Fantastic!

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2010)

Growing up, Ray Harryhausen was my movie hero - he specialised in putting on screen things which didn't exist. For the last 35 years his place has been taken by Stephen Spielberg, simply because he makes such very, very good films. And he has been known to put something impossible on screen every now and then, too.
To synopsise, a theme park is set up on an island, populated by dinosaurs reconstructed from prehistoric DNA extracted from mosquitoes preserved in amber. During the "test drive" of the park, attended by palaeontologists, things go horribly wrong...
Michael Crichton's book, though very enjoyable, is filled to overflowing with technobabble, particularly with regard to the park's computer system. And, if one is brutally honest, it recycles the basic idea of Crichton's own Westworld some 20 years earlier, albeit different theme park, different victims.
Spielberg strips away, simplifies, gives us a range of very human humans as potential (and actual!) victims, and a moderate amount of exposition so that we always believe what happens, and then sets off on the first of a number of spectacular set pieces. The story is minimal and almost incidental.
The cast are all good. Jeff Goldblum is not always to my taste, but Sam Neill's sincerity and dignity compensates. But this movie is never about the cast, nor the story.
The dinosaurs (and their integration into the movie) are nearly flawless - there are one or two points where the gallimimuses don't convince 100% that they belong against that particular background plate. They vary between mechanical/animatronic effects and CGI - and this is quite near that dawn of CGI for photo-realistic characters wholly integrated into movies - and it was impossible to distinguish which shots are physical and which are photographic. If you don't believe how truly remarkable Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were, particularly for their day, try comparing them with any CGI monster from the SciFi channel's specially commissioned movies nearly 20 years later, and see how unconvincing CGI critters can be, and how woefully they can be integrated into backgrounds (or, indeed, NOT integrated!). They stand up as well now as they did when the movie was first released and, given how far CGI has come since then, that is a testament to their quality.
If I had a criticism, it would be that the film is rather too leisurely in dealing with the set up - with the benefit of hindsight, the disastrous events of the second half of the film could have started a little earlier. However, this is more than made up for by John Williams' wonderful score.
Addition: April 2013 The recent 3D conversion is quite superb: you would never know that the movie was filmed flat.