{"id":691533,"date":"2026-06-08T12:17:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/691533\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T12:17:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:17:09","slug":"steven-spielberg-was-a-punching-bag-then-one-year-changed-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/691533\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Spielberg was a punching bag. Then one year changed everything."},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of Spielberg Week<\/a>, Slate\u2019s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.<\/p>\n

In 1993 Michael Jordan led the NBA in scoring for the seventh consecutive season, won his third consecutive championship and third straight Finals MVP award, then abruptly and shockingly retired from basketball, with no more worlds (or, in this case, Suns<\/a>) left to conquer. And yet Jordan wasn\u2019t even the most dominant American in his respective profession that year. That distinction would have to go to Steven Spielberg, who in June 1993 released his record-smashing adaptation of Michael Crichton\u2019s Jurassic Park, then returned in December with the rapturously acclaimed Schindler\u2019s List, a black-and-white, three-plus-hour Holocaust epic. Jurassic Park went on to surpass Spielberg\u2019s own E.T. as the highest-grossing movie of all time worldwide, a distinction that it would hold until Titanic snatched it away in 1998, while Schindler\u2019s List was immediately hailed as Spielberg\u2019s artistic zenith, an instant classic that finally earned Spielberg his first Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. (Even the modestly budgeted Schindler\u2019s was also a blockbuster, grossing more than $300 million.) By the end of 1993, Spielberg had delivered, as the New York Times\u2019 Janet Maslin put it at the end of her review of Schindler\u2019s List, \u201cthe most astounding one-two punch in the history of American cinema<\/a>,\u201d one that, in the words of journalist and historian Michael Schulman, \u201ccrown[ed] him Hollywood\u2019s undisputed king of art and commerce<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was in middle school in 1993 and saw Jurassic Park in the movie theater, as pretty much every kid my age did. I didn\u2019t see Schindler\u2019s List until a few years later, when it was screened at a mandatory assembly at my high school, a fact that says a lot about how people thought about Schindler\u2019s List in those days. It had been a long time since I rewatched either, but revisiting both Jurassic Park and Schindler\u2019s List 33 years later, along with the critical reception they both provoked, offers a fascinating view into the most pivotal year of Spielberg\u2019s career, and the beginnings of a change in the way both critics and audiences thought about his body of work.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe in hindsight, but for nearly a decade prior to the release of Jurassic Park, Spielberg had been in something of a slump, at least by his own standards. In 1985 he had released The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker\u2019s novel that performed well at the box office but prompted harsh criticism for its misplaced sentimentality and for what some critics saw as crude racial stereotyping<\/a>. The movie was Spielberg\u2019s most transparent attempt yet at finally engineering a win at the Academy Awards, where The Color Purple infamously received nominations in 11 categories and won none of them, with Spielberg himself going pointedly unnominated for Best Director. He followed it up with 1987\u2019s Empire of the Sun, another attempt at prestige filmmaking that was well liked by critics but a disappointment at the box office. 1989 saw the smashing success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third and (allegedly) final film in the Jones trilogy, but the same year\u2019s Always, a romantic fantasy-drama, failed to catch on with critics or audiences. 1991\u2019s Hook is now a beloved cult classic and was a sizable hit upon release, but reviews were lukewarm at best, and even its considerable box-office success fell short of studio expectations.<\/p>\n

\n Well into his career, even the director\u2019s champions continued to infantilize\u00a0him.\n<\/p>\n

Spielberg had long been acknowledged as an epochal filmmaking talent but was also at times regarded as an overeager child prodigy, whose populist tastes and voracious ambition led some to view him as a Tracy Flick\u2013like industry apple-polisher, the brattiest of the so-called movie brats<\/a>. Spielberg\u2019s well-known frustration with his lack of Academy Award recognition, which went back to his failure to receive a Best Director nomination for his work on 1975\u2019s Jaws, only added to this impression. (\u201cI got beaten out by Fellini<\/a>,\u201d the director was filmed moaning when the year\u2019s nominations were announced.) Alfred Hitchcock reportedly refused to meet with Spielberg after his breakthrough, dismissively referring to his admirer as \u201cthe boy who made the fish movie<\/a>.\u201d And well into his career, even the director\u2019s champions continued to infantilize him. In Pauline Kael\u2019s rave review of E.T., she described Spielberg\u2019s filmmaking as \u201clike a boy soprano lilting with joy<\/a>,\u201d an odd characterization of a then-35-year-old industry veteran.<\/p>\n

A lot of film critics in the 1980s regarded Spielberg with a complicated mix of admiration and unease, a stance that certainly persisted up until Schindler\u2019s List and, in some cases, didn\u2019t even end there. Starting with the paradigm-shifting triumph of Jaws and through the runaway successes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg had redefined the commercial landscape of studio filmmaking, a track record that made him as much an object of adulation among audiences as an object of suspicion among certain critics and industry insiders. Especially against a 1980s backdrop defined by corporate avarice, it was easy to caricature Spielberg as a wunderkind turned golden goose, the ultimate company man for a decade when the studios were clawing back control over their industry from the 1970s New Hollywood auteurs. When the director\u2019s forays into \u201cserious\u201d work like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun underwhelmed at the Oscars and, in Empire\u2019s case, the box office, the director\u2019s naysayers appeared to be validated: Maybe the whiz kid should just stick to kids\u2019 stuff.<\/p>\n

Jurassic Park returned Spielberg to the top of the commercial heap and then some, although it didn\u2019t beat the allegations that the director was best suited as a maker of cinematic amusement park rides. Jurassic Park is now fondly remembered as one of the most successful films ever made, ultimately spawning one of the most lucrative film franchises of the 21st century. But at the time of its release, many reviews were mixed, applauding the film\u2019s groundbreaking computer effects while bemoaning its tonal inconsistencies and lack of character depth. \u201cWe see [the dinosaurs] early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry,\u201d wrote Roger Ebert, \u201cbut the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment,\u201d while \u201cthe human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities.\u201d Still, Ebert begrudgingly gave the film three stars: \u201cYou want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

This might seem like the point to shake our heads in smug hindsight at the benighted wrongheadedness of such appraisals, but having recently rewatched Jurassic Park, I have to agree with most of Ebert\u2019s assessment. The suspense sequences are incredible, and the dinosaurs still look very cool (if certainly dated). The jittery zoom onto the rippling cup of water<\/a> remains one of the great cinematic evocations of impending dread, and those velociraptors in the park kitchen will still have you covering your eyes. But the film\u2019s nondino sections mostly sputter: The main characters are underwritten, and the two kids in particular come off like a parody of everything Spielberg\u2019s detractors find irritating about his depictions of children. (You get the sense that even Spielberg agrees\u2014the younger boy, Tim, is nearly killed a borderline-sadistic number of times.) Next to some of his previous blockbusters, it feels a bit like work for hire, far more impersonal than the Indiana Jones trilogy, to say nothing of E.T. or Close Encounters.<\/p>\n

Schindler\u2019s List came only six months later\u2014Spielberg put the finishing touches on Jurassic Park at night via satellite even as he was filming Schindler\u2019s List in Poland during the day<\/a>\u2014and upon its release, the film was touted as the long-awaited fulfillment of frustratingly delayed promise, the boy wonder finally putting away childish things. Reviewing the film in New York magazine, David Denby gushed that it was as if Spielberg \u201cunderstood for the first time why God gave him such extraordinary skills<\/a>.\u201d The New Republic\u2019s Stanley Kauffmann declared the film \u201ca welcome astonishment from a director who has given us much boyish esprit, much ingenuity, but little seriousness<\/a>\u201d and went on to note, \u201cThis may be the start of a new period in Spielberg\u2019s prodigious career\u2014Part Two: The Man.\u201d The Los Angeles Times\u2019 Kenneth Turan praised the film as creating \u201cas indelible a picture of the Holocaust as fiction film allows<\/a>,\u201d but not before swiping at \u201cthe broad, toys-are-us strokes of obvious heroes and hissable villains that have characterized much of Spielberg\u2019s output, up to and including this year\u2019s \u2018Jurassic Park.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty-three years later, Schindler\u2019s List has lost none of its power. For a three-hour film whose first two-thirds are unrelentingly bleak, the film has a ferocious energy and virtuosity that\u2019s impossible to look away from. Critic Bilge Ebiri has described Spielberg as a horror director at his core<\/a>, and the influence of that genre is indeed all over his work, from more obvious instances like Jaws, War of the Worlds, and, of course, Jurassic Park itself to more oblique examples, like the unexpectedly terrifying third act of E.T., the heart-rippingly dark finale of The Temple of Doom, or the much-celebrated Normandy opening of Saving Private Ryan.<\/p>\n

Schindler\u2019s List is a horror film of an entirely different sort. Although the film boasts no shortage of bravura set pieces\u2014the agonizing depiction of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto is a standout\u2014much of its power comes from smaller and perversely intimate moments, such as when Ralph Fiennes\u2019 Kommandant Amon G\u00f6th tries to execute an elderly Jewish man at point-blank range only for his pistol to jam, over and over and over again. The scene lasts only a few minutes, but every second grows increasingly unbearable, before finally resolving on an absurd, near-nihilistic reprieve. Schindler\u2019s List is a film about monstrousness in which the monsters are human beings, and thus not actually monsters at all. But it is also a meditation on perseverance and morality, and on imperfect people\u2019s ever-present potential for redemption. The film\u2019s final-act turn toward a more conventionally Spielbergian humanism and hopefulness has long been the subject of criticism, some of it deserved, but I don\u2019t think Spielberg was or is capable of ending his film any other way. I\u2019m also not sure we should wish he were.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Did Steven Spielberg Secretly Direct a Classic Horror Movie?
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

People Compared It to The Birth of a Nation and \u201ca Lynching.\u201d Now This Spielberg Movie Is a Classic.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He\u2019s One of History\u2019s Greatest Filmmakers. For a Long Time, He Was a Punching Bag. Then One Year Changed Everything.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jennifer Lopez\u2019s New Netflix Rom-Com Proves Exactly What She Needs to Do for the Rest of Her Life
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

The prevailing critical idea that with Schindler\u2019s List, Spielberg had finally made a great movie worthy of his talent has aged far more poorly than either Jurassic Park or Schindler\u2019s List and says more about the prevailing saws of late-20th-century film criticism than about Spielberg\u2019s filmography up to that point. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect film, and so is E.T.; Jaws is one of the most influential movies ever made, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the strangest megablockbusters that a filmmaker ever talked a studio into letting them make. The idea that these weren\u2019t serious films really just betrays a need for people to broaden their own preconceptions about what kinds of films deserve to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n

And needless to say, these are all pretty different movies: The notion that Spielberg was some precocious technician incapable of variety was never really true, and certainly by 1993 this was something any kid who had grown up on VHS tapes of his movies could have told you. In 2026 I\u2019m not sure how many people would still rate Schindler\u2019s List as Spielberg\u2019s best movie, in part because of our deepened appreciation of his earlier work, but in part because, well into the 21st century, he has continued to expand the staggering breadth of his filmography, through movies as far-flung in their ambitions as A.I. Artificial Intelligence<\/a>, Lincoln<\/a>, and The Fabelmans<\/a>, to name just a few. And hey, if you want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

Read the rest of Spielberg Week, with more coming every day<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article is part of Spielberg Week, Slate\u2019s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg. In 1993 Michael Jordan led…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,3378,178233,3208,206,6702,300046,16827,57990],"class_list":["post-691533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-features","tag-holocaust","tag-jurassic-park","tag-movies","tag-science-fiction","tag-spielberg-week","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-the-oscars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}