Jurassic Park plays like a lightweight hybrid of the two prior Spielberg films to spawn sequels: Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s in the same league as his best movies. Loosely based on Michael Crichton’s cautionary novel about an ill-fated project to clone dinosaurs from DNA recovered from bloodsucking insects preserved in amber, Jurassic Park showcases Spielberg’s mastery of visual storytelling and audience manipulation about as well as any movie he’s made. ( Avatar and perhaps Interstellar are the best candidates I can think of.) Yet in all that time, it’s hard to think of a single blockbuster spectacle that uses computer imagery to achieve a similar sense of awe and grandeur. In the twenty-odd years since Jurassic Park pioneered the use of photorealistic computer-animated living creatures integrated into a live-action film, computer animation has become even more prevalent. Rarer is the sense of awe and wonder inspired by Jurassic Park’s unprecedented vision of the most mythologized creatures ever to walk the earth, brought to life by a still-convincing blend of early computer imagery and animatronics. Making viewers scream and jump is one of the movie’s oldest and most familiar tricks.
