Concept: A pair of experts are brought in to inspect a huge nature park with genetically-engineered living dinosaurs (remastered in 3D).

• Everybody knows this is a great movie, but if you’ve seen it a million times since it came out in 1993 and you’ve seen all the sequels and reboots since (there’s even a kiddie Jurassic Park cartoon series on Netflix, yikes), is it worth seeing the original Jurassic one more time or buying the Blu Ray because it’s in 3D? Yep.
• This is a movie that everybody thought was great when it came out, but does the pacing and special effects really hold up to our standards today? Yep.
• No experience compares to the one that audiences got when this movie first hit the theaters in 1993. The world had never seen CGI to this extent at that time, bringing realistic life to beings via computer graphics. There was literally a universal sense of awe among audiences, rarely seen in theaters before or since. The only other time I had felt audiences gasp at the miraculousness of movie magic was with the original appearances of CGI-produced Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
• No, you’re not going to recapture the same experience of awe with this 3D version that audiences originally felt with the first theatrical release of Jurassic Park. Even if you’ve never seen this movie before, you’ve been so inundated with CGI in the 30 years since that you probably won’t be amazed at CGI anymore. The most you’ll say is, “Oh, that’s cool CGI.” But the 3D experience comes surprisingly close to that original awe. The movie is such a great movie, the 3D conversion is so well done, and the build-ups in the movie are so expertly directed (by Steven Spielberg no less) that the experience at least recaptures the sense of grandeur and amazement that the main characters share with us.
• The CGI of this 1993 movie holds up surprisingly well, unlike Gollum in the LOTR movies ten years later. If you look at the original versions of the LOTR movies today, Gollum not only looks like CGI but like old CGI. Even with most movies today, CGI is so obvious that you have to perform some effort suspending disbelief to enjoy the movie. But the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park look as real today as they did in ’93, at least in the 3D version. They look like they occupy the same physical space as the actors and that they have weight—this is a tribute to the perfectionism of Spielberg and the craft of all the people who worked on movie’s special effects.
• And about that 3D conversion: this is probably the best 3D effect I have seen in my home theater—including movies both that were filmed originally in 3D and those that were converted later (like this one). Spielberg supervised the 3D conversion of Jurassic Park and it shows. Nearly every camera take is splendid, showing off several levels of depth. Even scenes whose visuals probably wouldn’t have made any impression on me in the 2D version, like the first scenes of the dinosaur experts excavating in the desert or scenes of simply a helicopter flying over the ocean, all looked spectacular. And the 3D really does add to the impact of the movie, making it more intense.
• I had forgotten how terrifying this movie could be, and how suspenseful.
• This movie is filled with so many great scenes. Any movie would have stood out for just having one great scene (“1917” is my best example of a one-great-scene movie), but Jurassic Park is filled with great scenes, making it the classic that it has been. None of the Jurassic sequels, reboots, spinoffs, copy cats, and theme park rides come close to this movie.
• And the movie has a great story, engaging characters with a great set of actors bringing them to life, and a solid foundation of science that actually made sense.
• Loved that it was 16:9, allowing the entire screen to be filled and making the experience much more real. So many movies are 2.35:1, which always makes me feel that I’m looking through a slit on my screen. I wish all movies would be 16:9, so we wouldn’t all lose so much real estate on our screens.
• Fun Tidbit: Spielberg wanted to make “Schindler’s List,” but the movie studio was hesitant about making a major movie that dealt with Nazi atrocity and concentration camps (apparently, Hollywood execs at the time hought people just wanted escapism). So Spielberg agreed to make a blockbuster-type movie if they financed “Schindler’s List,” and that blockbuster was “Jurassic Park.”
• Viewed on an Optoma HD28DSE projector, 92” screen, Blu Ray, looked and sounded great. My only issue, and this is true for all 3D Blu Rays and not just this one, is sub-titles. I’m used to seeing movies with sub-titles so that I can capture all the dialog, but there’s a certain visual dissonance with 2D sub-titles and 3D content. I felt I constantly had to readjust my eyes from sub-titles to what’s happening on screen, back and forth; it was too much of a strain, and I just shut off the sub-titles after a minute of trying.

Jurassic Park (2013) 93%