Spielberg goes pre-historic!

Rating: 8/10 (15 April 2016)

It's more than a little uncommon for a film to visually impress two times in a row. What made for spectacular viewing the first time becomes old news by the second. And with the rate at which the technologies used at the movies advances, these former special- effects heavyweights begin to look dated very quickly.
The plot revolves around a group of people employed to verify the safety of a theme park being built by the CEO of InGen and creator of the park John Hammond (Richard Attenborough); the group consists of lawyer and the representative of investors Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), mathematician and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). And they are inspecting the park, a series of events lead to dinosaurs breaking loose and instilling peril among the crew. However, the storyline flows very well, providing the audience with enough action to allow for some of the more mellow scenes. The characters in the film are very, very well acted and even the children are believable when screaming at a dinosaur which isn't really there. It's good to know that (at the time) these actor's were not Hollywood's biggest stars, meaning the emphasis is placed upon their acting instead of the looks.
There are plenty of holes to pick in the plot if you want to get scientific, but that's not what this film is about. It's a terrific roller-coaster ride of a film that all the family (except the smallest maybe) can hold hands together to watch. One point that many argue is the velociraptors were only six-foot long and half the height of humans - Spielberg obviously wanted more dramatic impetus. Strangely enough, during filming scientists uncovered evidence of a 10-foot-tall variety, now named Utahraptors - so how's that for a bit of Spielberg magic?
Overall rating: 8 out of 10.