There’s a slight chance I think that the movie should have used the ending from this video
Last night I saw “Jurassic Park” in the 3D version. The best thing I can say about the 3D is that it was executed well enough that I mostly (except for a few awkward shots) forgot I was watching a 3D movie. What I really took away from it, though, was that despite its legendary impact on the use of digital special effects, the CGI really isn’t even in the top five reasons why the movie works, and still works to this day. They matter to the extent that they didn’t trip the movie up, and allowed Spielberg more freedom in the way he blocked and filmed sequences; but really we respond to it for these reasons more than any fascination we have with computer gimmickery:
1) Most of us have a lifelong fascination for dinosaurs. They live in our imagination and Spielberg exploits every aspect of that – the awe and the fear – in equal measure. It is intrinsic to the story that we go into the theatre desperately wanting to see them and, dangerous though it may be, to see them turned loose.
2) Spielberg gets childhood terror. All us “Dr. Who” nerds who know about not blinking for a Weeping Angel understand what amazing tension happens when Grant tells Tim about the T-Rex “He can’t see you if you don’t move”. Staying still and silent in the face of the scariest thing you can imagine – elemental contradictions like that get right to the kid inside you, and this movie is filled with them.
3) CHARACTERS. This is mostly a very well-cast movie, and Spielberg gives the performers room to add life and flourish to their performances. Goldblum’s audacious horndogging and jazzy delivery was immediately iconic even if the movie doesn’t know what to do with him after he articulates the moral of the story, and the whole subplot about Alan/Ellie’s argument over having kids (an invention for the film that effectively parallels the whole notion of responsibility in creating life, as well as giving Alan a character arc as he protects Hammond’s grandchildren) is barely-alluded to in dialogue, and is told mostly in glances. Hammond, instead of the barely-sketched money-grubbing Dr. Frankenstein stand-in in Crichton’s book, gets to be a tragic figure, whose whimsy masks his God-like pretensions and obessions.
4) Spielberg is, at this point in his career, fully-evolved as a thrill-ride engineer, and the way he paces the movie, wrenching us through surprise, suspense, terror, humor, and moments to catch our breath, up to the final money shot of the T-Rex roaring in triumph, is expert. The movie has less cinematic ambition than any of his “Indiana Jones” adventures; it is a self-consciously pure (you might even say blatant) exercise in wind-up blockbuster ecstasy for the whole family, which in its modern incarnation he practically-invented.
5) It did just enough homework to give it pseudoscientific varnish we could accept as a means to get to what we wanted to see; but it also took advantage of that homework to take us beyond the T-Rex and introduce the world to something much, much scarier – that clever little Velociraptor. A good movie knows how to not just give us what we knew we wanted going in, but something extra that it just knows we’re going to love.
Beyond this, the CGI is important, admittedly even crucial, to the extent that it didn’t undermine any of the above. But if you look at the effects movies that appeared after, which used a LOT more CGI than “Jurassic Park” – there’s a reason they’re not a LOT better. Because they didn’t get the above things right. The argument Malcolm and Hammond have about exploiting the tools others developed without any of the sense of responsibility for their proper use just gets more ironically meta with each passing year.
No one ever gets my “Mr. Pilkington” reference