Doctor John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) has created a theme park on the island of Isla Nublar, in which dinosaurs he had cloned run free behind electric fences. After a worker is killed by a velociraptor, his investors send lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) to demand a safety certification, and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), while Hammond enlists the help of paleontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), who are blown away by the living dinosaurs.
They learn that the creatures were cloned by extracting dinosaur DNA from prehistoric mosquitos preserved in amber, with DNA from frogs used to fill in the gaps in the genome. To prevent breeding, all the dinosaurs are female. The ethics of all this are debated and Malcolm warns that everything could go horribly wrong. Hammond’s grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello) join the tour of the park.
Most of the dinosaurs are no-shows and they discover a sick triceratops. Also, a tropical storm is approaching. Most of the park staff are evacuated to the mainland. A disgruntled employee, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) has been bribed to steal dinosaur embryos. To do this and escape, he deactivates the security system, which stalls the tour vehicles on their track next to the T-Rex paddock and shuts off the electric fences.
In one of the great scenes in movies, the Tyrannosaurus breaks through the fence and attacks the tour. It overturns vehicles, injures Malcolm, and eats the lawyer Gennaro alive when he abandons the children to hide in the toilet. Grant, Lex, and Tim escape over a cliff. Nedry crashes his vehicle in the storm and is killed by a dilophosaurus. Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck), the game warden, finds the injured Malcolm with Ellie and they are pursued in their jeep by the T-Rex. Grant and the children set off to cross the park, encountering species after species.
Grant learns that the frog DNA allowed the dinosaurs to change sex and they have been breeding. Hammond and chief engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) reboot the system, but the velociraptors have been freed and kill Muldoon. Grant, Sattler, and the children are stalked and cornered, but the T-Rex takes out the velociraptors and the survivors escape.
The film, of course, was directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen, based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, who wrote the screenplay with David Koepp. At the same time, Spielberg was directing Schindler’s List. Industrial Light and Magic, with Stan Winston and Phil Tippett, created the living, breathing, realistic dinosaurs we have been waiting for since the original King Kong. The score was by John Williams. The film won twenty awards, including three Oscars, and spawned five sequels.
It was filmed largely on the islands of Kaua’i, Maui, and Niihau. A hurricane cost plenty of delays but gave them some great shots. Plucked guitar strings created the iconic concentric rings of ripples in water that indicate the approach of the T-Rex. It took two months to film the T-Rex chasing the jeep. Eight puppeteers made the sick triceratops breathe. The velociraptors were created much larger than the real ones for dramatic effect, and then the man-sized Utahraptor was discovered. The sound-effects crew was supervised by George Lucas. The rain sometimes shorted out the T-Rex model and caused it to move spontaneously, sending those eating lunch nearby into screaming flight.
When the hurricane struck in Hawaii, everyone moved into the hotel ballroom except Sir Richard Attenborough, who slept through it all. “My dear boy,” he said when questioned, “I survived the Blitz.” The triceratops dung was made of clay, mud, and straw, and drizzled with honey to attract flies. David Koepp went to a theater in New York to see how the movie was doing, when it was announced that it was sold out for the rest of the day, and the next day too. He figured this was good. The sound of the T-Rex footsteps was sequoia trees crashing to the ground. When many theaters shut down in 2020 because of Covid, small drive-ins popped up and Jurassic Park topped the box-office again.