Jurassic Park is not the worst movie ever made, but it’s the one I hate the most.
There’s no escaping Jurassic Park. It’s constantly on television and film writers treat it like a masterpiece.
When writers talk about Jurassic Park, they employ language usually reserved for describing childbirth. Words like “joy,” “wonder” and “awe” get aired out. Devin Faraci, a pop culture writer/reporter whose stuff I usually like a whole lot (his gamergate soul searching is a masterpiece of self aware nerdery), calls it “one of the best movies ever” and leads with the sentence fragment “terror and wonder.” The Rotten Tomatoes review pull quotes overflow with ghastly phrases like ” the joy is timeless” and “this movie doesn’t just stand the test of time, it transcends it.”
Roger Ebert was a holdout skeptic for the film on its release, saying in his review that while he thought the dinosaurs were “a triumph of special effects artistry,” the movie overall lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment and strong human story values.” That qualified thumbs up is now supplemented by an unqualified one on rogerebert.com. On last year’s release of the 3D version of Jurassic Park, reviewer Nell Minow calls it a “thrill ride” and ” a masterpiece of the genre.”
In the next couple of posts, I plan on showing how terribly wrong they are.
