Recombinant Reels: Reassessing Jurassic Park’s 3D Revival
This year marked the 30th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), a cinematic juggernaut that not only shattered box office records but also earned critical acclaim, including three Academy Awards for technical achievements in visual effects and sound design and a Best Director nomination. As I returned to the big screen for the film’s recent commemorative 3D re-release — a pilgrimage I’ve made almost annually over the past decade in cities as far-flung as Chicago, London, and New York — I found myself in a surreal moment of introspection. As the lights went up, I realized I had been the only living soul in the theater. Confronted with my solitude, I began to wonder why my devotion to the film might seem excessive to many. Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth? And, does its conversion to 3D merely perpetuate this focus on technological progress at the expense of its cinematic artistry?
Although Jurassic Park was converted from traditional to stereoscopic photography back in 2012 — for the film’s 20th anniversary, which coincided with a 3D renaissance marked by films such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) — it was only during the 30th anniversary that I experienced the film in this new format. While the intent is to deepen the viewer’s immersion, the conversion to 3D, ironically, constantly risks flattening the perceptual depth of the original photography, much like a meticulously painted backdrop that simulates, but cannot replicate, perceptual dimensionality in a theater set.
Take, for instance, the iconic scene where a miner discovers a shard of amber containing prehistoric DNA. Spielberg originally composes this moment within a tableau of dense silver smoke, backlit in blue, artfully veiling and unveiling the cavernous contours of the mine. This visual interplay of revealing and concealing creates a dynamic space within the frame as the camera pans and zooms into the miner’s face marked by a labile mood that wavers from wonder to avarice. As the viewer is drawn into discerning the depth and perspective of the image, she experiences a simultaneous attraction and repulsion, not only to the visual depth of the scene but also to the miner’s ambivalent expression.
However, the 3D conversion attempts to “enhance” this effect by making the amber appear closer to the image’s surface, but this seems to render the cave, the miner, and the amber gem each as their own separate flat surface merely placed at different depths, each seemingly casting a “shadow” upon the layer behind it, a phenomenon known as the “cardboard effect.” This cardboard effect is an artifact of the 3D conversion process in which each individual frame is digitally repainted in grayscale, with lighter areas appearing closer to the viewer and darker ones receding. Rather than adding depth, this innovative technological process can paradoxically flatten a scene, reducing the complex interaction of light and space to a series of disjointed planes, thus potentially diminishing the original film’s immersive quality as a cinematic work of art.
But how is it possible to consider Jurassic Park, a high-octane blockbuster about dinosaurs, as a meticulously planned work of art? The key, perhaps, lies in auteur theory, as proposed by François Truffaut. [1] This theory, championed by the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, called for directors to treat their films as the expression of their own personal vision, much like how a painter treats his canvas or a composer treats his score.
Steven Spielberg — himself a pivotal figure in the American New Wave inspired by this theory alongside peers like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese [2] — evidently continued to embrace this approach in his adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel, Jurassic Park (1990). In doing so, Spielberg adheres to la politique des auteurs, crafting his Jurassic Park as a unique representation of his own artistic vision of the contradictory relationship between humanity and nature as it is crystallized in the forms of technology and art.
Consider the portrayal of John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park. In Crichton's original novel, Hammond is depicted as a malevolent figure who meets a deservedly grim fate, as in a morality play. Spielberg, however, takes a different approach. He portrays Hammond not merely as a villain, but as a character of both revolutionary zeal and reckless audacity. This Scottish entrepreneur — who made his fortune in Petticoat Lane, bamboozling crowds with flea circus illusions — has grander aspirations in resurrecting the dinosaurs through the novel application of cloning technology. Beyond creating a mere spectacle to lure the masses to his amusement park, Hammond hopes to create a genuinely transformative experience at the intersection of technology and art, one that he envisions could change the world.
This nuanced portrayal of John Hammond self-reflexively mirrors Spielberg’s own role as a filmmaker, prompting us to consider whether Spielberg and his generation, in their attempt to resurrect and advance the legacy of cinema, might have inadvertently cultivated a new life for the mass entertainment industry that threatens to undermine the very artform they sought to revive. In particular, the film’s innovative use of computer-generated imagery and stereoscopic technology to bring back to life the once-extinct creatures of ancient horror films such as King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925) poses a vital question: Are these advanced techniques being fully leveraged as tools to expand the realm of aesthetic experience, or do they risk being reduced to mere instruments of the preservation of investment capital — subordinated to the demands of mass marketing, ticket sales, and the allure of technological novelty — much like the profit-driven amusement park depicted in the film?
Household film critic Roger Ebert, in his 1993 review of Jurassic Park, answered the second question in the affirmative, bemoaning the film’s dependence on technological effects. For Ebert, the film’s focus on delivering the bottom line — “You want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs” — reduces the characters to mere cogs within the machinery of monster movie tropes, aping earlier works like The Lost World and King Kong.
However, this view may underestimate the film’s deeper cinematic artistry. It is true that the dinosaurs — the most fantastical element of the story — are depicted with a startling photographic realism, while the human characters are not depicted with a corresponding psychological realism. However, this does not mean, as Ebert suggests, that they are “half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream…” Rather, more precisely, Spielberg’s characters are cinematic sketches: not real, but surreal.
Take for instance, the main protagonist, Dr. Alan Grant, who serves as a kind of double of, or counterpart to, Hammond — a mercenary who cares about nothing but digging. Grant is easily seduced by Hammond’s bribe to fund his archeological dig in exchange for Grant approving Jurassic Park. Yet, Grant transforms from a hardened mercenary into a soft-hearted paternal figure: not by means of literary devices, such as dialogue, but rather, through cinematic technique.
Take, for instance, the action sequences in which Spielberg interchangeably employs the techniques of montage and cinéma vérité to compress and distend time, creating moments of intense emotional ambivalence, such as when Dr. Sattler races to restore power to the park while Grant and Hammond’s grandchildren, fleeing from dinosaurs, perilously climb the unpowered electric fence. The viewer is compelled to wish for two contradictory things at once: for the power to be simultaneously off and on. This heightened tension, achieved by means of inducing ambivalence, is not a cheap thrill, but rather becomes an accentuation of Grant’s own deep ambivalence toward the children, which he must resolve into a paternal love in taking responsibility for their survival.
Grant’s transformation is complete at the end of the film, when Sattler admires him as he embraces Hammond’s grandchildren during their escape from Jurassic Park. We are invited into Grant’s internal emotional world by means of montage — a close-up betraying Grant’s teary eyes, a pelican flying over azure waves, and a medium shot of the helicopter, whose flight resembles that of the bird. Perhaps Grant is admiring the majesty of nature, the evolution of the dinosaurs into the birds, and the way in which humanity, by means of imitating nature transforms both our relationship to ourselves and to nature: the promise of technology freed from its compulsory subordination as an instrument of capital accumulation.
The development of innovative techniques for artistic production poses new possibilities for film when it is treated as an autonomous work of art which is transcended by means of its own technology into a planned work; yet, at the same time, utilitarian art — the Hollywood movie subject to the demands of the entertainment industry — has not yet lived up to the promise of advancing the means of artistic production in a way that would simultaneously attain to and overcome mass culture. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park manifests these problems by rendering them into a critical aesthetic experience, a potential object for one’s contemplation. Will this artform become a fossil lost to time, or could it inspire a new generation to transform the cinema once again?
[1] François Truffaut, “Une Certaine Tendance Du Cinéma Français,” Cahiers Du Cinéma, January 1954; François Truffaut, “Ali Baba et La ‘Politique Des Auteurs,’” Cahiers Du Cinéma, February 1955; André Bazin, “La Politique Des Auteurs,” Cahiers Du Cinéma, April 1957.
[2] David A. Cook, “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in 1970s Hollywood,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 11–37.