JURASSIC PARK

Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1993.

Date: Sep 18th, 2005. Format: Dvd. Surrounding: Tampere. Previous views: Oct 1994.

I've never been a big fan of dinosaurs. In 1986 I was going to the new Dinosaur Park in Mikkeli, but it wasn't opened yet. After that family trip I started to think that dinosaurs suck. Later on, in the preceding summer I went to upper school, Jurassic Park and Cliffhanger were the two hit movies of the season. Didn't go to see either one of them. However, now, 12 years later, this soft digital Spielberg film brings some important memories. In the fall 1994 me and my very close same-aged friend used to take days off from our schools. Once we were just hanging around in the central Tampere and then, for some reason went to the video film store Elokuva-aitta and decided to rent Jurassic Park. We went to watch it to his home, and while the film was played I remember I was eating a lot of layer cake which was found from their refridgerator. Pre-historical attraction in the theme park, suited for the whole family, bored us pretty well. To me those times were quite happy and harmless, sort of like first "taking life to own hands" experiences. A little like how Charles Ryder experienced it in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. What I couldn't really see was that my friend was going quite confused, because in the preceding summer his parents were divorced and his mother had moved out to a new town. He started to take more and more days off from school, and eventually got fired from there. Eventually, we both ended up in the same evening school, for a little different reasons, though. Tragically, this friend died last November in a traffic accident and was survived by his girlfriend who was eight months pregnant. They were waiting for their first baby. We weren't so close anymore but it was shocking news, because in our most troubled times in the past (I had mine too) we shared almost everything and now his life was getting better, he was becoming a father to a child... I actually went really nuts about the whole terrible situation, because what happened to me on the side was the sudden waking up to admit that my own private life as a film enthusiast and a workaholic had been running on empty so many years. So, Jurassic Park, as lousy movie as it is, brings a memory from the very unique friendship we once had. We could have chosen a more inspiring film, though. **½