10 / 10
Official trailer
Jurassic Park is the film that redefined what visual effects could do and one of the foundational science fiction productions of the 1990s. Steven Spielberg directed. David Koepp and Michael Crichton adapted Crichton’s 1990 novel. Sam Neill plays Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist who has spent his career working with bones and is about to encounter the living animals. Laura Dern plays Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist. Jeff Goldblum plays Dr. Ian Malcolm, a chaos theorist who provides ongoing philosophical commentary on the project.
Richard Attenborough plays John Hammond, the billionaire who built the park. Bob Peck plays Robert Muldoon, the park’s game warden. Wayne Knight plays Dennis Nedry, the computer programmer whose theft causes the disaster. Joseph Mazzello plays Tim. Ariana Richards plays Lex. Samuel L. Jackson plays Ray Arnold, the chief engineer. The plot is a tour of an island theme park populated by genetically resurrected dinosaurs. It becomes a survival situation when the dinosaurs escape.
Pure movie joy, start to finish, and I’d put it next to anything Spielberg ever made. It’s a monster movie, an adventure and a theme-park ride at once, and it never forgets to scare me.
Every piece of it clicks: the cast, the effects, John Williams’s theme, the slow reveal of what Hammond has built. There isn’t a scene I’d trim.
The film made approximately one billion dollars worldwide on a sixty-three million dollar budget. It was the highest-grossing film of 1993 and held the worldwide record until Titanic (1997).
The visual effects work by Industrial Light & Magic and Stan Winston Studio established new industry standards. The film is a foundational document of 1990s mainstream cinema. The later franchise has produced multiple sequels, a Jurassic World trilogy starting in 2015, and ongoing entries through 2026.
The Effects
The visual effects in Jurassic Park represent the first sustained use of computer-generated imagery for fully realized creatures in a major studio production.
The CGI dinosaurs are integrated with full-scale animatronic dinosaurs built by Stan Winston Studio. The combination is the foundational technique that became standard practice for the next thirty years. The T. rex paddock attack sequence remains among the most-cited visual effects achievements in mainstream cinema.
The combination of pouring rain, animatronic T. rex, miniature vehicles, and selectively rendered CGI produces a sequence that’s aged better than effects work from the 2000s and 2010s.
The decision to limit CGI use was the key creative choice. Most of the dinosaur shots are practical. The T. rex is animatronic. The raptors in the kitchen are mostly performers in suits and articulated practical heads. The CGI is used where the practical work couldn’t deliver, especially for shots involving distance, scale, or motion that animatronics couldn’t produce. The audience can’t tell which shots are which technique. The integration is the achievement.
That decision to hold back on CGI is why I believe in these animals. The T. rex has weight, the raptors feel like they’re in the room, and nothing looks pasted on top of the actors. Films from a decade later with far more computer work look cheaper to me, and I think this restraint is the reason.
For Writers
Effects that use multiple techniques together age better than effects that rely on a single technique. Jurassic Park’s practical-CGI integration looks better than pure-CGI films from a decade later. The lesson is that creative production benefits from technique diversity. Relying on a single approach makes the work fragile to that approach’s specific failure modes. Multiple techniques in service of the same image produce redundancy. The redundancy is what survives technological change.
The Chaos Theory
Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm is the film’s philosophical center. Malcolm is a chaos theorist who has been brought to the island to evaluate the project. His argument is that complex systems can’t be predicted or controlled with the certainty Hammond has assumed. Genetic engineering is a complex system. Living things are complex systems. Putting them together on an island will produce outcomes that no one can foresee. Malcolm makes the argument repeatedly across the runtime. The argument is then proved correct as the systems fail.
Goldblum’s performance drives this philosophical thread. He plays Malcolm with the frustrated intelligence of a man who knows he’s right and can’t make anyone listen. The “life finds a way” speech, the most-quoted Malcolm line, is delivered with the casual confidence of a man making an obvious observation. Hammond responds with denial. The audience has the experience of watching the smart character try to communicate with the optimistic character while knowing the smart character is right.
Goldblum steals every scene he wanders into, and I adore him here. He’s funny, smug and right, and the film is smart enough to let him be all three at once. Part of the fun once things fall apart is watching Malcolm get proven correct while Hammond keeps insisting otherwise.
For Writers
A genre film that engages with an actual scientific philosophy can be more durable than one that uses science as decoration. Jurassic Park’s chaos theory structure is the foundation of the entire plot. The science fiction is the dramatization of the philosophical argument. The lesson is that science fiction works best when the science is doing actual narrative work. Decoration ages. Substance doesn’t, so pick a real scientific structure and let the structure drive the story.
The Children
The film’s decision to put two children at the center of the survival sequences was a deliberate choice that’s been criticized and defended for thirty years. Detractors say the children make the film more juvenile than it should be. The defenders say that the children give the audience an identification point that adult-only casts can’t provide. The defense is partly correct. The children’s terror is the audience’s terror. The adults can analyze the situation. The children just want to survive.
The kitchen raptor sequence is the film’s most effective sustained suspense passage. Tim and Lex hide from velociraptors that are hunting them. The sequence runs approximately seven minutes. The children’s performances drive it. Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards both commit fully to the terror the script requires. The audience reads the threat through the children’s faces. The sequence is one of the strongest examples in 1990s blockbuster cinema of how children can sustain suspense more effectively than adults.
My favorite scene in the film is the kitchen. Seven minutes of two kids hiding from raptors, and I’m holding my breath for all of it. I side with the defenders on the children: without Tim and Lex this sequence would be a clever set piece, and with them it’s terrifying.
For Writers
Children in suspense fiction transmit threat more effectively than adults because the audience automatically reads children as defenseless. Jurassic Park’s kitchen sequence uses this principle. The lesson is that the relative vulnerability of your characters determines how the audience experiences threat. Adults can be expected to handle threats. Children can’t. If you want maximum suspense in a sequence, put children in it. The audience will supply the protective response automatically.
Craft Note
Spielberg’s kitchen velociraptor sequence is the film’s strongest craft passage and a model of geographic suspense in 1990s cinema. Spielberg stages the children’s hide-and-seek through specific spatial constraints (the kitchen layout, the table reflection misdirection, the stainless-steel walk-in cooler) while Stan Winston’s animatronic raptors interact physically with the actors. The sequence shows Spielberg’s specific mastery of building tension through floor plans the audience can map.
Is Jurassic Park as good as people say?
10/10, and I don’t have a complaint worth making. The effects set a standard plenty of later films still haven’t met, Goldblum’s chaos theorist gives the film a brain, and the T. rex paddock and the kitchen raptors are two of the great suspense sequences of the decade. John Williams’s theme does the rest. The sequels never came close to this for me, so skip them and watch the original.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Jurassic Park, Box Office Mojo
- Why Steven Spielberg Finished Jurassic Park from Another Continent, SYFY Wire
- Jurassic Park, The Shining, My Fair Lady among latest additions to National Film Registry, CBS News
- Jurassic Park (1993), IMDb
