JURASSIC PARK is playing on AMC right now

Personally, this is one of the most disappointing summer blockbusters I ever saw. I remember the first time I read Jurassic Park, the novel by Michael Crichton, in November of 1991 (it was the first Crichton novel I ever read) and I was totally overwhelmed by everything in that book. I probably re-read it four or five more times in the year and a half between then and when the movie premiered in early June 1993. I was pumped for the movie, and all the more so because Steven Spielberg was at the helm, with special effects by Industrial Light and Magic.

So I went in to see the movie on opening day... and left the theater very let down. Jurassic Park the movie is so unlike the book in too many ways to count. The most obvious is the dinosaurs: the book has something like fifteen or sixteen species of dino, while the movie only has about five or six. I thought the ending of the novel - when the military arrives and burns down the entire island - would have been MUCH cooler to see on the screen than that last-minute "rescue" by the T-Rex. Entire characters and plotlines were left out from the book. Some of the movie just doesn't make sense at all, like toward the beginning when Grant is telling the kid about how the T-Rex saw things... when there's no way at all that Grant could have known something like that just from studying a pile of bones! I mean, that was something that he only realizes much later in the book, almost by accident.

Jurassic Park the movie soured me on the whole thing about being hyped for a big-budget summer flick for quite a long time afterward, it only being when Independence Day came out that I really felt that sense of fun again. But the movie version of Jurassic Park does have some merit to it: it was one of John Williams's best film scores of the past twenty years. And the technology that was developed to bring the dinosaurs to "life" did pave the way for MUCH more neat stuff in the years to come, like everything from the Star Wars prequels to this summer's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

So, for me personally anyway, I look at Jurassic Park the movie as being a movie that had a lot of promise, that failed to deliver on too many things, but all the same it sowed the seeds for a lot of what we've come to expect from good SFX blockbusters in the years since. I'll give it a grade of B+ for doing that much at least.