The Comic Critic Reviews Jurassic Park

I went on vacation last week where I stayed in town and just relaxed and decompressed at home. So I'm going to post an older review about a vacation gone horribly wrong. Dinosaur movies before 1993 were a lot of fun. They came in three basic formats in various degrees of quality. First, you had the lizards covered in makeup. These poor things were poked and prodded at each other with the occasional rewarding hiss or tussle for the cameraman. Next up from that, you saw the sectional giant prop, where either a large claw or a set of jaws would swoop in from off-screen. And the best were the stop-motion animations. They might have been a little jerky looking, but it was a lot easier to suspend your disbelief with them than it was with the extras from the reptile farm. Then Jurassic Park hit the scene. Its combination of full-scale animatronics (combined with highly integrated CGI) did more than carry a sense of disbelief. You wondered if your local pet store was going to expand to make way for this new inventory of potential pets. Finally, a real look at the famed giants that so fascinated us when we were little. I bet this film did wonders for the study of paleontology, inspiring a whole new generation into its field of research.

The Comic Critic Reviews Jurassic Park

I know it sounds a bit trite to mention over a decade later just how Jurassic Park revolutionized movie special effects with its combination of CGI and live action animatronics. It redefined the “Dinosaur” genre. Now I can only watch my old dinosaur movies with the same nostalgia I have in riding a big wheel. Now, I feel like I’m just to grown up to sit in the child sized seat anymore. And then there are all those wonderful cultural snippets that have been parodied to no end. Like the “Objects in rear view mirror might appear farther away than they actually are.” or the “Flashlight beam in the eye” scene. All of them now iconic.  Any movie that has such a profound effect on the movie industry and our pop culture deserves all the kudos that it receives.