Jurassic Park (1993)

There are blockbusters, and then there are the ones that genuinely shift what audiences think cinema can do. Jurassic Park, released in the summer of 1993 by Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg's own Amblin Entertainment, belongs firmly in the second category. Based on Michael Crichton's 1990 novel of the same name (Crichton also co-wrote the screenplay alongside David Koepp), the film presents a deceptively simple idea: a billionaire philanthropist, John Hammond, builds a remote island theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs, invites a small group of scientists and his own grandchildren for a preview weekend, and watches it all go catastrophically wrong. The pitch practically writes itself, which is precisely why the execution matters so much, and why it was always going to land on a director's desk rather than a committee's.

By 1993, Steven Spielberg was already the kind of filmmaker whose name alone changed the conversation around a project. He had spent the previous two decades demonstrating a rare gift for marrying genuine spectacle with human-scale storytelling, from the lean, pressurised tension of Duel all the way through to the warmth and wonder of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Jurassic Park found him at a commercial and technical peak, and the film became the highest-grossing release of its year. Much of that success rested on a genuinely revolutionary combination of practical animatronic dinosaurs, built by Stan Winston's team, and computer-generated imagery from Industrial Light and Magic, used in a way that had simply not been seen before on screen. The two approaches were blended with enough care that thirty-plus years on, the joins are still remarkably hard to spot.

The cast Spielberg assembled is polished but never showy. Sam Neill plays palaeontologist Alan Grant with a gruff, slightly reluctant warmth that anchors the film's wilder moments, while Laura Dern brings real intelligence and physicality to Dr Ellie Sattler, refusing to let the role become merely decorative. Jeff Goldblum, as the chaos-theory mathematician Ian Malcolm, operates on a frequency entirely his own, providing both comic relief and the film's moral centre in roughly equal measure. Richard Attenborough gives Hammond a grandfatherly charm that stops the character from becoming a straightforward villain, and Bob Peck, as game warden Robert Muldoon, delivers one of cinema's more fondly remembered final lines with appropriate dry authority. Neill would later return to the franchise in Jurassic Park III, and Spielberg himself would take the director's chair again for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, though neither film quite recaptured what this one managed to do.

"I hope these dangerous killing machines don't escape" They escaped. An absolute classic that still holds up brilliantly even today. The CGI and practical effects are still impressive decades later, and the premise (bringing dinosaurs back to life through genetic science) is as clever and thrilling as ever. It’s the iconic progeny of a franchise that, let’s be honest, went a bit downhill after this… but this first outing is near-perfect family suspense. The cast does a great job grounding the spectacle, the pacing is tight, and John Williams' score is unforgettable. Spielberg in the 90s was on another level and Jurassic Park is proof. A blockbuster with brains, wonder, and just the right amount of terror.

That point about the franchise drifting is one I keep coming back to whenever I revisit this film. There is a confidence here, a willingness to slow down and let a moment breathe before the next set-piece arrives, that the sequels rarely found the patience to replicate. The scene where the characters first see the dinosaurs roaming free, scored by John Williams in a way that makes the hairs on your arm stand up, is still genuinely moving. It earns its spectacle rather than simply delivering it. For me, Jurassic Park sits in that small group of films where the blockbuster formula and genuine filmmaking craft reinforce rather than undermine each other. They don't make them like this very often. More's the pity.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 1993  | Watched: 2025-04-14

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Steven Spielberg: Duel (1971) · Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
More with Sam Neill: Jurassic Park III (2001)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)