Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Jurassic Park (1993)

Dr. Alan Grant: Life found a way.

You'd think a person would reach a certain age, one where they've gone through enough of these to have an inkling that everyone dies and most of the people older than yourself who you worshipped as a kid, you're gonna have to say goodbye to them. But even with his openness about the cancer he'd been battling for years I wasn't prepared for my boyfriend to wake me up this morning with the news that Sam Neill had died. I'm sure I'd seen him in something before Jurassic Park -- I'd probably seen The Hunt For Red October; I doiubt I'd seen The Piano -- but he became, from the moment that movie opened, Dr. Grant to me. I actually have a vivid memory of not liking him having been cast in the role since I'd read the book and I'm sure the Dr. Grant that was swimming around in my hormonal 15-year-old head was hunkier. But the child-like (yes, Spielbergian) wonder under a faux-gruff exterior that he brought to the role was undeniable, and without it the movie wouldn't have worked. And it did work -- I went back and saw the movie twenty damn times in the theater, after all!

It took a long time for me to be able to see Neill as anything else -- and I'm sure, even though he more than anyone else in the franchise capitalized on the bank the role brought him, that single-role identification was a little harmful to his career -- but decades on when I finally got around to catching Andrzej Żuławski's Possession, well, if you've seen that movie you know it'll slap the spell off of anybody's face. I think I really only came to appreciate what a fine and versatile actor he was once that happened. So of course I'll find time to re-watch Jurassic Park for the ten billionth time this week but I'm gonna make space for The Piano, Dead Calm, In the Mouth of Madness, Hunt For the Wilderpeople, as well.

Thank you for everything. Sam Neill.