1993

DIRECTOR: STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCERS: KATHLEEN KENNEDY AND GERALD R. MOLEN SCREENPLAY: MICHAEL CRICHTON AND DAVID KOEPP, BASED ON THE NOVEL BY MICHAEL CRICHTON STARRING: SAM NEILL (GRANT), LAURA DERN (ELLIE), JEFF GOLDBLUM (MALCOLM), RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH (JOHN HAMMOND), BOB PECK (MULDOON), MARTIN FERRERO (GENNARO), B. D. WONG (WU), SAMUEL L. JACKSON (ARNOLD), WAYNE KNIGHT (NEDRY)

Jurassic Park

UNIVERSAL • COLOR, 127 MINUTES

A mogul invites three scientists, a lawyer, and his two grandchildren to tour a theme park filled with living dinosaurs cloned from ancient DNA.

Sam Neill encounters a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dinosaurs have fascinated movie audiences since Winsor McCay’s animated short Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914. Live-action films, however, have always had difficulty bringing the mammoth beasts to life. From The Lost World in 1925 to One Million Years B.C. in 1969, screen dinosaurs had typically been clay models animated by stop-motion photography, a laborious process that never yielded very lifelike results. But in 1993, Steven Spielberg upped the ante in prehistoric realism with Jurassic Park, an enchanting thrill ride that redefined the dinosaur movie and kicked off the age of high-quality computerized effects.

“I had wanted to make a dinosaur picture all my life,” Spielberg said in 2007, “but I could never find a realistic way to do dinosaurs until Michael Crichton figured out a science that would make it allowable.” In Crichton’s ingenious science-fiction novel Jurassic Park, prehistoric beasts cloned from the blood of ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber populate a theme park. Spielberg acquired the rights in 1990 (before the book was even published), and planned to film the tale using traditional techniques—computer animation being still too primitive. Seemingly overnight, the technology caught up to the concept. As Crichton told a reporter in 1993, “You couldn’t do it three years ago. But by the time they shot the movie, you could.”

Thanks to innovations at Industrial Light & Magic, special effects had grown by leaps and bounds in a short period of time. Stan Winston (whose credits include The Terminator [1984]), Phil Tippett (whose credits include the Star Wars trilogy), and Dennis Muren (of ILM) headed up the trailblazing team hired to combine full-size models with computer-generated imagery. Spielberg knew that the success of the film depended upon the dinosaurs looking realistic and, as Muren said, “they had to move with an attitude”—no miniatures, no stop-motion animation, no herky-jerky claymation jitters of yesterday. With their beady eyes glinting in the moonlight and their dripping, razor-sharp jaws, these CGI-enhanced monsters are so accurately realized that the movie was judged too intense for children under thirteen.

Though it doubles as a family film with cute kids petting benign brachiosaurs, Jurassic Park is a horror movie at heart. By nearly being devoured, Laura Dern and Sam Neill as paleontologists Ellie and Grant learn the hard way that their theories are correct—dinosaurs are smarter than we give them credit for. Those wily velociraptors can even open doors. In one scene straight out of a slasher film, young Lex and Tim cower in cabinets as a pack of predatory raptors stalk them through an industrial-size kitchen reminiscent of The Shining (1980).

Joseph Mazzello, Laura Dern, Arianna Richards, and Sam Neill

Before Jurassic Park even opens to the public, the beasts are already chomping at the bit to break free. Just as the movie’s main voice of reason, Jeff Goldblum’s mathematician Dr. Malcolm, warns in the first reel, “If there’s one thing that the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained.” The rest of the film bears out his hypothesis; the primal carnivores cannot be controlled by humans. Stretching suspense to the breaking point and wielding the power of suggestion (we only see about fifteen minutes’ worth of actual dinosaurs in the two-hour film), Spielberg does for dinosaurs what he had done for sharks in Jaws (1975).

In an unprecedented campaign, Universal spent $65 million to market the $63 million film, slapping its distinctive red, black, and yellow logo on everything from sleeping bags to boxer shorts. Thanks to the market saturation and the screen’s most awe-inspiring dino-monsters, Jurassic Park became the most successful movie in Universal’s history. Like many summer blockbusters, it grew into an institution, later spawning The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018).

Jeff Goldblum

Joseph Mazzello hides from two velociraptors.

Steven Spielberg and Richard Attenborough on location in Hawaii

Underneath its hair-raising effects, the original film is a story about evolving. Spielberg—who supervised the post-production remotely while in Poland shooting Schindler’s List (1993)—was evolving as a filmmaker, too. Before embarking on a new phase of his career as an Oscar-winning director, Spielberg rescued the dinosaur movie from the brink of extinction and ushered cinema into a new era of digital effects. After Jurassic Park, virtually anything filmmakers could imagine could be created.

FAR-OUT FACTS

The nine-thousand-pound Tyrannosaurus rex was constructed of a fiberglass skeleton filled with clay and covered in latex skin. To enable it to move, it was mounted on a “dyno-simulator,” a hydraulic mechanism based on the traditional six-axis flight simulator used by the military.

More than two hundred new software programs were created to perfect the appearance of the screen dinosaurs.

The film was still being shot when the most powerful hurricane in Hawaii’s history, Hurricane Iniki, struck the shooting location of Kauai in 1992. The cast and crew safely evacuated and resumed filming at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

It’s a dark and stormy night when the bloodthirsty T. rex makes its first appearance. Tim and Lex notice plastic cups of water vibrating on the dashboard of the car before T. rex stomps its way into the street. Making ripples appear in the water “was a very difficult thing to do,” said special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri, who plucked the string of an electric guitar to achieve the effect.

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