Film at 11 Podcast: Episode 13 | Jurassic Park (1993)

I may have made a mistake in this week’s Film at 11 podcast. I had several last-minute changes of mind about what movie to watch with my son Thomas, until I eventually settled on Jurassic Park. Mind you, this is the kid who found Gremlins a little too scary, and I thought it would be a great idea to make him watch dinosaurs eating people. If the boy looks a little traumatized in our discussion afterwards, I promise you he’s fine now. Still, maybe next time we should do a comedy.

In hindsight, I suppose eleven may be too young for Jurassic Park. I was nineteen when the movie came out, and it was definitely the biggest cinematic event of the year. (Steven Spielberg’s dinos sure crushed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero the following week.) To my memory, I saw it at least three times theatrically. Some parts of the movie have always frustrated me, including its excessive focus on young kid characters (even Thomas found them annoying!) and the goofy “Mr. DNA” plot device to explain the pseudoscience. I don’t think Jurassic Park is Spielberg’s best film by any serious measure. However, it’s always been an exemplary piece of popcorn entertainment.

This rewatch really reminded me of that. From the first T-Rex attack on the jeeps, the movie becomes one tremendous action and suspense set-piece after another after another after another. Even if a few of the visual effects have dated, most of them work plenty well enough to still sell the illusion. I had great fun with this viewing. I’m sure Thomas will warm up to the movie more as he gets older.

Jurassic Park (1993) - Joseph Mazzello as Tim
This is basically how Thomas watched the entire movie.
Title:Jurassic Park
Year of Release: 1993
Directors: Steven Spielberg
Watched On: Fandango at Home (4K)
Also Available On: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Blu-ray
Blu-ray 3D
Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Video Streaming

Universal released Jurassic Park on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in 2022. I bought a copy of the disc the following year during a sale at Gruv.com. I probably should’ve watched it before now. Depressingly, I’m finding more and more that 4K discs need to be tested immediately after purchase to ensure they actually work. This one glitched and froze up on me at the start of Chapter 5, just before the reveal of the first dinosaur. No amount of cleaning the disc can get it to play past that part. It’s toast.

Thankfully, I discovered this before sitting to watch with Thomas. I debated whether we should watch the included standard Blu-ray or stream the Digital Copy. Sadly, although it has the benefit of lossless audio, the Blu-ray has not been remastered, and is the same disc originally released back in 2011, which suffers some overprocessing with light edge enhancement and other problems. I decided that streaming the 4K master from Fandango at Home (Vudu) would be the better option.

The 4K stream indeed looks better than the old Blu-ray, but still has a number of limitations that may be endemic to the film. The digital visual effects – not just the obvious CGI, but also things like wire removal or green-screen work – were rendered and composited somewhere less than 1080p resolution at the time and then printed back to film. You can rescan that film element at 4K, 8K, or even a trillion Ks, but it’s never going to look better than it did back in 1993. Many of those shots will forever have a dupey appearance, with very noisy grain and some electronic edge ringing baked-in.

On top of that, cinematographer Dean Cundey shot the movie in a deliberately soft and hazy style, to help hide the seams in both the digital and practical effects. Visible detail is fair overall, but the 1.85:1 image never really looks up to 4K quality. The photography’s contrast is also generally flat, and the application of HDR doesn’t do much to change that.

Jurassic Park (1993) movie poster

I saw Jurassic Park in theaters twice during its opening weekend in 1993. The second of those was at a cinema that had been specially equipped with the brand-new, much-heralded DTS 5.1 surround audio system. My main takeaway at the time was that it was very, very loud.

Jurassic Park won an Oscar for Best Sound the following year. The movie has a famously powerhouse soundtrack that has been go-to demo material on every home video format for the past three decades. The DTS Laserdisc still fetches decent money in resale among fans of that format.

The physical 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray has a new DTS:X immersive audio track (the DTS competitor for Dolby Atmos). I’d love to hear more of it, but my disc crapped out before the movie even got to any sonically important moments. The streaming edition has neither DTS:X nor Dolby Atmos, just regular Dolby Digital 5.1. While that’s a disappointment, an argument can be made that it’s closer to what played in theaters in 1993 than any revisionist remix will be.

The streaming edition is of course highly compressed, but the movie’s underlying sound mix is so strong it still provides a terrific listening experience. The track has tons of powerful bass, especially during the T-Rex’s stomping and its famous roar. The surround channels also regularly light up with jungle sounds and screeching noises from every direction.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll replace my 4K disc (it’s too late now to get an exchange), but for the time being the streaming copy is satisfying enough. If I want to try something different, I also have a copy of the 2013 3D conversion on hand that I’ll need to give a spin eventually.

Related

Note: Screenshots on this page were taken from the 2011 Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.

3 thoughts on “Film at 11 Podcast: Episode 13 | Jurassic Park (1993)”

  1. Hey Josh,

    Universal is going to release a 3-movie SteelBook set for the original trilogy along with the more recent trilogy. They’re supposed to be encoded with Dolby Vision and Atmos.

    I’m sure they’re meant to coincide with the release of the new film in a couple of months.

    I don’t know if they’re going to release them singly.

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      1. The Lost World was fun until the T-Rex started rampaging through the suburbs, and then it got really stupid.

        JP3 had the cool pterodactyl scene in the “birdcage”, but the rest of it was fairly forgettable. I still enjoyed it more than Lost World.

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