Still beats every CGI movie out there today...

Rating: 10/10 (25 August 2004)

I just watched this again in what seems like years Honestly I have to say it's still great! It has aged very well considering the dinosaurs still look very real and outdo today's CGI, which is extremely surprising given it's more than 10 years old. When I did see it in the theaters, it blew me away and scared the poop out of me, and I was 19 years old. The big question I have is how is it that the CGI was such a success in this film, especially being that it pioneered the CGI world??? It's almost as if they had the secret recipe and didn't give it out while other films since then have tried to duplicate the `real' effects using CGI, only to deliver something resembling an arcade game. It's truly a shame we haven't advanced much beyond this level of `realness' with CGI. You would think after 10 years of fine tuning it that we'd be seeing CGI actors in place of the real McCoy's and not be able to tell. But yet we can't even get something like a guy in a spider suit or the Hulk to look real. EITHER GET IT RIGHT, OR GIVE IT UP!!!
This was an incredible movie, a 10 out of 10, why it only got 7.5, I'll never understand. However there's beauty and tragedy that came out of this movie. The beauty is that it gave birth to a new era of movie making with CGI, and did it well I might add. The tragedy is that since then every action director has thought that CGI is the only way to go. And tragically, here we are today with huge budget movies like Spiderman, which look incredibly fake. I guess directors figure it's better to give you the wide angle fake looking CGI action sequences rather than the close up puppet / animatronics shots (which looks real). So after watching Jurassic park again years later, I was astonished by how well it looks today and just had to spill my guts about it. Hat's off to Spielberg again!