The groundbreaking effects work is the king of this park

Rating: 7/10 (13 December 2015)

With Jurassic Park, director Steven Spielberg made a film that became the new yardstick for cinematic special effects back in 1993. In fact, the ground-breaking CGI work used here to bring dinosaurs to life before our eyes is still very impressive over twenty years after its release, so you can only imagine the impact that they had back in the day. Truthfully, the effects work is by far the most impressive thing about this one, as it has a fairly by-the-numbers story-line populated with clichÃ©d characters. A select group of people are invited to an island retreat owned by a millionaire who has been able to recreate living dinosaurs from ancient DNA. It's here that he intends to give an early tour of his planned new resort, Jurassic Park; the trouble is that things go wrong and the dinosaurs go on the rampage.
This was adapted from a Michael Crichton novel of the same name. I've read the book and seem to think that the novel and film are at the very least broadly similar. It's the second film from the pen of Crichton based on the very specific sci-fi idea of a futuristic high-tech amusement park going fatally wrong, leaving the humans to battle the dangerous inhabitants of the park; the other film of course was Westworld (1973), where it was deadly androids who filled the same roles as the dinosaurs do here. Both films speculate on questions regarding the dangers of man tampering with science in careless ways. For me Westworld is the better film but I do still enjoy Spielberg's dinosaur blockbuster. The effects work are worth the price of admission alone of course but the story-line and characters, while being extremely standard, do still get us from A to B and allow us to seamlessly experience the deadly wonders on hand in the park. It's a pretty solidly entertaining piece on the whole and one of Spielberg's better out-and-out popcorn movies.