Jurassic Park(s)

With a bored, rambunctious child to entertain, I thought I’d scare the wits out of her with a Jurassic Park marathon – 1 (awesome), 2 (ho-hum) and 3 (pretty good.)

In brief, a mad scientist (transformed in the movie into a kindly old man) has found a way to clone dinosaurs using blood from 65 million year old mosquitos. He creates a dinosaur theme park on a remote Costa Rican island – Jurassic Park – but sabotage sets the animals loose. All three films recount different tales of human interaction with the prehistoric giants, with different degrees of thrills and gore. As one of the more perspicacious protagonists says:

“Oh, yeah – Oooh, Ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

Jurassic Park was released – if you can believe this – back in 1993, and filmed Costa Rica mostly on Kaua’i and O’ahu in Hawaai, with Red Rocks Canyon Park and the Mojave Desert playing stand in for Montana. The interiors (including the classic kitchen scene) were shot on LA sound stages. As usual, the Hawaiians follow up with great movie-related tourism opportunities. Even better though is the Movie-Locations.com site, sadly for the inferior The Lost World, Jurassic Park II – but there’s a ton of precise travel information on the sites from the film – sadly San Diego was mostly just a delicious establishing shot.