Jurassic Park remains a key text in the history of blockbuster movies - the franchise gained new legs with the Jurassic world franchise.
Jurassic Park is not a movie that needs promotion and I cannot add anything new.
Watching it this time I was overcome by a sense of sadness.
Blockbusters feel so ephemeral now.
Even Spielberg is something different now.
Change was inevitable.
But watching Jurassic Park now, I was struck by its ease and the economy with which it sets up its characters and its world.
There is a sense of imagination and fun to even the small details - the cartoon DNA who introduces the concept; the interplay between Grant (Sam Neill) and the Murphy kids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello); the ‘objects may appear closer than they are’ gag during the T-Rex chase.
And the dinosaurs -realised by Stan WInston’s animatronics and a few moments of computer-generated imagery come across as tactile and real.
Even in terms of structure, there is a momentum and mounting tension. While it is well-paced, the film takes the time to ground us in the reality of the human characters before introducing the dinosaurs.
I have been watching a lot of disaster movies recently, and the narrative beats have become weirdly comforting - set up the core cast of characters in a peaceful world, and then unleash hell. Jurassic Park follows the same structure.
And these characters, with their various skills and expertise, are just people. They are not professional soldiers or superheroes. The one character vaguely prepared for this situation dies - which only draws attention to how bad the situation will get.
Compared with a more recent film like Black Adam, Jurassic Park is not impatient to throw spectacle at you from the jump. The filmmakers realise that in order for its special effects to be special they have to be special and rare, not in every frame.
Part of the reason may be that the technology was so cutting edge they could not show off the digital dinosaurs more.
But while the CGI was lauded, it is the use of puppetry and physical effects which give the Dinos their tangibility - without Stan Winston's team, the scene with the T-Rex would not work, nor the earlier scene where Dr Grant lies on the sick triceratops.
So much effort is put into putting across the dinosaurs as living things, and it is sad that later blockbusters - including the sequels which followed - saw CGI as a replacement for other forms of effects rather than an augmentation of them.
Despite the return of Spielberg and most of the original team, The Lost World is shockingly messy.
There are a few moments of visual style and Speilberg’s storytelling and suspense, but they are lost in the rush of nonsensical plotting.
Lacking a central plot, The Lost World instead gives us multiple subplots:
Malcolm’s expedition to check on the status of the dinosaurs
Malcolm’s expedition find his girlfriend
Malcolm’s expedition to bond with his daughter
And finally, InGen who invade the island with a plan to move the dinosaurs stateside (a scheme that is clarified weirdly late in the movie)
There is no centre to this movie - Malcolm and co spend the majority of the movie running away from/being killed by dinosaurs.
Pete Postlethwaite is memorable as game hunter Tembo, but he is ultimately a side character: he wants to hunt a T-rex, his plan is foiled and he is last seen abandoning his hunt and leaving.
Arliss Howard plays Hammond’s unscrupulous nephew but is completely toothless
At a certain point, I gave up - the movie just keeps going with no real momentum or purpose.
And then the T-rex gets shipped to San Diego for a brief rampage through the streets until it is led back to the boat and Howard becomes kibble for the T-Rex’s baby.
Weirdly, in its number of setpieces, scope, and narrative bloat, The Lost World feels like a contemporary movie like Black Adam.
The Lost World is such a mess, Jurassic Park III comes off as a major upgrade.
It is not a secret masterpiece, but JPIII keeps its ambitions relatively small.
Thanks to a contrived setup, Dr Grant (Sam Neill) has to rescue a child who has been stranded on the island.
The plot is simple and the characters are cardboard but it makes sense and does not deviate from being a simple monster movie.
Director Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Captain America: The First Avenger) handles the film competently - there are a couple of solid surprises but nothing as terrifying as the original.
Nowhere near as bad as I was led to believe, JPIII is just a generic monster tale.
Maybe they should have stuck with just the one movie.
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