Jurassic Park is a film that was just made for 3D – even though it wasn’t actually made for 3D.
Jurassic Park is a story familiar to millions – first as a book by Michael Crichton, then as Steven Spielberg’s huge hit film. A rich old coot builds a theme park filled with dinosaurs on an island off Costa Rica; invites some well-regarded scientists to tour the park and endorse it; sends his visiting grandchildren off to tour the park with the scientists, and it all goes horribly wrong.
Sir Richard Attenborough came out of acting retirement after fourteen years to play the ambitious old coot, John Hammond. The scientists are charmingly curmudgeonly paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who loathes children; sunny paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), who wants kids, and rock star pop scientist Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a specialist in Chaos Theory. The grandchildren are Lex (Ariana Richards), a computer whiz, and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), a dinosaur aficionado (who has read Grant’s book).
With the exception of Malcolm (largely because of Goldblum’s edgy performance), the rest of the cast are pretty much stock characters. The real stars of Jurassic Park are the visual effects and animatronic dinosaurs.
There are a number of supporting characters who aren’t real sketched in any better than main cast, though Wayne Knight (the head programmer for the park’s computer systems), Samuel L. Jackson (another computer guy) and Martin Ferrero (the lawyer who, famously spends his last few minutes in a rest room) make them at least as memorable.
Where the film excelled is in creating a sense of wonder with its dinosaurs – and turning that wonder to terror when everything goes horribly wrong. The animatronic dinosaurs, created by master creature maker Stan Winston, are incredible to behold – there’s a sick triceratops that that is as poignant as anything you’ve seen in a movie as just one example. The larger dinos – brachiosaurs, for one – are breathtaking visual effects that hold up extremely well even now.
The 3D conversion is as good as it’s possible to get. There’s some blurring in the fastest action sequences, but mostly it’s crisp and clean – even in the darker scenes. And with T-Rexes and Velociraptors terrorizing the characters, there are ample places where a sloppy 3D conversion could have rendered scary moments unintentionally funny. Instead, Jurassic Park 3D is a great ride and worth every penny spent on reformatting it.
If you loved Jurassic Park during its first theatrical run, you’re going love it now – quite possibly even more.
Final Grade: A-