‘Jurassic Park’ is a source of wonder and enchantment, and Steven Spielberg has concocted a thrilling tale, based on Michael Crichton’s (admittedly much darker) source material about the dangers of trying to colonize nature and exploit it for human consumption. With a scientific conceit involving the drawing of dinosaur DNA from the blood of 65 million year old fossilized mosquitoes, ‘Jurassic Park’ is blockbuster entertainment at its most sublime, with an intelligent subtext concerning the efficacy of appropriating scientific wherewithal into creating the ultimate escapist thrill ride.

There is also the consideration as to whether the manipulation of nature to bring dinosaurs and humans together into the same controlled environment is really just the quintessence of hubris and an abuse of power and wealth. The film is good at asking whether science can be a force of good for everyone, not just the wealthy and the elite, and there is an intelligent underpinning when the film goes to great lengths to explain the evolutionary science behind the phenomenon. The dinosaurs learn to escape from their domicile and the theme park becomes a threat to life rather than a site of entertainment, and Spielberg splices this with Sam Neill’s character arc as the palaeontologist Dr. Alan Grant develops from being wary of children to someone with nurturing tendencies towards them and who might yet overcome his hostility to raising a family with palaeobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern).

‘Jurassic Park’ is ultimately, though, a cautionary parable about the dangers of thinking we can harness nature for our own selfish purposes, and it is impressive that Spielberg has managed to foreground this lesson within the auspices of a blockbuster movie. And this is why Spielberg’s rendering works better than so many of the sequels, because it does not lose sight of the paradox that the spectacle to which we are drawn is, like the numinous, something of which we should be afraid and even repelled by. Spielberg holds together this counterpoint throughout and indeed foregrounds the morality debate between the scientists, the lawyer, the children and the entrepreneur and park’s designer, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), at the same time that the film unleashes the childhood thrills.

Anyone going into this film expecting to be dazzled by the premise of seeing dinosaurs wandering the earth will also leave questioning the efficacy of a scenario which, as Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theory-obsessed mathematician Ian Malcolm puts it, ‘Dinosaurs had their shot and nature selected them for extinction.’ Spielberg’s sense of timing and pace is also impressive, in which we don’t simply see the impressively CGI-rendered dinosaurs but watch them first via the wide-open gawp on the faces of the scientists in the jeep who could never have imagined that they would ever come up close and personal to the objects of their research. Spellbinding after all these years.