“With Hook, he’s at a junction point. And then two years later, he does Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in the same year. Just the most dominant shit. He has nothing left to prove after that. Hook, he still has stuff to prove. If it went straight from Hook to Schindler, It’d be like, that’s past. I’m not doing that kind of thing anymore. I’ve grown up. Here’s my kind of movie. But the fact that he does Jurassic in the same year, and he’s like, I can still knock this out of the park if I want to. You want me to build a roller coaster? I’ll build a roller coaster.
It’s hard for kids to understand now. But at that time, when you found out Spielberg was directing Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park was such a hit book. Six graders were carrying around Jurassic Park when I was in sixth grade, and everyone was like, how are they going to do the dinosaur? Literally, this is not possible because they’ll never make them look real, and he delivered on that in the most incredible way possible. And the movie still just rips. It’s hard to overstate how much you felt like you were watching the impossible happen in 1992.”
From Blank Check with Griffin & David with Lin-Manuel Miranda
After wowing audiences with a run of terrific whiz-bang adventures, Spielberg spent the back half of the 80s struggling to mature as a filmmaker. He wanted to be taken seriously, but he also didn’t want to lose his knack for amazing storytelling. Critics were starting to doubt if Spielberg had any depth or if he could ever grow up and make a movie for adults. In 1993, he silenced them all with Jurassic Park followed by Schindler’s List.
From the opening images (a scene I forgot), the film is cinematic in that classic Spielbergian way. Travel back in time to when special effects combined digital with practical. Effects which still hold up, possibly because the director is such a master with this kind of material.
What was the last sequence in cinema as calibrated and calculated for thrills as the T-Rex attack? Each beat is treated like a special trick move so that even the mud flowing into the upturned car is a bit of a wow. It is a perfect scene.
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