Earlier this week, movie fans were devastated to hear the sad news that Sam Neill had died aged 78. The Kiwi actor was best known for playing Dr Alan Grant in three Jurassic Park movies.
It was Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original that brought him to international fame and it’s on ITV1 twice this week, starting with tonight after the World Cup Semi-Final. Based on Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, the classic adventure follows a group of palaeontologists travelling to a fictional island where Sir Richard Attenborough’s businessman John Hammond has had scientists bring dinosaurs back to life.
That is, of course, before everything goes wrong and the sci-fi fun soon turns into a horror hunt of theme park visitors being eaten alive. At the time, the CGI used to create the dinosaurs was truly groundbreaking. So it’s unsurprising that Jurassic Park made over $1 billion worldwide.
In fact, the critically acclaimed Jurassic Park was so successful that it became the highest-grossing film ever made until Titanic arrived four years later. Winner of three Oscars, it’s hardly surprising that the movie is considered one of the greatest ever made. And to think that Spielberg released it the same year as another worthy of that title in Schindler’s List!
Jurassic Park is on ITV1 at 10:45pm tonight and at 10:50pm on Saturday night.