A sick park.

Rating: 6/10 (2 March 2012)

I need to get one thing out of the way first - I hate those awful children. Spielberg often makes huge mistakes when casting children in his movies (Hook, the aggravating Henry Thomas), but the JP kids really get on my nerves. He should have done with little Tim and Lex what he did to Alex Kintner in Jaws in have them devoured in torrents of gore. This would have pleased me a great deal.
Sam Neill (one of my favorite actors) plays Alan Grant, a dinosaur expert who is called to a remote Pacific island with his colleague Ellie Sattler and Chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) by excitable billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to give a fresh perspective on his new theme park and appease his anxious investors (although why a billionaire would need investors is kind of odd). The theme park turns out to be a dinosaur zoo, but nothing works as it should.
Park computer nerd Dennis Nedry (Peter Griffin in a rare live-action role) shuts down the security in order to smuggle dino embryos to the competition, and with the electric fences switched off the big things with pointy teeth step out into the bits of the park where they're not supposed to be.
Jurassic Park has often been nicknamed "Jaws with Claws". I don't think that's a good description. Where Jaws was a difficult shoot, was organic, and was a huge hit against expectations, Jurassic Park is deliberately designed to be a blockbuster without any of the raw edge that made its big brother so believable. I just can't get excited by a film that was made to sell merchandise.
My favorite aspect of Jurassic Park, is often the most overlooked. Dean Cundey's photography is great, full of darkness and backlights. I just wish that Spielberg allowed him to give the film a harder look as it sometimes has a fake, plastic feel. The CGI, having been rendered just a little shy of 20 years ago, are mostly photo-realistic but there are a few dinos that look incredibly fake (the brontosaurus on the grass plain looks terrible).
When making Jaws, the animatronic shark rarely worked. With nothing much to show on screen Spielberg compensated by giving us lots of shark POV shots, and Williams gave the unseen predator a constant presence with his iconic score. Now, in an age where filmmakers can give us anything with a computer effect (in a way, Spielberg made this trend mainstream with the success of Jurassic Park), the monsters are brought right out into the open, lessening our fear of them. A monster is only scary when it is in the shadows. Bruce the Shark was also an unstoppable force of nature, his random appearance out of nowhere giving him a mythical edge. The dinos in Jurassic Park were designed, within the movie, to entertain kids, and intended, as a movie, to entertain the kids in the audience.
They're not scary.
Jurassic Park is a good film, but it absolutely does not deserve the classic status that pop culture has marked it with.