This week sees the release of Jurassic World: Rebirth, and it seems like it’s being met with a bit of a shrug from fans, even if it’s still going to make a solid amount of cash—these movies always do. Jurassic Park has become a franchise for Universal, and a profitable one at that. Yet, none of the films have had the magic the first one did. But what magic was that? I’m glad you asked.
You see, younger audiences may not appreciate it now, but Jurassic Park gave us DINOSAURS. The new Jurassic World movies are full of CGI dinosaurs, but we had never seen them convincingly portrayed on the big screen before. At best, we’d seen—admittedly impressive—stop-motion versions such as those made by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, but Spielberg’s Jurassic Park truly brought them to life in a way no one could have ever imagined.
Of course, Jurassic Park began as a 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, and apparently as soon as it was published, Hollywood came calling, with folks like Tim Burton and even Joe Dante all flirting with the project. Yet Crichton was the one with his sights set on Spielberg, as he knew he was likely the only one who could mount an impossible project like this—especially as far as the special effects were concerned. And indeed, new ground was going to need to be broken, but it just so happened that the early nineties marked a period of amazing innovation for Industrial Light & Magic, with them having blown audiences away with their liquid-metal morphing for the T-1000 in T2. But Jurassic Park would be an altogether different type of challenge, as the dinosaurs had to look real—and without that, the movie would fall apart.
CGI, at the time, was arguably in its infancy. The movie broke ground with its depiction of CGI dinosaurs, which blew audiences away in 1993, but the film also used stop-motion with compositing courtesy of Phil Tippett, while Stan Winston handled the animatronic dinosaurs.
And that is what made Jurassic Park such a landmark movie for anyone who saw it in 1993. It truly gave audiences something they’d never seen before. And even with its rumored six limber new T-Rexes in Jurassic World: Rebirth, you’re ultimately getting a very familiar movie.
Another important thing to note is that the human element wasn’t lost in Jurassic Park. The script by David Koepp and Michael Crichton made some changes from the book but kept the same rich characterization. At the time, Spielberg’s career had actually taken a bit of a hit, as Hook was viewed as a flop. So, for Jurassic Park, in order to keep the budget in check, Spielberg eschewed established stars for the leads. Rather, he went after a trio of character actors. Sam Neill had appeared in Dead Calm and Memoirs of an Invisible Man, but was still viewed as a somewhat obscure New Zealand leading man. Thus, he made an unusual hero as Dr. Alan Grant—capable of the action needed by the plot but far from your typical movie star. The same goes for Laura Dern, who, like Neill, was acclaimed as a performer but wasn’t someone headlining hit movies. Jeff Goldblum was arguably the best known of the three, having led The Fly, but he also had a few huge flops—like Mister Frost, Earth Girls Are Easy, and a few others—that had, for a while, ended his career as a leading man. His role as Ian Malcolm would make him iconic, as would his all-black clothing and some of the amazing dialogue he got to spout off…
Plus, there was Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, who had been a fairly big star in England in the sixties but had essentially quit acting to become a director, having won an Oscar for Gandhi in 1982. The supporting cast included Wayne Knight, B.D. Wong, a young Samuel L. Jackson (“Hold on to your butts”), and Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello—the latter of whom was a protégé of Spielberg’s mentor, Stanley Kubrick, who had planned to use him in his canceled Holocaust project, The Aryan Papers.
And then there’s the music. John Williams and Spielberg are like peanut butter and jelly—they truly bring out something special in each other—and Williams’s score soars. What’s often neglected, though, is how scary the movie actually is. While never considered a horror guy, Spielberg was very adept at scaring audiences—Jaws made us afraid of going in the water for fifty years. He always pushed the limits of what he could get away with: you had lawyers being eaten, Sam Jackson getting his arm ripped off, and a lot more gnarly scenes. Most importantly, you never knew who was going to die. Even a guy like Sam Neill’s survival as Grant was never a sure thing. The T-Rex attack and the raptor showdown at the end are genuinely scary, and Spielberg’s sense of foreboding is magnificent—from the vibrating water glass to Ariana Richards barely able to hold a spoonful of green Jell-O when she sees a raptor.
All this is to say that, in some ways, it’s a bit of a drag that we all know Jurassic World: Rebirth won’t give us anything on par with that movie. Heck, I doubt it will even be as good as The Lost World, which at least had some gnarly kills, even if Spielberg probably should have passed on ever doing a sequel. The Jurassic Park series has become a never-ending cycle of diminishing returns—kind of like what happened with the Jaws series. Although don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying these movies are as bad as the Jaws sequels (though Jaws 2 has its moments). It’s just that the magic is gone.
But the original? The original remains a total banger.
