Several months ago, we revisited the original Jurassic Park, which is arguably still Michael Crichton’s best known work.
The movie is also one of Steven Spielberg’s biggest blockbusters, not to mention it blew open the door for game changing technology, CGI. Good, bad, or indifferent, because of CGI, movies, and movie special effects, will never be the same.
Over the summer, there was also talk of another sequel or a reboot, but like Jaws and Raiders, the first Jurassic is still the best, and it remains tough to beat nearly twenty years after the fact.
Now with all three Jurassic Park movies coming out in a deluxe DVD / Blu-Ray package, The L.A. Times recently talked to FX wizard Dennis Muren (Star Wars, Ghostbusters) about the original film, and how it holds up today.
“I always thought when we did it that within five or 10 years it was going to look old-fashioned and obsolete, but it doesn’t,” Muren said.
“When we were in dailies doing this movie, and we were doing the effects for six or eight months or so, we were looking at something and saying, ‘Did we do this? This has never been done before.’ It was really a very, very exciting period.”
Like effects before, Muren and his team thought they could do the dinosaurs off in the distance with CGI, “But as we were doing it, we just tried and got more bold, and got closer on ’em and closer ’till we ended up doing a close-up on a T. Rex with a performance that you’ve never seen before, because you could never get the acting of those animals with animatronics or with rod puppets. It was really a real shocker for the audience and ourselves too.”
Muren also recalled, “It’s not like I looked at the script and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is impossible.’ I did imagine what it would look like if it was going to be done the old-fashioned way. I know I would have been disappointed as a viewer, seeing another movie similar to what I’d seen before as far as the effects go.”
Note:TG Daily writer CB Droege will be reviewing the new Jurassic Park Blu-ray from Universal over the next few days.
