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Jurassic Park
The same year he won his first Best Director Oscar for Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg also created one of the best popcorn movies ever and a box office smash. Jurassic Park is a thunderously and consistently terrifying nightmare of nature versus technology and man's insatiable desire to control both goes horribly wrong.
The 1993 film is set in Central America where we meet an eccentric millionaire named John Hammond (Oscar winner Sir Richard Attenborough) who is putting the final touches on an amusement park he is planning to open in a year which will feature live dinosaurs, that Hammond is having hatched from birth but controlled by technology. Hammond invites a pair of paleontologist (Sam Neill, Laura Dern), a cynical doctor (Jeff Goldblum), and his grandchildren to tour the park in hopes that the paleontologists will endorse the park before it opens. But when one of Hammond's employee's attempts to steal dinosaur embryos and security systems controlling the dinosaurs are shut down, everyone on this tour is put in grave danger.
Spielberg really knocked it out of the park here and I'm not sure why I waited all these years to actually watch this film, but I can't recall the last time a film had me alternately riveted to the edge of my chair and jumping out of it. Admittedly, Michael Crichton and David Koepp's screenplay contains a lot of headache-inducing techno babble that keeps this movie in first gear for the first thirty minutes or so, but once said exposition is over and the genius that is Steven Spielberg takes over, just grab something and watch.
This film contains one heart stopping sequence after another made all the more effective because the group of people we meet at the beginning of this park tour get separated for the majority of the running time, documenting that classic saying about safety in numbers. It's not just Spielberg's state of the art (for 1993) technical wizardry, but it's not always about making the viewers eyes pop. There's a horrific scene where Hammond is suggesting to Neill's character that they break for lunch and he sees a bull in a harness being lifted over some sort of cage covered with leaves. We learn that a dinosaur is being fed but Spielberg doesn't show us the carnage, he just shows the bull being lowered, the noise as it happens, and the harness being lifted out, now torn and tattered. Racing a dinosaur out of a tree with a car right behind them that was also in the tree and the finale where we actual see different breeds of dinos turn on each other were also scenes that had me tempted to cover my eyes.
Some parts of the film had a slight air of predictability to them. We learn early on that Sam Neill's character is not crazy about kids, so guess who gets stuck protecting Attenborough's grandchildren for most of the running time? Or when a technician, played by Samuel L Jackson, says he can't run the park system without Wayne Knight's character and seconds later we see Knight's car stuck in the mud and having his own dino encounter.
There are some interesting messages about ecology and tampering with nature that come through here, mostly via Goldblum's character, but they take a back seat to the seriously scary and thunderous roller coaster ride this movie is. Did love the shot about halfway through the film of the gift shop with all the merchandising that we know is going to end up in an incinerator. Mr. Spielberg, we're not worthy. The film won Oscars for Visual Effects, Sound, and Sound Effects Editing, all richly deserved.
The same year he won his first Best Director Oscar for Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg also created one of the best popcorn movies ever and a box office smash. Jurassic Park is a thunderously and consistently terrifying nightmare of nature versus technology and man's insatiable desire to control both goes horribly wrong.
The 1993 film is set in Central America where we meet an eccentric millionaire named John Hammond (Oscar winner Sir Richard Attenborough) who is putting the final touches on an amusement park he is planning to open in a year which will feature live dinosaurs, that Hammond is having hatched from birth but controlled by technology. Hammond invites a pair of paleontologist (Sam Neill, Laura Dern), a cynical doctor (Jeff Goldblum), and his grandchildren to tour the park in hopes that the paleontologists will endorse the park before it opens. But when one of Hammond's employee's attempts to steal dinosaur embryos and security systems controlling the dinosaurs are shut down, everyone on this tour is put in grave danger.
Spielberg really knocked it out of the park here and I'm not sure why I waited all these years to actually watch this film, but I can't recall the last time a film had me alternately riveted to the edge of my chair and jumping out of it. Admittedly, Michael Crichton and David Koepp's screenplay contains a lot of headache-inducing techno babble that keeps this movie in first gear for the first thirty minutes or so, but once said exposition is over and the genius that is Steven Spielberg takes over, just grab something and watch.
This film contains one heart stopping sequence after another made all the more effective because the group of people we meet at the beginning of this park tour get separated for the majority of the running time, documenting that classic saying about safety in numbers. It's not just Spielberg's state of the art (for 1993) technical wizardry, but it's not always about making the viewers eyes pop. There's a horrific scene where Hammond is suggesting to Neill's character that they break for lunch and he sees a bull in a harness being lifted over some sort of cage covered with leaves. We learn that a dinosaur is being fed but Spielberg doesn't show us the carnage, he just shows the bull being lowered, the noise as it happens, and the harness being lifted out, now torn and tattered. Racing a dinosaur out of a tree with a car right behind them that was also in the tree and the finale where we actual see different breeds of dinos turn on each other were also scenes that had me tempted to cover my eyes.
Some parts of the film had a slight air of predictability to them. We learn early on that Sam Neill's character is not crazy about kids, so guess who gets stuck protecting Attenborough's grandchildren for most of the running time? Or when a technician, played by Samuel L Jackson, says he can't run the park system without Wayne Knight's character and seconds later we see Knight's car stuck in the mud and having his own dino encounter.
There are some interesting messages about ecology and tampering with nature that come through here, mostly via Goldblum's character, but they take a back seat to the seriously scary and thunderous roller coaster ride this movie is. Did love the shot about halfway through the film of the gift shop with all the merchandising that we know is going to end up in an incinerator. Mr. Spielberg, we're not worthy. The film won Oscars for Visual Effects, Sound, and Sound Effects Editing, all richly deserved.