By Michelle Sawyers

How do you make a classic movie even better? You remake it in 3D!

Whoever decided to turn Jurassic Park into an IMAX 3D movie is a genius. A regular movie at the AMC Lowe’s theater in Danbury, CT, has eight speakers. An IMAX movie requires 71. The extra speakers give you an unreal experience; people were jumping out of their seats.

It is definitely a good idea to have seen the movie beforehand. That way, you know that when Dr. Ellie Sattler is down in the basement switching the power back on there is a raptor just waiting to pounce. I’m 99% sure that somebody in that theater soiled themselves.

Some theaters just don’t have the right equipment for 3D and the movie ends up distorted and hard to watch which made me skeptical going in. So if you do plan to see Jurassic Park I definitely recommend finding an IMAX Theater. It is well worth the extra coin.

3D is back in vogue and rapidly becoming a popular effect with recent movies and I think one day in the future it will be hard to find a movie in 2D. I suspect it will be a transition similar to when VHS gave way to DVD.

Whereas the original Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and the graphics for the dinosaurs were good for their time, however not very realistic, the technology available today made it possible in the remake to create dinosaurs as scaly and realistic as I imagine a dinosaur should look.

Normally I would say classics shouldn’t be messed with; it’s why they are classics. However, Jurassic Park is a great exception which lent itself perfectly to a 3D production. I think King Kong would be a fantastic movie in 3D too. When’s that coming out? Don’t hold your breath.

By Tom Benton

“Jurassic Park” should’ve been the biggest hit film of all time. It wasn’t – isn’t even in the top 10 anymore. But it’s a pinnacle in all the things that make movies so irresistibly incredible.

Scale: the thrill of seeing life blown to literally gigantic proportions and the perspective that comes with it. Two helpless kids trapped in an immobile vehicle as rain pours on a stormy night. The gigantic electric fence between civilization and the wild splits in half. The electricity’s gone. And the ultimate cinematic manifestation of rampant, natural, inhuman force stomps through, the rain-soaked, bloated, horrifically gruesome tyrannosaurus rex. It’s caged there, in that space of existence created and confined by the giant screen, nature and the children, and all we can do is watch.

Complex themes edibly distilled: “Jurassic Park” is humankind learning to compromise with existence. Don’t look for that theme in heady dialogue or ponderous pacing: this ain’t a Stanley Kubrick film. When Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) tells the delusional man behind the park, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), “You can’t think your way through this one! You have to feel your way through!” – it’s Spielberg talking to the audience. (There’s a beautiful, fairytale kind of emotional abstractness about Spielberg’s films. I don’t know why so many people see his films as dumbly concrete.)

The naked taboo: The original appeal of the movies was, as my fair lady Pauline Kael described it, “kiss kiss bang bang” – people went to the movies to see all the sex and violence missing from their own lives. This helps perspective, too: having the romantic optimist in “Breathless” bite the bullet at the end while the practical logician goes on with her life clearly expresses the old romantic vs. realist conflict in a way that depicting that conflict in ordinary terms couldn’t. When I’m on the losing end of that conflict, it doesn’t feel like a human being is just not in love with me: it’s like I just got shot down dead right there in the street and she’s just walking away.

Tom Robbins wrote, “Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.” I believe it, man. We need that apocalyptic feeling: why do you think rock ‘n’ roll caught on like fire when it did? There’s a cathartic thrill to seeing nature lay down the f—— law: we need the kind of feeling our ancestors felt when those kooky bastards went up against the wooly mammoths. “Jurassic Park” delivers it in droves, almost sexual thrusts of that apocalyptic death! death! death! thrill. People who need that and can’t find an outlet turn into psychopaths, or artists. Can you imagine how much better the world would be if we all got that from our music, our books (Kerouac would be the master if he’d have just calmed the hell down or trusted his editors, or believed in editing), or if we got that from our movies? “Jurassic Park” delivers it as well as any movie, and better than most.

Awesome beauty: if I could capture it in writing, Steven Spielberg would’ve wasted two years making the movie.

It’s a hell of a date movie. I guarantee you want to make babies afterward, assuming your date isn’t a dud and you both have beating hearts. Home video has been cancerous to films – how the hell is your f—— iPod going to capture the scale of this titanic picture? But now it’s been remastered, the soundtrack’s been remixed for 7.1 surround (that’s a shitload of thunder) and they’ve put it in 3D. Which doesn’t really mean shit, except that it helps put “Jurassic Park” closer to where it belongs, with the T-Rex sitting atop the capitalist throne: the biggest hit movie ever made.