A Review of Jurassic Park (1993)
Jurassic Park was created from an award winning book by michael crichton, adapted for the screen, then directed by Steven Speilberg. It was a huge success and made huge advancements to the technology used in the film industry at the time.
I will avoid as many spoilers as possible, and focus both on the revolutionary technology used create this film, as well as the still pertinent message that this film conveys.
The movie has dinosaurs as a major feature of the story. Seeing as real live dinosaurs are difficult to come by, and even harder to train for acting, Speilberg had to use a relatively new technology that is all too familiar to us movie goers today. Computer Generated Imagery or CGI was something never really used to great effect in the movie industry until Jurassic Park took on the challenge, although Jurassic Park only contains around 4 minutes of computer generated dinosaurs and 10 more of non computer dino’s it still made major ripples in the film industry and changed the way many people went about filming movies. The widespread use of CGI in modern movies as well as works such as “James Cameron’s Avatar” owe part of their existance of the amazing use of CGI that was featured in Jurassic Park and brought it’s use into the mainstream.
The story of Jurassic Park is an entertaining one at that and its message is certainly one that was relevant at the time of it’s creation, but might be even more relevant now. The final moral of the story is one that has been told many times by many people in a multitude of ways. When boiled down to a single sentence the theme of the story is “Don’t play in God’s domain.” This was shown with the lackadaisical use of genetic manipulation and cloning used to create the park, and is clearly depicted in a quote from “Dr. Malcolm” “...The problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had... your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”
I apologise for the long quote, but it expresses the moral very blatantly, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The amount that this idea relates to our modern era is still erie, our use of technology merely for its use, as well as the rapid pace of advancement just because is a frightening thing to behold. We are currently “standing on the shoulders of geniuses” and have decided to advance technology just because we can. Without direction, and without us personally obtaining the knowledge ourselves we simply rely on those that came before us. With every iteration of this the quality of our forethought decreases while our power and ability to make very real and very large changes is ever more within easy reach.
Our current technological abilities allow us amazing amounts of power. We now have made massive advancements in the genetic technology that the things from Jurassic Park might not be that far off, and our new tech-based military featuring drones, are both great examples where with the push of a button we wield massive armaments that can take lives and change regimes and flatten towns or even cities without a second thought.
Although Jurassic Park was a film for the family, It made an important point that still rings true today, and it’s about time we take heed of it’s warning as well as that of the plethora of tales that share its moral.
Thank you for reading, Sly Prophet signing out.
Thank you for reading, Sly Prophet signing out.
