Does every kid go through a dinosaur phase? It was something I was thinking about when watching the new movie in the Jurassic Park franchise. Initially I could not remember ever having a collection of plastic dinosaurs, but after further reflection, I remembered that I did make a report about it in elementary school. This was in the eighties, so it was still a time when you had to go to the library for information, write everything by hand and go to the supermarket to make copies of pictures to paste in your report. The reason that I still remember it wasn’t so much the report itself, but the way it was checked. Because I went to a Christian school (even though I’m not religious) the teacher held tightly to the story of the bible and its timeline. That meant he had put question marks when it said that the dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. That did not fit into his conviction.

So there was a brief period in which I was interested in them, but it did not last long. The first Jurassic Park I do remember though, especially because (just like today) there was a lot of marketing for the film. There were TV specials (which showed how they made the water vibrate in the glass when the Tyrannosaurus Rex arrives), and the effects in the film were breathtaking then. Those effects might not wow us anymore and a movie really needed to do something special in order to excite us. Does Jurassic Wold manage to do that? Continue reading →