At the risk of sounding oxymoronic, Let’s start this at the beginning.
It was a usual Sunday morning for a middle schooler when he woke up one day thirty years ago! But mundanity stayed only for a little while until he opened up the daily newspaper and saw this stunning imagery of a kid hiding under a kitchen sink while a giant unknown creature lurks over the sink. I was stunned by the sheer visual experience the picture offered. It was scary and at the same time spectacular. I read the article which accompanied the picture. It was about Jurassic Park.
It spoke about director Steven Spielberg’s penultimate vision to bring these extinct dinosaurs back to life using advanced Computer Generated Imagery. Almost every word was gibberish to me then, but I kept reading the article over and over. I started visualizing the possibilities of how these creatures will be brought into a film, what would be the payoff, and how great it would be to watch it on a gigantic screen!
We are talking 90s- there was no internet, Zuckerberg was in diapers and Cable TV was a luxury. Still, I kept collecting every single piece they wrote about the film from every possible source —during which I realized that two of my favorite films (of those times) were directed by Spielberg (E.T & Jaws). It was the June of 1993 when the film finally came out. Unfortunately, India had to wait a little longer. Almost an year goes by. Jurassic Park gets a massive release in India and I was there... with my parents and brother occupying the comfy red seats of an urban cinema hall waiting for the screen to turn on!
And when it did I was witnessing pure magic for the next 100 minutes. Right from the DTS logo, I was in for an audio-visual ride. For the first time in my life, I was introduced to the power of visuals and sounds. When the guy jumps up on the cage, pulls up the gate and light bleeds through its holes - I was experiencing something that I’ve never ever dreamed of. A beautiful marriage of visuals to sound. An arresting flow of narrative that made you say “Never end”! And that was the magic of Cinema.
To date, nothing surpassed or even came close to the theatrical experience I got from Jurassic Park. And I think nothing ever can as the benchmark that it left is pretty huge.
30 years of Jurassic Park.
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