“That’s the best example”: the most Spielbergian movie ever made, according to Steven Spielberg
You know a director has cemented their place in cinema history when their name becomes an adjective, with Steven Spielberg one of the many iconic auteurs to earn that distinction.
Whether it’s a movie being described as Hitchcockian, Kubrickian, Tarantinoesque, Coenesque, Felliniesque, Lynchian, Cronenbergian, Capraesque, or Herzogian, that one word alone tells you everything you need to know about a film’s style, structure, content, or aesthetics.
As for Spielberg, he inspired several generations of blockbuster filmmakers, all of whom have sought to recapture that elusive Spielbergian feel. JJ Abrams is the most obvious, and he’s tried to build his big-screen career on the back of it, but it also applies to the likes of Colin Trevorrow, Joe Johnston, Chris Columbus, and Robert Zemeckis, most of whom were non-coincidentally proteges at one point.
Obviously, no one can touch the master. Whether it’s creating a sense of wonder, astonishment, or awe, grounding a big-budget spectacle piece at a child’s-eye level, combining stakes with sentimentality, and ladling on the emotion a little too thick, it goes without saying that nobody does Spielbergian like Spielberg.
His most successful flicks, in terms of their box office take and audience appeal, are the ones that embrace those archetypes the most, whether it’s Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark or Ready Player One and War of the Worlds, but for the man himself, there’s only one title that defines the term best.
While there are plenty of entries in his back catalogue that aren’t Spielbergian in the truest sense, from Munich to War Horse and The Color Purple to The Post, the three-time Academy Award winner has his ear close enough to the ground to know that the term is sometimes used as a criticism.
When asked if he felt that the word being used to tear down his career-long focus on mawkish, saccharine stories that made blatant plays to tug at the heartstrings while delivering eye-popping set pieces in the next breath was a bad thing, Spielberg went on the defensive.
“That’s what I do,” he declared. “I just do what I do. If I really cared, I wouldn’t have made Jurassic Park: that’s the best example.” You know what? He’s right. You couldn’t argue with him anyway, since he’s Steven Spielberg, but his 1993 classic is the definitive Spielbergian experience by every metric.
It’s got everything you’d expect from one of his signature crowd-pleasers: action, effects, a couple of kids in peril, family drama, jaw-dropping action beats, and a sweeping sense of scale, all wrapped up in a timeless adventure that became the highest-grossing release in cinema history, leaving not a single Spielbergian box unticked.
