Life has found a way.

Rating: 10/10 (31 July 2018)

In the summer of 1993 when Jurassic Park came out, I was keen on seeing it due to the movie being about dinosaurs but due to my young age, I wasn't able to watch it until it came out on VHS a year later and when I first watched it, I was left mesmerized and terrified by what I had seen. As I grew older and rewatched it more often, I began to see the movie in a different light and having recently rewatched it in preparation for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the movie still holds after 25 years. From it's interesting premise and themes to its ground-breaking visual effects and incredible performances, Jurassic Park is a prime example of how to do a summer blockbuster right.
The film opens on the island of Isla Nublar where a team is overseeing the delivery of a Velociraptor to be included in the new dinosaur theme park called Jurassic Park. However, the raptor is highly aggressive and kills one of the park employees. Following the accident, the park's investors demand that expect to visit the park in order to certify it as safe. They invite a chaos theorist named Ian Malcolm while the park's founder, John Hammond invites paleontologist Alan Grant and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler to endorse the park. Upon arriving on the island, the group is mesmerized when they see a Brachiosaurus and a group of Parasaurolophus. They are then taken to the visitors' center where they are shown a brief video explaining the process of cloning the dinosaurs which were done using fossilized mosquitos preserved in tree sap with the DNA of frogs added in. Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm all have serious doubts about the safety of the park and the ethical problems of having dinosaurs thrown into the 20th century and discuss it with Hammond but their words fall on deaf ears. The group is then joined by Hammond's grandkids for an afternoon tour of the park, however, the tour doesn't go as intended as the dinosaurs fail to appear. The tour is then cut short by a tropical storm during which a computer programmer named Denis Nedry, who has been paid off by a business rival of Hammonds to pilfer dinosaur embryos, shuts down the park's security system and escapes. With the power out, the tour vehicles stall next to the now insecure T-Rex paddock.
Given Steven Spielberg's prowess in the film community and being the father of the summer blockbuster, It's not surprising that Jurassic Park is a cinematic sightpost for him as the audience is given a sense of wonder and dread few modern summer blockbusters can provide us with nowadays, so much so that the franchise has been be going strong for the last 25 years and shows no sigh of slowing down. On the outside, Jurassic Park may seem like a cross between Westworld and Frankenstein but if one looks under the outer layers they'll find a cautioning tale of the dangers of trying to control nature and the consequences of doing so. It's a modern reciting of Frankenstein's monster but rather than focusing on a misjudged individual, the characters are confronted by a zoo of prehistoric monsters. The themes of mankind's overreliance on technology and trying to control nature are nothing new in the world of entertainment as they're been used countless times but the way the movie handles these themes is so well done and never once do the morals of the film feel forced nor does the movie feel the need to beat the viewer over the head with it's message every 5 minutes unlike some other films. A prime example of this is how Michael Crichton always seems to take delight in certain themes in his novels and that is clearly visible in Jurassic Park as he and David Koepp reveal the movie as a captivating, frantically wide-ranging narrative on the capabilities as well as the follies of technology as well as mankind's attempts to control nature as perfectly shown by Dr. Ian Malcolm, who besides being the best character in the movie, he is not fooled by Hammond's park and remains suspicious of the lawless environment of this industrialized El Dorado when he goes on the tour and again comments on functional mathematics as an aid for demonstrating how flawless images have a way of falling once they deal with reality which sums up the themes of the movie so wonderfully without the need to hit the audience over the head and actually serves the plot of the movie well.
In a sense, the plot of the film seems made-to-order for the genius of a director who can own most other directors in the world of filmmaking and storytelling by blending the suspense of Jaws with the newfangled morals of ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the idea of coning the dinosaurs and you have a recipe for a fantastic movie. While a few crucial scenes in the film certainly equal the terror factor that Jaws had, the major contrast with Jurassic Park is that the dinosaurs walk all over the human characters both directly and allegorically while the characters are also believably sympathetic as well as charmingly unique as they all have a part to play in the movie to the point that they never feel like the typical cardboard cut-outs you see in so many modern blockbusters, but nevertheless the dinosaurs still rule Jurassic Park in every possible way. One of the issues with Crichton's novel is a failure to create engaging characters that the reader can identify with as the book is populated by an identical assortment of contemptuous, cold lingo-uttering nobodies and mustache-curling villains, it's near impossible to give a care about which characters live or die. Such is not the case in the movie as Spielberg and writer David Koepp have given each character enough development for the viewer to be invested in them and along they may not be the deepest or complex of movie characters, the characters of Jurassic Park are likeable, funny, and approachable unlike a film like Jurassic Park 3 or Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom where the characters are paper thin and feel more like cardboard cut-outs. Directing the dinosaur's rampages is one of Spielberg's specialties and a film viewer's dream come true. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more clear that Spielberg is a master of using terror and dread to the movie's advantage with every roar and shiver that hints at what is coming. A perfect example of this method is where Malcolm looks down at a T-Rex footprint and sees the water ripple and tremble to make for a truly bone-chilling scene. Steven also relishes the usage of creating iconic moments in the film such as an astounding scene where a pair of merciless velociraptors hunts Hammond's two grandkids through the visitor center's kitchen. Sure, any director can shoot an action scene or show us an epic battle between two armies but it takes a special kind of director like Spielberg to show us just how a few pots and pans can go flying at the thud of a velociraptor's tailor how the kids deceive their devious attackers simply by using an elusion to their advantage. In watching such a masterly done scene, it also helps to see the bigger picture and put things into the proper context. No other director could have been able to convince an audience that there are marauding dinosaurs in a kitchen the way Spielberg can, making the scene a high watermark for his career as a director and storyteller. But if the movie has a standout scene that demonstrates all of Steven's talents in front of and behind the camera, it would be the scene where the T-Rex investigates and pulverizes a Jeep with Hammond's two grandkids inside. It's easily one of the most intoxicating scenes ever put on film and is bleakly insightful along with being justly frightening regardless if you're 5 or 25. When it comes to the more violent and gory aspects of the movie, Spielberg tends to leave out a lot and allows the viewer to come up with their own conclusions. When it's time to actually show a death or blood in the movie, Steven cleverly bypasses the glaring carnage by getting a better shiver out of the audience by showing a goat or a cow being left near one of these hungry prehistoric beasts and quickly disappear. In order to make the velociraptors a more menacing introduction in the movie's opening scene, he begins the scene with a character whose upper body remains in focus while the rest of his torso is being dragged away off-screen much like what happened in Jaws. Such uneasy and horrendous achievements are linked by a simple story of survival as our heroes try to stay alive while avoiding the dinosaurs. In the hands of another director or writer, this would come across as cheap sentiment or forced emotional melodrama but with Spielberg, it never feels dumbed down anything for this movie and always aims for the highest standards of horror and thrills.
Given Jurassic Park's impact on the filmmaking world in terms of pioneering computerized visual effects, it's not surprising that the movie blew audiences away the first time they saw the movie and the industry was changed forever as GCI was now a tool to be used and to be exploited. While CGI had been used before in The Abyss and Terminator 2, it had only in small doses and had never been used to show photorealistic visual effects, Jurassic Park changed all that. By using different kinds of effects for each dinosaur or scene to produce the best effect possible. Along with Denis Murren and his team at ILM and Phil Tippet's amazing stop-motion effects, the effects team were able to create dinosaurs that looked realistic rather than cartoonish or fake. The animatronics for the T-Rex, Brachiosaurus, and Triceratops look so life-like when they appear on-screen thanks to Stan Winston and his team who proved far more helpful to the finished movie than the CGI as their animatronics give the dinosaurs a level of believability that the CGI could never have done. Seeing the Triceratops on screen for the first time feels like a living, breathing animal while the raptor surprising Ellie makes them feel that much more threating and compe