I Just Saw

I watched Jurassic Park many times as a kid. It was the most thrilling and enthralling movie ever made when I was seven years old. As time’s gone by I’ve seen films that surpass it in my personal canon, but it remains an entertaining spectacle. It also remains the single unironically good film in the entire six-entry Jurassic franchise.

The Lost World (1997) and III (2001) are fitfully entertaining B-movies, elevated by their relative gruesomeness. (A little girl savaged by baby dinosaurs, a disembodied hand clinging to a ship’s wheel, a skeleton tangled in paragliding gear… these were intense films for their PG ratings.)

The Jurassic World movies, meanwhile, are simply junk. Jurassic World (2015) is technically the least awful but Fallen Kingdom (2018) is by far the most entertaining, almost reaching the trashy heights of Lost World and III; Dominion (2022) is a big, loud, expensive nothing.

The original Steven Spielberg Jurassic Park is the ideal monster movie, by turns suspenseful and funny. The story – based on a novel by Michael Crichton – should be familiar to you by now, but just in case: John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is an eccentric millionaire whose scientists have found a way to clone dinosaurs using DNA extracted from fossilised mosquitoes, while doctors Grant (Sam Neill), Satler (Laura Dern), and Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are respectively a couple of palaeontologists and a chaos theorist enlisted to take a test tour of the resulting dino-themed park.

Jurassic Park is that rare case of a film being leagues better than its source novel. I’ve never thought much of Crichton as a writer; the Jurassic Park novel (1990) aside, I mainly remember him as the guy who got so mad at a journalist for dismantling his climate change denialism, that he gave his name to a baby rapist with a micropenis in the novel Next (2006). Real mature, Michael. Although Crichton co-wrote the screenplay, it’s clear that Spielberg brought his own style and approach to the film, adding pace and characterisation to a somewhat clunky text.

The film isn’t perfect. It has a bizarre disdain for fat people, starting with a kid who’s menaced by Dr. Grant for mouthing off in an early scene before we meet our main human antagonist, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight). Knight is a fun actor, but all his role’s missing in terms of its fattism is comedy sound effects when he falls down. The “corporate espionage” plot might have been more suspenseful if he wasn’t a complete buffoon.

Nonetheless, this is a film of adventure and set pieces; the sense of operatic awe that Spielberg creates early on never lets up. The action scenes are high craft, Satler in the underground tunnels in particular an outstanding and classic sequence of pure suspense. Moreover, the dinosaur chase scenes are all the more effective because Spielberg takes his time building up to them. By the time the first dinosaur attacks, we have a full understanding of where we are, why, and what the stakes are. A good technique for appreciating that might be to imagine what this film would look like if it was directed by, say, Michael Bay.

Rating: 3.5/4