Living with Dinosaurs

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2007)

I don't know whether I should be writing this seeing Jurassic Park is my favourite film so I may tend to be biased. I first saw Jurassic Park soon after my sixth birthday in 1993. I was, as most six-year-olds are, interested in Dinosaurs, but Jurassic Park sparked me off on a whole new level of Dinosaur enthusiasm. Another thing I should add was that I played piano back then and instantly wanted to be able to play John Williams' fantastic theme. Now fourteen years later, it remains the one piece of music I remember. The music is the first thing I'd like to touch on, in short, it is epic and incredibly fitting. Even back then it had the qualities of timelessness which even a six-year-old could understand.
The film stands up today so well, which is incredible seeing the leaps and bounds which we have achieved in the field on special effects in the fourteen years since it was made. I still find the T-Rex the most realistic movie creature ever. In comparing it to Peter Jackson's "King Kong" I still find the Rex more realistic then the incredibly detailed Kong - which instead of looking real, looks like what it is - an incredibly believable CG model. The mixture of the then new computer generated animation and the animatronic Dinosaurs gives the Dinosaurs more realism then modern CG creatures have now. Where places like Jackson's Weta Workshop replicate interaction between actors and CG characters, in Jurassic Park, actors WERE interacting with the Dinosaurs.
The other characters in the film are superb, although differing quite a lot from the book. I like Alan Grant's dislike of children which he didn't have in the book. It adds more to the character's development. No-one other then Sam Neill could have been Alan Grant, even though he differs from the description of Grant in the book. Malcolm was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum incredibly well, and it was a show of the films good writing that he didn't turn into the whiny know-it-all as Malcolm was in the book. He of course was still the critic but Goldblum delivered this with more class then the "I told you so" Malcolm of the book. Gennero and Hammond were the two major differing-from-the-book characters and I'm not sure which I liked better. I know I did not want Attenborough's Hammond to be killed as he was too different from the ambitious capitalist Hammond of the book - he was too likable. Ferrero created a perfect blend of Ed Regis and the capitalistic Hammond, but his character from the book was all but gone, which was unfortunate because I thought that Generro was one of the more realistic characters in the book. Regardless, Ferrero's Generro was still a great character. Lastly on the characters/actors front I would just like to add that Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello were brilliantly realistic as Tim and Lex Murphy which is rare in young actors, especially now.
I know I've written too much so I'll close now;
The film is timeless and stands up incredibly well today, even with someone like me who has seen it countless times, as well as seeing the making of features and reading the book. It is still so realistic, even me with my now critical eye can easily look past the slight shaky-ness of the Rex at times, (brought on by the water which the skin soaked in,) and other such minor issues which people seem to always insist on pointing out to be always captivated by the film.