At times, you could swear Jurassic Park was meant to be in 3-D all along. A movie about a theme park that is, in many ways, its own theme-park ride, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dinosaur adventure always had plenty of in-your-face moments that one associates with 3-D gimmickry — from a pack of gallimimus charging toward the camera, to a jeep falling off a tree and straight at us, or even to an ominous dolly into a prehistoric mosquito caught in amber. The movie hasn’t lost any of its charm in the twenty years since its release; if anything, it’s gained some, because those slick, seemingly perfect CGI dinosaurs now seem slightly more fake than they used to. You’d think that might be a hindrance, but not here: The same way that Raiders of the Lost Ark was partly an homage to the action serials of an earlier age, so too was Jurassic Park an homage to the creature features and monster movies of Spielberg’s youth. Now it feels like it’s about to join their ranks.
Actually, part of the reason why those dinosaurs now feel slightly off might actually be the 3-D itself: The retrofitting sometimes separates the monsters into their own spatial plane. The almost imperceptible electric edge between the effects and live-action footage suddenly feels more pronounced. But don’t worry: Jurassic Park hasn’t suddenly become tacky. The effects may have lost some of their novelty, but the movie itself has gained some surprising profundity in the intervening years.
Jurassic Park shows us a director in transition, and the film captures his transformation in its own kind of cinematic amber. Spielberg’s early career was defined by a series of films notable for their childlike vision of the world; now he was becoming a man who made films about fathers, about parental responsibility of both the literal and figurative kind. We can sense that tension directly in the gradual transformation of the film’s nominal hero, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), from a child-hating grouch into a warm and cuddly hero and father figure to the film’s other two nominal heroes, Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex Murphy (Ariana Richards), the young grandchildren of dinosaur-cloning theme-park impresario John Hammond (Richard Attenborough).