Jurassic Park was first released in 1993 – whilst I didn’t get to see it in the cinema, plenty of my friends did, many of them going to the cinema for the first time. You never forget your first trip to the cinema, and I can imagine having that first movie be Jurassic Park makes it a particularly sweet memory, one that would serve only to make this re-release in cinemas all the more welcome. Re-releases are nothing new, but as fans of Star Wars will happily tell you, they can be bittersweet affairs. Whilst they may be brought back to the cinema to celebrate a milestone date or dvd release, the temptation for studios and directors to fiddle with the original can often be too big to pass up, meaning the movie you return to the cinema to see won’t be exactly what you saw originally. Sure, the improvements might be good, but at the same time The Lion King wasn’t a colossal success in 1994 because it was 3D, much in the same way that people don’t love Star Wars because of a cgi Yoda.
Happily, however, that argument is not relevant to this re-release – there are no effects or storyline changes whatsoever. The version of Jurassic Park you will see in the cinema is the exact same movie as in 1993, with the benefit of superbly remastered sound and a sharp picture. Everything, from the Universal Studios ident at the start to the dinosaur visual effects remains completely unaltered, and the film is all the better for it. You may say that with Star Wars, Lucas feels that new technology allows him to fulfil his vision a bit better but even 18 years later, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park still look real.
Having pretty much invented blockbusters with Jaws, there are few more capable of directing this sort of movie than Spielberg – and you cannot imagine anyone else doing it, either. Jurassic Park succeeds where many other big summer movies fail because instead of saying “what will we show them now?!” Spielberg’s approach is “how much can we hide from them?” – creating a movie that is as tense and nerve-wracking as it is exciting. There have been dozens of megabudget monster/alien/robot movies in recent years, from King Kong to Avatar, and whilst they’ve all impressed and amused, none have managed to also scare the audience like Jurassic Park does. I have seen it many times, as had my friends, but that didn’t stop us jumping and shrieking when the raptor peeked through the door window, or when the T-Rex smashed the roof of the Jeep.
Thanks to brilliantly executed action scenes full of subtle shots and build-ups, you never grow impatient for some dinosaurs – in fact you’re just terrified about when they’re going to turn up. This in turn leads you to empathising with the uniformly brilliant cast in a way you very rarely do with blockbusters at the moment. It’s this balance between the approach to the humans and dinosaurs that pretty much sums up why Jurassic Park is such a beautiful and landmark film – the effects are so brilliant they make you wish the dinosaurs were real, but Spielberg created such a wonderful cast of characters that you hope they don’t all get devoured by a hungry raptor. At no point does he sacrifice plot or character in favour of some effects, but at no point is it boring or drawn out. It goes without saying too that John Williams’ score provides goose bumps for the entire duration of the movie.
I can be prone to getting crazily excited about movies before and after, especially with summer blockbusters. More often than not, the film cannot possibly match the hype and hysteria that precedes it, no matter how hard I may try to convince myself (hello, Transformers 3). It can then become quite easy for me to become slightly disenchanted at times, thinking that perhaps I expect too much of these so-called spectacular summer movies. But after seeing Jurassic Park last night, with a bunch of friends who all laughed, jumped and screamed in the right places, I was reminded why I love blockbusters so much and how, in the right hands, how mesmerising, exciting and wonderful they can really be.
