1993: The Year Spielberg was the King of the World...

Rating: 9/10 (7 March 2019)

So many contrasts cohabite in "Jurassic Park", prehistoric relics and living dinosaurs, living dinosaurs and men's technology, men's technology and their total disregard for nature, the culminating point of the homo (not-so) sapiens and the downfall caused by his hubris. So in a man's creation that couldn't possibly go wrong, we have another man's creation bound to fail... with extreme prejudice.
Indeed, as the film's arc quote says "life will find a way", but once you give life that little impulse, it might come hand in hand with death, as part of its great cycle. And dinosaurs might simply remind men that they can be God, but they can be dinner as well. That's why 65 million years separate us from our reptilian ancestors. Men could deal with lions, tigers and bears, but dinosaurs, oh, my!
But that didn't affect the enthusiasm of John Hammond portrayed by the unforgettable Richard Attenborough. Hammond is an eccentric businessman with such dangerous ideas they fall into the mad scientist trope, a mix of Willy Wonka (for the cane and the dreamy location), Dr. Moreau (for the Island and the dangerous implications) and Colonel Sanders (for the white suit, the elderly gentleman manners and the cunning business sense). But don't get it wrong, Hammond is a small player compared to his real-life counterpart Spielberg who spared no expenses to make the title work better than the park itself, generating almost a billion dollar of profit out of 65 million dollars for marketing, starting with the number itself.
It's jut as if there was something coming full circle in the history of evolution, in the name of science and Spielberg's fascination for the little ideas that grow into visual wonders and challenges for Hollywood craftsmanship. "Jurassic Park" is in fact Spielberg coming full circle with his own career evolution, two decades after his groundbreaking "Jaws". There's no doubt that it was Spielberg and only Spielberg who was capable to make such a film, Michael Crichton wrote and conceived the idea but Spielberg made it a universally acclaimed family-friendly blockbuster and the landmark that redefined film-making and started the digital revolution.
With the same "J", "Jurassic Park" is the "Jaws" of the nineties ensuring a smooth transition from practical to computer-aided effects. In the make-it-or-break-it moment of the film, when Sam Neil and Laura Dern (playing a couple of paleontologists) discover the real attraction of the park, their dropped jaws echo our own wonder, Neil's tears looked like what could've been George Melies' reaction had he seen how far cinema went. And that these effects still hold up today is a tribute to the perfectionism of Spielberg.
Spielberg who, by the way, was still capable to direct "Schindler's List" while supervising this project from Poland. Maybe the former was too personal a movie it could only force him to take the latter as personally on a technical level... and with a more business-driven hindsight. After all, if it's any consolation for Spielberg's detractors, the film also betrays his own hubris: you can't help but spot the Spielberg's self-awareness in that shot of "Jurassic Park" merchandising shop.
But can we blame him? This is the man who made the ultimate thriller with "Jaws", the ultimate family film "E.T.", both became the highest grossing movies of their time. Spielberg combined the two, he made a thriller that could attract children with a minimal parental guidance, "Jurassic Park" became the highest-grossing movie of all time before "Titanic". So this was his momentum, in 1993, Spielberg also director of the Best Picture winner, was the King of the World. And the king of action movies as well.
The action sequences utilize mechanisms inherited from Hitchcock like the race against the clock with a kid climbing down a temporarily deactivated electric fence and the gears being switched on, or taken from "Jaws", the suggestion of the T-rex' presence through the infamous shaking glass of water. For a film that prepares us so much to a monster movie, the writers' imagination created moments of pure ingenuousness and managed to turn the most mundane places such as cars or kitchens into deadly traps. But while "Jaws" had a no-holds-barred rule, Spielberg knew very well a 90s audience wasn't ready to see kids serving as appetizers (still, he didn't turn them into these 1970s know-it-all brats).
So the film also works in spite of its relative predictability. As groundbreaking and powerful as it is, it is also symptomatic of the trend of the 90s where we know the characters who are likely to survive and save the day thanks to aforementioned skills. Spielberg doesn't make his cast nonentities and allows them to share their views about recreating life but subtlety isn't his strongest suit. While Goldblum plays the most interesting character as the chaos theorist insisting that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, Sam Neil's disliking of kids (set in a distasteful opening scene) seemed far fetched and only there for a needless arc, the kids in the film were nice enough and and he had great chemistry with them.
But these considerations hardly matter when the real star are the special effects and the dinosaurs. Forget the blatant lack of security, the improbable survivals or the contrived ending, Spielberg knew people didn't watch a film like screenwriting students, his common denominator instinct paid off. He knew we would all be at the edge of our seat when the T-Rex pops up and we would all go "aaaw" with the brachiosaurus or the baby dinosaur. Spielberg was a visionary showman like Hammond, but HE left nothing to chance.
I remember I was eleven when I participated to a game show and one of the questions I got was "which animals are featured in "Jurassic Park"?" (I hadn't seen the film yet but no one could miss the movie, its poster and the whole publicity around it) the film was undeniable in 1993 and is still today.