So I legit think I haven’t seen this movie since the ’90s, and probably only saw it 1-2 times back then. And yet somehow, I still remember lines and scenes from it almost perfectly. Evidence of how it sneakily turned into a major cultural touchstone, I guess?

Things that stood out to me on this rewatch:

  1. This has gone down in history, for probably good reason, as the first major movie to be driven by CGI. But precisely because it was so early in CGI history, it means that CGI was super-expensive and difficult, and they only used it where nothing else would work. Which means that to a modern eye, this movie stands out for its practical effects. Dinosaur puppets all over, models, hydraulics, all these kinds of old-school physical effects. Even the scenes with dinosaurs are still like 90% real.

  2. The CGI is dated, and looks dated, obviously. The first big brontosaurus reveal has them feeling almost weightless visually, with the grass not even smushing underfoot. Muscle movements have a kind of “stretching polygon” feel in some places. And on a 4K disc, they’re clearly not rendered at 4K resolution. (On a couple of “lots of CG” shots, the whole screen is blurry, in a kind of “composited at a lower res” way.) But for all that, they don’t look terrible. They still work for what they’re doing.

  3. I mentioned that they were weightless visually, but where they’re not weightless is aurally. So much of this movie’s work is done by the soundtrack. By which I mean, yes, the John Williams score — classic Spielberg wouldn’t even feel like Spielberg without John Williams — but also the sound effects. There are jump scares that exist only on the soundtrack, the reverberant bass of T-Rex walking around is ominous in a drums-in-the-deep way, and just generally the soundtrack does a lot to establish the dinosaurs as existing in that place. This is a new DTS:X mix, and while the use of heights is subdued, the use of surround is not, and I think that was the new mix being faithful to the original surround-heavy soundtrack, which presumably was trying to use every technical tool available to make it feel immersive.

  4. The most dated thing from the movie, really, is Samuel L. Jackson smoking in an office. Jolted me right out of suspension of disbelief in a way the dinosaurs never did. I kinda want it to be an example of how bad Hammond’s labor management practices were (and they were very bad), but I think it’s just supposed to be semi-normal? idk

So the reason I watched this movie is that I want to watch the whole series build up to the sixth capstone one. I feel like I am going to regret this, because pretty much universally, everyone agrees this is the only good one. But whatever regrets I have later, this one is actually recommended more highly than I expected it to be — I remembered it as a stupid action movie, but it’s now aged into a vintage period piece from a bygone era. “Only watch movies 25+ years after they were made” is probably not a sustainable policy, but it has upsides.