(9) SF: JURASSIC PARK

(1993 – yes I know there’s an ongoing franchise but I’m only really counting the first film)

Everything’s better with dinosaurs!

We all love dinosaurs, ever since we started digging up their bones – and we particularly love them in cinematic form. I’d argue that there is not one film that would not be improved by a dinosaur (or dinosaurs). Citizen Kane would have been MUCH improved by a dinosaur.

Anyway, Jurassic Park is the pure awesomeness you get when you combine dinosaurs with Steven Spielburg’s mastery of cinematic action and visual effects. Does it need any further introduction? You all know it. You probably can all quote it, from some point or other in the film or franchise.

I actually read the book first. Michael Crichton might have gotten a bit…controversial in his later years, but he sure knew how to craft a story – and Jurassic Park was one of his finest and certainly his most successful. Of course, there are the usual differences between the book and the film – the former had a starring role for the T-Rex’s tongue and the lawyer Gennaro was much more heroic (as lawyers should be), punching out a velociraptor and surviving rather than sniveling in a toilet before being slurped down by the tyrannosaur like the film’s lawyer.

Spielberg’s magic was of course to bring the book to life. The plot is the same – scientists discover how to recreate dinosaurs through a complex cloning process, involving dinosaur blood from mosquitoes fossilized in amber and filling in the gaps with other animal DNA, most notably transsexual frogs. Naturally, they come up with a dinosaur theme park to profit from this discovery, and equally as naturally, everything that can go wrong does go wrong – usually in the form of sharp pointy teeth.

Or in the words of character Dr. Ian Malcolm “Oh yeah, ‘oooh aaah’. That’s how it always starts. Then later, there’s the running and the screaming” – neatly summarizing each of the movies in the series, as TV Tropes pointed out. The same quotation might arguably apply to diminishing returns of the sequels, albeit with marginally less running and screaming. To which I offer the counter-argument – shut up, there’s dinosaurs! Even so, I’ll stick with just the first film for this entry – the franchise has been trying to capture the same magic ever since.

Of course, when it comes to the dinosaurs, there is only one true star. Despite the franchise’s effort to focus on the velociraptors (which I understand they beefed up from their actual and less imposing size of chickens), there’s only one true king (or more precisely, queen) of the prehistoric jungle – the tyrannosaurus rex.

FANTASY OR SF?

Well, it’s obviously SF – genetically engineered dinosaurs! Although I do like it when dinosaurs pop up in fantasy, which they do surprisingly often. Everything’s better with dinosaurs!

HORROR

Elements of survival horror from animal predators – the tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptors in particular.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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