A great adaptation of the book, and a landmark film of the '90s.

Rating: 10/10 (11 June 2003)

I watched Jurassic Park again recently (June 7, 2003) to reacquaint myself with it before writing a comment; and what I noticed especially upon my latest viewing of it, and what many people may often overlook, is how quickly (compared to the novel) the movie sets up its story and characters.

The movie begins with a day on the job in Jurassic Park that goes very wrong, and the sequence is so gripping that I can't imagine anybody who after seeing it wouldn't want to keep watching to see what happens in the rest of the movie.
And the scenes that follow, introducing the Nedry and Hammond characters, are just perfect. When Nedry says, "Don't get cheap on me, Dodgson. That was Hammond's mistake," we understand his motivation with that single line, while the Jurassic Park novel spends several pages explaining character motivations.
And Hammond's assurance throughout the movie that he "spared no expense" reveals all that the audience needs to know about his character. Obviously he thinks (as a rich man) that enough money can solve any problem; thanks to Attenborough's sly performance, Hammond's offer to fund Grant's dig reveals a man who uses his charm as a weapon and coldly calculates his words to get what he wants.
In brief, I think David Koepp's script for this movie is superb, considering the limitations of the source material. No offense intended for Crichton fans (since I like him myself), but while his grasp of contemporary science and scientists is as good as any writer since Verne, his skill as a writer ranks somewhere between Reader's Digest and a cookbook.
The Crichton novel Jurassic Park is very entertaining, but it suffers from uneven pacing and long setup scenes; it also goes on too long and degenerates into sheer silliness by the end, with Muldoon blowing up a velociraptor with a rocket launcher (!), Grant killing velociraptors with poison eggs (!), and so on.
Mercifully, Koepp's script remains simple and low-key from start to finish, preserving the thrills and chills of the novel while eliminating its excessive (and excessively long and detailed) subplots.
Of course Spielberg was the ideal director for this movie: once the tyrannosaur breaks loose the movie never stops and becomes a true roller coaster in its final hour or so. With John Williams' moving musical score backing him up, Spielberg also creates a genuine sense of wonder in this movie that few subsequent special-effects movies have been able to duplicate. There is real magic in the scenes in which the park visitors encounter a brachiosaur, watch a velociraptor hatch and touch a triceratops. But with the promise of genetic engineering come the risks.
Again, Koepp's script deserves credit for subtly reflecting the problems with technology which ensure that something as complex as Jurassic Park could never really work. Grant cannot touch a computer screen without causing a glitch in it; nor can he even buckle his seat-belt aboard the helicopter ride to the park, because the two halves of the buckle are mismatched. If something as simple as a seat-belt can go wrong, what could go wrong in Jurassic Park?
The performances are almost uniformly good: I have already mentioned Attenborough, but the real standout is the late Bob Peck as an old-fashioned big-game hunter. One of the movie's best moments occurs when Peck realizes that the velociraptors have escaped, and after removing his hat he looks off into the distance with a crazy expression on his face that is just priceless. And his final line of dialogue is one of the movie's best.
Samuel L. Jackson is worth mentioning because his role in this movie is his last significant pre-Pulp Fiction role, and also because his trademark line "Hold on to your butts!" is another of the movie's most memorable quotes.

Oddly enough, the only weak member of the cast is the beautiful Laura Dern: one problem is that the script gives her little to do in the movie's second half besides scream and run from the dinosaurs; yet even in the scenes that give her something to say, her acting seems awkward and unconvincing. Since Spielberg managed to elicit decent acting from everyone else in the cast (even the kids!), I have to conclude that Dern was either miscast in the role or somehow failed to connect with her character.
Even the silliest sequence in the movie, the tour-ride film featuring "Mr. DNA," works because it explains in a minute or two how the park was achieved, whereas the book required pages and pages to explain the technology. I also believe that if Jurassic Park did exist, the commercial nature of the project would inspire a cheesy Disney World-type orientation for the tourists.
Jurassic Park was the big summer movie of 1993 (I went to see it three times), and was briefly history's top-grossing movie; and while the incredible special effects drew the crowds, I think the movie was popular because it also taps one of our fundamental fears.
Jurassic Park is not merely a thriller about people running from dinosaurs: it reflects our fear that our technology will fail and leave us vulnerable to deadly and unforeseen natural forces, a fear that will remain with us for the foreseeable future.
Consider the SARS epidemic and scare (I hope no one considers this comparison too inappropriate): SARS is a deadly force of nature which we hope and pray our modern technology will be able to contain, but we don't know for sure that it will. I make this connection only to emphasize why I think Jurassic Park is so effective, because beneath its slick surface of fiction we sense the same anxiety that we feel for real dangers.
Anyway, Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies, and despite its flaws I think it's one of the best pop entertainments of the past ten years.
Rating: 10 (Because it's just as good the tenth time you watch it as it was the first time.)