Jurassic Park

1993

Steven Spielberg adapted Michael Crichton's novel into the film that proved computer animation could carry a creature and a story at the same time. Sam Neill and Laura Dern play paleontologists invited to inspect a theme park stocked with cloned dinosaurs, with Jeff Goldblum as the chaos theorist who tells them it will fail and Richard Attenborough as the tycoon who spared no expense. The effects hold up largely because Spielberg used so few of them, leaning instead on Stan Winston's animatronics and on what a shivering cup of water can do to an audience.