I am often asked
what’s my favourite movie. I usually answer with a well-regarded classic, such
as Fargo, The Godfather, or The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly. However in full honesty Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) is probably the one
movie that really affected me the most the first time I saw it, despite the
fact that, let’s face it, it is not perfect. It makes no sense for an island
full of dinosaurs to be nearly evacuated for the weekend, and the science is
pretty questionable. Yet maybe because I was around six years old when I first
saw it, that movie has left one big dinosaur paw-shaped print in my mind.
In this age of
CGI and grand-scale summer movies it is easy to forget what an
adrenaline-injection this movie was. Dinosaurs had been featured in movies
before, but they mostly looked like giant puppets. Steven Spielberg and the
effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic in collaboration with
animatronics by Stan Winston were the first guys who managed to convince you dinosaurs
had been brought back from extinction. I was certainly convinced when I first
saw the movie in a Quebec movie theatre in the summer of 1993. As the movie has
some pretty effective horror scenes, it stuck with me for a long time, but like
the rest of the world I fell in love with dinosaurs. Suddenly there were books
and TV specials about the film’s revolutionary effects and the dinosaurs they
had brought to life. I once went to a museum exhibit where you could pretend to
dig out dinosaur bones out of the sand. This wasn’t just another summer blockbuster;
it was a cultural event.
Being the smart
filmmaker that he is, Spielberg went the slow-boil route before unveiling his
new creations. Based on Michael Crichton’s book, Jurassic Park opens with a foreboding sequence where a park worker
gets badly killed while game wardens are trying to get a velociraptor, those
smart and scary dinos, into its cage. All you see is big crate emerging out of
the jungle and the creature’s eye inside, but given what it does to the guy it
grabs the viewers knew this was no panda bear.
Another very
clever tool was the scientific exposition scene that explains how millionaire
John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) managed to clone animals that had been
extinct for millions of years and set them up on a Costa Rican island. It’s a
theme park, so the tourists will need information before starting the tour.
This exposition is given to the team of experts who must assess whether or not
the island is safe for tourists. They are a diverse bunch who are in for a hell
of a ride.
Dinosaur expert
Alan Grant (Sam Neil) and his botanist girlfriend Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) are
impressed with the science, but don’t think it is wise for man to revive
animals that were naturally wiped out by evolution. Chaos theorist Ian Malcolm
(Jeff Goldblum) believes there are too many unknown variables and that chaos
will ultimately prevail. On the other hand greedy lawyer Gennaro (Martin
Ferrero) is only concerned with how much money the park will generate. Well, it
was pretty easy to predict how that guy was going to end up. When my brother
and I would re-watch the movie on VHS, we would have fun with Gennaro when he
said how if in 48 hours the investors are not convinced, he is not convinced
and he would shut down the park. We would look at each other and say “in 48
hours, he’s dinosaur poop.”
Thanks to the
sabotage of engineer Denis Nedry (Wayne Knight), quite a few characters do end
up as dinosaur meals after the park’s fences shut down in the middle of a
hurricane that hits the island. Big brachiosaurs had already been revealed
early on, but during the sequence when the T-rex breaks out of his fence that
was when you knew this was a whole other ball game. It’s a hell of a
suspenseful reveal too, with that big thumping coming out of nowhere as the
rain is falling outside, the glasses of water vibrating, the two kids wondering
what happened to the goat, and then a bloody part of it landing on the jeep’s
car. Hold on to your butts kids.
Seeing poor Tim
(Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards) nearly get crushed by the T-rex and
be hunted by the raptors in that also incredibly suspenseful kitchen scene were
some the scariest scenes I had seen at the time. Again, I was around six, so I
have to say that PG-13 rating was very well-deserved.
Yet no matter how
scared I was the first time I saw it, over the years I have kept coming back to
the world of Jurassic Park, whether
by eventually reading Michael Crichton’s book for a school assignment, getting
the entire trilogy on DVD, and re-watching the first movie when it was
re-released in 3D in 2013. It scared the living daylights out of me the first
time, but man did I have one hell of a ride. Jeff Goldblum lightened the mood
with some funny lines (“What do they got in there? King Kong?”), the music by
John Williams filled me with wonder as the helicopter flew into the island, and
the effects were so great you thought dinosaurs were once again walking the
Earth.
Here’s hoping
next year’s Jurassic World can
measure up to the impact of the original. If not, I can always hop on for
another tour in the original park.
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