Has something in common with another Michael Crichton novel that was adapted into a film

Rating: 8/10 (27 November 2016)

John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites a 'select' group of people to take a tour of a theme park that he's created called 'Jurassic Park'. This theme park is one of a kind which boasts live dinosaurs made possible by Hammond and his team extracting dinosaur blood from mosquitos that have been preserved in tree sap for millions of years. Hammond decides to give the group a tour of his theme park, but whilst the group are on this tour the park suffers some major mechanical problems and the dinosaurs start to turn their attention on their human hosts....
Jurassic Park, in many ways, shares a lot in common with Michael Crichton's other science-fiction novel Westworld. Westworld's central plot focused on an amusement park where paying guests integrate with robots and a power outage causes the robots to malfunction resulting in them turning on their human counterparts. In this respect, Jurassic Park is very similar and this is the main thing that ensures that it holds your interest.
One criticism that I have with this film is that it is a little on the slow side and it is around the one hour mark before the 'theme park' malfunction occurs. There is a lot of exposition at the start, of which some of it is interesting and relevant, but the cynic in me couldn't help but see some of it as being merely padding. There is a sub-plot involving one employee selling embryos to a rival which seems important at the start, but ultimately goes nowhere which again merely elongated a film with an already overly generous running time.
Having said that though, once the second half of the film arrives then it rarely let's up and Spielberg does turn this into an effective chase picture. The special effects are good and still look quite impressive to this day.
The performances from the main players are all OK, but particular praise should go to the child actors who actually managed to not be particularly annoying at any point which came as a great relief to me.
Jurassic Park is definitely worth watching although one thing I will say is to be careful if you're intending to watch this with young children - it's PG Certificate is a bit misleading and I suspect that younger children may find some of the scenes distressing. Also as I mentioned earlier, if you enjoyed this film then you should definitely check out Westworld - although if you do choose to watch Westworld make sure that you don't watch it with your kids!!!!