Jurassic Park

Rating: 5/10 (11 August 2016)

I have a love/hate relationship with Steven Spielberg's films. The relationship has been more hate than love, but after recently watching Jaws I have decided to move the gauge closer to the middle. Anyway, Jurassic Park did little to move the gauge closer to the "love" column. The popular 1993 adventure directed by Spielberg starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum about a modern-day park in which dinosaurs roam free, was plagued by poor pacing and over-the-top effects use of the famous director.
Through decades of scientific work and development, John Hammond, a wealthy financier has developed a park in which real dinosaurs he has developed through cloning from mosquitos over a million years old. Once he recruits scientists Ellie (Laura Dern) and Grant (Sam Neill) and brings along mathematician Malcolm, Hammond thinks he is on easy street for securing his park and bringing dinosaurs to a public that would otherwise never experience them in real life. After a park employee attempts to steal embryos and the dinosaurs break free, it becomes a race for their lives while dinosaurs walk free around the planet once again.
I am just the biggest fan of Laura Dern, so anytime she is a lead in a film is a treat to be enjoyed. Dern was fantastic in her role as the awestruck scientist. You feel her watching her dreams come true as she watches the manufactured dinosaurs in their natural habitats. You can see the prime directorial efforts in each scene. The audience is able to recognize that Spielberg is really pulling more from his actors than he does in other films. In order to create the world of Jurassic Park, the reactions of the actors must be larger than life, and Spielberg was able to elicit those reactions lending to the credibility of the film. Jeff Goldblum was a fun surprise in this film. Having no experience with him as an actor, I was pleasantly surprised with his performance. He was fun, and serious when it called for it, creating a nice bit of comic relief to a predominately stuffy cast. The acting was definitely the standout of this Jurassic Park and was the only aspect lending credibility to an otherwise over-the-top CGI ridden film.
An inventive concept, a great cast, and larger than life characters, Jurassic Park should have been a home-run, and it largely was among audiences of the time. Going back to revisit the film, however, exposes the film's weaknesses. The Achilles heel Jurassic Park suffers is its pacing. Far too much is fleshed out in explaining each aspect of the creation of the dinosaurs, with nearly an hour passing before we even see any dinosaurs. The action scenes make up for the slow start to a point, but it would have been nicer to focus on more actuality of the dinosaurs rather than the concepts of what brought them about. Of course, the audience needs to understand how the dinosaurs came to be, but not to exhaustive detail. Exhaustive detail is precisely what you get with Jurassic Park; one of the many movies, I feel, whose sequels surpass the originals.