The defining dinosaur movie, a good but not great watch

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2017)

"Jurassic Park" is an American 2-hour movie from 1993, so this one will have its 25th anniversary next year. The director is of course Steven Spielberg and with this effort he returned to animal scare films, even if this one is certainly not as much on the horror level as "Jaws". The writer is David Koepp, who even if still without an Oscar nomination as of today worked on really many prestigious projects over the years. He was only 30 when this one here came out. And the cast includes several familiar faces too. Lead actor Sam Neill is probably the kind of actor where you recognize the face immediately, but perhaps not the name. Samuel L. Jackson and Jeff Goldblum (would have preferred more screen time for both as I like them quite a lot) on the other hand are really famous these days still and the young Laura Dern just had her first Oscar nomination back then and a second followed fairly recently. And then there are the late Attenborough and Peck as well as BD Wong who is also another familiar face.
The story here is about what happens when a group of scientists go visit a theme park and find out that the old scientist working there actually managed to breed real dinosaurs from frog DNA and it is a revolutionary achievement of course. But things go wrong fairly quickly when they realize that next to the peaceful vegetarian dinos, there are also brutal carnivores and this means not just small raptors, but even big versions of the most known dinosaur in history, the infamous Tyrannosaurus Rex. The fact that the scientists also brought their children grants for some great scare scenes overall. I think that this film here is not really about great acting, even if the cast does a solid job with the material they are given. It is all about the scenario of actual dinosaurs living in our world. Fittingly, the movie took home no less than three Oscars and these 3 wins out of 3 nominations are a formidable achievement that really is a rarity in filmmaking (if we ignore Lord of the Rings for example). These wins were all technical categories. And the film's success, not just with awards bodies, also resulted in several sequels being produced and Chris Pratt also took over in a relatively recent movie based on the work by the original writer Michael Crichton (rip) who also worked with Koepp on the screenplay here for the 1993 film. And I guess you could say that they did a pretty decent job as scenes like the shaking water or the dino hatching the egg are still very well-known today, such a long time after this film came out. And so did Spielberg. I would not necessarily agree with IMDb voters though that this is one of the best 250 films ever made. But it sure makes for a good watch. I give "Jurassic Park" a thumbs-up, also because it never drags despite its fairly massive runtime. Go see it if you are among the very few who haven't already.