The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.
I love Jurassic Park (1993). I’m hardly alone in my affection for Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur thriller, but right at the intersection of childhood nostalgia and what I would consider actually good filmmaking is this iconic blockbuster. While the sheen has been rubbed off from many films that I adored as a kid, I think Jurassic Park holds up both in its sense of awe and terror, as well as its artistry. (I’ve come to appreciate Spielberg even more in recent years—he always made it look so easy.) Like many of life’s most worthwhile endeavors, it amazes and petrifies in equal measure.
None of the sequels has come close to capturing the brilliance of the original, particularly not the first three Jurassic World movies. I was thus wary about Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025), but my dedication to this franchise (blech, I hate that word) compelled me to go and see it. And, reader, even knowing that there are serious cinephiles out there, many of whom I consider friends, who will judge me when they read this, I gotta say—I didn’t hate it. Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali have good chemistry, at least more so than Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the previous three entries, and the dinosaur parts are, appropriately, quite thrilling.
Could the film’s hefty budget have been used to make, like, 15 low-budget masterpieces? Sure. Would those films have dinosaurs? Probably not. So, really, I’m just as likely to continue seeing these Jurassic Park sequels as I am anything that might actually really be good just because of the dinosaurs. Nothing will ever quite re-create the experience of seeing Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant witness a brontosaurus for the first time, with John Williams’s ebullient score in the background, but it’s a high I’ll continue to chase until I die, probably. Give me a chilly movie theater, an ice-cold Diet Coke, and some dinosaurs on a hot summer day, and my icy pretensions melt right away. As an aside, as I get older, I find myself less excited to dislike something. If anything, each time I go to the movies, whether it’s to see an obscure arthouse film or a big blockbuster, I yearn to be moved or at least entertained, even if I recognize something as being objectively not good “art.” I credit my dad, who took me to see everything from Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) to Battlefield Earth (2000) as a kid and found something to like about almost everything we saw.
Now that I’ve discredited myself as an authority on cinema, I’ll mention having seen the new 35 mm print of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) at the Music Box Theatre. What might Fellini have in common with Jurassic Park? Well, nothing, but he did have an influence on Spielberg. The two met in 1973, and three years later, Fellini—nominated for Amarcord (1973)—was among a murderers’ row of filmmakers (the others included Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, and Milos Forman, the latter of whom won) who beat out Spielberg for the Best Director Academy Award, even though his film, Jaws (1975), was up for Best Picture. Spielberg was even the last person to whom Fellini wrote a letter before he died in 1993.
In the original Jurassic Park, which I rewatched over the weekend, the park’s founder, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), says, upon witnessing the demise of his hubristic endeavor to make dinosaurs a theme park attraction, “Creation is an act of sheer will.” I thought about this in relation to 8½, which is so much about creation that many consider it to be among the best movies ever made about the movies. But then Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler admonishes him, reminding him that what he created, like a flea circus he boasted of so long ago, is still just an illusion. I thus thought of Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), the Fellini stand-in from 8½, whose creative ambitions and subsequent creative blocks threaten to ruin him.
In the film, Guido has constructed a massive rocket launch pad before even writing the film, soon realizing that it shouldn’t be science fiction at all. It stands as a testament to the hubris of this man and his propulsive desire to create, but ultimately, it is the mere edifice of an illusion, like that of cinema. I understand the frustration—to want to create something real but to be up against the limits of manifesting the depths of one’s imagination.
Until next time, moviegoers.
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