Back to Isla Nubla

Later on today, I’m off to see Jurassic Park, which, in 2013, seems a very weird thing to be writing. The film’s been given an IMAX 3D re-release this year though and, with a chunk of the afternoon spare before a business meeting tonight, it’s the perfect time to go and see it.

The funny thing is, I’m a little apprehensive.

Not in any major way. I’m not going to be sitting there frantically checking the aspect ratio or weeping and rending garments if the 3D is a little futzy. The movie’s a stone-cold popcorn classic and no amount of dubious post-processing will do anything to stop that. No, I’m apprehensive because the last time I was on Isla Nubla, I was 17 and just starting down the road to where I am now.

Some brief context; I grew up on the Isle of Man. This means nothing to most of you I suspect so go to Google, type it in, and…there you go. For those of you reading this in the UK, the Isle of Man is really easy to spot because it’s what the weather guy always stands in front of. A tiny scrap of land, sitting in the middle of the Irish Sea. Imagine Father Ted but as a hard-hitting documentary series instead of a sitcom and you have my childhood, that kind of thing.

Anyway, when you grow up somewhere that small you get hardy individualism beaten into you by the Siberian winds at an early age. Or they leave you out on the ice floes to die. Definitely one of the two. For many of my friends, that individualism became a love of the outdoors that has led them to 10K, Iron Man and Marathon runs, working for the Coast Guard and the sort of general easygoing physical aptitude that living somewhere the sea regularly tries to eat will grant you. It’s an acknowledgement of living under a big sky, and turning that into your playground.

My big sky was different. It was a cinema screen perched at the end of a movie theater so large you could, and occasionally did, fit the entire population of my home town into it. I saw everything I could, aided by parents who readily accepted that this was my thing and genetics which made me look 18 by the time I was 14. I ran headlong at the greats; Cameron, the Scott brothers, a light smattering of John Woo, the Robocop movies, the Die Hards, early Albert Pyun stuff (I used to own an ex-rental version of Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow. I suspect Angelia Jolie’s had them all tracked down and burnt by now).

If I could see it, I saw it. I loved movies, I loved talking about movies and most of all? I loved disassembling movies to see how they worked.Movies are one of those mediums where the story and the story’s assembly are the same thing and even bad films can tell you about narrative. What not to do is just as important as what you should do.

Being an industrious, and gobby,kid this eventually led me to the local paper. There, filled with absolute confidence and absolutely no idea of how to back it up, I pitched a regular movie review. By some miracle, they didn’t have a movie reviewer and away I went. Now, I was seeing movies for free, was being paid ten WHOLE pounds for each review and all I had to do was talk about them? I did that anyway! This would be easy!

It really wasn’t.

I’d been writing since I was 14, had discovered the wonders of not WRITING IN BLOCK CAPITALS ALL THE TIME AND ALSO PARAGRAPHING around the time I was 15 and I knew exactly what I wanted to do; throw myself into pop culture, find the good bits and help people understand the bad ones better. It would be a lifetime’s work, but I was 17 and clearly immortal so I figured I had it down.

I really didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I was working and I was getting good too. To this day there’s stuff I wrote back then I’m a little bit proud of but I’d never written for someone else before. I’d performed at plenty of magic shows (Different, longer story with way more dice mutilation) but I’d never performed at writing. What if I was rubbish? What if they didn’t pay me? What if I was rubbish AND they didn’t pay me?

Jurassic Park was my first assignment and, it turned out, the one that saved my life. You see there’s this moment I love that some films have, where the audience and the main characters’ emotional responses are in absolute lockstep. The moment in Hunt for Red October where Jack works out Ramius is defecting is a perfect example. So is one particular moment in Jurassic Park.

The land rover the main characters are riding in pulls up and Alan Grant (Played by Sam Neill, a man with a strong claim on the title Greatest Character Actor Of The Last 30 Years) looks sideways and just…stops. He’s wearing shades, but everything about his posture and motion screams amazement. He stands up and slowly turns Ellie Satler (Played by Laura Dern, who has a strong claim on Greatest Character Actress Of The Last 30 Years, but should probably share the title with Holly Hunter) to face what he’s looking at.

‘It’s….it’s a dinosaur.’

It’s a single line of dialogue that’s obvious and expository and so completely honest. You watch as the pair of them, along with Sir Richard Attenborough as John Hammond walk, amazed, up to a Brachiosaurus. The thing’s immense and completely unconcerned about them being there and we watch for two minutes as the scientists see their entire world shattered and rebuilt. The highlight of the scene is Grant, sitting down, looking at a watering hole where different species are peacefully moving around each other.

‘They’re moving in herds. They do move in herds.’

It’s an astonishing scene, firstly because it was the first time CGI had ever actually worked to simulate a living being and secondly because this is exactly the sort of vindication these scientists have dreamed of and never, once believed they would get. It’s the emotional core of the movie, the moment where the sheer wonder of the Park sweeps them and you up.

I loved it. I still do, and ‘It’s a dinosaur’ was the first line of my review. 400 words later I was a published journalist for the first time in my life.

That was 19 years ago. And simply doing that math almost gave me a nosebleed. Since then I’ve worked for three newspapers, written for nationally and internationally distributed magazines, hosted a podcast for six years and counting, won an award and written an entire book about the 6th Doctor.

It’s without a doubt the single oddest career I could have imagined myself having and if some of the stuff in the wind happens it’ll only get odder. It all started with Jurassic Park, and Isla Nublar and that single perfect moment of cinema with the Brachiosaurus, the intellectual vindication and Sam Neill. It’s been a long time since I’ve been back to Isla Nubla and my apprehension, I think, stems from a worry that I’ll look at the film with jaded eyes. That’s every movie journalist’s curse and one the vast majority fall victim to; you get blase, you get distanced, you get bored.

That hasn’t happened in 19 years and I never want it to, because the moment it does, that big sky I chased through the screen every chance I could becomes small, measured and known. If that happens, I lose my sense of wonder and that’s North to any movie journalist worth a damn.

I don’t think it’s going to be a problem though, and that’s why I’m apprehensive rather than nervous. I started this journey on that fictional hillside in Isla Nubla 19 years ago and going back isn’t an ending, it’s just another stop along the way.

‘It’s a dinosaur.’

Hell yes it’s a dinosaur and one I can’t wait to meet again. The velociraptors though? Those you can keep.