This has long since become a tired franchise, but’s a treat now to revisit Steven Spielberg’s original film for its 30th anniversary. It is a spectacular and thrilling movie about Jurassic Park, the hubristic tourist attraction offering real-life dinosaurs cloned from dinosaur blood that has been extracted from insects encased in ancient amber. But what if something goes wrong and the dinosaurs turn out to be bigger, stronger and angrier in captivity than we thought?
The film is based on a bestseller by Michael Crichton, and – as with Spielberg’s version of JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun – the darker, dystopian notes of the original have been strategically de-emphasised to focus more brightly on the adventure and conventional jeopardy involved, along with childlike awe and wonder. Jurassic Park also has one of the boldest and catchiest John Williams scores with a classic central theme, and it has one of the meatiest cast lineups of any Spielberg picture.
The then 70-year-old Richard Attenborough, in Santa Claus white whiskers, plays the ebullient plutocrat Dr Hammond, whose brainchild is Jurassic Park – although noone is so discourteous as to imply that Dr Hammond is himself a bit of a dinosaur. Sam Neill plays tough-minded paleontologist Dr Alan Grant, called in to inspect the park as an independent observer to mollify Hammond’s uneasy investors – although as Hammond is bankrolling Dr Grant’s research, there is surely a conflict of interest. (Dr Grant wears a hat that may remind you of a certain other scientist-adventurer.) Grant’s partner, Dr Ellie Sattler (played with enormous charm and vigour by Laura Dern), is also along for this inspection; she is longing for a baby, which gives a subtextual frisson to the fact that all the dinosaurs at the park are female and not allowed to breed. Jeff Goldblum is in some of the grooviest form of his career as Dr Ian Malcolm, a chaos theorist who is evaluating the park, this discipline corresponding to the free-jazz looseness of his speaking style.
The smaller roles are great, too: Bob Peck is the gimlet-eyed game warden who understands how terrifying the velociraptors really are; BD Wong is a geneticist in the backroom labs; Wayne Knight (later to find immortality as the postman Newman in TV’s Seinfeld) is the crooked IT engineer who is selling out the park’s dino-embryos to a competitor; and Samuel L Jackson has a cameo as a keyboard operator, smoking a cigarette in the office – because everyone was cool about that in those days.
When Jurassic Park’s CGI dinosaurs were first unveiled on screen in 1993 they really were staggering, and however blase we are now about these kind of effects, they still look good at least partly because of the childlike responses of Neill and Dern. They are different from the shark in Jaws, so hidden and malign, and different also from ET, open and benign. Moreover, they are not endowed with agency in quite the same way: the raptors may be the stars, and they are mean – but they are not as mean as the duplicitous humans. It’s still an amazing ride.
• Jurassic Park is in UK and Irish cinemas from 1 September, and is available for streaming on multiple platforms in Australia.
