Boy, do I hate being right all the time. Jurassic Park is the winner of The 2021 Recommend If You Like Rewatch Tournament – Not Funny Movie. After a relatively easy defeat of The Thing, soundly handling The Shining, taking down Heat and giving Die Hard its first real challenge, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dinosaur money machine is our winner.

If the criteria for this tournament is based on being ‘rewatchable,’ Jurassic Park is the ultimate rewatch, above all television and other movies. One could say it is the GOAT of rewatches, with one leg flung right across our windshields. You probably understand that reference, reader, because you too have done your fair share of Jurassic Park rewatches.

So what keeps us coming back? Is it the ethical questions that we are asked to grapple with, as the stakes continue to raise for our heroes after park security fails? Perhaps we obsess over the parallels we see, as science lovers in the modern era, watching as company profits override rationality on the world stage.

No! No! We revisit Jurassic Park because it has a script full of quotables, tons of hot babes from the 90s, a John Williams score, and above all else, because it looks so freaking cool.

The first time I saw Jurassic Park was as a 5-year-old, after emotionally lobbying my parents that I was now capable of watching adults get eaten by animatronic dinosaurs without losing any sleep. It was my first favorite movie, even though my favorite dinosaur at the time (the humble “girl dinosaur,” triceratops) is only featured as a big sick baby next to a heaping pile of shit. Like children of the last decade have begged to watch Frozen or Moana on a twice weekly basis, Jurassic Park was an obsession. 

Jurassic Park feels real to us because of how many of its special effects were produced physically, creating something tangible and touchable to be afraid of. I’m a fan of practical effects, as I admit to being a bit of a luddite as far as movie fandom goes. For as many shots as we get in the movie of the dinosaurs in their whole bodies through the magic of computer images, those are saved for moments of awe, and images of predators chasing prey (and humans). When it comes to instilling terror in the audience, the sharp teeth, claws, and dino-muscle are best presented in their realistic glory, using massive puppets that roar and drool. They look sticky to the touch, full of gristle and flesh that could bleed if the skin was ripped. Perhaps this is how the cast is able to react to the dinosaurs in ways we read as authentic, because instead of playing opposite some guy in a motion-capture suit, Tim and Lex Murphy are screaming into the gaping maw of a hydraulic powered monster.

Of course, all of this isn’t to say Jurassic Park doesn’t have a couple important lessons sprinkled in, it’s just that those lessons seem to have had little impact. I’m not so sure that we’re returning to Isla Nublar because we want to reflect on the ethics of playing God when it comes to the ecological universe as much as because we think it looks cool. Maybe in a world without COVID, I’d be pontificating on the lessons of how Jurassic Park influenced me to be a more thoughtful and sensitive person, the type of guy who pauses regularly to make sure the wisest people are having their ideas honored, and warnings heeded. Instead, we have decades of post-Jurassic Park history to demonstrate that mankind feels perfectly fine to continue playing God, and stuffing our fingers in our ears when the smart folks in the room tell us that there is an impending disaster. 

The people who inhabit the universe that is Jurassic Park don’t seem to walk away having learned any lessons, either. The 1993 original has been met with a slew of sequels, video games, and children’s television shows that demonstrate the same formula of, “Hey, we shouldn’t be continuing to create dinosaur islands, but dammit, we’re going to do it anyways,” followed by mass suffering and certain economic disaster for company shareholders. When will they learn? 

Oh, who cares. Just watch the original. It looks really cool.

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