Everything a Hollywood thrill ride ought to be.

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2012)

Co-scripted by Michael Crichton from his own best-seller, "Jurassic Park" is a great deal of fun, offering action, suspense, scares, amusing performances, and some of the most utterly convincing special effects that you'll see in a film of this type.
Billionaire John Hammond (a delightful Richard Attenborough) has created an island theme park populated with living dinosaurs that he's had cloned from ancient dinosaur DNA. When issues as to the safety of the park arise, he hires renowned paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to inspect the place and hopefully give it their seal of approval. He's so confident of his security measures that he even lets his target audience, in the form of his grandchildren Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), come along. Of course, one can guess that things are going to go horribly wrong...
Steven Spielberg once again proves himself one of the masters of such entertainment, giving it a true sense of grandeur, with excellent location shooting in Hawaii and the Dominician Republic, impressive production design by Rick Carter, and effective cinematography by old pro Dean Cundey. John Williams gives the production another of his anthemic and rousing scores. Admittedly the story takes its time to really get going, but it emerges a grabber, with the tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptors becoming true forces to be reckoned with. The dinosaurs are brought to convincing life using a variety of practical and digital effects, utilizing the talents of such gentlemen as Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Phil Tippett, and Michael Lantieri.
The actors display just the right amount of awe & wonder and subsequently apprehension and real fear, and the spectacle thankfully never overwhelms their efforts; Goldbum is priceless in his typical fashion as a charismatic eccentric; also among the well chosen supporting cast are Bob Peck as game warden Muldoon, Martin Ferrero as the lawyer Gennero, B.D. Wong as a scientist, and Samuel L. Jackson and the scene stealing Wayne Knight as other park personnel. And just as the actors show that awe & wonder, so too will the audience feel those emotions; there is real movie making magic on display here.
Any kid *or* adult who's ever felt a fascination for the extinct animals of Earths' past will be pleased with the results. And the message about the nature and folly of man trying to "play God", as it were, often a recurring theme in fantastic cinema, comes across here in high style. Very well done overall.
Nine out of 10.