If you are the rare person reading this because you’ve never seen Jurassic Park, then good lord, you are among the luckiest of filmgoers. Please choose your cinema and viewing companions carefully, as you won’t get your first time again and you’ll remember it forever; you don’t want it blighted by memories of sticky surfaces and weird noises at inopportune moments. But even if you’ve seen it countless times, you’ll know it’s impossible to see Jurassic Park too often. And now, for a limited time only, bits of it stick out.
Twenty years on, Spielberg’s dinosaur disaster endures as a blueprint for the modern effects blockbuster. It takes something that couldn’t otherwise be realised (a dinosaur park), fills it full of characters with wit and depth (even the little kid is funny) and puts them through the wringer for two hours, only using CG when it serves the story rather than to obscure the lack of one. There is the occasional logic fault, but none big enough to be heard over the cacophony of delight surrounding it, and certainly none that can’t be forgiven in a world that has already asked us to believe the extinct can be resurrected by squeezing gunk from old mosquitoes.
The 3D conversion is, for the most part, an effective addition, though there are times when it’s negligible. The fact that several of the major sequences are set at night doesn’t play well — it’s difficult for a shadow to loom out of the screen — so in the era-defining T-Rex attack you likely won’t notice a great deal of difference. It doesn’t lessen it as an action sequence in which every frame is vital, but it doesn’t have any noticeable extra layers.
It’s in the Velociraptor sequences and the Gallimimus charge that the 3D improves the experience. The bladder clenches a little tighter when there’s the momentary thrill that several hundred pounds of charging teeth might leap right into your seat.
The 3D is a novelty, but the chief attraction here should be in once again seeing one of the most amazing blockbusters in history on the biggest screen possible.
