July 26, 2026

Jurassic Park (1993) — The Spectacle

Show Notes
Transcript

Jurassic Park changed visual effects forever and redefined what audiences believed movies could show on screen. Based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel, Steven Spielberg combined practical creature effects, animatronics, and groundbreaking CGI to bring dinosaurs to life with unprecedented realism. In this episode of Spielberg Reloaded, we examine the making of Jurassic Park alongside Spielberg’s simultaneous work on Schindler’s List, creating one of the most remarkable periods in film history. We discuss Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Industrial Light & Magic, the T. rex attack, and the film’s lasting warning about

A.I. was used to help with narration and creative elements of our scripts.

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Calarogu Shark Media. The first time you see the Brachiosaurus,

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you believe it, not in the way you believe a

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special effect, in the way you believe something standing in

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front of you in a field. Alan Grant's mouth falls open.

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Ellie Sadler laughs and cries at the same time John

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Williams opens up the orchestra and somewhere in a theater

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in the summer of nineteen ninety three, something shifted in

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what movies were capable of. This is Spielberg reloaded episode nine,

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Jurassic Park nineteen ninety three. That idea that Spielberg was

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finishing Jurassic Park while simultaneously making Shindler's List is one

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of the more remarkable things any filmmaker has ever done.

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An almost absurd overlap in tone and scale. They are

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nearly perfectly opposite films. One is about the worst thing

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human beings have ever done to each other, the other

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is about dinosaurs. Both are masterpieces of their kind, and

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the fact that the same mind produced them in the

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same twelve months says something about the range of Steven

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Spielberg that no single episode of this series can fully

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account for. Spielberg has said that making Shindler's List was

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so emotionally devastating that Jurassic Park became a form of

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relief that working on the effect sequences and the action

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set pieces gave him somewhere to put his energy on

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the days when the weight of what he was filming

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in Poland became too much to carry. The joy in

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Jurassic Park is real. It came from somewhere real. The

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man who was confronting the Holocaust needed some afternoons to

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watch a t Rex run. Jurassic Park was released in

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June nineteen ninety three, adapted from My Crichton's nineteen ninety

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novel by Crichton and screenwriter David Koop. The premise is

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the one You Know. A billionaire named John Hammond has

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used recovered dinosaur DNA to clone living dinosaurs on a

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remote island, built a theme park around them, and invited

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a group of experts to assess the park before it opens.

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The experts include a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, a mathematician, and

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Hammond's own grandchildren. Things go wrong before lunch. The film

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established visual effects standards that the industry is still measuring

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itself against. Thirty years later, Industrial Light and Magic used

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computer generated imagery at a scale and with a photorealism

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that had never been attempted. The dinosaurs moved with weight

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and purpose. They breathed. When the t rex pressed its

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face against the gloss of the tour vehicle in the rain,

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you could feel the heat of its breath. Critics and

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filmmakers who saw early footage described the experience as a

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before and after moment. There was cinema before Jurassic Parks

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effects and cinema after, and the line was absolute. The

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story of how those effects came to exist is worth telling.

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Spielberg had originally planned to use go motion photography, an

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advanced version of stop motion animation, for most of the

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dinosaur sequences. ILM's computer graphics team asked for a chance

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to show him what CGI could do. Instead, what they

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showed him in a test reel stopped the room. Spielberg

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sat in silence for a moment, and then said they

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were going to have to rethink the whole film. Tippett

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reportedly joked that he was extinct, a line Spielberg later

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echoed in the film itself. But Spielberg characteristically use the

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techechnology as a last resort rather than a first instinct.

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He shot the dinosaurs practically wherever he could. Animatronic creatures

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built by Stan Winston's team, full scale mechanical heads and

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legs and torsos that the actors could actually interact with.

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The CGI was deployed for movement, for scale, for the

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shots that no puppet could achieve. The result was a

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seamless blend that neither approach alone could have produced, and

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it remains more convincing than films made with far superior technology.

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Two decades later, the cast understood what kind of film

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they were in. Sam Neil plays Alan Grant with gruff,

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reluctant warmth, a man who doesn't particularly like children and

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spends the film learning to be responsible for two of them.

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Laura Dern plays Ellie Sadler, with more intelligence and capability

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than the film sometimes remembers to use. Jeff Goldblum plays

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Ian Malcolm, and Jeff Goldblum playing Ian Malcolm is one

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of the great pieces of casting in Spielberg's filmography, a

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man so perfectly suited to a role that it is

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impossible to imagine the film without him. Malcolm is the

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chaos theorist, the voice of everything the film is trying

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to say, the only person on the island who arrived

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already knowing it was a bad idea. Richard Attenborough plays Hammond,

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and his performance is the film's most interesting and most underrated.

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Hammond is not a villain. He is something more dangerous,

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a true believer. He built Jurassic Park because he could,

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and because he genuinely thought it would bring people joy,

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and because it never seriously occurred to him that wanting

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something very much was not the same as having the

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right to do it. The film's argument, delivered largely through Malcolm,

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is the one that has only become more pressing in

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the thirty years since Life Finds a Way. Malcolm says,

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and what he means, is that complex systems resist human control,

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that the assumption of mastery over nature is not ambition

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but delusion. That the gap between what we can engineer

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and what we can predict is where catastrophe lives. In

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nineteen ninety three, that argument was about genetic engineering and

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theme parks. In twenty twenty six, it is about artificial intelligence,

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about synthetic biology, about any technology powerful enough that its

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implications cannot be fully modeled before it is deployed. Hammond's certainty,

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his faith that the controls were sufficient, that the containment

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would hold, that he had thought of everything, is the

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same certainty that has preceded every technological disaster in human history.

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Wilberg does not make Hammond monstrous for it. He makes

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him sympathetic, which is the more honest and more frightening choice.

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Hammond sits in the bunker eating ice cream while his

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park collapses around him, and he is still, in some

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part of himself proud of what he built. The dream

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was real. The failure of the dream does not make

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the dream wrong. In his mind. That psychology, the innovator

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who cannot be taught by his own consequences, is as

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recognizable now as it was then. The t Rex sequence

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remains one of the great sustained set pieces in American cinema.

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Spielberg builds it with the same architectural precision he brought

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to the truck chase in Raiders. Every element established early,

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every escalation logical, the tension ratcheted without a single false move.

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The rain, the cup of water, the footsteps, the silence

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before the impact. Children who saw it in nineteen ninety

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three remember exactly where they were sitting. Some of them

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became filmmakers because of it. The veloci raptors are the

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film's other master stroke. Where the t Rex is force enormous,

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almost elemental, the raptors are intelligence. They hunt in coordinated patterns.

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They test fences for weaknesses. They remember. The kitchen sequence,

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where two children try to stay silent and stay alive

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while two raptors systematically search the room works as pure

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horror because Spielberg trusts the audience to understand that what

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makes the raptors terrifying is not their size, but their attention.

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They are looking for you, specifically. Jurassic Park made over

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nine hundred million dollars worldwide in its original theatrical run,

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surpassing Spielberg's own et to become the highest grossing film

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ever made at that point, a record it held until

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Titanic in nineteen ninety seven. Later re releases, including a three

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D reissue in twenty thirteen, eventually pushed its lifetime total

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past a billion. It launched a franchise that has stretched

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across multiple sequels and decades. The original remains so far

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ahead of everything it spawned that the sequels barely seem

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to inhabit the same genre. That gap between the film

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and everything it spawned is itself an argument about what

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Spielberg brought to it. The sequels have the dinosaurs, they

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don't have the dread, the wonder, or the moral intelligence.

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They don't have Hammond sitting in the bunker eating ice

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cream while the dream burns. They don't have the moment

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when the Brachiosaurus turns its head and the audience understands

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for the first time that everything has changed. Next time,

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no spectacle, no wonder, Just a black and white film

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about the worst thing that ever happened, made by the

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man who had spent his entire career making you feel

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safe in a dark room.