I took my 7-year-old son to watch the latest Jurassic Park movie at his insistence. The only other film in the series he'd seen was the very first one. I'd noticed the new release had garnered some tepid reviews, so I wasn't expecting to be wowed. By now, most fans have resigned themselves to the fact that no dinosaur movie will ever match the heights of the 1993 original.
But as a self-professed dinosaur nerd, the chance to see some new dinosaurs duke it out, dismember, or scare the living daylights out of a few foolish humans was more than enough to happily accompany my son to the cinema. By the time the credits rolled, I was mostly satisfied and assumed he'd feel the same, relishing the simple thrill of watching dinosaurs on the big screen.
When I asked him, "So, did you have fun?" his usual response to almost any movie I've taken him to has been an emphatic "Yes!" So I was quite surprised when he said, "It was okay. Not as good as the other one." It had been a while since we'd watched the original, so to confirm, I asked, "Which other one?" He promptly replied, "The one where the kids are hiding from the dinosaur in the cafeteria," referencing one of the finest scenes with the velociraptors.
I was taken aback—both by how well he remembered those scenes and by the fact that he'd reached a milestone in his growth, starting to become more discerning about what he watches. It's a bittersweet turning point: he's no longer the kid who can be force-fed anything to keep him happy. Instead, he's begun to develop the first slivers of that elusive quality that's so hard to define—taste.
