Jurassic Park

Before Steven Spielberg decided to bring dinosaurs onto silver screens for worldwide audiences, no one has ever paid attention to the pre-civilization creatures as much as we would after watching Jurassic Park, the mightiest adrenaline jockey adventure thriller ever made!

Kicking off with a dangerous inciting incident, the world we’re about to deal with was introduced. From the graphical presentation ride showing fossilized tree sap containing mosquitoes, egg hatching, multitude dinosaur species, visitation feeding, self-driving car through paddocks, the technology, the park, the lab to the very little processes and details, none will shatter your willing suspension of disbelief even for a bit! All our dreams, fascinations and thirsts were quenched by the mere sight of a tall neck Brachiosaurus walking about in a plain field! For many, this was the first time they believed in miracle and magic! No one has ever before gifted this massive sense of wonderment in motion picture history!

More importantly, the prime rep of antagonism was teased, choking us on our swallowed saliva. No, opposed to popular belief, it isn't the T-Rex but Velociraptors instead. We'd see hints of it from here on, like the claw souvenir and how the predator hunts preys, building and building towards a terrifying climactic confrontation! Spielberg is known for tension building. The way he instigates the idea that something's happening through facial reactions and hint prologues engendered genuine suspense, especially the water ripples in cup prior to welcoming the T-Rex! One hell of a timeless scene that was! Jeep rescue, Gallimimus run along, kitchen Velociraptors, electrical fence start-up, skeleton structure dangle, poison-spitting Dilophosaurus, and Raptor inside cable chamber were similarly high voltage sequences where the makers squeezed out every drop of tension juice available for us! There's no escaping mishaps without consequences, be it big or small, rendering the events meaningful!

Jurassic Park had a swift and clear screenplay. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), a visionary industrialist has constructed a theme park based on genetically cloned dinosaurs. To seek approval, he invites scientific experts for a visit expecting endorsement in return. Little did he know this is the end of it all when things go uncontrollably awry! Successive scenes always answer the ones prior. With memorable characters such as the ever charismatic Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm and old school protagonist Dr. Alan Grant played by Sam Neill pouring in doubts about the park's existence, voracious debate regarding the film's theme versus counter-theme and chaos theory constantly took place in the background. After a colossal destruction, as the latter looked out of the chopper window seeing birds fly, we know instantly evolution transpired for the greater good.

Even in such an exciting story that's always on the move and hurry, the makers still managed to sneak in a tangential arc for the hero. He evolved from avoiding kids to embracing them, visually cued further as he threw away the claw he used to scare a boy once. Alan pranking the duo with a fake electrical shock and saying "God bless you" after a post-meal Brachiosaurus sneezed on the girl were really funny scenes! Speaking of scenes, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) checking on a sick Triceratops by digging into its giant dung and resting head on its breathing abdomen burnt onto our memory cores permanently. Not to forget, there's even a BFG Easter egg hiding on one of the tires, a movie Spielberg would create 23 years later!

Michael Crichton’s vision was already ambitious to read, but Spielberg has pulled off the impossible by transliterating each and every word of the original novel into majestic and extravagant visual bonanza! John Williams’ iconic score, cutting edge animatronics perfectly blended with landmark visual effects of long life shelf, Dean Cundey's expert framing plus camerawork, top notch sound design, well-constructed monologues and dialogues granted every kid in the 90s a childhood like never other to come!