Three decades after making movie history in Jurassic Park, Sam Neill has revealed what really made the original so successful after recent instalments in the franchise received mixed reviews.
And no, it wasn’t just the dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park premiered in 1993 to massive critical acclaim and box office success, raking in over $1.1 billion worldwide and becoming an instant classic.
“Yeah, 30 years. I was a young man then, but it just seems like yesterday,” he recalled fondly on Today.
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“I remember the effect it had on the world, and that’s a number of things. It’s Spielberg, it’s dinosaurs, there’s Laura Dern, what’s not to love?”
Two sequels were released in 1997 and 2001, though they weren’t as successful, followed by a reboot in 2015 which then spawned two sequels of its own.
Though the three new films have made billions at the global box office, millions of fans insist that the original film is still the best and Neill may have just revealed why.
“What you need more than anything is a great story, and that first film had a great story. There’s no question about that,” he said.
“Things have advanced technologically, but at the end of the day, it is telling a good story.”
The digital effects in the Jurassic World reboot trilogy are fantastic, but many critics panned the storytelling in the second and third instalments.
Even cameos from the original cast – including Neill, who reprised his role as Dr. Alan Grant – couldn’t save Jurassic World: Dominion from a lousy 4.8 out of 10 critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Many took aim at the plot, calling it everything from “disappointing” to “the worst thing to happen to the dinosaurs since that meteor 65 million years ago”.
They also compared it to the original film, which has held up surprisingly well over the last 30 years despite the fact that CGI was in its infancy when the movie premiered.
“We broke new ground. No-one had seen anything quite like this before,” Neill said.
“CGI effects had just come into their own and to see living, breathing dinosaurs, not models, moving around just blew people’s minds.”
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Even now, the original film is a beloved classic and Neill is cashing in on the nostalgia around Jurassic Park for a good cause.
The actor is set to auction off some of his props from the franchise to raise money for charity as part of a memorabilia auction on June 28.
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He listed the boots he wore in the original film, which he said he found “lying around in my cupboard”, and the hat he wore in the most recent installment, Jurassic World: Dominion.
Listed online as Lot 261, the boots that Neill wore on the set of the 1993 classic have a starting bid set at $3,000 and are expected to sell for as much as $12,000.
“I’m pleased to see them go and I have a little more cupboard space,” Neill added with a laugh.