Jurassic Park

Many of us will have been too young to remember the first release of the now legendary Jurassic Park, perhaps Steven Spielberg’s greatest film to date. The film hardly needs an introduction; nor does it need to provide a reason for seeing it, for the film is pure entertainment - two hours of pure heart-pounding, dinosaur-chasing, wise-cracking fun. Along with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Jurassic Park heralded believable and fully-realised computer-generated imagery in the early nineties, setting the precedent for the rest of the decade that has lasted into the twenty-first century. Some would even argue that the overall effect of the film has never been surpassed, due to the guiding hand of the most commercially successful director of all time.

It’s hard to have grown up in the past twenty years and to not have watched this film. Everyone seems to remember a particularly defining moment, whether it be the initial attack of the poor helpless Mexican theme park worker, the primary rain-soaked encounter with the T-Rex, big Dennis (Knight) being devoured by that freaky ink-pitting creature, or the Velociraptor siege in the kitchen. Who could forget the douche-bag lawyer ‘escaping’ to the toilet? Old memories will be refreshed for the returning viewer, and new ones will be created for new audience members. Perhaps the greatest reason for the film’s abiding memory in the mind of the nineties child is the idea that children themselves were not free from danger. Spielberg employed the innocent device so well with Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but subverts it here by placing Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards into inescapable terror. This is a terrifyingly good blockbuster film experience.

Jack Porter