Real life has been a bit of a downer this week. My family is going through a loss and it has made it a bit more challenging to keep up with the challenge than the previous weeks. Jurassic Park came on and my daughter and I needed a good comfort movie so we decided to watch it. Jurassic Park is one of my all time favorite movies and it still holds up as a Must See film for the whole family.
Welcome to Jurassic Park!
Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neil) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) are taken from their dig to join Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to visit and tour a new theme park built by John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Everything is pretty boring until a computer problem appears to have caused a major power outage that allows the cloned dinosaurs to escape their pens and hunt the visitors.
Jeff Goldblum gives an iconic performance in this film that really showcases his quirkiness. His conversation with Laura Dern about chaos theory is one that I’ve remembered since I first saw this film. Sam Neil is a fantastic hero in this film who delivers a line that I have to say aloud every time I watch Jurassic Park. It’s when Lex Murphy (Ariana Richards) says, “He left us,” and Grant and I respond, “But…that’s not…what I’m gonna do!” I can’t leave off the eccentric Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond and his Santa Claus type presence that makes him a jolly old millionaire crazy enough to start a dinosaur theme park.
That’s not what I’m gonna do.
There are so many great moments in this film that Steven Spielberg brings to life. The first time Dr. Grant sees a living, walking dinosaur. The terror the kids experience as a T-Rex is trying to get to them through the see-through roof of the jeep. Dinosaurs that freaking open DOORS!!! So many great moments all expertly brought to life make this movie one of my most watched and most beloved films. None more than Dr. Grant teaching some punk kid a lesson about respecting dinosaurs by intimately describing each and every detail of what it would be like to be eaten by a velociraptor. I still laugh every time I see that scene that that smug look on the kids face drops to a terrified, yet respecting, straight faced expression.
This film is one that I’ll watch for years and hopefully one day show to my grandkids like my grandmother use to show me Wizard of Oz. It’s a film I saw multiple times in the theater, I’ve owned on multiple platforms, and have shared with my daughter and many of my students. If you’ve managed to live long enough to learn to read this blog and you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to get a copy and watch it!
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