The “best movie ever made,” according to Jennifer Lawrence: “Pretty much perfect”
Everyone has a different answer on which movie deserves to be called the greatest ever made, but few would agree with Jennifer Lawrence, even if the one she opted for is a stone-cold cinema classic.
Having grown up obsessed with Dumb and Dumber, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, There’s Something About Mary, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s clear that the Academy Award winner isn’t one of the chin-stroking sorts who ruminates over whether Citizen Kane or The Godfather deserves the honour.
On the other hand, she’s also a fan of the classics, with Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, and John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence among her all-time favourites, although she did also find a spot for Will Ferrell’s ‘Frat Pack’ caper Old School, too, so it’s nothing if not an eclectic mix.
The Hunger Games star’s candidate for the closest thing to perfection that cinema has ever produced does at least hail from one of the industry’s most celebrated and legendary directors, and she’s even got plenty of backing from her peers, with Scarlett Johansson another lifelong devotee to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
“Jurassic Park, I believe to be the best movie ever made,” she told W Magazine in an interview alongside Emma Stone. “It’s incredible.” Her two-time Oscar-winning friend concurred, adding that “it’s incredible” and “it’s pretty much a perfect movie.”
Spielberg’s billion-dollar blockbuster doesn’t come up too often when trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and name the best features to have ever rolled off the Hollywood production line, but that doesn’t mean it should be excluded from the conversation. More than 30 years later, and it’s still one of the best big-budget flicks that has ever been made, and it holds up better than most effects-obsessed films released today.
It’s also one of the most influential movies of its time, helping to usher in the CGI revolution that marked the next major leap in mainstream cinema, and those effects continue to age better with each passing year, thanks mainly to the stream of headache-inducing pixelated monstrosities that swamp the multiplex every year with sequences that somehow look worse than a fantasy from 1993.
There is one high-profile name who’d disagree with Lawrence’s belief that Jurassic Park is “the best movie ever made,” and that’s Spielberg himself. The filmmaker didn’t have the same emotional connection to the material that he had on other productions, and as a result, he wouldn’t even rank it in the top five Steven Spielberg movies, even though he’d be wrong on that front.
Six sequels of increasingly diminishing quality have only reinforced the notion that Spielberg captured preshistoric lightning in a bottle with Jurassic Park, and he’d at least agree with that when the directorial icon confessed that the closest he’s ever come to phoning in a picture was on its sequel, The Lost World. If anything, the sextet of shoddy follow-ups have only enhanced the original’s legacy, because none of them have come remotely close.
