Jurassic Park was my Star Wars. I was nine years old when it came out and must have been to see it four or five times in the cinema. I bought all the books and merchandise I could (although no toys; I felt too old for toys!), and even ploughed through the dense 'Making Of' book that went way over my head at the time. I knew the dinosaurs were just special effects but they looked totally real to me, and I wanted to BE Tim.
Even now, it stands up extremely well, far better than ET. Casting some off-centre actors like Jeff Goldblum and Wayne Knight worked so well, and the improvisational feel of early scenes really lifts the story above the simple action flick it tends to be remembered as. The characters are honed to perfection, dialogue fleshing them out with such efficiency yet believability that story seems far longer than it really is. And let's not forget that this is a movie that made me seek out books to explicate the basics of chaos theory when I was still in primary school. Only today did I really understand how remarkable it was for me to understand phase space and strange attractors and to recognise the name of Edward Lorenz at ten years of age.
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