In thinking about Jurassic Park and what I want to say about it, I've isolated four main points that I want to emphasize when it comes to this movie:
1) Jurassic Park was lightning in a bottle. For shark movies, there is really only one good story and that's Jaws. I think time has pretty much proven this to be correct. Everything else just isn't as good. The same goes for dinosaurs. That one good story was penned by Michael Crichton who was a genius and foresaw how genetic engineering could possibly bring back prehistoric/extinct animals if you could just get the D.N.A. blueprint from something. It's just enough of a stretch to make this tale believable. There's no old world sorcery or time travel element involved. The story just asks you to stretch the science we already know today a little further and bam...you are in Wonderland.
2) Michael Crichton obviously had a thing for theme parks run amok. HBO is currently running the critically acclaimed Westworld, based on a story by Crichton. In a similar vein, Jurassic Park is the same kind of show, taking a theme park and making it all break down in the most catastrophic and dramatic fashion possible.
3) Jurassic Park has many themes to it. One is that humans and greed are at the root of failure when it comes to realizing big ideas. A second (and sometimes overlooked) message of the story is parenting and acknowledging that parents oftentimes don't make the best decisions when it comes to children. They can also get completely overwhelmed by natural circumstances causing events to spiral out of control even in a world full of the modern luxuries and conveniences that we all take for granted. In the end, the character of Dr. Grant is every adult out there who finds himself suddenly caring for smaller humans and just winging it to try and keep them safe.
4) John Williams's musical score is perhaps the best one that he's ever done, and it's perfect to the tiniest degree in adding emotional punch to scenes in the movie. If ever there was a musical score that is a true masterpiece, it is Jurassic Park.
Only one Jaws, only one Jurassic Park. And Spielberg knew how to bring the human element to life. That's something that really lacked in the last movie. (Not to mention the tons of mistakes.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a good movie though it got a lot wrong about dinosaurs.
ReplyDeleteWhat things did they got wrong about dinosaurs? I remember 25 years ago being interested in this movie, and reading that they had tried to be as accurate as possible regarding the animals that they put into this movie.
DeleteThe T-Rex not being able to see them standing still (something they changed in Jurassic World), the size of raptors (they were more like chickens), and probably some other stuff.
DeleteI loved that movie but always thought it would have been even better if the dinos had just eaten those darned kids!
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the Weird Al parody: a T-Rex ate our lawyer so I guess they're not all bad.
DeleteThese are examples of movies I ought to like and want to like but always come away just feeling meh.
ReplyDeleteI remember taking my oldest son to see Jurassic Park in the theater. When that first dinosaur walking onscreen, it was a magical moment for both of us. Nothing like dinosaurs to a boy at that age.
ReplyDeleteI remember how they kept the dinosaurs hidden in the trailers so people would have to see the movie to see how they came out. Then even hid the dinosaurs for the scoring. I was in college at the time, and my oboe teacher told me he played one day on it. (He occasionally did scoring sessions on the side.) And how the dinosaurs had been blanked out.
ReplyDeleteYeah, now they are so commonplace they just show everything in the trailers. The same thing has happened to Alien. They used to keep the xenomorph out of the trailer. Now they just don't care and put the xenomorph right there in plain sight in the trailers. Gotta say, it makes me think that the franchise (alien) and Jurassic Park has (if I'm gonna be honest) jumped the shark. They need to be put down and hard and not talked about for a hundred years when they can be reinvented at some point.
DeleteI totally agree. The first Jurassic park was a masterpiece of storytelling and showed how CGI could allow movies to do things never thought possible. Everything since has been bad. I enjoyed the last one despite the ridiculous story but mostly because I like Chris Pratt.
ReplyDeleteI like Jaws more every time I watch it. Spielberg has made a lot of great movies but I don't think he's ever topped this one. He really understates the shark for the first half of the movie and makes it more of a family drama. Few directors have that much patience in this genre.
I saw Jurassic Park with (at the time) my very young nephew, and I was so glad the sound was way up because I was screaming during the scene with the velocoraptors in the kitchen. Spielberg of course always looks for the human angle and family connections in all his movies, which made that dino film the best.
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