30 years later, 'Jurassic Park' shows how great direction can overcome dated effects

by Mitchel Green - June 9, 2023

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

There are movies that make us love movies, and there are movies that make us obsessed with them. I don’t know what switch flipped inside of me when I watched “Jurassic Park” on a random Friday night when I was 12 years old (it wasn’t even the first time I had seen the film), but it hooked me. I needed to know everything. I needed to see every movie ever released. I needed to figure out how they got made. I needed to read every piece of film criticism ever written. Half of my college degree, getting into screenwriting, and starting this blog all happened because Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece triggered something in me that turned me from someone who loved movies into someone who needed them.

“Jurassic Park” blew my 12-year-old mind because it shifted my perspective on what movies were. At the time, movies were, to me, nothing more than a way to consume stories. I watched for plot and character, for what was going to happen. But watching the film then drew my attention to the craft of filmmaking. How were the visual effects so seamlessly incorporated into the image? How did they decide when to use digital over practical ones? Why wait so long to show the dinosaurs? I started paying more attention to who was making the movies rather than who was in them. It was no shock to me then to realize Spielberg directed the film. He was the filmmaker behind “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” my favorite movie at the time, and remains so to this day.

Spielberg is the reason “Jurassic Park” works. It isn’t the effects — which are still impressive for the time. It isn’t the story and characters — though they are reasonably entertaining. Spielberg’s overwhelming impact on these movies is apparent because, of the five other films in this generally terrible franchise, the only decent follow-up is the one he directs. The effects get better (or at least updated), and some characters return as the franchise continues. But when Spielberg steps away from the films, they become lifeless husks of movies that are completely unaware of why the original was good in the first place.

It’s clear at this point in his career that Spielberg can make a great film in any genre — action, adventure, science-fiction, musical, war — and he’ll often combine them in creative ways, but he always seems most confident and assured when he slips back into horror mode. Early in his career in “Jaws” and even the tv movie “Duel,” his Hitchcockian ability to build suspense through shot composition and camera movement was something he had already mastered, and fleshing out the rest of his visual storytelling abilities throughout his career only props up how well Spielberg does horror when he returns to it.

The best scenes in “Jurassic Park” are the ones that feature these horror elements. The opening in which the park staff tries to get the raptor in the enclosure uses a don’t-show-the-creature approach similar to “Jaws” and combines it with off-putting reaction close-ups to create a terrifyingly chaotic sequence where the audience never knows what is happening, but does know the gruesome results. The slapsticky death of Dennis Nedry at the hands of the Dilophosaurus is both comical in the series of events that plays out and terrifying in its uses of darkness and weather to disorient. Then there’s the film’s centerpiece, the sequence where the T-Rex escapes its enclosure, a masterful example of horror filmmaking, slowly building up to the reveal of the creature and then slowly building again to the attack, creating a sense of being trapped by keeping the camera inside the cars for the most part, and then the explosion of violence from the dinosaur. It’s one of the most intense sequences in Spielberg’s entire filmography.

Of course, as its many sequels haven’t seemed to realize, “Jurassic Park” works because it isn’t just empty spectacle. Much of the text is an unnoteworthy warning of the consequences that can come with using new technology to disrupt the natural order of the world, but it’s more interesting to read all of this philosophizing as Spielberg commenting on the way new technology would impact the film industry, for better and worse.

“Jurassic Park” is a landmark use of computer-generated imagery in film, and Spielberg uses the introduction of dinosaurs as a metaphor for this new CGI. We don’t see any digital effects until 20 minutes into the film when the characters first gaze upon the Brachiosaurus. The film introduces the audience and the characters to something mind-blowing, something they’ve never seen before and never thought they might see. The scene still provokes awe and wonder despite the relatively dated effects because it’s tied to a big moment for characters that we care about. Compare this to the introduction of the finished park in “Jurassic World,” which, given its presentation, should generate a similar emotional response. However, it doesn’t because the audience doesn’t care enough about the characters, and the effects are not nearly as revolutionary for their time.

Spielberg is also using the material to warn against the overuse of this new, powerful technology at the expense of the human touch. When a fellow paleontologist uses a new computer system to map out a dig site before they begin, he says, “Two more years of development, and we won’t even have to dig anymore,” to which Alan Grant sarcastically replies, “Where’s the fun in that?” At a time when AI is threatening to replace jobs in several sectors of the film industry, it reads as a pushback against automation. Sure, you might be able to do and create anything you want, but if there’s nothing human behind it, will it mean anything? As Ian Malcolm says, “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.” The illusion of reality in “Jurassic Park” has allowed the film to hold up over the last 30 years. The sets, animatronics, and human touch combine to help it believably reach that illusion.

People throw around the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” a lot, but it’s true. Big, effects-driven blockbusters in the modern age are more digital than human. Martin Scorsese has described these kinds of films as theme parks, and how ironic that a movie from 30 years ago that both led to and warned against Hollywood’s current moment is about a senseless theme park whose creators were primarily concerned with money over anything else. Perhaps Hollywood studio execs needed to take a lesson from this film other than “People must really like dinosaurs and digital effects.”