Jurassic Park (1993)

Originally Reviewed

Thursday June 1, 2006

"Spared no expense" is what millionaire John Hammond continues to proclaim throughout the film about his theme park geared towards bringing forth a realistic adventure that everyone can visualize and touch. This is Spielberg's attempt in the making of this film and I believe successfully accomplished in his recreation of these massive creatures. The problem is there is only so much one can do with dinosaurs other than run!

Jurassic Park is about millionaire John Hammonds creation of an island theme park where genetically engineered dinosaurs, cloned from the DNA found in amber incrusted mosquitoes, created to be displayed in what is planned to be a most unique theme park. Hammond?s investors though are rather skeptical of his creations and require that he have some experts in the field to provide a stamp of approval. So two paleontologists (Laura Dern & Sam Neil) and the comical relief mathematician (Jeff Goldblum aka "The Goldblum") are brought to the island to experience all of its glory... or disaster.

Everything appears to being going according to plan, but little do the visitors know that their lives are severely in danger. A massive storm is about to hit the island, but that happens to be the least of their problems. Wayne Knight (better known as Newman) plays the greedy computer engineer named Dennis whose in charge of the keeping all the systems running. He's run into some financial trouble, or more likely wasted all his money away, and Hammond is unwilling to increase his salary so that he can blow even more. So Dennis turns to the competition and offers to procure them dinosaur DNA for large sums of money, now all he has to do is obtain the DNA and get off the island before the storm gets worse.

Obtaining the DNA isn't the problem its getting off the island in time, after he shuts down the security system, making it look like system maintenance, he's free to go but has to make his way through Jurassic Park unaware that the dinosaurs are now on the loose! Meanwhile the visitors are in more danger as they sit in front of the Tyrannosaurus Rex enclosure that is no longer secure. Now everyone is faced with the challenge of escaping the island alive and intact.

I couldn't help but think why is Dennis, "Newman" still working there? If I'm running some elaborate park that relies on security, I wouldn't continue to employ someone who potentially had it out for me because they wouldn't get more money, especially when they have access to almost the entire system and could easily make more money selling the secrets or in this case the DNA. Big mistake there which pretty much lead to the whole disaster, but of course without it you wouldn't have much if a movie.

Jurassic Park is the film that started the ball rolling bringing dinosaurs back to the screen in realistic form. Probably one of the biggest movies of it's time and certainly visually top at the time, 13 years later its realism is still pretty impressive. The only problem is it starts to get old pretty quick. While the film actually progresses in the beginning fairly quickly, once arriving at the island things start to take a slower pace and it's quite a while until any real action takes place. Then when the dominos finally start to fall, it's all about running for your life.

In the end, Jurassic Park is definitely an entertaining film, well put together and is very well written and entertaining. You have to give the actors credit as well for doing a great job pretending that there was actually something there when for the most part there wasn't. I wasn't even overly annoyed by "The Goldblum" whose fast talking rambles can sometimes become tiring. Overall, I liked Jurassic Park, but I didn't love it, its definitely entertaining but how entertaining can running away from dinosaurs for two hours be after a while, it gets to be a little old, but the story did help to make the repetition bearable, something the sequels suffered from.

8/10