A Love Letter to Jurassic Park

    Long before I became a Z-list internet personality, I had it in my head I was gonna be a paleontologist. I was the quintessential dinosaur kid. I spent hours of my childhood leafing through Gurney’s Dinotopia books, The Ultimate Dinosaur, and later, as my childhood obsession grew into something slightly more scholarly, Greg Paul’s The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs and Anthony J. Martin’s Dinosaurs Without Bones. So of course I’ve seen Jurassic Park more times than I can count.

    It would probably be more dramatic if I said I remember the first time I saw Jurassic Park like it was yesterday, but the simple truth is I don’t. In all honesty, I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen it--images from the film are so embedded in my psyche it’s like they were there before me, waiting. When I’m on my deathbed and my life is flashing before my eyes, the chances that stills from Jurassic Park will be interspersed between memories of my beloved wife and I enjoying a perfect day at the beach together and echoes of our seven children laughing as they open their presents on Christmas morning are higher than I’d care to admit. But, as usual, I digress.
    Every time I sit down to rewatch Jurassic Park, I’m afraid it won’t hold up. It always does. My relationship with the sequels is somewhat more fraught.

    The Lost World: Jurassic Park was met with a lukewarm response on release and has since faded into relative obscurity, considering that it’s a sequel to one of the highest grossing movies of all time. Call it the Avatar Effect, I guess. I like it for what it is--a solid dinosaur action adventure movie, though it never quite manages to inspire the same sense of awe that the original does.
    Jurassic Park III is widely considered the weakest of the original three movies, but for my money it is the most disturbing. Unlike The Lost World, Jurassic Park III doesn’t even really try to make its dinos seem majestic; they’re monsters through and through. From the dream sequence on the plane to the scene where the raptors torture a guy to draw out the rest of the cast, the movie doesn’t shy away from the horror of what’s happening on screen. Further, the increased focus on the weird science aspect of InGen’s experiments on the island only heightens the Corman-esque style of Jurassic Park III. Granted it probably all could’ve been done better, but it’s undeniably interesting, which is more than I can say for the next two installments.

    I hated Jurassic World and whatever the second one was called--Fallen Kingdom, I think?--to the point that I don’t much want to write about them, so I won’t. What I will say, though it may be heretical, is that I would much rather have seen an R-rated remake of the 1993 Jurassic Park that hewed closer to Michael Crichton’s novel than the noncommittal soft reboot(s) we got from Trevorrow et al.
It’s been a while since I’ve read it but if I remember correctly, the book opens with a guy getting disemboweled by a raptor in Costa Rica and only gets more graphic from there. Plus, I’m pretty sure Crichton describes Dr. Alan Grant as looking less like Sam Neill and more like real-world paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who, for his part, looks less like a paleontologist than he does outlaw country singer David Allen Coe. But, like I said, it’s been a while since I’ve read it.

    The only thing that has me at all looking forward to the release of Jurassic World: Dominion is the hope that everything finally goes completely off the rails and the studio does something interesting with the IP again. But who knows? Maybe Capcom will try to cash in on the resultant dino mania and we’ll at least get a Dino Crisis or Dino Crisis 2 remaster out of it, but I’m not holding my breath.