Jurassic Park

October 12, 7:26 PMSteven Spielberg ExaminerJustin Murphy

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    The moment Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler excavate fossils, moviegoers had no clue what they were in for when Jurassic Park opened in theaters. Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, Spielberg snagged the movie rights before the novel was even published. They learn that an employee of the genetic engineering company InGen has been killed in accident. John Hammond, the man who owns the company, hires a few expert to avoid a lawsuit from the employee’s family. Along with Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcolm comes along to provide the film’s comic relief.

    While enchanted by the park at first when they learn dinosaurs have been revived with the use of mosquito DNA from the same prehistoric time. Seeing these dinosaurs for the first is a majestic experience, yet when they learn Hammond bread raptors all hell breaks loose! They begin terrorizing the park, and Ian Malcolm is injured along the way, and barely escapes with his life. No one expected such a journey to go horribly wrong, much less experience so much terror. Each of them feel the park is a failure, including Hammond himself who decides to shut it down.

    The film was released and became a box office smash. It has also been suggested that Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s return to more aggressive films in the style of his early made for television movie Duel and his first big screen hit Jaws, the film that brought forth the innovation of the summer blockbuster. An innovation that has come to dominate the Hollywood film industry over the last three and a half decades.

    Jurassic Park is considered a landmark film in its use of CGI to animate the dinosaurs. An early prototype of CGI was used on a film adaptation of one of Crichton’s early novels Westworld. After the release of Jurassic Park, the use of CGI in movies has flourished. The first computer animated film Toy Story debuted in theaters a couple years later. These experiments almost a whole industry of computer animation and CGI based films over a decade and a half after Jurassic Park’s release. However, there is some debate to this day over whether or not computer dominated films are a good thing. In the same irony to the novel and film’s debate over whether or not using biotechnology to revive dinosaurs was a good thing.