Sam Neill died on July 13th, and by the evening of the 14th I had finally gotten Amanda to sit down and watch Jurassic Park with me, start to finish. I pitched it as a memorial viewing, which it was, but I will confess to some opportunism. I had been trying to get her to watch the whole thing for ages, always forgetting when the opportunity arrived, and instead we watched a litany of other films, or shows.

Here is what I came away with: Jurassic Park might be a perfect film. Not a great film, though it is that. Not an important film, though it is certainly that. A perfect one, in the specific sense that Back to the Future is perfect. Every setup pays off, every payoff was set up. You could teach screenwriting with nothing but this movie and a whiteboard. I've only got two Film Criticism and Appreciation credits to my name (or however many credits the classes were worth...), but I have no problem staking this claim.

Back to the Future gets deserved praise for its clockwork plotting: every stray detail in the first act (the clock tower flyer, the Twin Pines Mall sign, "you're my density") comes back with an echo of what had been set up. Jurassic Park runs the same "telegraph office," and I think it goes underappreciated because the dinosaurs Bogart the screentime.

Muldoon tells us in the first twenty minutes that raptors test the fences systematically, probing for weakness, remembering. That line sits in your back pocket for ninety minutes before arriving at the kitchen scene. Grant's whole opening scene, terrorizing a kid with a fossilized raptor claw and a lecture about pack hunting and flanking attacks, is delivered as characterization, yet sets up major beats in the closing acts. "Clever girl" is absolutely peak because the scenario was already laid out; anyone keeping a close eye on events knows exactly what will happen, and there's nothing to be done about it.

Before we ever see her, we learn she refuses to be fed, that she wants to hunt, that she responds to movement. We see the goat, standing alone, a Coalmine Canary catering to a cantankerous carnivore Queen. Even the rippling glass of water on the dashboard, one of the most famous images in the movie, is a telegraph, the film teaching the audience of the threat, all starting with the first teases of "T. rex" minutes earlier. Rather clunkily, however, Lex announces she is a hacker in what plays as a throwaway character beat, and then the entire third act pivots on her at a UNIX terminal. For those pointing at the screen asking what in the world she means, some context: they were running Silicon Graphics machines at the park, the same SGI hardware ILM was using to develop the film's groundbreaking CGI. When Lex sits down at the terminal, the 3D file browser she flies through is FSN, an actual program that shipped with SGI's Unix systems.

There are other fantastic moments that have payoffs as the film goes onward. Dennis Nedry's shaving cream can, the lysine contingency, "objects in mirror are closer than they appear," the seatbelt that gives Grant two female ends to knot together right before we learn the all-female park has been breeding. All of it serves a purpose, much like the intentional design employed by the most successful games of all time.

The dinosaurs are only about half the danger, and the movie earns every setpiece.

Think about what these people actually endure. A tropical storm that severs the island from the mainland. A power grid failure that turns the entire park into a dead machine. A car falling through a tree canopy, branch by branch, in a sequence that is pure physics and pure terror and contains zero dinosaurs. A twenty-foot climb down an electrified fence while section-by-section the fences come online. Tim gets electrocuted and has to be resuscitated by a man who, ninety minutes of screen time earlier, could not stand to have a child in his car. The perils are man-made: infrastructural, environmental, systemic. Hammond built a park that could kill you a dozen ways before a single animal got loose, and raptors are the punctuation on a sentence about his hubris.

This is what Spielberg is doing in every frame. The cinematography and its establishing shots do much heavy lifting in spatial awareness, not only for the characters, but the audience as well. Before anything goes wrong in the kitchen, you know where the counters are, where the reflective surfaces are, where a child-sized body can and cannot fit. Before the rex breaks out, you know the layout of the paddock, the position of both cars, the location of the goat. The camera builds the space, then the space becomes the story. Action geography has become almost a lost art.

And the movie makes you wait. The full T. rex reveal arrives an hour in. An hour! A modern studio would break out in hives, or at the very least be lambasted by focus groups. But the film spends that hour preparing the setpiece honestly: with wonder (the Brachiosaurus reveal, with John Williams doing the heaviest lifting of his career), with dread, with character, with that sick Triceratops scene where the plot fully stops so the paleontologists can simply have feelings about touching a living dinosaur. These explorations of emotional stakes, from our protagonists and from a host in way over his head, are precious moments, setting the beauty and majesty of these creatures against how deadly they remain.

Amanda, for the record, is living proof the method still works. She liked the film, and she was genuinely scared at points, proof how effectively the screenwork and cameraplay build these threats. The T. rex breakout had her on the edge of her seat, three decades of cultural osmosis be damned. You can know exactly what is coming and the film will still get you.

Everybody changed in the end. Alan Grant begins the film as a man who jokes about the extinction of children and ends it with two of them asleep on his shoulders while Ellie watches him with a smile that tells us, life may actually find a way for her and Grant. Malcolm, the rock star of doubt, gets to be catastrophically correct. Even Lex and Tim get miniature arcs, turning their fear into competence, and confidence.

But the one that got me on this viewing was Hammond. He is, structurally, the villain: a lonely showman whose ambition perverted the laws of nature to manufacture something he insists on calling dinosaurs, a flea circus operator who finally got real fleas. The novel punishes Hammond with a violent death, left ruing the very day he built the park. The film gives him the ice cream scene instead, all his desserts melting in a dead park while he explains to Ellie that he only ever wanted to show people something real, something they could see and touch.

Ellie admonishes him, telling him that he's still running a flea circus, but lives are on the line. This quiet scene gives Hammond space to come to grips with what he wanted, and Ellie gives him outside perspective and guidance. In the end, Grant says he has decided not to endorse the park, and Hammond, holding the amber-topped cane that contains his entire dream, says that so has he. A fall from grace, a change of heart, arriving only after life, indeed, found a way to procreate without his permission. Attenborough plays him as a grieving grandfather at his own funeral. Charlatans rarely get written this generously, and the movie is richer for it.

Patrick (H) Willems put out a video this spring asking why there are essentially no dinosaur movies, and the answer to his question is the same one this rewatch confirmed: because Jurassic Park is the dinosaur movie, so towering and so complete that the entire genre collapsed into a single franchise's gravity well. Thirty-three years on, we get Jurassic sequels and almost nothing else, as if Spielberg salted the earth by accident. Watching the original again, I get it. Why would you climb the mountain when the flag at the summit is visible from everywhere on the planet?

Which brings me to my one item of franchise business, and I will keep it brief because I could get pretty heated. Grant and Sattler not ending up together is an unforgivable act of narrative vandalism. The entire emotional spine of the first film is Grant growing into the man Ellie already saw, a man who could hold sleeping children, and finally understand what survives extinction. Jurassic Park III gives us a Grant who let that go, an Ellie married to some rando named Mark, and expects us to accept it. I do not accept it. The first film earned that relationship the way it earned its setpieces, beat by beat, and the sequels soiled it.

Rest well, Sir Sam. You spent a career playing men who look at impossible things and you made a paleontologist in a battered hat into one of cinema's great images of wonder. This household watched you take off your sunglasses one more time, and the moment worked exactly as designed. It always will.