[movies] The Cult of ‘Jurassic Park’ … a look at the long-term fascination with Jurassic Park from academic and amateur fans …

This is getting us close to the soul of Jurassic Park, so I make one last call to Phil Tippett. Phil – an Oscar-winning effects man who helped dream up Jabba the Hutt – was Jurassic Park’s dino-director. Phil says what makes Jurassic Park click is that “it’s a movie from a different age.”

Though we remember it for the effects, Jurassic Park feels … palpable in a way few CGI-loaded movies do today. When the T. rex smushes the Ford Explorer, that’s a real Ford Explorer. When the electric fence topples, that’s a real fence. Richards says perhaps 80 percent of her dinosaur scenes were shot with Winston models, allowing her and Neill and other actors to actually be with the effects.

Fanboy-dom is about something irretrievable, a lost world of childhood. And here, from the age of Avatar, we can see it clearly. Jurassic Park, along with The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991), were the stars of an amazing in-between period of summer-movie history. An interesting couple of years between the Analog Era and the Computer Era. We were charging headfirst into the movie future, but we hadn’t quite left the past. Jurassic Park had 55 computer-effects shots; The Phantom Menace, released six years later, had around 2,000.

The Cult Of Jurassic Park

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2015 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Movies.

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