My favourite film when I was 12: Jurassic Park
I had a Saturday job when I was 12. To try to bulk out their incomes a little, my parents grew plants to sell at a market. At the crack of dawn every weekend, Dad and I would dutifully hook his boxy homemade trailer to the back of his car and we’d drive to Canterbury, where we had a stall in a perpetually freezing indoor market on St George’s Place.
The market is long gone now, first becoming an indoor laser centre and then university accommodation. But the building a couple of doors down remains a cinema. For the most part, the cinema and the market didn’t interact at all. And then, in July 1993, Jurassic Park opened.
Suddenly you couldn’t get in or out of the market, because the doors were blocked by cinema queues. The first weekend, this took everyone by surprise. The second weekend, the traders were ready. The confectionery guy made hundreds of bags of penny sweets, and wandered up and down the lines selling them to customers. The guy who screen-printed T-shirts suddenly had a ton of slightly knockoff Jurassic Park designs and did the same. The burger van had someone out front taking orders. If there had been a way to reposition hanging baskets to maximise on this emergent dinosaur market, I’m sure my dad would have tried it. It was extraordinary. I had never seen anything like it.
Business at the market was so good that it was a couple more weeks before I found time to sneak off mid-shift and watch it. Even then I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew the name. I knew the logo. But my only frame of reference for dinosaur films was The Land Before Time, so I went into it thinking that the dinosaurs would probably be able to talk to each other.
And then my first reaction, weirdly, was disappointment. Being a 12-yearold, I basically wanted Jurassic Park to be a version of how Donald Trump watches films; just a non-stop supercut of big-ticket action sequences, with all the guff like exposition and character development shoved off into the bin. Once I’d got over the whole no-talking thing, I wanted nothing but dinosaurs eating each other. It is with some regret that I can look back on this moment and see that I basically wanted a Jurassic Park as imagined by Michael Bay. May heaven forgive me.
Of course, looking back, it’s clear that the quieter moments are what make the film sing. The rippling water is scarier than the T-Rex itself. The raptors’ kitchen stake-out is far more effective than any of the chase scenes. Sam Neill seeing the dinosaurs for the first time was more profound than us seeing the dinosaurs for the first time. The moment that stayed with me the longest, for crying out loud, was probably achieved by getting a nearby electrician to rattle a doorknob. The reason the film the stayed with me – and it did; it was the first film I went to see multiple times – is Spielberg’s mastery of tension and release. Had the film been Dinosaur Bloodbath as I wanted, I would have forgotten about it by the time the credits rolled.
It is also to the film’s credit that the three adult leads have aged impeccably in the last 27 years. Neill has weathered into a twinkly-eyed farmer on Twitter. Jeff Goldblum has effectively memed himself to immortality by basically becoming a random noise generator. And Laura Dern, whose best work was lost on me for at least a decade after Jurassic Park, has grown up to be pretty much the best person alive.
It’s easy to forget, what with all the terrible sequels and near constant ITV2 replays, what a great film Jurassic Park is. It represents a mastery of the genre that Spielberg created with Jaws. It sits right at the sweet spot between emotion and spectacle. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of hanging out with my dad, a man I can only converse with on Facebook Messenger right now. Whatever the reason, Jurassic Park will always be special to me.