“Jurassic Park” is 20 years old but she sure doesn’t look it. Now according to press materials the film was “65 Million Years in the Making” so a couple of decades are mere drops in the bucket but I still find the longevity near-miraculous. Here we have an incredibly special effects heavy film that pioneered the use of extensive Computer Generated Effects to generate a mass of creatures that share a lot of screen time with the flesh and blood actors. Yet somehow the work still looks amazingly real. The film shows you living, breathing dinosaurs and you will believe every minute of it. This 2013 3D re-issue of “Jurassic Park” makes a good case that this Pop Cinema juggernaut is also a timeless classic.
The miracle here is that this defies the standard. Look back at any SFX movie a couple of decades old you will see kinks and flaws. Even the original “Star Wars” trilogy seems clunky compared to modern movies and that’s WITH the added CG junk shoved into it.
In 1993 “Jurassic Park” ushered in a new era and really stood on the cusp of the computer reliant movement that dominates today. And I do literally mean the cusp. As the film began prepping, the dinosaurs where to be created with a mix of huge Stan Winston (“Terminator,” “Aliens”) created puppets and Stop Motion animation, the standard at the time. Put then director Steven Spielberg was shown some test footage put together by Industrial Light and Magic that pretty much proved that Spielberg give the audience “Real Dinosaurs” and the movie world was never the same again. This was “The Big Bang” that changed everything.
As the first out of the gate, “Jurassic Park” looks better than anything that preceded it for nearly a decade. Not until Gollum was there anything to come close to this sort of Creature Feature magic. The transitioning between the practical puppets (they still used Winston’s puppets and the man made an actual sized T-Rex!!!) and CG is seamless.
Enough about the techie stuff, what about the film itself? “Jurassic Park” illustrates that Mr. Spielberg is the master at creating popcorn cinema. Once we get through the exposition that takes its time introducing the players and the set up (Science uses DNA to make monsters), we get to the action and the film never lets up to the end credits. Spielberg does falter a bit with the real life characters as our hero Dr. Grant (Sam Neil) is no Indiana Jones. All are pretty flat dimensionally with the exception of Jeff Goldblum as sputter-talking Dr. Ian Malcolm. This is perfect 90’s Goldblum but unfortunately he spends the last half of the film lying on a table, injured, listening to the rest of the movie happening around him.
With the re-release of “Jurassic Park” we have an opportunity to revisit an important film that is pure entertainment. I was lucky enough to catch it in the IMAX format and I say seek it out. This is classic Spielberg when the man was operating at the top of this game. 1993 Mr. Spielberg not only gave us dinosaurs but also released “Schindler’s List,” arguably his best drama work. Good year, Steven. Very good year.