10/10 - Hold on to your butts!
Jurassic Park is probably my all time favorite movie.
It's got dinosaurs and it's awesome. That's it. I love it.
It's also a tight, intelligent story, that totally holds up over 20 years later, with impressive special effects, wonderful characters, and a concept that permeated pop culture for decades. This is Spielberg at his best. One of the iconic adventure film. inauthentic raptors and all.
To celebrate my favorite movie, I just want to share some of the great moments that make me love this film.
That Alan Grant introductory monologue, telling a kid why a velociraptor is scary and not a six-foot turkey. This was a great moment to legitimize Alan as a knowledgeable scientist, with a healthy respect for dinosaurs, and foreshadow what was to come. But why is this kid on a archaeological dig? Where did he come from? Why is the kid there if he doesn’t know anything about dinosaurs? My biggest question, why do all the other adults let Alan tell this innocent kid about what it will feel like to get eaten alive? That’s kind of messed up. What a great scene.
"If The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."
How freaking great is Jeff Goldbulm. In the making-of special features, Spielberg said Goldblum was a naturalistic actor who always sounded like he was coming up with the lines in the moment. It's so true, that's definitely the appeal of Dr. Ian Malcolm. Thank you Michael Crichton for this phenomenal character.
"I’m always on the lookout for the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm."
I love the way the way the raptors are the mystery element. The very first scene shows an animal cage, and then something goes wrong and a guy gets eaten. Back to that Alan Grant monologue that happens to me more real than he knows. Then at Jurassic Park the pen for the raptors doesn't show anything, they're all hidden under big leafy trees and bushes, but get to destroy an airlifted cow. Even Muldoon, the Kenyan game hunter, says "they should all be destroyed." The T-Rex might have been the "star" but these guys were the unseen danger. J.J. Abrams has become famous in recent years for using the mystery element in his movies, and this is the sort of thing that inspired him. Raptors are all we heard about in the first half of the movie, so you knew when you saw one in the second half, you were in big trouble.
"The park will open with the basic tour you’re about to take."
The combination of Samuel L. Jackson as the chain smoking Ray Arnold and Wayne Knight as the nefarious Dennis Nedry is just so delightful. Sometimes character actors make a movie, and in this case, the almost cartoony relationship between these two adds so much depth and texture to the world.
“Find Nedry, check the vending machines!”
The inexplicable appearance of a cliff that didn’t exist 15 minutes earlier. If you ever noticed that, congratulations you continuity expert! It's my favorite goof. The T-Rex paddock is a major set piece, as the jeeps break down next to it, and we spend a lot of time looking beyond the fences to see if our movie monster will appear. The little goat sits waiting just beyond the fence, we can see the ground inside the T-Rex pen, it's all flat. Then! A few scenes later! The Jeep the kids are in gets pushed like a kickball inside the T-Rex pen where it... falls off a big cliff. Where did this cliff come from? It's the exact same location the goat was in earlier, and now it's a 30-foot drop. What happened here? It's made even better when later, Ellie goes to look for their missing Jeep and somehow sprints down to the bottom of this cliff and back up to their search car in about a 3 minute round trip. Pretty impressive, Ellie!
"...He'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velociraptor.
You stare at him, and he just stares right back"
It’s almost cheesy to look back on the set design now, but the creation of these elaborate set pieces are what made Jurassic Park so great. It wasn't just a location, it was a theme park. It was Disneyland for dinos. Everything from the animal cages to the door handles had such distinct branding, unique to this world. Now, those images are quite iconic, with the Jeeps going down in movie history as one of the more memorable vehicles.
"T-Rex doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt.
Can't just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct."
"Hammond, after some consideration, I've decided, not to endorse your park."
Even though Jurassic Park is so high on my list of movies, I haven't watched the new Jurassic World yet, as I'm re-watching the whole series before getting to it. I'm sure it's a great addition to the Jurassic franchise, but lets be honest. Chris Pratt is no Jeff Goldblum.
No comments:
Post a Comment