It would be wrong to call these two films failures – The Lost World is at least an interesting failure – but audience and critical expectations dwindled. With a much tighter focus and concise running time, that final instalment is watchable paint-by-numbers. A third film, 2001’s Jurassic Park III directed by Joe Johnston, cut Goldblum and returned Neill to the mix. Pete Postlethwaite – these films adore a morally-ambiguous English person – adds much-needed mystery as a big game hunter. Nothing here is as instantly iconic as a T.rex chomping on a loo-bound lawyer or the quivering plastic cups of water, but there are some nice Spielberg touches. But if you buy into these creatures, and the real-life human actors sure as hell sell the experience, the film is a beguiling ride.įour years later, Spielberg returned with The Lost World: Jurassic Park, keeping Goldblum and a bit of Attenborough, losing Neill and Dern, and adding Julianne Moore (as palaeontologist and Malcolm’s girlfriend Sarah Harding). They seem uncanny because, uh, who knows what a Triceratops was actually like (scaly, I guess?). It is both a help and hindrance that no person has encountered a dinosaur. The film’s most memorable scene, in which Sattler treats a sick Triceratops, is certainly more lifelike and definitely more moving than any other film in the franchise. 30 years later, Jurassic Park’s visuals look dated, but not nearly as dated as CGI from ten years ago, largely thanks to the emphasis on animatronics and Spielberg’s light touch. man, capitalist greed, the responsibility of science – are intellectual enough to sell the premise, but not deep enough to distract from the main action. The film was shot on the Hawaiian island Kaua’i: intimate nature shots and real-life storms (footage from Hurricane Iniki made it into the film) give the blockbuster a lived-in feel, as though it were your dad’s holiday recording, if your dad were an Oscar-winning director. Rewatching the blockbuster in 2023, what surprises most is its homeliness. Over its initial run, it raked in over $900 million. On its debut weekend, the film made more money than any other in history. Initial wonder gives way to widespread terror when the film’s antagonist, the Tyrannosaurus rex, escapes its paddock. Hammond has found a way to clone dinosaurs from DNA in fossilised mosquitoes, and then had the savvy to create a theme park for these creations. And cynical chaotician – though, really, could a chaotician really be anything else? – Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Around them are humans: John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), palaeontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and pableobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Ones that eat humans, ones that eat leaves. Jurassic Park, based on American author Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel of the same name, goes big on dinosaurs. Five years later, one of its executive producers, Steven Spielberg, released another dinosaur picture (this time, as a director) which would take our hunger for the prehistoric to new heights. Perhaps the animated feature, about dinosaurs just trying to stay alive, whet cinema-goers’ appetites. Ostensibly for children but with enough charm to win over adults, the film would spawn decade-spanning sequels, of wildly different quality, as is usually the way with such things. A few decades ago, a film about dinosaurs, which muses on courage and family and the virtues of sticking together, opened to critical praise ( The Washington Post commented that the “emotionally rich” film contained “touches of beauty”) and box office success.
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