The Philippine Online Chronicles

M3 (Magic Movie Moments) is a chronicle of my life, through film. I’ve watched so many movies, and have connected so many moments in life to them. Sometimes art imitates life, sometimes life imitates art, and through this series I will see where these things intersect and how they interact.

Jurassic Park: The moment I fell in loveーwith movies

I remember having seen Jurassic Park at least five times in a movie theater. I’d nagged my parents, my friends, my cousins, and I remember watching it alone at least once.

By then I was already a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek, idolized Indiana Jones, and been scared to death by the future where the singularity known as Skynet would bomb Los Angeles and it would be up to John Connor to save us. My father was, and still is, a big fan of action movies: Steven Segal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, I’d see all their movies, whether in the theater or on our junky VCR at home.

All these things entertained me, but I didn’t think them different from other stuff on TV or in theaters. These were just things that I watched. Jurassic Park becomes important, at least now in recollection, because when I try and think of the film that made me realize that movies were magic, then this movie is it.

It was a combination, I suppose, of my own getting older and learning how to really see the movie, as well as the movie’s power. Not many people would rank Jurassic Park on their list of best movies, not many would even rank it highly among the rest of Spielberg’s oeuvre, but with its story and amazing visuals I was taken, and suddenly I saw the world of movies differently.

It helped that I was a dinosaur nut. I had the Robert Bakker book, had read the novel, had lots of dinosaur books even though a good number of them I could barely understand because they were way too technical for my pre-teen mind. But Jurassic Park was something I could fathom and enjoy perfectly.

It took these things that I loved, dinosaurs, and it brought them to life. In the scene where the characters first arrive on the island and they are all left gaping in awe at the park and its inhabitants, my own jaw dropped. And no matter how many times I re-watched it, my jaw still dropped. I recently watched it again with my sister, and as she was taken by the images, I found myself still feeling that sense of wonder.

Jurassic Park’s intensity is amazing. After introducing us to the beauty and wonder of these dinosaurs that look real, it throws us into the main conflict, with man struggling against beast, specifically against beasts that man was never meant to confront. The approach of the T-Rex as the kids look at the cup of water vibrating, the T-Rex’s jaws clamping down on the side-mirror that reads, “Objects may be closer than they appear,” the Velociraptors stalking the kids on the kitchen. There are just so many unforgettable, pulse-pounding moments.

I’m going to be writing regularly about movies that were important to me. Whether they made me change my mind about the world, or made me feel something, made me realize something, or helped to define a moment in my life.

The first great intersection occurs with Jurassic Park, as it marks the moment when movies, when seeing a film in a theater, came to mean so much more than popcorn and watching something on a big screen. It was the first time that I was lost to this world, that I was fully enveloped in another. I wasn’t in a movie theater in Burbank. I was in Jurassic Park, on the back of a jeep as it tried to escape a T-Rex, asleep on a tree branch and waking to the growls of a brachiosaurus, running as a Raptor’s razor sharp talons click-clacked behind me in pursuit. It was the first magical movie moment, and I’ve been chasing them ever since.

Photo: “jurassic park-1992” by , c/o Flickr. All Rights Reserved.