Take 2: Jurassic Park
Posted on Aug 21, 2025 by Admin
Known for churning out hit after hit, the name Steven Spielberg has become synonymous with the summer blockbuster. We take a look back on his 1993 dinosaur epic, which set the bar for visual effects
Words Katie Kasperson | Images Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment
Best known for box office knockouts like Jaws, ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg is, above all, committed to filmmaking as a craft. On Jaws, his crew created multiple mechanical sharks; it was also the first major motion picture to be shot out on the ocean. The beloved, titular ET was a combination of live actors, animatronics and prosthetics. While Raiders once again proved Spielberg’s preference for filming on location, taking his company from France to Tunisia and, finally, Hawaii. About ten years later, he returned to the islands to adapt Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel about dinosaur clones gone rogue.
Today, Jurassic Park is one of the most successful film franchises of all time, with Spielberg’s classic spawning a series of sequels – the latest being Jurassic World Rebirth. Blending Kauai’s topography with pioneering VFX, the iconic action-adventure film cemented Hawaii as a top spot and CGI as a viable storytelling tool.
Centring around a small team of scientists, Jurassic Park puts the ethics of genetic cloning under a microscope, while also being an action movie about thwarting should-be-extinct predators. To build anatomically accurate versions of these ancient creatures, paleontologist Jack Horner advised and Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) helped execute. While Spielberg was initially hesitant about relying on CGI, the final film includes 15 minutes of dino screen time; six minutes of CGI and nine minutes of animatronics.
Thanks to the team at ILM, audiences watch as a convincingly realistic, life-sized T rex escapes its enclosure, flips a car with two kids inside it, chases down the scientists (this sequence took two months to perfect in post) and ultimately kills several park employees. However, Spielberg wanted to avoid the dinosaurs-as-monsters trope, choosing to include scenes with friendly dinos too – such as the Brachiosaurus herd peacefully grazing the fields or the sick Triceratops that the visitors encounter. For the latter, the crew brought an animatronic to Kauai – the only one filmed on location, while the rest lived on sound stages at Warner Bros and Universal Studios.
Near the final days of filming on Kauai, Hurricane Iniki caused the crew to scramble, breaking down and packing up the sets, taking cover on the nearby island of Oahu. The Hawaiian weather proved an untamed beast, but the state’s scenery is unrivalled – as the film shows.
Thanks also to financial incentives for filmmakers, Hawaii has since played host to a range of high-profile productions, including several Jurassic Park sequels, Lost, The White Lotus, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Hawaii Five-0 and plenty more. Jurassic Park lives on through this continuing local collab, but its legacy also survives at ILM, where its influence on CGI is indisputable.
In this series, we also take a second look at the cult classic The Shining.
This story appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Definition
