t just a good popcorn movie. It’s one of the best popcorn movies ever made. Spielberg streamlines the whole thing almost effortlessly, transforming all the Crichton scientific stuff that I remember being terribly boring in the novel into a few onscreen minutes with a cartoon DNA strand. Spielberg also cranks up the set pieces, finding endlessly clever ways to swing from one to the next, just as he’d done in the Indiana Jones movies. (It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Alan Grant, a character that Harrison Ford turned down, dresses a whole lot like Indiana Jones.)
In making Jurassic Park, Spielberg had to deal with some of the same weather and technology issues that had come close to wrecking the Jaws shoot. (My favorite piece of Jurassic Park lore: When Hurricane Iniki hit Hawaii, where the film was shooting, the pilot who flew in to get Spielberg and the cast and crew out happened to be Fred Sorenson. Years earlier, Sorenson had played Jock, the pilot from the beginning of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.) Once again, though, Spielberg made any limitations work for him. Two of the tensest set pieces from Jurassic Park don’t even involve dinosaurs. Instead, the action revolves around a Ford Explorer stuck in a tree and an electric fence that’s about to come back online.
None of the actors in Jurassic Park were especially famous. Unlikely sex symbol Jeff Goldblum carries himself as a star, even though he’s a weirdo character actor by nature, and even though he was probably most famous for turning into a disgusting mutation in The Fly. Laura Dern had mostly done critical-favorite auteur stuff like Wild At Heart and Rambling Rose. Sam Neill, 20 years older than Dern, was a screen veteran, but he’d only just had his first real box office moment as a Russian officer in The Hunt For Red October. Spielberg knew that the stars were the dinosaurs, and he got some real performances out of them.
Before Jurassic Park, I don’t know how many people had even heard of velociraptors. I had loved dinosaurs as a kid, and I still remember wondering how to pronounce the word “velociraptor” when I was reading the Crichton book. Spielberg portrays the raptors as chilling, calculating hunters, and he turns them into stars. Two years after Jurassic Park, the velociraptor had an NBA franchise named after it.
But the Tyrannosaurus rex is the movie’s great legacy. Early on, the T. rex is a dark shadow, a tremor in the ground, a looming presence that can’t even be seen. Then, she’s an unstoppable force, a titan ripped out of her temporal space, one who pauses for just a second to consider the cowering lawyer that she’s about to eat. Finally, she’s a last-second savior like Han Solo in Star Wars. When the T. rex returns to make her big babyface turn at the end of Jurassic Park, killing the two final-boss raptors, my theater audience flipped the fuck out. It was beautiful.
The common knock on Jurassic Park is that its human characters are underdeveloped, that they’re only there to be eaten or to escape. This is true, but it’s not a flaw. It’s just what happens in a monster movie. Nobody goes to see a dinosaur flick to enjoy a subtle and layered Sam Neill performance. Decades into the blockbuster era that Spielberg helped birth, barely any directors understand the way films should move the way Spielberg does in Jurassic Park. Dr. Alan Grant has an arc—he hates kids, and then he likes them—but it barely matters. Laura Dern seems friendly. Jeff Goldblum finds charming and interesting ways to spout exposition about chaos theory. The kids do the things that kids do in Spielberg things. Almost everyone else gets eaten, sometimes after delivering catchphrases. Just a few seconds after all the surviving characters are safely off the island, the credits roll.
Watching today, Jurassic Park remains a nearly perfect machine. Only a few things have aged badly. Some of the characters are a bit broad; if anyone other than Spielberg had directed the film, the greedy lawyer might’ve been derided as an anti-Semitic stereotype. Nobody needs the little girl to be a “hacker.” Some of the CGI seems just a tad primitive today, though honestly not much. (Effects-heavy movies from a decade later have aged far worse in that respect.) The only thing that really bothers me about Jurassic Park is the character of John Hammond.
The big films of 1993 are full of evil rich people who try to play God. In the John Grisham adaptations The Firm and The Pelican Brief, the villains are shadowy conspiracies of financial interests—murderous money-laundering lawyers in the former, murderous oil tycoons in the latter. In The Fugitive, Harrison Ford is framed for murder because he stands in the way of an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company. In Indecent Proposal, horny billionaire Robert Redford throws a happy couple into turmoil by offering Woody Harrelson a million dollars to rent Demi Moore for a night.
Theoretically, John Hammond should be the evilest, richest asshole of them all. In Crichton’s novel, Hammond is unequivocally the villain, the rich businessman who refuses to let a few dead bodies stop him from his plans to open up his theme park. (Crichton rewards Hammond by having a herd of tiny, cute compsognathus eat him alive.) Spielberg knew how to make a guy like that the villain; he’d done it with the mayor in Jaws. But the middle-aged Spielberg identifies with Hammond too much, and he instead renders him as a kindly, doddering old man who only wants to bring magic into the world. Spielberg even gets his fellow filmmaker Richard Attenborough—the man who’d defeated Spielberg for the Best Director Oscar in 1983, the year Spielberg was nominated for E.T.—to play Hammond.
In Jurassic Park, Hammond shows a bit of the arrogance we expect from a villain. The movie’s carnage only happens because Hammond won’t give a raise to his IT guy (Wayne Knight, madly cackling). Hammond clearly hates the IT guy and considers himself to be the man’s better, which leads to his own downfall. Later on, after the dinosaurs have started eating people, Hammond still thinks he can make the theme park happen. But after a stern talking-to, he abandons the idea and gets to survive. For a movie where so many people get bitten to death, it’s a toothless portrayal. Spielberg identified with an evil rich guy so much that he couldn’t bring himself to depict the character as an evil rich guy.
Of course, we now have a better idea of how Hammond’s character would work. Hammond wouldn’t be one man; he’d be a board of directors. And Jurassic Park would open, no matter how many people it would put in peril. We see that now, in real life. Today, during a pandemic, Disney World is open. Maybe the animatronic pirates won’t eat the tourists, but if they did, would it look any different?
After Schindler’s List, Spielberg co-founded DreamWorks, his own film studio, and he didn’t direct another movie for four years. When Spielberg returned, he attempted a similar one-two punch, coming out with The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Amistad in the same year. It didn’t work out as well that time. But Spielberg came back, as he always does. He’ll be in this column again. And Jurassic Park eventually returned to box office titan status. When the pandemic hit, the original cast had reunited to shoot another new sequel called Jurassic World: Dominion. As of right now, it’s still supposed to come out next June.
Earlier this summer, a funny thing happened. Once again, Jurassic Park was the No. 1 movie at the North American box office. The film only played on 230 screens, mostly drive-ins, and it added less than a million dollars to its 10-figure total. But it remains an almost ageless spectacle. I would like to think that some kids, sitting in the backseats of some cars, got to see those dinosaurs for the first time. And I would like to think that those kids made the Spielberg Face.
The runner-up: I’ve already written at length about The Fugitive, and that film remains perfect dad-movie fare—a muscular action ride that barely lets up and never insults your intelligence. (In The Line Of Fire and Cliffhanger, two of 1993’s other successes, do many of the same things, though not quite as well.) But my favorite of 1993’s hits is a very different movie: Nora Ephron’s smartly sweet Sleepless In Seattle.
In some ways, Sleepless In Seattle, the year’s No. 4 earner, is a masterfully executed writing exercise: a romantic comedy where the two leads show serious chemistry even though they only actually interact with each other in the final minutes. But it works thanks to its light touch and its lead performances; Tom Hanks, in particular, shows off a rare kind of movie-star charm. Also, as a Baltimore native who was 13 when Sleepless opened, I am utterly helpless before the scenes of the city in the early ’90s. The Baltimore Sun probably would’ve never flown a writer across the country to work on a vague human-interest story about a talk-radio caller, but I doubt the paper even gives its reporters bus fare today. So Sleepless is a heartbreaking time capsule in a lot of ways.
Next time: Steven Spielberg’s protégé Robert Zemeckis gets his own Oscar moment by turning baby boomer history into mythology with Forrest Gump.
423 Comments
At the risk of sounding like a broken record… obligatory missed opportunity:
“I‘m only trying to say that Isla Nublar is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t see giant creatures here, they’ll be glad to gawk at the monsters on Skull Island, the kaiju constantly threatening Tokyo, or the ones near New Zealand on Monster Island!”
I remember working in the projection booth at the local theater when a couple of copies of the trailer were delivered one afternoon probably sometime in late ‘92. I knew the movie was coming, I had read the book already, but didn’t know much more than that. Spliced one of the trailers to the beginning of something and watched it and I remember it being the first time I learned who any of the cast members were, and this was only a few months before it opened. I couldn’t imagine that happening now. And that first teaser trailer? Not a single shot from the movie, not even any of JW’s score because it probably hadn’t even been written or recorded yet. And it was amazing. Audiences at our theater applauded it.
I think that might be the earliest movie trailer I have any memories of.
Perfect. Now that is what a trailer should be like. Not the plot summaries we usually get. Just enough to whet our appetite, and keep us thirsty for more.
This just gave me chills. God I love this movie.
That was a nostalgia gasm
I really hate it in Spielberg movies where a main character is doing something (like leaning on a triceratops ) and we cut to another character smiling indulgently with beatific kindness , it just makes me cringe.
You’d prefer if they glowered with malevolent cruelty? What exactly are you expecting the other character to do?
Yes! I want nonsensical reaction shots from all the characters.
It’s not malevolent cruelty but one of my favourite small moments is the grim look Hammond gives as he watches Grant and Ellie during the raptor feeding. It’s one of the few times he breaks the showman act to contemplate what the others are making of the situation.
Please give me an example of this
leaning on a triceratops?
If you really want to cringe, watch the sad Spielberg cover band work that Chris Columbus does in the first Harry Potter film, where he uses that technique almost to the exclusion of all else. Sorceror’s Stone is basically Reaction Shot: the Movie. At the very least Spielberg sometimes manages to use that shot for storytelling purposes. For example, when Hammond smiles beatifically at Grant and Sattler, sure, it’s the movie announcing to us that this is a happy moment where we should feel happy, but it’s also Hammond experiencing the satisfaction of a carnie who’s hooked a mark.
Yeah, the Rifftrax gets a great joke out of the Hammond bit (“Now to move in with that timeshare pitch!”) Meanwhile in the same sequence, as Maryann Johanson points out, even Malcolm, otherwise the perpetual pebble in Hammond’s shoe, can’t help but smile at the sight of that brontosaurus — even he’s not made of stone.
Harry Potter could be basically Reaction Shot: The Series. In my mind anyway, I haven’t watched them all a lot, but I think it is most egregious in one of the last movies where an entire room is magically changed to reveal so much more, and there is Harry looking on in beatific wonder as if thinking “how?” At this point he’s been in magic school for 5 or so years. He’s flown brooms, traveled through fire and portkeys, stayed in bigger inside then outside tents, fought dragons, giant basilisks, etc. etc. etc. This shit shouldn’t surprise him anymore.
I feel you and share your annoyance at those moments, but Sorceror’s Stone takes things to an insane level. In scene after scene, just about every line of dialogue gets a reaction shot from every character in the scene. So you get something like:HAGRID: Yer a WIZARD, Harry![Close up: Dudley cowers in the corner.][Close up: Mr. Dursley gapes and one of his eyes bulges so hard it looks like it’s gonna pop out of his head.][Close up: Mrs. Dursley sniffs angrily.][Close up: Harry beams.][Close up: Hagrid looks satisfied with himself.]And then next line and next round of reaction shots, over and over and over again, for an entire friggin’ movie. I mean, I get that it’s hard to work with child actors, and sometimes the best you can get out of them is an isolated shot of them emoting, but this is ridiculous.
I’ll take your word for it. And I know that that one is the longest of the Potter movies. Maybe a good editor could’ve trimmed a lot of those reaction shots and gotten it to a manageable 90 minutes.
That’s not a great example – it’s showing that even Lex – someone not fussed by dinosaurs – can be awed by the gigantic, peaceful beauty of the triceratops. Its a great beat.
At night, I still dream they made Jurassic Park where all the dinosaurs wear skirts. Sometimes I daydream that in the office, too.
Recent work in paleontology confirms that dinosaurs wore skirts. Once thought to be only the domain of schoolgirls and cheerleaders, we are learning that skirts have a long evolutionary history.
But what’s still not widely understood is that the Mesozoic Era spanned an enormous 180+ million years. Over that interval, the skirts evolved from ankle-length to mini, and back again, several times.
What about a short skirt and a long jacket?
Well you’ll be an Austrian nobleman / Commissioning “Jurassic Park Pt3″
Off topic, but lately I’ve been thinking about a sequel where “She’s changing her name/From Karen back to Kitty”
I want a Clever Girl with a mind like a diamond
I want a Clever Girl who knows what’s best
Using a machete to cut through red tape?
Did you mean feathers?
In retrospect this film is a veritable catalog of all of Spielberg’s worst impulses, his most annoying storytelling tics, his ham-fisted direction, his cloying sentimentality, his lack of nuance. They become glaring obvious after you’ve seen 25-30 of his films,
I can’t figure out if your comment is deliberately dumb or accidentally dumb. Spielberg has directed 32 feature films.
But maybe Mike hasn’t seen all of them?Actually, Mike might be right. Jurassic Park does display a lot of Spielberg’s worst instincts. And the fact that they actually work so brilliantly in Jurassic Park may well explain why Spielberg doesn’t realise that they’re bad instincts!
“a lot of Spielberg’s worst instincts”I’m so confused. How are they bad instincts if they work so well? What makes them bad?
A bad instinct is one that tends to lead to bad consequences. That doesn’t mean it ALWAYS leads to bad consequences.
Most mistakes in art – and a great many mistakes in life – come from taking something that worked well in one context, and insisting on doing the same thing again and again in different contexts, where it no longer works well.Think of cooking. Spielberg is sometimes like a guy who once put a ton of sugar in a cake, way more than the recipe called for, and it turned out delicious. So then he thinks, “right, so I just have to put a ton of sugar in EVERYTHING!” – whether he’s making a cake or an omelette or a sirloin steak. There are times when doubling the amount of sugar a recipe calls for can actually work; but there are many, many times when it doesn’t, so in general it’s a bad instinct.
I guess, but considering he’s got a pretty damn good track record, maybe he knows how to use sugar better than you do. 🙂
If I weren’t allowed to have opinions on filmmakers who were better than me, I wouldn’t have any opinions on film at all. To paraphrase Dr Johnson: you don’t have to be a carpenter to know whether your chair wobbles.
Sure, but calling his choices “bad instincts” in a movie that uses them really well is kind of baffling. It’s like saying that it was a terrible idea to use eggs in a recipe in which the eggs (and the dish as a whole) taste great. Like, okay…?
They are only obvious after watching his entire catalogue and attending a semester class discussing his work.
And it still made an AWESOME FUCKING MOVIE
And such small portions!
If we’re going to do this with popular movies, I’ll confess I’ve only felt this way about The Sixth Sense. Re-watching it last year for the anniversary, and noticing all the directorial choices we’d see M. Night do again and again for the rest of his career- I just can’t unsee it. People keep wondering how The Last Airbender could have gone so terribly, but it’s all right there onscreen. Fun-loving Sokka’s interactions with Princess Yue are so unnecessarily godamn serious and the film’s lack of levity and over emphasis on self-importance is Shamayalan to a T. He hasn’t changed! He hadn’t changed when he made the overrated Split, and it took people until Glass to realize he’s still garbage. I’m ranting now, I know, but I just watched The Last Airbender again (not by choice) and it’s got me all riled up.
When the 25 year re-release came, I saw it again, at the IMAX in Waterloo, and it did not disappoint.Later that year, I saw it again, at the Royal Albert Hall with a live symphony orchestra playing the score, and it did not disappoint.For a quarter of a century, I’ve stopped what I was doing whenever it came on TV, and it has never disappointed.The small moment in the hatchery, when Grant starts to realise he’s trapped on an island with velociraptors. The quaking spoonful of dessert. The none-more-Spielberg race down the tree, pursued by car. Grant pretending to be electrocuted (“That wasn’t funny!” “That was great.”). The official beginning of Samuel L Jackson’s long career of quipping in summer blockbusters. Gods, I love this movie.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen this movie, and don’t care to think how many more I’ll see it. Doesn’t matter if it’s on Syfy or Netflix, background noise or the main attraction, I’m still going to watch it.I have a lot of “favorite movies”, but this is one I’ll truly never get tired of watching.
22 times for me on the big screen, in nearly every format (I’ve never seen it in 4DX or a drive in screening) – I doubt I’ll ever get bored seeing it like that. I’ve watched it twice this past month after UK cinemas reopened. Being able to take my son for the first time a couple of years ago was a huge moment for me. (In fact, thanks to parent and baby screenings, his first trip to the cinema was Jurassic World at 6 weeks old – nowhere near as good as Park but it was still a cool one to start with). So many great moments. Dennis and the dilophosaurus (anything Nedry, really). Hammond’s heartbreak before he gets on the helicopter at the end. The debate at the meal (I really enjoy all the interplay between Grant, Sattler and Malcolm). Gennero (“Are these auto… erotica?”) . The Rex leaping out at the gallimimus (and the slab of meat it rips up). Muldoon (“No – we can’t. We’re being hunted… “). The raptor smashing into the skeleton with a clash of Williams’ symbols. That rightfully iconic final roar. So many more.
I remember the anticipation of getting to seeing real live (okay fake) dinosaurs on the big screen was huge. I think I saw the film twice in five days at Catford cinema (back when it still existed) and loved even more second time around.As all you guys above say, it’s such a rewatchable film. I genuinely think it might be Spielberg’s best work, which is probably silly to say in the same year as he’s working on Schindler’s List.
It’s worth mentioning, I think, that Jurassic Park wasn’t just the highest-grossing film ever… it grossed more than any two films from the previous decade, combined. Almost as much as the #2, #3 AND #4 films of that year put together. Only ET had ever grossed considerably more than half Jurassic Park’s take.Of course, that’s not as impressive as it sounds, due to inflation and whatnot, but still. Kind of makes the point: yeah, this was a colossally huge cultural phenomenon. Not only was it one of the best-selling film ever, but it absolutely dwarfed anything else that was going on around it. Imagine Avengers: Endgame in popularity, but in a film world in which there were no other Marvel films, and no Star Wars films for competition, and the nearest rival was a light comedy. It was JUST Jurassic Park..The Jurassic Park logo was (almost) right up there with the Batman logo for a while…
This was the last movie I remember running for the entire summer at the theaters. And I’m sure many others did. I’m sure “The Avengers” was still showing at theater 20 in the megaplex in September of 2012. But “Jurassic Park” is the one I remember still being on the marquee at the 6 and 8-plexes into the fall, and just dominating the summer. A check of Box Office Mojo shows me it was still in 1000 theaters and the #9 domestic earner in the last week of September, its 16th week of release.
My other memory of its domination in the public’s consciousness was going to see the sequel at 2:30AM the night it opened. Other movies had started to have hyped midnight showings on Thursday night, but “The Lost World” was the first time I saw theaters schedule a film to open at midnight and then just continue the showings every thirty minutes through the early AM hours to the next day.
I didn’t go see Independence Day until late September and it was still screening in the multiplex’s largest house. But that didn’t open until July, of course.
Sony thought it could compete and opened Last Action Hero the weekend after. Ha! I ushered at a theater that summer and it was the bombiest bomb we had. Screenings were less than half filled opening night.
Probably his most enjoyable. Schindler’s List is excellent and so is Saving Private Ryan, but I’m not going to play those as something in the background or watch if I’m sick on the couch.
Parent and baby screenings… I’d never survive, lol
Oh, they were an awesome way to bond with my sons and spend some quiet time with them. Only a few were busy (mostly any that also attracted the dads – I think SPECTRE and Force Awakens both sold out). Usually it was a handful of spread out parents who timed milk and sleep carefully for maximum effect. Still, as one of the cinema’s managers one of the best changes I made was adding subtitles to those screenings, just in case.
I wasn’t able to enjoy this the first time in theatres as I was a terrified child, and this movie frightened me. No idea why, it wasn’t intrinsically a horror film. I don’t think I grasped that people weren’t going to be inadvertantly murdered in Hollywood blockbusters yet.All subsequent viewings have been very enjoyable.
I remember hearing about this happening a lot when it was released. I was 9 years old, my brother 7, and my parents were hesitant because various cousins came out of the movie terrified.
My dad just laughed at me being scared, so he probably would have still recommended it for smaller kids- I was also 7 at the time
I saw it three times the summer it came out, just before I turned 15. Every time I shook for about 30 minutes afterward, and then couldn’t wait to see it again.
After I read the book (as an adult, right after it came out) I had nightmares about the T-rex. So, don’t feel bad.
Never read the book myself, but someone here once quoted the painfully succinct Nedry scene, and it was stuck in my head for a couple of days.
I have it on good authority no one really likes you!But here take your damn star for, “Later that year, I saw it again, at the Royal Albert Hall with a live symphony orchestra playing the score, and it did not disappoint.”
Then I’m not going to win friends by admitting that I also saw Back To The Future in the Albert Hall with orchestral accompaniment, and it was also bloody magnificent.
See my original post 🙂
I’ve seen all three Lord of the Rings with orchestras at Royal Albert Hall (as well as Jurassic Park) – absolutely incredible, especially with the Royal Philharmonic having done the actual scores. I’ve seen Jurassic Park and Jaws like that at smaller venues but, awesome as it is to hear the scores live, the Royal Albert Hall is just a fantastic venue for it.I’d love for them to do 2001.
It is a majestic score. It’s all very well talking about Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List being a great 1-2 for a director… but wow, what an amazing year for a composer!It’s just ridiculous that Williams wasn’t Oscar-nominated for Jurassic Park. On the other hand, he won the Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe and Grammy for Schindler’s List, so he probably wasn’t too disappointed…
I very badly want my daughter to see this, but on the big screen, and I keep missing it. I was ready to go for the 25th anniversary and there were no showings near us. So I keep putting off just queuing it up on Netflix, because I want her to have that same experience I did, flattened in my seat by that T-Rex roar. When it was doing the drive-ins a few months ago I almost went, but then thought about how shitty the sound would probably be and the less than ideal projection scenario, and held off. It’s right there on Netflix and I keep holding off thinking it will hit a big screen near us. Of course now, who even knows when we’d get to a theater again.
I saw this at a drive-in last year (double bill with Jaws!) and the sound was fine, but the projection’s framing was slightly off. Which was very interesting, I bet it would not be as noticeable in a lot of moves but Spielberg uses every bit of his frame for the T. Rex. But regardless, it was still a great time.
I was really tempted. But I read a couple of reviews and all noted that any scenes “taking place at night” are hard to see. Uh oh. Plus this was June in Houston, and the directive from the drive in that your car had to be off was a deal breaker.
Oh woof, yeah, that doesn’t sound pleasant.
A recent essay about the framing of Jurassic World: The Sequel points out how the new movie shot in ‘scope at 2.35:1 doesn’t frame the T-Rex as well as Spielberg’s original JP shot in 1.85:1.
This makes sense — while it contains elements of both, a T. Rex is neither a snake nor a funeral.
It’s a train?
I geek out about aspect ratios and the reasons to shoot flat or scope and this minidoc is informative, particularly with the use of “vertical space,” something I haven’t much considered.Steven Spielberg was totally right in shooting this flat. That guy’s got talent! I’m here watching this vid again because last night’s Simpsons rerun “The Hateful Eight-Year-Olds” spoofed JP’s awestruck shot here at 2:20. How serendipitous.
You’re an awesome parent.
Well I caved in and we watched it Friday. I missed getting to see her flatten in her seat at that first T-Rex roar but she got quite a few good jump scares from the raptors. God it’s such a great movie.
Me too. Any time I’ve moved, bought a new TV, bought a new sound system for said TV, this is the first movie I throw on to test the AV equipment.
I saw it on a five-foot screen at my small country town’s RSL as a little tacker. Nothing was lost on a screen even that small.Nothing was lost.
This is the first movie I can remember seeing more than once in a theater (I was 12 when it was released). And when it came out on VHS, I think I watched it every day for two weeks after picking up a copy. It’s quite possibly Spielberg at the height of his filmmaking powers, and as you said, it still never disappoints.
My primary memory of Jurassic Park was that I was working at Blockbuster when this movie arrived on home video. Holy tapdancing Christ, that was a nightmare. We had something like 200 copies that were perpetually rented out, and people would sit and camp out next to the return bin for an hour or more, waiting for someone to drop off a copy and get really shitty if we weren’t Johnny-on-the-spot when a new tape came in. “Excuse me! EXCUSE ME, video store person! Someone dropped off a tape, check and see if that’s Jurassic Park, PLEASE!!”
I was never that desperate, but my friends and I would always comb the just-returned stack at the counter to see what hadn’t been re-shelved yet. That’s where you’d find a lot of the new releases. The racks were for suckers.
Yeah, a lot of those people were parents who promised their kids that they’d get to see Jurassic Park and showed up at Blockbuster at 6pm on a Friday thinking they’d get a copy of a movie that was released to video that afternoon.
My daughter was born after this movie came out-I took her to the 25th anniversary in 3D-she was pushing back in her seat at the T-Rex sunroof scene, but so do I. She liked the movie.
I got to take my son to the short IMAX 3D run in 2013 when he was probably 11, and it was the first time he’d seen it. Watching him was as much fun as watching the movie. He was hooked for life.There wasn’t much to the 3D, with the notable exception of the raptor leaping and snapping as whoever it was escaped through the ceiling tiles.
I never saw it in theater. My parents thought we were too you. All our classmates of course, did.
The dinosaurs were real, I don’t care what anyone tells me. THEY WAS REAL.
I similarly saw the IMAX rerelease (with someone who had never seen it, truly a delight), and later with a live orchestra, and yeah, I’ve never passed it up on tv, and I could watch it right now. It’s literally the first movie I remember seeing. Simply a perfect movie.
Jurassic Park: The movie where every scene is its best scene
It’s funny: there’s always the one scene in a great movie that makes no sense. Not only does Sam Jackson’s disembodied arm and hand randomly appear perfectly on Laura Dern’s shoulder, but she seems relieved by being grabbed from behind in a life-or-death situation. Sure, it’s a human hand, and he’s the only other one there (if memory serves), but you’d at least turn around before relaxing to the point of engaging in conversation. I nominate that Jurassic Park sucks entirely because of this.
Same. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it and I’ll never tire of it. I think I was 10 or 11 when it came out, and I read the book first because the movie looked scary and I wanted to know what to expect. Turned out the movie scared me even more than the book did.
I remember coming home from the theater as a teen, absolutely giddy, trying to describe how amazing this movie was to my mother, who was like “So, you liked the dinosaur movie, huh?” I couldn’t put into words how the tech in this movie changed everything. It was similar to being on a field trip to some tech place and all I can remember from that day was someone said, “Ya wanna see something really cool?” to me and a few of my classmates and then proceeded to load up Wolfenstein on his work PC. Mind you, this is when the SNES was only two years old and we were still playing Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. I was staggered. Floored. Gob-smacked. Just like when I saw Jurassic Park for the first time.
I loved this movie when I first saw it (I was 15). I came out of the theater vibrating with glee over an essentially perfect moviegoing experience.But I still remember, upon seeing those first dinos during the Spielberg Face moment the article talks about, thinking that they looked not quite realistic. The lighting was off, somehow, and there was an odd shimmer that I immediately noticed. It wasn’t a huge deal (I’ve never been much of a stickler for realistic CGI) but it’s always kind of bothered me that that moment didn’t have the same impact on me it’s widely considered to have.
That scene and the stampeding Gallimimus scene are probably the two where the CGI has weathered the worst. Everywhere else the film does a fantastic job of hiding the weaknesses of the effects; those scenes just don’t provide any way to do that.
If I updated JP, about the only thing I would mess with would be the Gallimimus scene and fixing that light off-brown shading. Maybe a couple of renders with realistic shadows would help.
I agree, there was a slight yellow cast that made the first dino just a hair off from what it should be to make it feel real. Which is not to say I didn’t love the movie and enjoy the dino effects overall.
Fuck yeah I love this movie.
I’m actually glad they didn’t go with John Hammond as the straight up villain as depicted in the. The movie version is far more interesting as a character and far closer to being a real person.Plus, Attenborough delivers a fucking amazing performance.
Indeed. I can’t bring myself to fault Spielberg for not going with the cheap evil-industrialist cliche, whatever modern sentiments might crave.
As pointed out above, the cliche was heavily in demand at the time of the film’s release.
I’ve just reread the book for the first time in over 20 years – I like the version of Hammond’s character we get there for the most part (though I prefer the film version) right up until the end when his “fuck those kids” attitude takes him over a line and makes him just an outright dick.
There’s no way on Earth Dickie Attenborough could ever have been that heartless (leaving aside Brighton Rock and 10 Rillington Place). I’m glad the movie version is so naively positive.
I had never heard of 10 Rillington Place, but I see it’s on Prime. That’s going right on my watch list.
I’d say enjoy, but the true life story behind it is very awful.
Tim Roth has recently tackled the same role for BBC a few months ago. By way of comparison, it might be worth checking that out too.
HOLY CRAPI just googled 10 Rillington Place and am absolutely horrified. Jesus. Nightmare.
Came here to rebut the article exactly like this. Leaving satisfied.
Very true. Also, I feel like Jurassic Park could have only been conceived and built ny someone with good intentions, even if misguided. A CEO motivated by greed would have gone for more low-hanging fruit, or weaponized the technology. I mean, the greatest technological advance of the 20th century and you open a theme park? That’s a man motivated by joy.
The Disney parks account for more revenue than the movies, TV, and streaming. And you don’t become a titan of industry through joy or good intentions.
Do the parks actually make more money than the actual movies? Jesus.And you’re right about the job/good intentions, I guess I was thinking more about passion? Like the way Elon Musk is investing so much in going to mars: it might have a huge payoff some day, but there are easier and less risky ways to make money, so I imagine a big part of his motivation is just passion for space (and ego).
75 million just in the American parks. Imagine people spend on average, oh, $100 per ticket, and $50 on food and souvenirs. I think that’s a conservative estimate, but that’s $11 billion/year right there. Add in the Disney-owned hotels and I’ll bet that’s another 20-30%. That’s about the same as the entire movie industry’s box office revenue for a year
Now, I don’t know the margins. It may be that parks are so labor- and capital-intensive that the PROFITS from the movies and parks are much more similar. But from a revenue standpoint, the parks/hotels/food/souvenirs are a bigger business than the box office/home media/streaming/TV.
Which is exactly why (well, among many other reasons) Jurassic World was so damn silly. D’Onofrio’s character 100% intended to weaponize raptors for guerrilla combat, which…I mean what could go wrong there??
Well, he was working for the same government that wanted to weaponise bats, so they tied incendiary bombs to the bats, then let the bats go, and then the bats got sleepy and decided to have an nap under the evens of the nearest available structure, which just so happened to be the facility from whence they were launched, and set it on fire, because the US does not understand neither irony nor poetic justice.
In the book, Hammond picked amusement over pharma because there’s less pressure to drop your price to make your product available to the masses.
Absolutely. The movie’s one flaw is that it has a three-dimensional and believable character as the villain, rather than a cackling, moustache-twirling EEEEVVVIILLL guy imported lock, stock and barrel from fifty other films? The flaw is that the villain doesn’t look like a villain, and makes you sympathise with him and want him to survive even though you know everything is his fault?Yeah no. The fact Spielberg doesn’t just follow the cliché path of least resistance to give the audience over-easy, comforting answers is part of what makes it a great film.
You don’t have to eat babies or say racist things to manage to fuck things up. Hammond is a genuinely nice, good-hearted man. But he’s colossally arrogant, he’s naive, he’s narcissistic, he’s willfully and criminally negligent, he’s optimistic to the point of insane recklessness, and he has far, far too much power with far too few restraints. Billionaires, in particular, don’t need to be Evil People to be a force for evil in the world, and JP is a better film thematically for realising that.
It’s also – ideology and reality aside – a much better film narratively for the way that Attenborough’s performance makes the audience conflicted throughout the film. You KNOW Hammond is wrong, and on one level you want that smug, know-it-all pomposity wiped off his face, and for the CLEARLY right Grant and Malcom to be proved right – and you know this will happen. But at the same time, it feels like punching Grandpa, and you kind of wish Hammond’s fairytale ambition really could be true.
Jurassic Park tries to evoke two contradictory impulses: childlike wonder and awe and marvelling at what could be possible; and, at the same time, cynical fear about what would probably happen in reality. Hammond encapsulates that duality. Make Hammond an outright villain from the start and you contaminate the wonder and awe, which to some degree we feel because it’s trustworthy, cuddly Grandpa presenting them to us.The lack of an equivalent Hammond figure in Jurassic World is a big reason why it doesn’t capture the same sense of wonder – if even the woman in charge of the park is obviously cynical, heartless and manipulative from the start, why should we approach it in any spirit other than cynicism? Hammond is the Santa Claus who makes the presents in the sack seem magical; the fact that he’s ALSO the reckless fool who put some lethally dangerous presents in the sack and gives them out cheerily to children is a big part of the film’s conflicted, and hence powerful, emotional resonance.[incidentally, I’m not sure how anyone can look at a world with Elon Musk in it and conclude that it’s unrealistic for a mad billionaire to waste money on a longshot project that appeals more to children than to sane a board of directors. And Musk isn’t even the owner of his companies! In a world of Bezos and Zuckerberg and Gates and Bloomberg and the rest, the idea of projects like Jurassic Park being driven by the whims of billionaires rather than by coldly-calculating boards of directors is more realistic than ever! I mean, Jeff Bezos is literally spending over $1bn on making a prequel series for The Lord of the Rings, not because he thinks it’ll earn $1bn back, but just because he wants to watch it. If he were a dinosaurs fan rather than a SF&F fan, he’d totally be building Jurassic Park if he could…]
This 100%. It’s easy to make Hammond the villain. Far harder to make him a sympathetic character. And this might be the creative choice that elevates the film into a classic.It’s not just Jurassic World — nearly every sequel goes the opposite route, and includes a Paul-Reiser-in-Aliens character who is willing to put the main characters in harm’s way to monetize the dinosaurs in some way. Jurassic Park 3 is the only exception, and that movie still includes a lying rich couple that drives the plot, as well as a character willing to steal dinosaur eggs for personal gain. The sequels see more than one shadowy board of directors scheming about the number of people they’re willing to let the dinosaurs eat in order to profit. It’s all boring and thoroughly predictable.A billionaire filled with childlike wonder who created dinosaurs just because he thinks dinosaurs are awesome? And continues to think he might be able to salvage the experiment even after he’s put his own grandchildren in mortal danger? It’s unexpectedly human material in the middle of an otherwise silly film, and it anchors the plot in a way that’s completely missing when (for example) we learn that the villain has a bunch of Russian mobsters on speed dial for a dinosaur auction. The first movie is so much better *because* Spielberg identified with Hammond so much.
“The lack of an equivalent Hammond figure in Jurassic World is a big reason why it doesn’t capture the same sense of wonder.”JW also seems to present its patrons like they are rubes visiting Six Flags for the first time. People who can afford shit like that choosing it over month-long luxury trips across Europe. The movie looked like it picked up its extras from a state fair.
Attenborough’s great, even if his portrayal reminds me of Scrooge McDuck
Yeah, it changed it from “Greedy pricks are pricks” to “Somethings are beyond man’s control, even if he creates those things himself with good intentions” which is much more fascinating.
There’s a reason the saying “you were so busy proving that you could that you didn’t think to consider whether you should” (from memory, give me a break) has such staying power. It’s baldly evident in today’s technology marketplace.
“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they *should*”I know the Internet loves memey shirt-open Malcolm but that lunch debate is his highlight of the film for me. Goldblum just goes for broke with every line and its great.
It’s real laziness when you can’t be bothered to Google a prominent movie quote!But lord is that sentiment even more resonant today than it was in 1993.
I was 90% just highlighting a great moment. Only 10% shaming you.
That 10% hurts, dammit!
Ah, remember when Bloomberg killed an entire tech-wanker startup in 61 seconds?
The Juicero! What a dumber, simpler time that was.
100% agree. One-dimensional black and white characters are much, much less interesting than complex ones approaching a believably realistic person with competing motivations, good and bad. The movie does not shy way from putting his greed and arrogance on display, just not in the fashion of a mustache-twirling man in black. At the same time, he also demonstrates almost child-like joy and wonder at what he is creating, and he genuinely seems to want to share that with the rest of world. Of course, he will make vasts sums in process, but it’s also an end unto itself for the character. There is no ill-intent in Hammond’s attempt to create this spectacle, merely a lack of serious consideration of ethical questions and practical consequences en route to that goal. And while we may have reached peak anti-hero/sympathetic villain in our movies and television several years ago, it’s still pretty odd to see an actual critic wish that an antagonist was more of a shallow caricature than something approaching a real human being.
They did the same thing later in Jurassic World – the billionaire seems to genuinely be a decent guy falling victim to hubris rather than ruthless capitalist. I didn’t hate it (in part because of the great actor playing the role), but it’s a bit weird.
I could easily see Bezos or Musk behaving almost exactly the same way. Maybe a bit more ego, but Hammond’s a little older and hopefully wiser.
I was too young to watch this in the theaters and my parents got the VHS in 1994. It immediately became what I watched almost every other weekend. Just so much fun to watch.
I’m a 3D artist and to this day, the CGI dinosaurs, to me, are a technological masterpiece. The modeling and animation are impressive but what really sells it is the lighting, and the shading of the skin and ultimately, the compositing of the 3D renders onto the back plates. At that time, this had to be so ridiculously difficult. My software now has features like global illumination, using HDRI images to light scenes realistically. The global illumination simulates the way light bounces off of surfaces and makes things so much easier and realistic. To me, it’s like they created fire. That’s how difficult it must’ve been.
The way the car lights bounces off the rex’s open mouth never fails to stun me, especially for 1993 technology.
The T-Rex scene used darkness to obscure things, but understandably so given the amazing complexity of the action scenario. But the first Dino shots are presented in stark daylight, with nowhere to hide the potential flaws. The chutzpah of that choice was fucking mind-blowing.
Bookened by the chutzpah of that ending that Tom talks about, the T. Rex busts in, wastes the raptors and roars in triumph as that WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH banner floats past, clearly legible. So blatant, so boss. I am sure my theater lost its shit too.
I know I did. 😊
Yep. “Flipped the fuck out” is completely accurate to my theater’s reaction in that moment XD
As a fan of that basketball team Tom mentioned, I can relate. (The T.Rex is LeBron James.)
Roger Ebert made that point in his review of 1998’s Godzilla.
The fact that the CGI for Jurassic Park still holds up 27 years later is amazing. When you see some of the work on other more recent blockbusters, it’s quite stark how good a good Spielberg’s team on this.
The fact that the technology isn’t off the shelf and readily available is mind-boggling. They obviously guarded their secrets jealously.
There’s a documentary about it somewhere. They were going to use go-motion puppets, but a few guys at ILM created a test reel of a dinosaur walking through the ILM parking lot and showed it to Spielberg.The documentary is mostly about one of the animators: Steve Williams, who was born in Canada and studied animation at Sheridan College, one of the top animation schools.
This is the documentary of which you speak (or at least, I think it is!) – I found it pretty damn enjoyable:
https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/spielberg
Yeah, there are a couple of good docs on the behind the scenes. Just the fact that those ILM guys went and did a test on their own time because they thought they could do it better is so bad ass. Phil Tippett was probably a little pissed and yet, Spielberg had the wisdom to keep him involved. The tools changed but not the years of motion experience he had.
The “I think we’re put of a job” “Don’t you mean extinct?” exchange apparently came from Tippett’s reaction to the CGI test.
It was also one of the first movies to apply motion-blur to its CG creatures, and it really pays off in the “they’re flocking this way” scene.
It took 20 years for JP’s CGI to look dated to me. That’s astounding craftsmanship that you just do not see these days.
I’m not technically gifted enough to know who to credit, but this is probably the best CGI movie in my lifetime. In terms of how much it’s used and how technically proficient it appears 27 years later. Someone should be teaching a class about how to use CGI and with this movie as the prime example. There’s no good reason why this movie should still work and look this good almost 30 years later. TBH, you could never discuss enough how amazing that is.
“None of the actors in Jurassic Park were especially famous …”See, Richard Attenborough? NONE. You got told.
Yeah, stick that stupid Oscar win for Gandhi up your arse….as we say in UK.
Sir Richard Attenborough at the time – he became Richard Lord Attenborough a month after the film’s release (having turn the peerage down a year earlier). Winner of the Martin Luther King Peace Prize, the Legion d’Honeur, and the Padma Bhushan (third-highest civilian award in India).In 1993, he’d already been nominated for 10 BAFTAs (won three and a Fellowship), 5 Golden Globes (won three), and 2 Oscars (won both). Notable film appearances include such things as Brighton Rock, The Great Escape, Dr Doolittle and 10 Rillington Place, along with around 70 other films; as a director, he’d created Oh What a Lovely War, A Bridge Too Far, Gandhi and Cry Freedom, with Shadowlands set to come out later in 1993 (sidenote: bloody hell, that’s not a bad filmography!). He was also known for having kept Chelsea afloat, and for being the brother of the most recognisable voice (and one of the most beloved TV personalities) in Britain. In 1993, I wasn’t yet 10, and I’m not sure I’d ever even been to a cinema, but even I had heard that it was a major coup that Jurassic Park had somehow gotten Sir Richard Attenborough himself to play a part (obviously I myself was more interested in the dinosaurs…).
Dickie was a great man, except for supporting Chelsea.I guess even nice guys have some flaws.
Is it necessarily a mistake to make Hammond amiable? The idea that people with too much money need to be evil to fuck things up is, IMHO, a more dangerous notion.
I agree entirely!“Why does evil exist? Because the people with the power and money are Evil People!” is a very comforting thought for many people, but it’s one of the most pernicious beliefs possible. Thinking that evil happened in the past because the people with power and money were evil is one of the main reasons why people with power and money continue to do evil things – after all, they’re not evil, so what they do must be OK, right?Hammond is one of the best examples in pop culture of how you don’t have to be an evil man to cause evil in the world – and how wealth and power can make it very easy to do so.
We could all do with a bit more faith in the virtue of human beings… and a bit LESS faith in the power of virtue to prevent or solve problems…
This all day. And it speaks to one of the problems with the sequels, which have had clear-cut, more traditional “evil” villains ever since!
I agree. It’s more realistic that Hammond is too ensconsed in wealth and privelege to even consider he is endangering people and violating a variety of ethical boundaries.
I also agree. The change makes for a much more interesting film, and a more complicated and compelling character, IMO.
Yeah, I understand the criticism, but the “rich guy just wants more rich evil corporate money, money, money” scumbag is everywhere. We’ve seen that guy, he’s in a LOT of movies. Not every rich guy has to be that rich guy.
I think Hammond is a lot more interesting as a starry-eyed Walt Disney who, yes, can be cutthroat and do all the shitty things rich people generally do to get rich, but also genuinely wants to give people something truly magical. It adds a bittersweet heartbreak to the carnage that’s lacking if the whole thing is just “asshole with money wants more money”.
Watching his denial as he talks about how things will be better going forward, while his grandkids are still out in the park overnight, sort of says it all. He can’t believe things can truly spin beyond his control.
Which tbh, are how certain people are acting about the pandemic right now. Hammond is as real as it gets
Yeah, I think “this film should have stuck with Crichton’s original characterization” is an…unusual opinion.
Exactly. I don’t really think Musk and Zuckerberg are truly evil people. They just have by accident come into more power and money than they really know how to handle. Peter Thiel on the other hand, really *is* a supervillain.
Yeah that’s just Tom getting his Leftist on. He can’t help himself
Came here to make a similar comment. Amoral rich evil guys are a dime a dozen in the movies, something the author seems to ignore or not understand. The movie version of Hammond, humanized and likable but clearly flawed and responsible for what happens, is far more interesting to me.
CGI tools have gotten better over the last 27 years and there’s been some truly stunning stuff big (LOTR) and small (the Winklevoss twins). But this is still my favourite CGI shot, one which stuns me everytime I see it (22 times so far on a big screen) and can’t be done justice with a crappy gif.
(Though this isn’t too shabby either)
Caused one of the greatest grins on my face ever when I saw that for the first time – yes. We were all rooting for the T-Rex. It’s cute…but only just cute enough.
The film definitely earns that triumphant, showy moment.
She makes such an impression that we sit through almost the entirety of Jurassic World so the Star can make her appearance for the big fight.
The banner coming down, just a perfect touch.
Watching that over and over again drives home how fucking brilliant that little camera move up and down with the foot is to make you “feel” the weight of it without even noticing it happens.
Definitely. And it also shows how much thought and planning went into those CGI shots – because they had to – which is one of the reasons I think it holds up against modern stuff where it’s sometimes a quick fix or a tool that can just be applied almost automatically.
I thought that shot was animatronic, which is why it was nighttime and raining, to help hide the mechanisms. No?
That shot’s CGI but the scene is a mixture of the full(ish) sized animatronic and CGI. The latter mostly for the full body or walking/running shots.
I started watching this a little while back and, while I can’t really argue with all the glowing praise it gets, I think it’s flaws become a lot more apparent when you’re no longer a starry-eyed kid utterly in love with dinosaurs like I was when I was eleven and it was my favourite film of all time. When I watched it again, there was an element of “when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!” in the first act which kind of lingers throughout all the bits of the film that don’t have dinosaurs in them — though, to give credit where it’s due, the bits that do have dinosaurs in them more than compensate. And yes, John Hammond could have been made at least 15% more soulless-capitalist; the movie would have benefited from more of a villain beyond just the dinosaurs themselves, and he’s the only real logical candidate. The “corporate espionage stealing-the-embryos” plotline comes closest, and you get hints of what a snake he should be from the hints that he’s underpaying Newman, but that naturally doesn’t really go anywhere after Newman gets his face eaten off. Overall, it’s somehow both a great film and just an okay one, if that makes sense. Though the movie does a very clever balancing act with Jeff Goldblum: it makes him smart, right and just likeable enough that you want to see him survive, but just obnoxious and smug enough that you don’t really mind too much that he gets the shit kicked out of him by dinosaurs several times before doing so.
The most confusing/annoying issue I have with Jurassic Park is whether Dennis Nedry is supposed to be Hammond’s son or not.17 year old me thought yes, but later life me eventually twigged he was being sarcastic with his “thanks Dad” comment.
Ha, I had the same feeling. Why else would he keep such a slovenly, sarcastic asshole around. I mean he can’t be that great of an IT guy if the 11 year old could hack his system so easily.
To be clear, she didn’t hack anything. She used it. The system had been rebooted because they couldn’t get into it. She just sat down and turned things on.
Yeah, but I think though that up until about 2000 or so, anyone good with computers was thought to be a “hacker”.
And “good with computers” included “being able to turn it on”.It was basically witchcraft.
The fact that she would know a UNIX system better than a pro developer AND figure out how to navigate the park’s infrastructure on the first try was pretty damn annoying.
Worst part of the movie to me, it made me roll my eyes when I saw it in theaters.
As did the suggestion that this girl was a hacker. GMAFB.
All while her brother stood around doing nothing when he could have easily grabbed the shotgun…
Just re-watched this and noticed it for the first time. He’s not doing anything else!
I’m near certain he’s just being sarcastic.
Me too…..now.
For years though I was convinced he was Hammond’s son and that for unknown reasons couldn’t be bothered to see his kids who were visiting at the time.Hey sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop with me 😀
He’s not his son. “Thanks, Dad” was him being sarcastic after getting a paternalistic lecture.
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I guess I’m slightly internet famous now, nice crowd judging by the replies.
What’s funny about that is that in the book, Hammond was an amoral capitalist who just wanted to make the park exclusive to only the wealthy. He also ends up being eaten alive.Also Book!Ian Malcom was basically just Crichton’s author-insert who was there to get badly wounded, go off on a book-halting monologue about Crichton’s views, and than die.Also, as an aside, Crichton went on to become a climate change denier…
Disclosure was where Chrichton became the Scott Adams of bestselling authors.
Him writing Disclosure kind of explains why he got got divorced multiple times…Also, remember in Next where he wrote one of the critics of State of Fear (aka Crichton’s collection of lectures about why climate change isn’t real disguised as a novel.) as a pedophile with a tiny penis?
I just remember that in State of Fear he had the Obviously-Martin-Sheen character literally devoured by cannibals. Ho ho ho, take that, liberals!
What a piece of shit that book was. (edit: I still think the book Jurassic Park was absolutely fantastic, though. Maybe all that ER time/money broke his ability to think and write.)
Much like how Dan Simmons turned into the Alex Jones of fiction writers after Flashback.
Before “Disclosure” was “Rising Sun” — in which the Japanese are presented as scheming monsters working to undermine America. As opposed to people just trying to be successful and happening to succeed better than the US at the time. And of course Japan’s time at the top was short lived as they were dethroned first by the South Koreans and then the Chinese. Given “Rising Sun” and “Disclosure”, I’m not quite understanding why people were surprised by “State of Fear”.
I just wish they got Richard’s brother to do the commentary that plays on the tour in the cars instead of Richard Kiley. That would’ve been perfect.
The use of Richard Kiley was a deliberate dig/tribute to Disney.
That, and in the book they have Richard Kiley doing the narration, too.
Crichton had a habit of unsubtly inserting his opinions into everything he wrote. In The Terminal Man, he stops the plot for a page or two so he can go on a rant about how forcing children to go to school is a form of mind control just like sticking electrodes in somebody’s brain to stimulate certain feelings. A reporter who disagrees is portrayed as smug and naive.
This is on my list of “the film was better than the book” for a number of reasons, but foremost would be the kids. Crichton clearly hated kids, and the kids in the book are the worst I’ve ever encountered in any work of fiction. Yes, worse than all the non-Charlies in the Chocolate Factory.
I dunno, I only saw this for the first time a couple years ago as a 30-something-year-old and I thought it was very good. Maybe not quite as magical as it would have been as a kid, but it more than met my expectations. (For comparison, I also only saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark for the first time a few years ago and thought it didn’t really live up to its reputation.)
Given how ubiquitous a trope “evil soulless capitalist” is these days, I appreciate that Hammond doesn’t go too far in that direction. I do think the subplot about him underpaying Newman is a little silly, considering Newman’s salary is probably less than 0.1% of the park’s annual budget.
The opening with its four or five separate prologues is a little bit impressive for how efficiently Spielberg stages and shoots the dialog (the scene with Neill, Fern, and Attenborough in Montana is just three or four very long shots from different angles – it’s remarkable as a piece of blockbuster filmmaking). But there’s a very clear distinction between the “good stuff” (or, everything that happens after the tyrannosaurus escapes) and everything that comes before. There also isn’t much of an ending – once the characters escape the last chase, it pretty much goes straight to credits .
My take on Hammond was that he was so used to things going the way he wanted that it never occurred to him Jurassic Park would not be the same. He could afford to be a kindly grandfather figure who wanted kids to experience the wonders of the park, sort of like brutal financiers who become philanthropists once they’re worth billions. What made no sense was that he “spared no expense” on anything EXCEPT the one guy at the center of the park’s technological controls. That there would not have been a full technology team, failsafes, etc. around the programming that runs the entire place would simply not happen. Especially once Nedry proved to be such a pain in his ass.And I won’t lie, the kids bugged the hell out of me.
That entire T. rex scene, where the vehicles get attacked, is a bloody marvel in every way. There’s the beautiful visual shorthand of seeing the tethered goat (as a reminder it’s there – Chekhov’s goat? – and as a cue to the audience as to where the vehicles have stopped), the first, ominous ‘boom’ of the footstep followed by an excruciatingly long pause until the next one, the genius bit with the ripples in the glass of water, and then that wonderful shot of the T. rex’s claw draped casually over the fence; the one that’s supposed to be electrified, as the sign under its claw warns, but clearly isn’t, as we the audience might suspect but the characters certainly don’t. And the scene where’s it’s looking in the window, and the beam of the flashlight hits its eye and its pupil contracts: terrifying. Such a little thing, and so, so scary.I saw this in the cinema when it came out, and had no idea what to expect. I knew some of the work of Dickie Attenborough, and remembered Sam Neill as being really good in My Beautiful Career, but the actor I was really there to see was Bob Peck, whom I’d loved since his amazing turns in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby and the British TV series Edge of Darkness. Apparently Spielberg had seen him in the latter as well, and wanted to work with him (I think in Empire of the Sun), but the timing didn’t work out until Jurassic Park. He was very good as Muldoon; it’s just a shame that (spoiler) the character survives in the novel but snuffs it in the film. (Also, sadly, Peck died – far too young at 53 – in 1999).
Yeah, Bob Peck may not have been in many things, but at least in Britain he was certainly a high-profile actor just for his role in Edge of Darkness, which at the time was often cited as a candidate for the best TV show ever (and still should be! It’s amazing!)He wasn’t exactly a Leo DiCaprio bit of casting… but he was probably the equivalent of casting, let’s say, Idris Elba today.
The T-Rex attack remains one of my favorite sequences in movie-dom. Just a perfect buildup, not just in that immediate scene, but everything in that movie had led to this point and it was this glorious, cathartic, terrifying, thrill. I thought my heart was going to explode out of my chest the first time I saw it.
The “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” shot of the t-rex is SUCH a great touch, even if it is a Far Side homage (or rip-off, but I’ll go with homage)
Same. I was 13 when this movie came out, and I saw it in the theater with my best friend. No parents. We were both typical ‘80s kids who’s parents let us watch whatever horrific slasher movies we wanted, so we were pretty desensitized. I can still remember how terrified we both were by that stupid simple glass of water, and the ominous “BOOM” of T-Rex footfalls in the background. Even as a 40 year old adult, that scene still gives me the shivers. ESPECIALLY the version where Malcolm is stuck in the back of the Jeep watching the puddle, and is completely on his own.
At this point you’re bored because no dinosaurs. Then it makes you realize that’s a good thing.
I think I’d seen Jurassic Park a good 5 times as a kid, then fast forward maybe 10 years when it was re-released and I went to the theater for the 3D anniversary edition for a bit of a lark. Everyone in the cinema was chatty and bubbly (presumably because most had seen it before) but when the T-Rex scene kicked into gear they were dead silent. Even after all those viewings it still has the shock and awe to be legitimately terrifying.
I saw Jurassic Park in the theater. The T-Rex escape scene had me completely immersed. I can still see that foot sinking into the mud in my mind. That one touch captures it all: everyone is fucked.
Muldoon was my favorite character as a kid. SHOOT HER! SHOOT HER!
Fun fact: which maybe lots of people already know. Spielberg wanted Dickie Attenborough to play Henry Jones Snr in The Last Crusade, but scheduling got in the way.
It would have been interesting to see what accent he’d used in that, as his Scottish one in Jurassic Park is only marginally better than Harrison Ford’s one in Last Crusade.
…Bob Peck, whom I’d loved since his amazing turns in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby…I watch NicNic every Christmas Day and Peck’s Mulberry Hawk/John Browdie double shot is one of my top-three favorite performances in 8.5 hours of brilliant performances. And of course, David Threlfall as Smike makes me cry like a tired toddler every time. Every. Fucking. Time.
I know that almost all the actors in NN play multiple parts, but I think in terms of playing major roles who couldn’t be more contrasting, Peck as the gentle giant John Browdie and the villainous Mulberry Hawk is the best (although Suzanne Bertish as Fanny Squeers/Miss Snevillicci/Peg Sliderskew is pretty damn close).I taped the original production when it aired on a Canadian specialty channel back in 1983, and watched it over and over. In 1986, when the RSC mounted a new production, I was watching Entertainment Tonight (when it was still a fairly serious entertainment news show), and they said it was coming to Los Angeles. I lived in Vancouver, and was in my early 20s, and said ‘Wow, it would be so great to see it.’ My dad, who was watching with me and knew how much I loved the show, said ‘Go; you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t.’ So I booked the trip, phoned the box office in LA to get a ticket (when asked what price ticket I wanted – I think the best seat was $100 – I said ‘I’m flying from Vancouver to see this, I want to be on the stage’), and flew to LA for three nights.
Dad was right – I’d still be regretting it if I hadn’t gone.
I saw the ‘86 production, as well—I lived in Philly at the time and I drove up to New York for the day (which was a production in and of itself). What an unforgettable experience. And you’re right about Fanny Squeers/Miss Snevillicci! The other “blink and you’ll miss it” dual-casting choice that I loved was Edward Petherbridge as Newman Noggs/Hawke’s Rival. He was a most convincing fop!
Just here to note how long I laughed at “Chekhov’s goat.” I sometimes wonder how Anton would feel about how widely we’ve applied his narrative principle to pop culture.
I knew the film was something special when even my mum was raving about how amazing that scene was after our screening. The sound blew her away.
I like your commentary on how Hammond is treated more sympathetically here than in the novel, and how that situation compares to how it would probably play out in the real world now — which was sort of predicted/reflected in the sequels (especially the first), if not in any real depth. This makes it that much more fascinating to me — ESPECIALLY in our current socio-political climate where common sense and “elite” expertise alike are so consistently ignored in favor of fun and the almighty dollar — that of all the franchise’s human characters, the one who’s pretty much become the Big Good, the one who gets the most special/set apart merchandise, is Malcolm, the character so obviously set up as his antithesis/quasi-nemesis down to being clad in black to Hammond’s white. I honestly wonder if that role had been filled by a more “everyman” performer than Goldblum whether it would have landed the same way.
“The movie’s carnage only happens because Hammond won’t give a raise to his IT guy”I like the irony that the Park came crashing down because Hammond did, indeed, spare some expense.
No. No. Let’s end this fiction right here. I know it’s disproportionately championed on the internet because approximately 75% of the internet is downtrodden IT helpdeskers who get indignant when they don’t get to run their systems the way they want and can’t reconcile with the fact that their job is to make computers work for people at their job who do the actual work, not to simply give them hardware to faff about with – so they identify with Nedry. Nedry deliberately underbid. He says so in the movie. Hammond mentions Nedry’s personal money troubles – “I am sorry for your financial problems, Dennis, I truly am – but they are YOUR. PROBLEMS.” Nedry’s goal all along was to underbid to make sure he got the job, then extort more money out of Hammond when it became too late to change IT teams – which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to IT. Then when that didn’t work, Nedry sold out to Dodgson. Nedry’s 100% at fault. He shut down the systems, got his neckbeard arse killed before they could be turned back on, and that led to the disaster.
That’s a hell of a grudge you’ve got against I.T. workers. (For the record, I’m in your 25% who aren’t)And I’m not disagreeing with the fact Nedry’s the bad guy or that he underbid to get the job – though I think you’re adding your own subplot about him planning on extorting Hammond (also —neckbeard?) – but Hammond did go for the cheapest option, which was Nedry. That’s my point. Everywhere else he claimed to splash out (“The voice you’re now hearing is Richard Kiley!”) but he went for the lowest bid for I.T..That doesn’t mean he deserved what he got but it did lead to it. That’s chaos theory.
Meh, fuck the lot of them. I’ve never met an IT flunky who didn’t impede the actual work that went on at a workplace, who could never get over the fact they were their to serve the people who do the actual work. Nedry’s behaviour is perfectly in line with this.(The “we can’t fire him because we don’t know how the system works” is why they never fired the IT guy at my old work who sexually assaulted another employee.)And Hammond only would’ve gone with Nedry’s bid based on the idea that Nedry could do it – and Nedry was the one who would’ve made that promise. Nedry lied; people died.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but I think there’s a little bit of a stretch in terms of what we’re presented with on screen. I’ve never read the book, so don’t know if there’s more backstory with Nedry in that.
I finished re-reading it a couple of weeks ago – there’s not. Certainly no masterplan to extort Hammond. He also undercuts the competition with his bid so, again, Hammond goes with the cheapest option, and there’s a bit about how the workload turned out to be way more than he thought – which is hinted at in the film when he lists all the work he has to do (“You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2-million lines of code for what I bid for this job?”) – but that’s it. He wants money, someone offers it to him, he thinks he can get away with it, he does it.
You take a low bid so that leaves more money for other things.
I’d say Nedry underbids not so he can extort Hammond but because he only cares about getting the job so he can steal the embryos.
Which is the part of the movie that always made the least sense. The entire island is going to be controlled from a single nerve center, and you give the job to ONE GUY?? Not IBM?
But his people were from Cambridge! The thing that doesn’t make sense to me – and I love this film an unapologetic amount – is that everyone working on the island is heading off on leave the same day their first ever guests arrive for a vital visit. Apart from running the zoological and security aspects, they’re supposed to be there a weekend – who’s cleaning their hotel rooms? Cooking for them? That cake and jelly buffet isn’t enough! Even if it was prearranged time off for everyone bar… what, three staff (excluding Hammond), just pay them obscene overtime to stay!
yea, that… In all my years, I’ve never heard this be someone’s takeaway from the film… but I kind of love it
More thoughts:
No commentary on how this movie helped redefine what could be regarded, if not marketed, as a “family” movie? That this got the PG-13 but was a huge draw for kids anyway, followed by “Mrs. Doubtfire” at year’s end and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” the following winter, was the beginning of the end of the G/PG “family entertainment” craze the studios were on after “Home Alone” and the Disney animation revival, leading us towards an era where violent superhero movies are the default live-action “family” titles and even Disney and Pixar animations don’t want G ratings anymore.
I first saw this film on its second weekend in theaters in a packed house. All the dinosaur setpieces went over like gangbusters, but there was also no denying that Goldblum was the MVP among the actors. I think the line that got the biggest laugh was “Remind me to thank John for a lovely weekend”, but pretty much everything that was meant to get a laugh got one.
Actually now that I think of it, I was probably making a Spielberg face when it was my turn to get a picture taken with Goldblum at Wizard World Chicago last year….(helped by the fact that he’s substantially taller than I am, or for that matter than most of the people there).
Spielberg used his influence on BBFC and stopped the film from getting a 12 rating in UK. Instead we got some extra blurb about it not being suitable for children under 8, but the film was still given a PG rating.It’s that sort of power that saw him become a Knight of the British Empire, even if he can’t technically call himself ‘Sir Steven Spielberg’.
The same with the even more grim The Lost World and (though not Spielberg) Fellowship of the Ring (with The Two Towers going so far over PG as to be one of the primary reasons the 12A exists). I can’t think of any others that had the special “Might not be suitable for those under 8 or of a nervous disposition” warning.
Ooh, I remember news articles about parents’ groups complaining the movie was too scary, and quotes from kids whose asshole parents wouldn’t even let them buy the toy tie-ins, let alone see the movie.
I don’t think that the boom of G-rated kid-pandering blockbusters was long enough that Jurassic Park’s role in ending them was all that revolutionary. 1989’s Batman was marketed as a family film, and it had characters saying “shit”.
In the UK, Batman was the film for which the 12-rating was created.
I feel like Batman (1989) was the real PG-13 innovator and of course Spielberg was already heading in that direction when he made stuff like Temple of Doom which led to the invention of the rating in the first place.
“Batman” was most certainly a step in that direction, I’ll agree — but first there was the “kid empowerment” movie push, and then came 1992 and “Batman Returns” getting in a whole lot of PR trouble for having so much of its marketing being aimed at kids in light of the content. My mom had had no trouble with Batman ‘89, but she was appalled by “Returns” when she took us to see it. “Returns” did well enough at the box office in the end, but there was a sense that audiences had rejected it after the initial week or two, and everyone had been reminded of why PG-13 came about in the first place.
There were debates and complaints about “Jurassic Park”’s appropriateness for children — Roger Ebert noted that “Last Action Hero”, which was also a PG-13 but marketed as relatively family-friendly, was milder (even though, for starters, a major plot point involves a child’s death) — but that movie was such an audience steamroller, not putting off people the way “Temple of Doom” or “Batman Returns” did, that they ended up relatively moot, and the rating’s initial strength really started to crumble.
Great point about what was considered family entertainment then versus now.
I was 8 when this and Mrs. Doubtfire came out, and there was no chance in hell my parents were letting me see either one. (In fact, rather embarrassingly, I didn’t see Jurassic Park start to finish until 2007. I’ve since seen it about 70 times.) While there are certainly things that a pre-teen wouldn’t understand watching those movies, it all seems rather quaint.
I’ve been thinking about this recently as it relates to The Simpsons, which I was also not allowed to watch as a kid, and have been doing a deep dive into lately on Disney Plus. Given how controversial The Simpsons was in the 90s among certain demographics, it’s almost hard to believe that Disney is now marketing it as one of their properties so heavily. I don’t have an overarching point here, I just find it all kind of interesting.
I agree how weird it is that Disney+ (rather than Hulu) took on “The Simpsons” as a streaming title given its reputation at its height — we kids were allowed to watch it but it was borderline — but again, most of its content is pretty much standard-issue “family” fare now in a world of MCU and DC movies.
If there is a major difference between “Jurassic Park” and today’s PG-13 blockbusters (even the latter entries in that franchise) it’s that actually playing action setpieces for genuine terror seems to be out of fashion. It’s hard to build real suspense in franchises where principal characters are pretty much guaranteed to NOT die until 2 or 3 entries in, and sometimes not even then.
we kids were allowed to watch it but it was borderlineOne overarching thought as I watch the classic seasons now as a 34 year old: I don’t blame my parents for not letting me watch it. I would not have gotten the humor and probably would’ve repeated stuff not understanding what it meant at inopportune times.
Watching it now is like taking a class on the origins of modern comedy.
I think that’s a good point. Most of JP isn’t horror, but the bits that are, really are played as horror – with both fear (T-Rex when they’re in the car!) and disgust (severed limbs falling on people!). Which makes the moments of relief more powerful.While horror itself is probably as popular as ever as a genre, mainstream film, and mostly TV, seems all to be much ‘safer’: less serious danger, danger laughed off more, and much less psychological trauma.
There was a lot of nervous “really just a horror movie” talk at the time from people who were reluctant to take their kids to a horror movie, but they all ended up taking them.
My classmates and I mostly didn’t get to see it in cinemas – we didn’t go to the cinema much at all, given that there wasn’t one in our town, and the one in the nearby town was only a couple of screens – but I was allowed to get the VHS……which every kid who came to my house begged to watch!
…but I didn’t let them because it was way too scary for me.
There’s a generational difference that’s probably underlooked. I was the youngest kid in a big family raised by Boomers, and I remember watching Ghostbusters and the Indiana Jones movies in kindergarten. Jurassic Park came out when I was 10 and was way more kid friendly than either of those. My friend who were the oldest members of their families and thus had parents 10 or 20 years younger than mine often had more restrictions on their media intake. One of my brothers has a really wide age spread among his kids, and it’s really interesting because his oldest daughter was raised with a similarly laissez faire attitude to me, but his other kids (who are about 10 years younger) aren’t allowed to watch anything more violent than Star Wars.
Lost World is almost as good as Jurrasic Park. Obviously JP is just an untouchable classic, but LW had more interesting characters, better drama, and a better sense of the horror element in these creatures. The looming dread is palpable. Pete Postlethwaite was perfect as the John Hustonesque big game hunter. Jeff Goldblum playing off Julianne Moore was entertaining. The chase to the coast with the “Moveable Feast” was terrifying. And regardless of whether you agree, I stand firm that it is 100x better than Jurassic World and its sad offspring will ever be.
I think you are the 1st person I have seen that thought Lost World was better. Personally I think aside from the effects, everything about that movie is done much worse. I don’t find any of the characters likable and Spielberg was clearly not interested in making it the same as he was for JP. I think the idea behind Jurassic World is better, but the script and execution really let it down.
I said “almost as good”, but my other points stand. Including that the very idea of JW is money-grubbing dreck, and the execution (and casting) seal the deal.
I think the idea of having the park open was a great idea, I just wish it was explored more, if it was structured closer to JP there could have been more time spent with the active park before the chaos ensued. It really needed a more experienced director and a few more rewrites to excise alot of the garbage, like the kids family drama.
Eh, not such a compelling idea as to warrant a revival of the franchise. It is just a rehash of the “hubris of man” trope that was covered quite nicely with the first trilogy. (and yes even JP3 was better than JW) But now we even bigger, better, mutant dinos! And Crisp Rat is a cool motorcycle raptor whisperer. Yawn.Oh, and I forgot, I will concede that the ending of the Lost World was sucky. JP is a self-contained conceit, and bringing dinos to the mainland is just unnecessary.
It also has that horrible scene with the pterodactyls and the British lady whose only sin was trying to look after two shitty kids who are actively trying to get away from her.
It’s funny how much Spielberg strangles the story to head in the direction of San Diego so he can do what clearly really interests him (doing a Godzilla riff), and then when he gets there he almost immediately loses interest in it. You can kinda feel him having an identity crisis about doing big violent blockbusters – something he’d gain clarity and focus on after 9/11, when he started banging out Minority Report and War of the Worlds.
Outside of Indiana Jones, Speilberg just didn’t make sequels, so that probably explains at least some of The Lost World’s issues. It can be easy to lose interest when your characters are dino chow, rather than an whip-weilding heroes.
Why did Steven make JP2?? He has said he refused to direct Jaws 2 because sequels suck. He only make Indy 2 because George Lucas pestered him into it. I wonder why he made JP2. It is Spielberg’s only outright boring movie.
I’m the second, then.
Lost World borrows too much from King Kong. It’s almost a remake, but with dinosaurs instead of apes.
Hmmm, well arguably JP is even closer, in that it mirrors the attempt to civilize the monsters, and sell them as entertainment.Now that I think of it, LW is actually like the first half of King Kong, dealing with surviving the savagery of the Island. And then JP represents the second half.
In the second half there’s also the intent to bring dinosaurs to a San Diego park, similar to bringing Kong to New York.
True.
I think The Lost World’s problem is that it seems to think that letting the dinosaurs continue to live on Isla Somar in their “natural habitat” is a good thing when they’re an ecological disaster waiting to happen. Hell, the moment the dinosaurs escaped pretty much doomed Isla Nubar and Isla Somar’s unique ecosystems and it’s almost certain that, if left to their own devices, the dinosaurs would all die anyway from too many predators and not enough prey.
Well perhaps that is as it should be. After all, there is never going to be any “natural” sustainable way for these creatures to live.
Oh, and by no means do I think LW made any logical sense. It was just a well told yarn, until the ending part fucked it up. But then the same can be said for JP, albeit somewhat better.
I wish they’d used the idea from the books where juvenile raptors were always getting off the island and attacking babies on the mainland. “The authorities won’t tell you,” Guitierrez said finally. “Because they are afraid, and perhaps also resentful of you, for what you have done. But something very peculiar is happening in the rural regions.” “Biting the babies?” “No, thankfully, that has stopped. But something else. This spring, in the Ismaloya section, which is to the north, some unknown animals ate the crops in a very peculiar manner. They moved each day, in a straight line-almost as straight as an arrow-from the coast, into the mountains, into the jungle.” Grant sat upright. “Like a migration,” Guitierrez said. “Wouldn’t you say?” “What crops?” Grant said. “Well, it was odd. They would only eat agama beans and soy, and sometimes chickens.” Grant said, “Foods rich in lysine. What happened to these animals?” “Presumably,” Guitierrez said, “they entered the jungles. In any case, they have not been found. Of course, it would be difficult to search for them in the jungle. A search party could spend years in the Ismaloya mountains, with nothing to show for it.” “And we are being kept here because . . .” Guitierrez shrugged. “The government is worried. Perhaps there are more animals. More trouble. They are feeling cautious.”Perfect setup for a riff on Predator.
There’s also the problem introduced by the lysiene deficiency. Wu explains that outright – the dinosaurs can’t survive without their makers.Yes they adapted to breed, but nothing indicated they overcame the lysiene deficiency. All the dinos on Isla Sorna should be dead.
I don’t think they were super upfront with it, but I always took the failure to die from lysine deficiency as the whole “Life Finds A Way” similar to the breeding. Which is the reason explicitly named in the novel TLW re: Site B still being a thing – Crichton has passages about locals in Costa Rica noticing new animals eating soy beans + chickens + other lysine rich foods and how genetic diseases may have been killing the dinosaurs off prematurely so none reach full adulthood, resulting in carnivores being sustained off the carcasses of herbivores that only ate the lysine rich foods they foraged on the island.
And Jurassic Park III?
A entertaining enough toss off, that should never have been made. But was still better than Jurassic World.
The kick the can bit at the beginning and Pterodactyls made me like JP3 more that JP2/Lost World.
The Lost World has two great set pieces – the people on the glass and the raptors in the grass. There’s a lot of other stuff to like as well – Postlethwaite, the nastiness of the compy scene (especially the lip biting), Williams’ main theme… I even like the ending. Its silly but it’s big, fun B-movie silly (which is Jurassic Park III all over – and that’s not a knock on it).
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Ah ah ah. You didn’t say the magic word.
Hmmm. Is it “I’m tired of these mother fucking dinosaurs, on this mother fucking island”?
One thing that really turns me off from the Lost World is the cinematography. Kaminski works well with Spielberg in a certain context but in summer blockbusters ,no. I hated the look of Crystal Skull too.
I can see that – some of his work is great (A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can) and I don’t mind The Lost World’s look as it fits the darker, more grungy look of Site B (but can understand it’s not for all). But the cinematography of Crystal Skull is garish and unnatural compared to the original trilogy.
I don’t hate Jurassic World, but it’s also very clear in my head that it’s completely junk food. It’s like a $150 million Twinkie.
I really wanted to like it as a twinkie, but I couldn’t even enjoy it on that level. I blame Chrisp Ratt. 😜
Yeah, I’ve never regretted the time I spent eating a Twinkie.
That’s a big Twinkie.
What a glory it would’ve been to have seen Muldoon and Tembo share a scene in The Lost World. They’re both from Kenya; they would’ve moved in the same circles. One the gamekeeper, the other the hunter. Having said that, enjoy this deleted scene introducing Tembo:
Thank you, I hadn’t seen it. Ha. It looks like it was cut from an Indiana Jones movie set in present day.Now you’ve got me pining for a whole movie centred around Muldoon and Tembo.
I can sorta see why they cut it. I don’t think him kicking that Ugly American’s arse really added anything to his character – I don’t really think we need Tembo to be a brawler or even the sorta “I am a gentleman, sir!” type, and the poling really is out of tone (funny, but too goofy). But the rest of the introduction is great.
Yeah the silliness of the poling takes the scant utility of the scene, and just kills it.
I get the feeling this was some B-unit direction. And I can see how the whole thing would take away from the pacing of the film, since while Tembo is a fantastic character, he’s not really a main character, and no one else in the film gets an introduction like that. Then again, re the poling: they did have that girl defeat a raptor with the power of gymnastics, soooo…
“Then again, re the poling: they did have that girl defeat a raptor with the power of gymnastics, soooo…”Ha! Touché.
I don’t know; there’s no better example of a filmmaker wanting to make two completely different movies than when Spielberg tacks a second, forty-minute movie on the end of The Lost World.
Yes as I said elsewhere, I actually forgot about the sucky, silly ending. Ah well, if you stop watching once they leave the island, it’s still kinda cool though. 😜
I like The Lost World more than most (Stegosaurus!) but I like them all. The concept of animal rights people going to protect the dinos is certainly an idea both this and Fallen Kingdom attempted, though I still think there’s more that can be done with that in both movies. Nevertheless, I’ll take the opening scene, with the rich family on the beach, over any of the other opening scenes in the franchise.
Yesss, that scene is so brutal! Makes me cringe everytime. As a parent I’m always like, who the fuck let’s your 10 year old just wander around a strange tropical island unaccompanied. And you have fucking butlers that could do it for you!
My standard take: Jurassic Park is the better movie, Lost World is the better use of dinosaur carnage. It is incredibly cruel (suck it, Toby Ziegler) and nasty, a horror movie where the original is a monster/adventure movie. It’s a bit bloated but it still rules. Spielberg has a sadistic streak and it is let loose here.
You nailed it! Letting his freaky flag fly like he did in Jaws & War of the Worlds.ETA I know he had to bite it, but I was always kind of sad that Toby Z didn’t survive.
I actually like “Lost World” better in some ways.
I think Moore works better than Dern as the female lead, Vanessa Lee Chester is much better as The Kid, and I dug Postlethwaite’s vibe as the jaded hunter.
Yup. Yup. And double yup.
Oh, also: I know a lot of people think the San Diego sequence feels tacked on, but it was EXACTLY the kind of thing the first one left me wanting. 🙂
TLW has two T-Rexes – plus a junior bonus – and one of them stomps around a place that isn’t Hawaii, so advantage TLW.
You can never have too many T-Rexes!
Lost World doesn’t work for me at all. It reads as “Jurassic Park, but more of this stuff.” That stuff being chase scenes, people being eaten, and flat characters.The book at least saves itself by putting things squarely from Malcolm’s perspective. The movie is Spielberg going, “Yeah but how about we make Ian’s daughter do dino gymnastics?”The Site B concept also doesn’t work for me. It’s indicated that Isla Nublar does everything, from the park to the production side. It doesn’t make sense why they’d make another site for production only, have no guardrails on the dinosaurs, and leave behind million dollar genetic creations after the park’s closure.
But if the the JP characters were thin paper, the LW characters were at least corrugated cardboard. 😜 I leave all sense of story logic behind when I sit down for a guilty pleasure watch of LW. Even crappy Summer Blockbuster Spielberg is better than 90% of the competition.
Part of the problem is the source material: Jurassic Park the book is (ahem) worlds better than its schlocky-ass sequel.
Another take: It’s Spielberg’s worst movie. (This opinion is held by someone who hasn’t seen 1941.)
Actually I like 1941 for the watching a dumpster fire thrill of it.
But have you seen Always? Because that is far and away his worst. (For what it’s worth, I rewatched all of Spielberg’s films during lockdown and ranked them as I went – JP was first for me, TLW was 20/32)
Negatory. JP is first, over Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, SL?Heck, I’d rank The Color Purple higher than JP. Duel and AI too.
What about numbers 2-19 and 21-31? This is about a month late, but don’t leave us hanging Doc.
I agree – I watched LW recently and had forgotten how scary it is – I think it’s actually scarier than the original, to be honest.
I’d actually put War of the Worlds in about the same league – it has a lot of the same virtues and most of the same flaws. It’s a two hour chase with thin characters and a weak ending. Jurassic Park is better executed and much more “tactile,” if that makes sense, but it’s pretty thin.
Good comparison. And I like both quite a bit. With War of the Worlds I like it’s ragged structure, like its being made on the fly in the middle of a chaotic war zone. You might say it’s a flaw, but Spielberg is pretty canny, so I wouldn’t doubt if it was a conscious choice.
I never got the craze around this film. I had been looking forward to it and was underwhelmed. Probably because I was expecting a different tone. I had scenes from the novel in my head, but also its general atmosphere and tension. I understand in retrospect that there were still, at the time, technical limitations, and a reason for showing fewer dinosaurs. I see also how and why Spielberg decided to make it more of a movie for kids. But for me, this tone (and the gentle t-rex deus ex machina at the end) meant I wasn’t watching the audiovisual version of the novel that had thrilled me. It felt diluted. Blunted.The consequence is, I feel baffled by how important this film is to people. It felt like a rock having been replaced by a cushion, yet it seemed to have impacted the public. I’m almost jealous of the emotions people experience when re-hearing the soundtrack, and perplexed when they evoke the thrills. It’s as if they described the novel, or as if they described the movie that I was expecting to see. It’s charming, in a sense (because they are charmed and it’s a sweet emotion to behold), but I feel disconnected.I think it’s the only movie that gives me this odd impression. There are some very popular films that I happen to dislike (from Matrix to Avatar) but it’s different. I’m less confused by those qualitative divergences. In Jurassic Park’s case, it’s more quantitative. I get and share the appeal, but, really, was there enough of it on the screen ? It’s like I had read the menu, expected more on the plate, and am still surprised and vaguely disappointed by the impact of this bias, as people enthousiastically relish it around me and call it marvellous memories.
I love this movie. I was about 4 when it came out in Australia. I was at the height of my dinosaur-mania and bitterly disappointed when Dad took my older siblings to see it but not me. He made it up to me though, when I was sick a year later I crawled out of bed to find he’d rented the video for me and we all watched it together eating Malteasers and ice cream. Every time I see it I’m amazed at how well it holds up. The only thing that’s really aged all of the Linux-centred dialogue.
The last scene with the T-Rex is so brilliant you can’t even be mad that the giant dinosaur whose very footsteps caused ripples in puddles earlier in the film somehow managed to sneak into the building without anyone noticing. Seriously, what door did it fit through?! Do they have an employee/dinosaur-only entrance?!Okay, so you can get a little mad. I will also never forgive the film for conflating velociraptors with my favourite dinosaur: deinonychus. Other than that, it’s a perfect film.
Sleepless in Seattle: Gender flip the main characters and think about how creepy the movie could have been if a Male reporter was conspiring with a little girl to stalk her mother.
It’s plenty off-putting without the gender flip. No idea why that movie was popular.
It’s almost as if creepiness isn’t based on behaviour, but merely on gendere…
I have a hard time understanding people who like SiS and “You’ve Got Mail” and think they’re romantic.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1993 Post:The Numbers1 Jurassic Park, Universal, $338,700,7402 The Fugitive, Warner Bros., $183,875,7603 The Firm, Paramount Pictures, $158,340,8924 Sleepless In Seattle, TriStar Pictures, $126,680,8845 Mrs. Doubtfire, 20th Century Fox, $122,765,0846 Indecent Proposal, Paramount Pictures, $106,614,0597 In The Line Of Fire, Columbia, $102,243,8748 Aladdin, Disney, $93,790,423 9 Cliffhanger, TriStar Pictures, $84,049,21110 Free Willy, Warner Bros., $77,698,625Wikipedia1 Jurassic Park, Universal, $914,691,1182 Mrs. Doubtfire, 20th Century Fox, $441,286,1953 The Fugitive, Warner Bros., $368,875,7604 Schindler’s List, Universal, $321,306,3055 The Firm, Paramount Pictures, $270,248,3676 Indecent Proposal, Paramount Pictures, $266,614,0597 Cliffhanger, TriStar Pictures, $255,000,2118 Sleepless In Seattle, TriStar Pictures, $227,799,8849 Philadelphia, TriStar Pictures, $206,678,44010 The Pelican Brief, Warner Bros., $195,268,056
If there was a list of Most Discussed Movie Scenarios, Indecent Proposal would be top 10.
I’m an unabashed In the Line of Fire fan. Great cast, excellent performances, Malkovich going apeshit, all-killer/no filler pace. Also GTFU with that Fugitive ‘dad movie’ bullshit. I may be a dad now, but I sure wasn’t when I saw it in theaters. That movie kicks ass..
Not a sequel to be seen.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
This list is all sorts of fucked up and wrong. There is no world in which Back to the Future is worse than The Graduate or the original Rocky.
I’m surprised there was no mention of Last Action Hero in this article. Jurassic Park really caused a resurgence of big blockbusters where the movie was the star not the actor. I can see why many analyst predicting Last Action Hero winning out over Jurassic Park.
Even though it came out in 1993, Jurassic Park feels like the last great ‘80’s blockbuster. It’s as theme-y as John Williams would be until he got back into the Star Wars universe. It’s as conventionally roller coaster-y as Spielberg would ever be after that. And we haven’t really had the ‘round the block lines that put the “block” in “blockbuster” ever since (although the rise of online ticketing has done a lot to kill that). Coming as it did after a few creative down years for Spielberg (after The Color Purple snub, his only real creative success came when he went back to the Indy well in 1989), 1993 was also a pivotal year in Spielberg’s career, the blockbuster king not only reminding us he could still roar, but that maybe he was ready to stop chasing that particular whale.
My daughter loves this movie to an absurd degree. She first saw it when she was young and dino-mad, so like, 7-8 years old. She was not scared, she was thrilled. I was thrilled as well, getting to watch it with her. And it truly held up. The story movies like a shot, the dinosaurs are truly impressive even now, and the suspenseful scenes are still nailbiters, no matter how many times I have seen it. I tried to show her the second one, a little later, and it was just too much for her, which I thought was interesting. Where in JP she was thrilled, in the Lost World she was just scared. She did eventually finish all of them, and they remain her favorite movies, and she is extremely difficult to please.
(I have to take umbrage with the classification of The Fugitive as “dad-movie”, though. I was 17 when it came out, and a girl, and it was my absolute favorite for many years. I still have the entire thing memorized. That’s another one that has aged extremely well. Still great fun.)
The Fugitive was one of the 1st movies I ever got when I joined Columbia House. I wore out the VHS from watching it, it’s one of those movies that ever bit of craft came together, good performances, great music and pacing.
My only issue with The Fugitive is that they have to undercut the conflict between Ford and Jones in the third act – most of the movie runs on the idea that Jones doesn’t care whether Ford is innocent or not, and then he has a burst of conscience at the most opportune moment for the plot. It’s still a really fun movie, don’t get me wrong, and a weak third act is basically par for the course in Hollywood. But it still bums me out whenever I watch that movie.
It’s not like he lets Ford escape. He still does his job and brings Ford in, while believing fully that he was framed.
Very much seconded. Whenever The Fugitive is on, I find it hard not to keep watching to the end. Other than the third act being a bit anticlimactic, it’s a film with fantastic pacing, charismatic acting, a few great lines, and basically just a long series of the sort of set-pieces that could be the finale of most other films. It’s not very deep or meaningful or important, but it’s a real masterclass in suspenseful popcorn filmmaking.Oh, and unfortunately its other flaw is having That Evil Guy Who Always Plays the Evil Guy play the Evil Guy…
My kids also love Jurassic Park/World, but particularly my now-13 year old. He’s a huge Chris Pratt fan thanks to Guardians and Parks & Rec, so it was a given that he would be into JW as well. I made both my kids watch JP on Blu Ray before we went to see JW and it’s one of the few “80’s” movies I insisted they watch that they actually enjoyed. They really appreciated the nods to the original which showed up in JW.
I think I like The Fugitive more every time I see it. It’s just really good at what it does.
I first heard of this movie about a year before its release, from a 1/4-page blurb in U.S. News & World Report about the discovery of Utah raptor. The last line speculated how it might influence Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Jurassic Park, which immediately made me think, “holy fuck, Spielberg is making a dinosaur movie? How could it not kick ass?”When I later found it was based on a book by the author of Andromeda Strain, one of my favorite pre-Star Wars sci fis, that pretty much sold me. I knew going in that a PG-13 four-quadrant Spielberg blockbuster wasn’t going to include the book’s many graphic disembowelings, but I still wasn’t disappointed. The dilophosaur opening its fringe and spitting in Nedry’s face (Newman!) really got this movie rolling. I need to show it to my kids b/f it leaves Netflix next month. I don’t care if it gives them nightmares (I had nightmares about the raptors chasing me and I was twenty-fucking-one years old).
I saw it in the theater when I was 8 and the only scene that genuinely scared me was Tim on the fence. The dinosaurs eating people, that didn’t bug me at all – but knowing that they were going to turn the power on while my surrogate character was dangling 15 feet off the ground, that was simply too much to handle.
The fence is great but I feel like the raptor attack at the end somehow doesn’t get enough credit — in particular that fantastic bit where Lex is frantically trying to close the door as a raptor charges, and it turns out it’s her reflection. Great bit of misdirection there.And of course, on the scare front, Sattler in the power shed is pretty damn good as well.
To me that’s the effect of the movie. CGI raptor crashes into stainless steel kitchen counter, dents it, shit flies, raptor’s temporarily knocked senseless. Just an incredible shot.
The dino-planets aligned with the discovery of Utah-raptor. Remember, folks, velociraptors were actually only about the size of a large goose, and the raptors in the movie were scaled up to make them scarier…which everyone was calling bullshit on……and then, bam, Utahraptor.
The book’s and movie’s “velociraptors” were based on Deinonychus, which was discovered in the 1960s, not Utahraptor. Crichton and Spielberg consulted with Deinonychus’ discoverer, who said that “the Terror of Jurassic Park really is Deinonychus parading around under an assumed name”:
https://news.yale.edu/2015/06/18/yale-s-legacy-jurassic-world
It always kind of surprises me that for how much JP made at the box office, it didn’t make that much more. It was a genuine, old school, blockbuster phenomenon. EVERYONE wanted to see it. Screenings were sold out for weeks; I remember driving 30 minutes to theaters out in the sticks just to get to a screening that wasn’t sold out and get my fix. Its box office take is nothing to sneeze at, but I always thought it should have made Titanic-level money.
My friend at Blockbuster hid a VHS copy for me when it forst came out because I couldn’t get there until after 6PM. They were all out by noon he told me.
That is a GOOD FRIEND.
In another example how culturally huge this movie was, when The Weather Channel was only showing graphs and weather screens before they actually had people on it, John Williams score from Jurassic Park was music that accompanied the whole thing.
Ahh I’m late to the comments! But GOD DAMN do I love this film, and here are two small reasons why:
ECONOMY OF LOCATION: I love that the film walks through all its major locations and then flips them later for action/horror: The safety of the car becomes a deathtrap, the fence once protected but now it electrifies, the main monitor room and the JP foyer where the T-Rex enters. CHARACTERS: As much as people like to call the characters shallow I think they’re developed to just the right degree, the same way James Cameron economically developed iconic characters like Hudson and Vasquez in Aliens. Even as side characters Malcolm, Hammond, Muldoon, Nedry and Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson’s character) all get memorable lines and just enough personality to imprint themselves on your memory. I sure as hell remember them a lot more clearly than most movie characters, and I’d even wager that they have become iconic in their own way (Muldoon’s ‘Clever Girl!’, Arnold’s ‘Hold onto your butts’, Nedry’s ‘You didn’t say the magic word’)
I completely disagree with your take on Hammond. He’s interesting, multi-dimensional, and one of the rare movie villains that is basically just a villain by accident. It’s one of the things that makes Jurassic Park rich and not just a rote, predictable affair. Lots of blockbusters have mustache-twirling villains; I’d prefer to keep Hammond as someone who is just badly misguided.Not coincidentally, perhaps, I also love Spielberg’s Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’s a bit more outright evil than Hammond (okay, more than a bit). But he’s also correct when he tells Indy that they are very similar (the famous “only a nudge” speech). And he’s a genuine romantic with seemingly real feelings toward Marion, albeit kind of creepily expressed feelings. These are both two of my favorite villain characters, specifically because they aren’t just made out to be as evil as possible at every turn. But crucially, the movie doesn’t slow down its pace to enrich them. They are drawn in very economically and the movies around them never stop going. Spielberg was so good at that.
Belloq’s not evil, just amoral. He delivers his speech about them being similar not long after Indy nonchalantly shoots a guy on the street (not unreasonably, but he could have run).
I dunno. I kind of agree with your basic argument, that he’s more amoral than evil—but isn’t willingly working for a genocidal dictator evil in and of itself? He doesn’t give a shit about Hitler’s agenda but he has to realize that even if he intends to keep the Ark for himself, somehow, going to find it with a bunch of Nazi goons means there’s a high likelihood it will end up in Hitler’s hands.
Anyway, regardless of how you choose to split that particular hair, I love the character.
The movie takes place in the late 30s, right? At that point the world didn’t yet grasp just how evil Hitler was – he was just another populist with an expansionist agenda. He didn’t roll into France until 1940. But yeah, Belloq had a pretty good idea what kind of character he was dealing with and just didn’t give a shit. The Nazis were a means to an end.
Looking back at 1993 popcorn cinema, it’s interesting to note that major blockbusters contributed got two Best Supporting Actor nominations at the Oscars that year — Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive and John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire; much harder to imagine something like that now, given the greater divergence between commercial cinema and awards. And Jones even beat Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.
…..unless they’re playing Joker in a Batman movie.
I love both of those movies, but Fiennes got freaking jobbed for Schindler’s List. His portrayal of Goeth is the absolute personification of the banality of evil. He was both revolting and mesmerizing.
“The common knock on Jurassic Park is that its human characters are underdeveloped”Are they really, though? Ellie Satler IMO is absolutely a feminist icon in this film. She takes no shit when Hammond stammers about her going out when it’s dangerous because she’s a woman. Her competence, intelligence, and empathy are highly developed. Also the film purposefully switches the whole stereotype of women being motherly, by having Grant be the one taking care of the children throughout most of the movie. Just because Grant and Satler don’t necessarily have character arcs, doesn’t mean they are bland characters. IMO they are very well developed and come across as fully fleshed out human beings.
I could see the argument for the characters played by Jeff Goldblum and Wayne Knight, who are kind of caricatures. But the former works because it’s Jeff Goldblum hamming it up, and the latter works because he doesn’t overstay his welcome.
Don’t forget it’s Lex who’s the Unix geek. Unfortunately, they chose not to honour reality and didn’t have her with a 2′-long beard. I wish they kept that aspect of Grant from the book, but – in the book, he outright loves kids because kids love dinosaurs like he does. But I guess Spielberg had to put his daddy issues in again.
The characters are not “well-rounded” or whatever but they are well-sketched and then given to actors who know what they’re doing. Dern and Neill and Goldblum play exactly what they need to play.
Yes for the most part they are interesting enough characters, the series was never able to replicate that after.
It’s been a while, but in III, doesn’t Vince Vaughn casually hide a T Rex egg or something with the military folks, essentially siccing a giant death lizard on them? And it’s sort of played as clever shenanigans instead of attempted murder? At least that movie brought the aviary in.
Vince Vaughan is in Lost World.III has Sam Neill going back to the original island to save William H Macy and Tea Leoni’s stupid kid.
Yes! I don’t think they are necessarily well rounded, but they were all highly likable in their own ways. You find out everything you need about them in a very natural way. The scene with Grant and Ellie talking when they first appear on camera is fantastic. The scene in the helicopter with the dialogue between all of them is so well done that you have already established who you like and don’t like without overtly being told. But absolutely the best scene for how well sketched the characters are is when they are actually in the island about to land on the helipad. Grant trying to find a way to buckle his belt, Ellie trying to help him, Gennaro nervously putting it on, Malcom not giving a care in the world about it and smoothly buckling. It’s pure magic.
I feel Jurassic World doesn’t establish any of its characters in the same way or tries to copy the magic and doesn’t quite get it right. I’m hoping the Dominion does a better job.
Satler also has the great “Dinosaur eats Man; Woman inherits the Earth” speech.
Followed by a fantastic double slow-head-turn from Malcolm and Grant to stare at her.
Great point. I love this column, but the writer tends to give the male characters / actors a lot more attention that the female characters / actors. Like the column about T2. It’s disappointing, as the female characters are generally more interesting to me.
That’s true, and that’s all Spielberg and the performances. Crichton couldn’t write a well-developed character to save his life.
This was my biggest complaint of the movie and why I’ve always been meh on it. It often resembles every other big-action spectacle type movie in that the characters were flat and relied too much on the actors charm to bring them to life. In fact, THIS IS basically just a generic big-action spectacle movie. Compare it to Jaws where Spielberg spends a large part of the movie developing both the characters involved, the town and the people who lived in the town. I also always thought that, strangely for a Spielberg movie, the kids were annoying as hell and I spent the entire movie wishing they’d be eaten
My favorite scene in the film is Satler’s disillusioning of Dr. Hammond. “You never had control! That’s the illusion!” For all of the technical wizardry and tense action scenes on display here, the film’s best scene is the one where a smart scientist has to explain to a well-meaning old man that he cannot play God, no matter how much money he has or how long he’s planned for this. I couldn’t disagree more with the criticism that this film made a mistake in making Hammond sympathetic. I actually found his portrayal in the novel pretty dull. Richard Attenborough brought humanity to a character who easily could have been obnoxious and cloying.
The characters on the page are pretty bland (even in the books) but were cast perfectly. Would Ellie Satler have made an impression with anyone other than Laura Dern in the role? We’ll never know, but she is absolutely a feminist icon and single handedly made the color combo of salmon and blue a power flex. In my mind.
I’m trying to wrap my head around Alan Grant being played by Harrison Ford and I cannot come even close to seeing it. I mean this with all respect to Sam Neill, but Grant is way too much of a shlubby dork to make Ford feel natural.
But I can imagine Ford yelling at Newman “You switched the samples!”
“WHERE’S MY FAMIL- er, YOU SWITCHED THE SAMPLES”.
In the book, Grant is described as a “gruff, barrel-chested man of 50.” As you say, love Sam Neill but that’s not really his physique.Related, when I read the book as an early teen, I was like “What? The hero of the book is MY DAD’S AGE?”Now, as a father myself slowing decaying into schlubby dorkdom, I think to myself, “It’s ok, you’re still younger than Grant and he got to be an action hero!”Time makes fools of us all.
I could be wrong but I think book Grant is a composite of Jack Horner and Robert T. Bakker. There aren’t many celebrities in the paleontologist world but Horner and Bakker were two of the few who reached some fame, since they used to appear in Discovery Channel docs (Back when Discovery actually had shows about science).
Dr. Robert Burke from The Lost World was definitely Bakker.What I think is cute as fuck is that Bakker and Horner have a major nerd-fight going on, in a Farnsworth-v-Wernstrom way, where Horner believes the T-rex was a scavenger, but Bakker swears it was a hunter.When Burke got eaten in The Lost World apparently Bakker loved the send-up, and sent a message to Horner saying “See? I told you T-rex was a hunter!”
Agreed. Neill had the look of someone who spent his time poking around deserts. And I never would have guessed he was that much older than Dern. You could tell there was a bit of an age gap but it never stood out as unbelievable.
I was a 27 year old man when JP came out. When Hammond revealed the dinosaurs to Grant and Sadler, I was in tears. I’d been a dinosaur nut since I was three years old, and Spielberg completely nailed the sense of awe and joy and incredulity that I know I’d experience if I were in that jeep, watching those dinosaurs living and breathing. But the bit that still reduces me to a sobbing mess, even today, is Hammond’s quiet, reverent “I’ll show you” line. Even though he’s the guy who’s been living and working with the dinosaurs for years now, they still affect him. Wow. Just wow.
Grant’s reaction to the news he has a T-Rex as well. You know in that moment that, even if that brachiosaurus was all he’d get to see, if that’s all Hammond had accomplished, it was enough to fill him will all the awe and wonder in the world. But the casual comment that there’s more..? Amazing.
Ultimately, in two hours of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are only on screen for 14 minutesI absolutely would have guessed triple that.
It shows the skill of Spielberg to visually imply the dinosaurs it makes it seem like the movie has more dinos then expected. I do miss the river raft scene from the book though. I know it was done in JP3 but I think JW missed an opportunity for an action scene with the brief scene with the kaykers going down the river.
I don’t know why it never hit me before, but this is another example of my favorite trope, when it’s gotten to the point that the heroes have no way to defeat the villain, either because they aren’t evil or their overmatched, and their only hope is that a bigger villain will take out the one threatening them for their own reasons. I call it the Addison DeWitt.
Maybe it’s because I was in my twenties when Jurassic Park came out, but I have always found the movie over-rated. Great popcorn movie? Sure. Classic? Ehh… The human characters are really thin. You can handwave that away if you want to and say it’s a monster movie. Okay. Counter-argument: Jaws. I remember coming out of Jurassic Park and wishing it were more like Jaws. Still do. I enjoy JP, but Jaws is a masterpiece. Jurassic Park pales in comparison.And those kids… I mean, I knew Spielberg wasn’t going to kill them. Whenever they were supposed to be in jeopardy the stakes dropped to zero.
Hammond got eaten alive? Wasn’t it Newman?
In the book it’s both. Nedry by the dilophosaurus, and then Hammond by the compys. If you’ve seen Lost World, think of the scene where one of the hunters wanders off to pee and gets attacked, and you have the basic idea.
Where my Cliffhanger heads at? Great movie, just-ok SEGA game.Action movies used to be so much bloodier. Even John Wick, for all its headshots and jaw dislocations is pretty dry, blood-wise. In Cliffhanger, that one henchman gets his leg slashed by those sharp climbing cleats and blood just POURS out. So fuckin gnarly.
Right here. Raise your hand if you thought Rooker’s girlfriend was really going to get dropped into the abyss in the first scene.
Aw, man. I am going to have to watch JP tonight. The shot of the T Rex at the end, with the banner falling as it roars… just thinking about it now gives me the chills the same way it did when I first saw it in 1993.
“And I would like to think that those kids made the Spielberg Face.”For what it’s worth, I recently showed my kids that scene, and only that scene (I think they’re still just slightly too young for the scarier parts in the movie, although pretty soon I’ll probably just say hell with it and show them the whole thing), and they both definitely made the Spielberg Face.
I think it’s a perfect movie and has no flaws that aren’t endearing. (I’m biased as it’s my favorite movie.)But, my one complaint is that it has pushed out all other dinosaur movies. You don’t get dinosaur movies unless they’re Jurassic Park/World. IMO there should be at least 3 big budget dinosaur movies every summer. Dinosaurs are great.
There’s a level of craft to Spielberg’s action sequences that is just astounding. Every action director (looking at you, Zack Snyder) should be planted in front of a screen and forced to watch like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
I said something similar in an article on Indiana Jones. Spielberg does a couple of things that always just work. One is that it’s not about speed. There’s rarely frenetic action-y “BANG, KERPLOW” Michael Bay-style business with Spielberg. Spielberg uses slowness and stillness as a way to ratchet up tension, rather than speed. A few times in Jurassic Park it’s by having characters climb stuff as danger looms. Climbing down the tree, climbing up the electric fence, climbing onto the T-Rex bones, it’s people trying to be fast at something that needs to be slow.
There’s also a really clear, deliberate cause-effect-reaction-cause process to his action scenes where the environment plays a role in complicating matters. Looking at the scene that ends with the hero shot of the T-Rex, our protagonists climb down the scaffolding, Raptor emerges, to avoid the Raptor they climb onto the skeletons, raptor jumps onto the skeleton, skeletons break apart and start to spin, (which, by complicating matters, is just such a great “oh fuck” moment). The pieces of skeleton start ripping free from the ceiling, dumping the protagonists to the ground below. Skeleton pieces start falling ON our protagonists, and as they recover from that the scene resets to the “we’re all fucked” moment as the cluster together while the two raptors close in from either side.
It’s just such a beautiful master-class in escalating tension, making the situation increasingly complicated in a completely logical A causes B causes C process. It should feel like a cheat when the T-Rex deus ex machina’s its way into the room, but it doesn’t.
I’m a little amused by this “unlikely sex symbol” business – at the time, Malcolm grossed out every girl I knew. The movie has aged in some funny ways – the park looks like such a piece of shit now, slowly hauling people eight at a time on the same track they’re expected to return on, and the only reason we see the T-Rex or velociraptors at all is because they broke out. But man, it was so starmaking for the T-Rex and velociraptors, that was pretty sweet.
I’ve always thought the interiors of the lodge area looked ridiculously cheap, as did the merchandise in the gift shop. Walls of Jurassic Park water bottles and other disposable crap are what you’re going to sell to people who can afford to visit that park? Disney has better merch.
Hammond insisted that the whole world should be able to enjoy the park but if that’s how he wants to do it, it’s going to have a waiting list longer than a human lifespan.
I do remember the lawyer who represented the investors saying, once he saw the dinosaurs, something along the lines of ‘yeah, yeah…we’ll have half off Tuesdays”I honestly thought that having Hammond make the claim that it would be accessible to anyone pushed him too far into naive territory. Two years after opening? Maybe. Day one? No freaking way, if you’re asking investors for hundreds of millions of dollars.
I was never really sure who made the big decisions at that park. But it clearly isn’t built for a lot of people, and the few people who get to go through are barely ever going to see anything.I know Jurassic World gets a ton of shit but one of the things I liked about it was that not only did it look like a more believable crazy-crowded tourist attraction, it had already escalated things with their liability (canoe next to a stegosaurus! ride a baby dinosaur!) enough that genetically creating a monster hyper-dinosaur seems inevitable.
I rewatched this recently for the first time in probably over 20 years and it more than held up. I probably enjoyed it even more than I did as a kid. None of the sequels can even touch it. My local theater is offering to rent out a whole screening for $99. I’ve never seen Jurassic Park on the big screen and am seriously considering it.
What’s your local theatre? I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If you can afford it, go for it.
excellent movie that I almost always watch when I find it while flipping around…but those fucking kids. Oh dear god, I wish they had been eaten. I have never rooted harder for an ostensible protagonist to be eaten than I did for those kids. I know their purpose was to be terrorized but FFS, in that kitchen scene I’m surprised they didn’t put on steak sauce thinking it would confuse the raptors. When I realized that the boy was the bass player from the Freddie Mercury movie, I prayed a raptor would run across the stage at the end of the Live Aid show and eat that kid, a long-awaited and well-deserved meal.
Thank god I’m not the only one. Why Dern thought the boy was endearing from the very first moment, despite him being a whiny neusance, is beyond me. Even under a director who is typically great at directing kids, these who just could not act.
Tell us how you really feel.(Also–yes).
The kids were honestly worse in the books, Lex whines all the time and is younger, and Tim is kind of a Gary Stu. Grant is even more of a badass and Malcom even more of a blowhard
amazingly the kids in the Jurassic World movie were just as obnoxious, especially the older kid, giving cute girls waiting in line the rapiest looks imaginable, and then taunting the younger whiny kid for being upset about his parents divorcing. I assume that was to give the older kid a very specific starting point for his “arc” but still, I just kept hoping he’d get eaten right after the dinosaur taunted him for being a little bitch.
re: the part where Muldoon tells Sattler to run because they’re being hunted—is anyone else distracted by what appears to be an obviously male stuntman running in place of Laura Dern wearing what appears to be a bad wig? Could that really have been Laura Dern?
She tells Muldoon to run, and is clearly seen leaping into Grant’s arms with no cuts. ???
Actually he tells her to run, she takes off and they cut to someone jumping over some obstacles (seen from the back only) and before it shows her sprinting to the shed it appears to be a guy in a wig running through the jungle
Spielberg identified with an evil rich guy so much that he couldn’t bring himself to depict the character as an evil rich guy.I don’t know how much of this is Spielberg’s fault. I haven’t read the book since it was released, but I seem to recall that Hammond wasn’t an evil guy in that portrayal so much as someone with grandiose dreams and more money than sense.Still, there are lots of movies where Hollywood’s bias in favor of evil rich people shows in a bad way. My favorite example is Devil Wears Prada, a book about an evil rich person who mistreats her assistants. The book goes to Hollywood, where every decisionmaker and star involved as assistants they want to believe they treat fairly, and suddenly the portrayal of the evil rich person is tempered by “Hey! Just so you know, every once in a while a person like me has to kick butt to get things done!”I don’t think this is Spielberg identifying with an evil rich guy so much as Hammond slotting conveniently into the Carl Denham role from King Kong, as a filmmaker analogue. Directors can’t resist the temptation of turning their movies into an analogy about moviemaking.
A lot of the stuff about greed that gets pushed off onto Gennaro in the movie is Hammond in the book; the “…and people will pay it!” stuff. Also, things like the description of the flea circus come off a LOT differently in the book.Book Hammond is greedy and amoral. Part of the book’s message about the threat of genetic engineering is that he is using it in dangerous ways. He may not be developing a viral weapon or manipulating genes to create super animals, but he still views genetic engineering as a means to an end: making him even more wealthy, not helping humanity.
Hold on now, we’re saying Hammond would have been a better character had he been less three dimensional? It’s necessary for villains to be unlikable because we have to make a statement about rich people being evil? Villany can’t sit side by side with genuine good qualities? One of things I like about Spielberg is he understands the best villains are the relatable ones. The mayor in Jaws may be a toothless, calculating politician, but he’s also a guy leading a community that depends on revenue to survive and he eventually feels genuine horror at his own decisions. Rene Belloq, my favorite villain in all space and time, doesn’t care about power and isn’t particularly anxious to hurt anyone, he just views archaeology and history as a connection to eternity, and he sees people as expendable in pursuit of that connection. But you totally want to hang out with him! How fun would an evening drinking in Paris with Belloq be? Even Amon Goeth, whose evil was very, very real, has relatable human dimensions, albeit despicable ones. Outside Spielberg, how much less effective would Thanos have been had Josh Brolin played him as a cackling maniac instead of turning in this layered, understated performance that communicates actual emotional pain? How much would Magneto, Kylo Ren, or DeNiro’s character in Heat have been diminished if they didn’t respect and even want to hang with their heroic counterparts? I actually haven’t seen JP in years, I just think in general that a story never loses out with a likable antagonist.
how much less effective would Thanos have been had Josh Brolin played him as a cackling maniac instead of turning in this layered, understated performance that communicates actual emotional pain?I think we have evidence on that from Endgame, where he’s entirely uninteresting.
Eeeexactly. I saw Infinity War 5 times in the theater, mainly because I found Thanos so interesting when portrayed as an actual character…and he wins in the end! Endgame, on the other hand, was one and done.
I love the callback to Dr Grant’s humiliating that kid at the beginning, explaining how the raptor would hunt you (“and that’s when the attack comes, not from the front, but from the side”), and then Muldoon falls for the same trick.
Strongly disagree that the science parts are boring in the book. They’re essential table setting and are effectively balanced with all the action.
It doesn’t take place in Seattle? (Serious question.)
Assuming you mean Sleepless in Seattle and not Jurassic Park, no it doesn’t. Tom Hanks’ character is from Seattle, but Meg Ryan’s character is a reporter in Baltimore, and that’s where her part of the story takes place.
Two things about JP – when Crichton was interviewed, just after the book came out, and Spielberg was in line to do the movie, he was asked how they’d do the dinosaurs. Crichton said “well, we thought of computer animation, and stop-motion, and other things. Steven said he thought it would better to just build them…” And I know they didn’t REALLY do that. But the seamless combo of models and CGI and lighting (and sound!) made it look like they did.And – I saw the movie in the theater when it came out. As my friend and I drove home, along the rural two lane road back to town, we both thought, and pretty much said at the same time “doesn’t it seem like we’re going to see a T-Rex cross the road up here?” And we weren’t scared, like you’d be walking through the woods after a horror movie – we just kind of expected it to maybe happen….
I have had problems with Spielberg’s work over the years, and probably will again, but this is a perfect movie. Yes, even the kid being a Unix hacker, even the odd moment in the beginning where for some reason there’s a child out on the dig with Sam Neill. As this VERY good article points out, everything works, and STILL works.
[And I think the choice to make Attenborough more of a, well, goofy and lovable super scientific Walt Disney really made a lot of sense. For one, he played it perfectly, and for two — you kinda don’t need a human villain when you might at any time be attacked by an island full of dinosaurs.]
I saw Jurassic Park in a giant old theater in Sspokane last year that was absolutely *packed* – probably 400+ people – and it was the finest moviegoing experience of my life.Something I love about Jurassic Park is that, while it does have some of that damn Spielberg sentimentality in it. it’s exactly that “awestruck wonder” that gets everyone killed. “Ooh, look at the majesty!” *gets eaten*
“’Ooh, ahhh’-that’s how it all starts but later there’s running and screaming “
I’ll be so bold as to say this: dinosaurs are birds. Not reptiles. This is considered established consensus today. Birds are the surviving descendants of non-avian dinosaurs.My actual hot takes:Jurassic Park is the greatest popcorn movie ever made. It is the movie which supplants King Kong in the movie pantheon of visual spectacles. The entire rest of the Jurassic film franchise is rewarmed leftovers and each time you go back, there’s less to eat and it’s only getting older and smellier. Jurassic World was taking the final bits and pouring cheez sauce all over them. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was trying to scrape the residue out of the Pyrex container and dusting it over Ritz crackers.Jurassic World: Canceled by Corona is sitting on the couch, vaguely recalling that awesome meal you had that one time. But it sure as hell isn’t that actual meal.
I remember the ‘dinosaurs are birds’ debate being kind of the hottest take of the day, thanks to this movie. Maybe scientists were with it, but for grade school kids like me, our minds were blown.
I like The Lost World but it does that thing sequels do where they take the cool side player from the last one, make him the main character, and he’s immediately less cool.
It was nice to see Sam back for JP III. Ellie being with another dude felt like an F-you to fans, tho. It has exactly 1 good scene (birdcage) and exactly one legitimately chilling scare (the phone).I still love a lot of the ideas in Jurassic World. The functioning park, the corporate influence. The military contract, domesticating raptors… But it’s just too many ideas at once, and none of it breathes.
Fallen Kingdom had too much plot armour protecting a now ballooning cast of seemingly invincible heroes, and the clone shit is a problem. But I did like the auction, and where things are headed around the world.
Really not important but all birds are dinosaurs but not all dinosaurs are birds. All humans are primates but not all primates are humans.
I strongly disagree with the take about Hammond. I forgot about him being a villain in the book, but I am glad Spielberg chose not to just make him another corporate villain. Because you know what, it is INSANE to not want to have a theme park with dinosaurs if you figure out how to do it! Spielberg clearly understood that.
My partner is a HS teacher, and in the spring of 2019 her school did a school-wide Frankenstein-related curriculum. They showed Jurassic Park on a huge screen in their very nice auditorium, and all 1000 kids were there to watch it (it’s a boarding school, so this wasn’t a sleepy 10 AM bunch either, this was their Wednesday night entertainment and they got to all be out later than they otherwise would have, so it was as close to a real theater experience as possible.)
And I’ll admit that, while I was only 7 when I saw it in theaters, I hadn’t considered just how many kids today probably hadn’t seen the original one. These are kids born a decade after it came out, and they’ve had plenty of other options for entertainment. (I normally wouldn’t go to a school function, either, but hey, this is Jurassic Park on a huge screen on a stormy night in early March.) God this movie absolutely still plays. I can’t think of another movie released before, say, 2000 that would have worked as well as this one still does to hook an audience that is seeing it for the first time now. The effects are obviously a key to that, but the overall notes and moments, too; it was wild listening to the chattering turn to silence fairly quickly (the fairly horrific opening scene doesn’t get enough credit for setting that tone, too, kids know they’re going to get to see some shit and that really keeps them involved and lets the suspense build to the T-Rex paddock in the rain.)But it wasn’t just the dinosaurs. The shirtless Goldblum gif scene still plays too, obviously, and both Nedry (Wayne Knight should also get credit for being a memorable villain) and the lawyer being eaten were big hits. But the car/tree scene was just complete tension; screams, gasps, and huge rounds of applause after that and after the first T-Rex scene. The T-Rex coming from out of nowhere at the end for the save, too, also earned huge applause and cheers. It was one of my favorite “theater” experiences ever. But the moment that got the biggest round of cheers, albeit from only about half the audience (they made up for it with enthusiasm): “Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.” That moment was rivaled nearly by the moment where Lex saves everyone (after saving her brother repeatedly by outwitting raptors in the kitchen) via computer skills. I know this essay says no one needs her to be a “hacker”, but I think that actually one of the things that helps the film hold up is that representation. Lex is an awesome, strong, smart character, who saves the day multiple times in a variety of ways. Between Lex and Ellie, this movie offered characters that let an entire generation of women get into it in a way that a lot of blockbusters hadn’t before. (Even Leia ended up in a slave bikini, you know?) There’s a reason that a lot of Millenial women love this movie and also love dinosaurs. And it holds up a hell of a lot better than Jurassic World, which is only a decade old, in large part because of this. For a lot of other reasons too, of course, but even beyond how they treated women in the movie; whoever decided to make the pair of kids two boys really, really messed up, from both a basic storytelling perspective and in terms of recapturing what made Jurassic Park so special to such a huge audience to begin with.
In the book I’m pretty sure the boy is the one with the computer skills, so the girl is just the wet blanket who doesn’t know about dinosaurs and has no other valuable skills. Sounds like Spielberg’s change was a good decision. I was a cynical kid so I thought the change was pandering, but even at 8 years when this came out I hated child-insert characters in fiction and didn’t care for the kids in this movie in particular so I was not the target. I didn’t need a Robin to pretend to be, I wanted to be Batman goddammit!
Ha, you probably hated Wesley Crusher too!I think that’s a fair point on kid insert characters, but at the very least a film set at a dinosaur theme park had a solid reason to have kid characters, and they’re handled well here.
I 100% resented Wesley, and I remember a recurring feature/plot device in the Star Trek: TNG guide i bought and loved growing up was “Wesley Screws Up.” I also hate the human kid in Bucky O’Hare that got switched with the ape-like bruiser character and and had to pretend he was not a child in a suit who was in over his head. Just give me a fictional world and interesting characters, don’t pretend I am part of that world.That said, JP was so well made that I did feel tension as a kid during all the scenes the kids are in danger, even though i did not like them it was thrilling cinema.
It’s amazing how well this movie holds up. Whenever I watch it on tv (which, b/c I watch it whenever it’s on, is often), I always turn it on either (1) when they first see the dinosaurs or (2) when the T-Rex first appears, and both of those scenes are just magnificent. The score, the dinosaurs, everything. It all holds up. I’m also glad Hammond isn’t a villain like in the book–I like the performance better here.
Still think that the lawyer should’ve survived. Dude was Izzy Moreno off Miami Vice, who are these chumps? Why kill off Miami Vice and Sam Jackson bruvva, it makes no sense.
“Maybe the animatronic pirates won’t eat the tourists, but if they did, would it look any different?”I would argue that, yes, it does look different, because in the movie the dinosaurs eat the tourists right there on the spot, with implied blood and gore (can you imagine a “Saw”-like R rated version?). In today’s world, the tourists will catch the ‘Rona and die back at home 4-6 weeks later, giving the park administration plausible deniability. That’s the only reason anything is open today at all. If half-decayed, viral infected zombies were roaming the streets right now, would anyone venture outside? I think not.
I did not know that the velociraptors in the kitchen scene were guys in suits until last year. Which parts of the film are stop-motion?
I don’t believe there’s any stop motion in the actual film, it’s all CGI/animatronics/puppetry. Early in the production, they planned on using stop motion, but they went with CGI when Spielberg was shown an effects demo. Spielberg said he felt bad because the stop motion they made was some of the best ever produce, but he still didn’t truly believe it.Here’s a test they did of stop motion:
I can safely confirm Spielberg face for the next generation. Earlier this year I showed my 12 yr old daughter Jurassic Park and when T-Rex breaks out of her pen she was awestruck! Not understanding that moment is the result of a master filmmaker at the top of his game she was just pure response. It was a particular kind of magic that only movies can do.As far as the Hammond criticism goes: At the time making Hammond grandfatherly and non-villainous was doing something different. As you already pointed out evil rich men had a monopoly of the bad guy slot that year. We got our evil corporate bad guys in the last two Jurassic Worlds and, with the exception of Vincent D’nofrio exuding sweaty menace didn’t quite do the job. Also Nedry was a greedy slug.
In hindsight and especially the books Nedry was completely screwed financially by Hammond, and Hammond didn’t seem to give him much help for a complicated system that seemed to have no backup. but…he still endangered a bunch of people leading to their deaths. Not much can justify that.
I remember my parents dragging me to see The Fugitive, which, as a kid, I had no interest in at all. Seemed like my dad’s revenge for making him take me to Super Mario Bros. At this point in the summer, I wanted to see something like Free Willy, but I don’t think he’d ever trust me again, so he wanted to see- Oh! “Dad movie.” I get it now. Anyway, it ended up pretty awesome. One of my Top 3 that year:10. Swing Kids
9. Philadelphia
8. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
7. Groundhog Day
6. Tombstone
5. Mrs. Doubtfire
4. Rudy
3. The Fugitive
2. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
1. Jurassic Park
Sam Neill is an all-time great terrible actor. His work in Possession will never be matched.
My favorite movie theater story comes from seeing Jurassic Park. My Dad took me to see the movie when I was much younger. I had a box of Reece’s Pieces with me and a soda (important later). I am not sure I have ever been more enraptured during a movie. The scene in the kitchen in particular. I was clutching the box of candy like a white old lady her pearls. When the velociraptor makes a run at Lex and she is trying to close the door before it full on snacks her, damn. When the raptor hits the cabinet opposite her, I lost it along with the entire box of reece’s. It literally rained tiny pieces of candy on myself and everyone around me in a 10 foot area. Just a perfect popcorn movie.
To visually see dinosaurs like this after years of really awful stop-motion is a feeling I don’t think can ever be replicated again. It also marked a huger step in CGI than Terminator, as that looks a bit more dated now.