What Makes The Original Jurassic Park Movie So Special? If you are in your twenties or younger, you may have seen some of the latest Jurassic Park sequels in a theatre and you may have been unimpressed by them, you may be wondering what's the big deal about the original movie? Well, let me tell you, at least my opinion.
When people talk about Jurassic Park (1993), they often mention the quality of visual effects. Indeed, Jurassic Park had amazingly good visual effects, so much so that 30 years later, the film still holds up. And this is felt even more strongly when you see movies or documentaries made in the recent times that are not nearly as good as the 30-year-old Jurassic Park. People think even the sequels didn't match the original film in terms of visual effects. But how can a movie that was made in 1993 have better visual effects than some modern movies and why are visual effects so important in Jurassic Park? The answer to the first question is mainly the correct use of a mixture of animatronics and CGI and using them brilliantly and making them blend in with the environment. CGI was often a comical thing back then, so using it only where animatronics were not practical was really a good decision, but where they used CGI, it was ahead of its time, indeed. One thing that people don't realize is the way they blended the effects into the environment. In one of the first scenes where dinosaurs make an appearance, we see a herd of parasaurolophus and a pair of sauropods near a lake at a distance, this is the moment memed to death btw, but the brilliant thing about this scene is that they used just the right amount of haze and air distortion and put everything behind that subtle filter and it looks so good, so convincing, makes dinosaurs blend in with the environment. Regular movie goers wouldn't even consciously think about these things, nor would they be able to recognize it, but their brains tell them that it is very convincing and buy it as real. To summarize, the effects are better than even some modern movies, because of their artistic use, despite using technically inferior technology. And it is a very common thing actually, especially in video games, some games look better than others, even if they are older, for the very same reason. That is not to say old games are generally better than new ones, but it means without a good artistic design, higher resolution alone doesn't make things better. This brings us to the second question, why are visual effects so important in this film? Because in that moment, the audience, along with the characters, see the dinosaurs for the first time ever! They are not some dude in a bulky, comical costume or a poorly sculpted stop motion figure with jerky movements. This realism just brings dinosaurs and their majesty from imagination to the real world. This was the success of Jurassic Park.
Really, this movie would have been an average action movie, without the impact of its visual effects. The story is fine, but nothing special, acting is OK. All the moral questions about bringing the dinosaurs back to life just serves as drama and the movie doesn't really have any good answers for it, Malcolm's speech is just glib in my opinion. I guess if we had the chance to bring them back for real, we don't btw, most important thing would have been not to release them into the wild, for there is no way of guessing how it would disturb the environment, but other than that, they wouldn't be super intelligent killing machines that cannot possibly be contained. When you think about it, the opening scene is kind of laughable actually, like a bunch of professional people with all the equipment, still incapable of transferring an animal that would have been no more dangerous than a lion, that is if they had the species right. That was a velociraptor, you probably already know this, but velociraptors were turkey sized animals that could pose no threat to an adult human, there were bigger raptors, but they thought the 'velociraptor' name sounded cool, which is true. And there are a lot of scientific errors in this movie, scientists actually think that T-Rex probably had the best eye sight in animals ever, because of the size of the eyeballs, which is actually a factor in the quality of sight. On the other hand, a lot of people talk about how the movie was very modern in terms of its understanding of their movements and behavior. Overall, it was a mixed bag in scientific accuracy. And it had a huge impact in making paleontology popular. If you watch a lecture on YT or something, you'll actually hear from real paleontologists how Jurassic Park was a factor and how they wanted to be a paleontologist from childhood, because of this movie. But none of these matter, as I said, Jurassic Park's success was to bring dinosaurs to life, in a sense, for real. It is really a timeless and an amazing movie that still holds up.