Jurassic Park (1993)

This was the Movie Club pick for this week.  This movie is a stone-cold classic.  It doesn't matter how many times you watch it.  The T-Rex in the rain?  Iconic.  "Hold on to your butts"?  All-time great.  Velociraptor snorting on the glass?  Spine-chilling.  One of the greatest action thrillers of all time.  Accept no substitutes.  Original post 19 Apr 15.    Some of you readers may not remember when this movie came out.  If you haven't seen it by now, it means no one loves you and you're going to have to take care of yourself.  I was eleven, my brother was six and our mom told us we could not see it in theaters because she felt it was too scary so we had to wait an interminable six months for it to come out on VHS (kids, go look that up) which I seem to remember being around Christmas.  I say all of that to make a point.  I don't remember what I had for breakfast today but I remember watching Jurassic Park for the first time.  That's how groundbreaking this movie was.

Archeologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and his partner, paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) are hired by entrepreneur Richard Hammond (David Attenborough) to preview his newest theme park, for which he spared no expense.  Hammond's team of scientists and geneticists recreated dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquitos and engineered an island's worth of creatures.  Hammond hopes to turn Isla Nublar into the world's first and only interactive dinosaur petting zoo, but outside parties have gotten wind of the breakthrough and bribed one of Hammond's software engineers (Wayne Knight) to steal the DNA combinations.  This disgruntled employee rigged certain security features to fail, unknowingly putting Drs. Grant, Sattler, Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and Hammond's two grandchildren in danger.  Now they all must try to survive the island's predatory inhabitants.

I was curious to see how the special effects have held up after twenty years since 1993 was pretty much the Jurassic period of CGI, but the folks at Industrial Light and Magic were worth every penny they were paid.  Their integration of blue screen work with animatronics gives the dinosaurs a lovely 3D texture while smoothing some of the jerky robotic movements.  The tension is still palpable, as is the sense that the characters are in real peril.  Spielberg also eschews his characteristic slow build to really dive into the action from the first scene.

Obviously, this film remains culturally significant as it is about to have its third sequel, Jurassic World, coming out in June of this year.  I've not been jumping at the bit to see it but I will say that my interest is prodded somewhat by revisiting the first one.