Movies: Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D

Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies. It holds my personal record for films I've seen most often in the cinema at 10 11 times. It's hard for me to believe it's 20 years old, because that means I'm way older than I think or feel.

Actually, the movie came out when I was in high school. I was such a fan that my friends got a kick out of giving me JP gear. Even my journalism teacher gave me a JP coloring book and some die-cast dinos for my birthday that year. (She was the coolest; we went to Star Trek conventions together.) I had shirts, hats, toys, posters, coloring books, puzzles, bedding . . . A little weird for a high school girl, probably, but then I always was unusual. And my kids are now benefitting from my collector's mentality by having lots of awesome toys to play with, stuff you can't find any more.

There's also the fact that I was known as "The Raptor" . . . But that's another story.

Okay, so the movie. Well, it looks its age; not much one can do about that. But it has aged relatively well, too, in that Stan Winston's effects work holds up. And Spielberg, well, he's always been a personal hero of mine, so . . .

You definitely see the hand of the man who made Indiana Jones movies in Jurassic Park. That moment of finding and holding up the amber-encased mosquito. The musical score, particularly in scenes like when the jeeps first pull in to the Visitor Center. Some of the punches are a bit too obvious, like the way they show the besmirched JP logo several times as things go terribly wrong. Yes, we get it: It's a disaster.

But then some of the stuff is just so much fun, too, like "Space Aliens Stole My Face" on the trailer fridge at the Badlands dig. I love the scene with the car in the tree. And the movie is just so damn quotable. A lot of Spielberg movies seem to be, so I don't think it's so much the writing as the directing. Spielberg gets great work out of his actors, and he knows how to use film as a medium to make memories. Because that's what a film quote is: Something memorable that you not only carry away from the film but eventually incorporate into your everyday life. How amazing is that, when you think about it? That a well-delivered line can become part of a person's personal shorthand?

I don't know that the movie needed the 3D treatment. You'd think something like Jurassic Park would be awesome in 3D, and some scenes were, but the rest . . . ::shrug:: Of course, as regular readers know, I'm no big fan of the 3D push. But this one gave me less of a headache than some others have done. And if you're going to see it in 3D, you might as well see it in IMAX. Pretty awesome to see Waldo (the T-Rex) lording it on the really big screen.

Look, my love for this film clearly biases me from being able to make an objective review. But let's just say that, if I was a little worried I'd walk away disillusioned, I needn't have been. Seeing it in the cinema again only reaffirmed my love for Jurassic Park. It is a classic.