Jurassic Park is a great film. Nowadays it’s remembered more for it’s groundbreaking technical achievements than for it’s dramatic merit, but as a suspense/`horror film it more than holds it’s own. The slightly dated-looking velociraptors still terrify, and Richard Attenborough and Jeff Goldblum both put in memorable performances (“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”) Ironically, in a film that delighted in the eye-popping spectacle of hulking tyranosaurs and lumbering triceratops rampaging through the island landscape, the most terrifyingly memorable scenes of the whole film showed very little of the dinosaurs at all. One scene in particular shows Alan, Lex, and Tim cowering behind a desk in an abandoned office building as two unseen velociraptors prowl the room in search of blood. As an audience we see nothing more than a couple of dark shadows and scuttling reptilian feet, but the suspense and terror generated in this scene is absolutely agonizing. The moments where Jurassic Park is most successful are when it shows you less, not more. Less doesn’t make money though, and Universal Studios were prepared to invest in much more.
Cashing in on the success of other recent 3D remakes, notably Star Wars and Titanic, last year Universal decided to re-release the film in digital stereoscopy to mark the original film’s 20th anniversary. So, what’s wrong with that? Surely as good a film as Jurassic Park could benefit from a “fresh coat of paint.” It’s surely harsh though to relegate all the painstaking work done by the original crew to the annals of mediocrity. The assumption that exists behind these 3D remakes is that 3D is the superior medium and can only enhance our experience of films. Whether or not viewers or directors accept this is irrelevant. The fact is that the thousands of cast and crew responsible for the original Jurassic Park worked to create the ideal 2D experience, with every shot, cut, and transition tailor made to be seen in 2 dimensions. This 3D re-release is rank with the same arrogance that dismisses the tireless work of a film’s crew as fundamentally inferior and not up to modern standards. Jurassic Park is a fantastic achievement that should stand on its own without the need for modern gimmickry.
21st century 3D films employ very specialized recording equipment to capture footage for 3D conversion. Stereoscopic conversion does however result in a number of visual problems; not least among these a 30% light loss and significantly reduced color saturation. Modern editing techniques are able to partially compensate for this in post-production in a painstaking process that involves capturing scenes from multiple angles using cutting edge stereoscopic cameras. When studios are trying to fit a film with “retrospective 3D” however to films like Jurassic Park, they are essentially animating over the original film without compensating for light or color loss. What we are then left with is a dark, muddled experience that hinders as much as it enhances.
3D is an exciting cinematic tool that is pushing the boundaries of how we watch films. However, the same was being said 60 years ago about color. Casablanca is not a fundamentally inferior film just dying for a bit of color, and every film made in the last 20 years is not in desperate need of a 3D facelift. Directors like Martin Scorsesee and Ang Lee have proved that there is an exciting frontier in 3D film-making filled with possibilities, but these lie in the future, not in the past.
~Joe Kreider