The Spielberg Series: Jurassic Park (1993)
Hold on to your butts.
It’s impossible for me to be objective about Jurassic Park.
It came along at just the right time. I was 13 years old, had read Michael Crichton’s novel just a year prior, and wanted to see some of its tensest moments brought to life. My best friend and I nagged our moms incessantly to drop us off for the first showing on the Saturday of its release weekend, and I went back six more times that summer. I wore out our VHS and have seen it at least twice on theatrical re-release. I watch it at least once a year. It’s not my favorite movie — it’s not even in my top 5 favorite Spielberg movies — but it’s a major part of my cinema DNA.
When I heard they were making the film, I worried that its content might merit an R rating, which would make me unable to see it. A poster at my local theater bearing Steven Spielberg’s name gave me relief; I knew him from movies I loved like E.T., Hook, The Goonies and Back to the Future. His name meant the movie would be safe (even the grisly Jaws was PG). I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but it was the first instance where I knew a filmmaker’s presence implied a specific style, tone and approach. It was my first thought that there was a guiding hand behind these movies, that it was someone’s job to tell these stories.
Just five years earlier, the very concept of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (also produced by Spielberg) ignited my obsession with movies. There were films I liked before; I remember being delighted by An American Tail and Oliver & Company in the years prior. But the seamless mixture of animation and live-action was pure magic to me, and I read everything I could about the film. I watched every making-of special, bought the soundtrack and my parents even bought me a Southby’s auction catalog of stills from the film. I don’t quite understand the latter, but I obsessively flipped through it because I was the closest I ever even got to seeing the film until it hit VHS, because my parents weren’t sure whether it was appropriate. It was the first videocassette I bought with my own money.
In the five years between Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park, there were films I enjoyed (like any kid that age, I went through a major Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phase), but nothing sparked the obsession that Roger Rabbit had until I started hearing more about Jurassic Park. Even with Hook, a movie I would have called my favorite upon its release, I liked it as a movie but didn’t care much about how it was made. But the news coming out about Jurassic Park was tantalizing. Spielberg was using computers to make ultra-realistic dinosaurs? The digital sound was going to rattle our theater walls? This seemed amazing, and I read everything I could prior to the release of the film.
I bring this all up to say that I went into Jurassic Park armed with all the knowledge of how Steven Spielberg was going to pull the strings and manipulate our emotions, and yet he still got me. From the moment the unseen raptors devour the unlucky crew member in its opening, through the T-Rex attack and into that tense kitchen finale, I was hooked. I kept going back, and loved it more each time. Even viewing the film earlier this year with my kids, I got lost in the adventure. Jurassic Park is one of the best pieces of big-budget spectacle I’ve ever seen.
This time, we see the shark
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to take my son to see Jaws on the big screen (in 3D, which was surprisingly effective). The movie still retains a primal power, and it’s fascinating how much tension Spielberg creates by keeping the shark off screen until the most powerful moments.
It’s easy to want to compare Jurassic Park to Jaws. Both are creature features that revolve around similar ethical dilemmas. In Jaws, Chief Brody tries in vain to close the beaches; the mayor keeps them open because he’s terrified of losing profits. In Jurassic Park, a team of experts is brought to a remote island where scientists have used cutting-edge genetics to bring dinosaurs back to life. The island’s owner wants the experts to sign off on the park because they, of course, are terrified of losing profits. In both cases, nature decides it’s not too concerned about the money.
But nearly 20 years after Jaws, Spielberg knew his approach had to be different. Both Jurassic Park the movie and Jurassic Park the fictional park are built on the promise of spectacle. You can’t keep the T-Rex off screen for most of the movie.
Instead, he shows us our first full dinosaur only minutes after everyone is assembled on the island. After a brief and fraught helicopter ride, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neil), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), mathematician Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) and lawyer Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) have accompanied eccentric billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to his mysterious island. They’re not far from the launchpad when Sattler realizes that the island’s plant life has been extinct for millions of years. But no one’s listening to her because they’re all staring off screen. Spielberg gives us one of his all-time great moments as we watch them discover a towering brachiosaurus; a moment later, we get to see it, too.
Where Jaws made us wait until the third act to glimpse the shark in full, Spielberg lingers on the dinosaur, as well as several more running in the background. John Williams’ score, one of his best, rises. It’s a moment of wonder, even beauty. I’ve seen Jurassic Park more than a dozen times by now, and it’s still a moment that hushes me. It’s Spielberg throwing down the gauntlet, delivering on spectacle before the story’s even in full swing.
Spielberg’s triumphant return
Watching this in context of Spielberg’s filmography at the time, it feels even more triumphant. The onslaught of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. (we’ll just conveniently ignore 1941) was a decade in the rearview. In the subsequent years, Spielberg hadn’t really floundered, but he had struggled. The Color Purple connected with critics and audiences but never secured the respect he sought. Empire of the Sun had its defenders but was a box office disappointment, and two Indiana Jones sequels were hits but paled in comparison to Raiders. Always was a critical and commercial disappointment, and Hook was a seemingly sure-thing that earned him the worst reviews of his career and was only a modest hit with audiences.
Jurassic Park is Spielberg reasserting himself, reminding viewers that no one delivers large-scale thrills better. His command of set pieces is muscular; I don’t know if he’s ever topped himself as a large-scale storyteller. The T-Rex attack is very possibly the most purely thrilling sequence he’s ever directed, a masterpiece of pacing. It creates tension through one iconic shot after another: the rumbles growing closer, causing the water in the glass to vibrate; the goat left out as bait gone and then, just as quickly, splattering on the car; a claw casually pawing at the now-useless electric fence; the T-Rex eye glowering into the Range Rover, its pupil shrinking as a beam from the kids’ flashlight hits its eye. It’s a tense, scary and thrilling moment, and watching it again, I forgot to breathe, just as I did nearly 30 years ago.
Any one scene like that would make it an all-timer, but Spielberg keeps batting them out. The vicious death of Nedry at the hands of a spitting, Gremlin-esque dilophosaurus. The gallimimus stampede, then a hallmark of visual effects. The one-two shocks of Samuel L. Jackson’s severed arm falling on Ellie’s shoulder, followed closely by the raptor leaping out of the shadows. The exquisite terror of the raptors stalking the kids in the kitchen, heightened by the grace notes Spielberg provides (I’m partial to the impatient way one of the raptors clicks its claws). The fist-pumping “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” finale.
In the lead-up to Jurassic Park’s release, much of the hype centered on how Spielberg and visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren had built upon the computer technology James Cameron used for Terminator 2 to bring Crichton’s dinosaurs to life. In reality, there are less than 15 minutes of CGI dinos in Jurassic Park, but at the time, it was a major leap forward. Revisiting Jurassic Park, what’s amazing is how well those effects still work, and how the film also benefits from use of old-school techniques and old-fashioned solid filmmaking.
We’ve reached a point where it’s possible to toss anything we can dream of on the big screen. But, with apologies to Jurassic Park’s most famous line, just because directors think they can doesn’t mean that they should. Over the last few decades, I’ve sat through countless CGI-drenched action adventures where I can’t make heads or tails of what’s happening. Nothing feels weighty or real, and the film seems to think that just because something crazy is on the screen, the job is done. There have, of course, been films where special effects have created something truly memorable since Jurassic Park — Peter Jackson’s initial Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar, and Gravity, to name some obvious examples — but the vast majority of big-budget films seem to believe that tossing digital shiny objects on the screen excuses them from the hard work of employing any discipline or craftsmanship.
Likely because digital effects were still in their early stages, and also because he’s just damn good at this, Spielberg doesn’t let the computers tell the story. He uses visual effects as a tool, just as he uses animatronics, miniatures, stop motion and men in suits. He also pays attention to individual shots to increase tension, provide information or deliver a pressure-relieving gag (the sign on a rearview mirror during a T-Rex chase is still a reminder of Spielberg’s playfulness). None of this should be surprising; paying attention to individual shots and using all the tools at your disposal to tell an effective story is what a director’s supposed to do. But it’s amazing how much craftsmanship seems to be forgotten when you can just create everything in zeroes and ones. You don’t have to look much farther than the other Jurassic films to see this type of story approached badly.
The only good Jurassic Park movie
Jurassic Park came out nearly 30 years ago. It’s inspired a follow-up novel, two direct movie sequels, a three-film legacysequel series and a Netflix cartoon. And while I haven’t watched the Netflix series, I can safely say that in terms of the other ancillary content, Jurassic Park is the sole good entry in the Jurassic Park universe. This past summer, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion was an embarrassing misfire, but it’s worth remembering that even Spielberg couldn’t bring the magic back (we’ll get to The Lost World in a few films).
Spielberg remembers that the film should awe, not just scare, and there are several moments where he slows the movie down just to say “we have dinosaurs in this movie; isn’t it cool?” The first appearance of the brachiosaur works because it’s rooted in wonder, and Spielberg builds sympathy for a sick triceratops shortly afterward. Even a vicious raptor can look cuddly as a hatchling, and there’s a charming interlude in the midst of all the action where Dr. Grant and the kids seek refuge in a tree and come up close with the brachiosaur again. Where all the subsequent films treat the dinosaurs like monsters, Jurassic World treats them as creatures worthy of respect, and they only become dangerous when humans trespass in their world.
Crichton’s novels were thrill rides that served as delivery systems for his opinions on the possibilities and dangers of modern technology. Jurassic Park the novel is harder-edged than the film, with John Hammond as a greedy monster who won’t admit he made a mistake and, in the end, gets his comeuppance. Spielberg, probably identifying too much with the spectacle-loving eccentric, has Attenborough play the role a bit cuddlier and with a touch of naivety; his Hammond is redeemed in the end. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of the change, as it undercuts the critiques of playing God for profit, and there’s no one else to punish for Hammond’s greed, which causes the deaths of several people. But I’ll admit that I have a lot of affection for Attenborough’s performance, so I can’t get too mad.
And it’s not like Jurassic Park just looks the other way at InGen’s greed. Where the other films pay lip service to corporate malfeasance and the ethical quandaries of genetic tampering, it was always just to set up another dino melee where the characters were fodder. Here, Spielberg, working from a script co-written by David Koepp and Crichton, takes time to set up the science behind Jurassic Park and give his characters scenes to debate each other. It still, of course, devolves into chaos (theory), but the presence of smart actors talking about theory and ethics gives the film more grounding than your typical thrill ride, even if the lack of a truly hatful corporate figure and a series of plot hoops that need to be jumped through rob it of some of the focus a masterpiece like Jaws.
And where future Jurassic Park movies would be fronted by characters who ranged from improbable heroes to lunk-headed doofuses (and sometimes played by the same actors from this film), here the protagonists are smart, likable and have enough personality to increase our emotional investment. I like Sam Neil’s curmudgeon with a heart of gold, but I also appreciate the childlike joy Neil brings when Grant can finally see his lifelong obsession up close. This is rightfully one of Goldblum’s most iconic role, and he struts in with T-Rex size confidence and owns the screen. And I love Dern’s humor and energy. I believe these are smart characters, and it lends the film’s earlier scenes an intelligence that makes it easier to accept the outlandish situations that evolve. This might also be the best supporting cast Spielberg has ever had up to this point, with Jackson, Wayne Knight, and B.D. Wong doing great work in minimal roles. I don’t even mind the kids, both for the fact that Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards do solid work and because you’re simply not going to put a dinosaur adventure on the screen and not have kids in it.
All that adds up to one of Spielberg’s greatest crowd-pleasers. If it doesn’t quite hit the top tier of this late-70s/early-80s output, it’s only because there was something in those earlier films that isn’t quite there with Jurassic Park that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s that Close Encounters and E.T. came from a Spielberg vibrating with youthful enthusiasm and fearlessness; Jurassic Park feels more like the work of a master craftsman. It’s still great, it just doesn’t quite feel as transcendent.
But after a shaky near-decade, Spielberg was back. Jurassic Park netted him some of the strongest reviews of his career, sitting pretty at 92% at Rotten Tomatoes. It grossed $357 million in the United States, where it sat as the #2 box office champ for a time, just under the director’s own E.T. It became the first film to gross more than $500 million internationally, bringing its worldwide haul to $914 million and making it the top-grossing worldwide release of all time (it would be surpassed by Titanic four years later).
It re-established Steven Spielberg as the world’s biggest entertainer, and seemed to hint that he was ready to put the loftier artistic aspirations behind him and embrace his place as a preeminent purveyor of popcorn thrills.
But six months after Jurassic Park’s release, Spielberg’s next film would hit theaters. And while the dinosaurs ruled the box office, it was Schindler’s List that would earn Spielberg the artistic and awards acclaim he’d been chasing.
Note: One more mea culpa. My hope was to do these every Sunday, but trying to fit in time to watch these movies and write about them, along with other film reviews, podcasts, etc. and my kids’ increasing activities outside of school is making that hard. I’m going to ease off on the weekly deadline and just keep this series coming as I can get to them, otherwise I’m going to just get frustrated. Also, Schindler’s List, which will be the next entry, will probably provide a good breaking point for the year so that I can move into some fun series for Halloween and spend November and December catching up on 2022 releases. Doing this on the side is a fun way to keep writing, but the outside obligations keep presenting challenges to what that release schedule looks like. Thanks for your patience!
One of the defining cinematic moments of my childhood was at the end of this film: the velociraptor is about to pounce on the heroes but, out of nowhere, the Tyrannosaurus Rex chomps it just in time. I was blown away. That part still thrills me to this day.