With Jurassic Park, the man who invented the summer event movie took Michael Crichton's tome and transformed it into an awe-inspiring blockbuster using every inch of screen.
Richard Attenborough is billionaire boffin John Hammond who plans to open a theme park on a remote Costa Rican island featuring dinosaurs genetically modelled from fossil DNA. Sneak preview visitors include palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Satler (Neill and Dern), chaos theory expert Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) but the park goes off-line, the dinos escape and prehysteria breaks loose.
Spielberg treads gradually, building up an impending sense of menace over the first hour with evolutionary arguments hammering home the theory that dino-recreation is a Really Bad Thing. Then he lets rip on an unforgettable second half, with set piece after set piece. So the script and the performances aren't exactly Oscar material, but it scarcely matters given that the real stars here are the ILM-created dinosaurs, a miracle of modern moviemaking...
