Jurassic Park Review

The movie Jurassic Park is about an island theme park with dinosaurs as the main attraction. Mr. John Hammond, the owner, invites a group consisting of paleontologist Dr. Grant, paleobotanist Dr. Sattler, mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. Malcolm, Hammond’s lawyer Mr. Genarro, and Hammond’s grandchildren Tim, and Lex to inspect it before it opens to the public. While the group is on a park tour, a greedy park employee shuts down the park's power along with the security system to allow him access to the dinosaur embryos and sell them to a competing company. Despite his failed attempt, the employee jeopardizes everyone else’s safety as the dinosaurs break free and begin going on a rampage as the cat and mouse game begins while the humans attempt to restore the power and escape to safety.

The general underlying theme of the film is that life will always find a way. Despite genetic alterations such as gender control and amino acid restrictions used by the scientists creating the dinosaurs, they will find a way to breed and thrive in their environment. Humans cannot and should not control nature, as it will always find a way to survive.

Steven Spielberg always does a good job directing his films. There are many suspenseful scenes and times where you have no idea what is going to happen next. When I was watching this with a group of my friends for the ethnography, they were on the edge of their seat as they were waiting to find out what would happen. The screenplay was also co-written by the author Michael Crichton, who wrote the book this film was based off of. I read the book “Jurassic Park” which was much more violent than its adaptation. Steven Spielberg wanted certain parts of the book taken out because of the violence. Many other changes were made from the book such as switching the ages and personalities of the characters Tim and Lex to better suit the actors. Spielberg wanted a certain actor to play Tim so they switched him with Lex. As usual, other details or parts of the book were taken out because they simply could not fit all of it into the movie. But overall, I feel that they did a good job of translating the text.

The quality of the special effects in this movie is outstanding as it won several academy awards for them. When I was watching it with some friends for my ethnography, they could not believe how real the dinosaurs looked especially with the technology for 1993 when the film was released. This film is even the 17th highest grossing film in USA box office history. The only flaw I could really think of for this movie is that the idea of taking DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber millions of years ago and then creating a fully functioning dinosaur is pretty far fetched. I just do not think that even with today’s technology that would be possible.

            This movie has been one of my favorites since I was about five years old when I first saw it. To this day I can watch it over and over again. As a little kid, I was always fascinated with dinosaurs and when I first saw this movie I could not believe I was actually seeing what I thought were real live dinosaurs. I highly recommend this movie for anyone of any age and give it a rating of five out of five stars. 

Movie Review at Imdb.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/reviews

[582]