JURASSIC Park returns to cinemas this week for a celebratory re-run, some 30 years on from its 1993 debut. Such is a rare treat. Steven Spielberg’s roar-some monster-piece remains best seen on the biggest screen in town.

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park had yet to hit a single bookshop shelf when Spielberg bought the film rights. Quite the leap of faith at a time before the technology that would bring the film to spectacular life had even been invented.

The move proved adroit. Jurassic Park would go on to become the highest grossing film ever made - a title it would lose four years later to James Cameron’s Titanic. Audiences, dazzled by the film’s groundbreaking visual effects, flocked to cinemas over and over.

It is easy to pinpoint the moment in Jurassic Park in which a likeable romp ascends to the level of all-time classic.

It’s the sequence that sees Doctors Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) first drive through the park and experience the astonishing work of Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond first hand.

Alan sees it first and can barely believe his own eyes. He wrestles Ellie’s attention and she too stands in awe. There before they is a real, living and breathing, Brachiosaurus. And, Hammond boasts, they have a T-Rex too. Then comes the clincher. As Alan looks to the valley below, John Williams’ extraordinarily score swells and we see not just one Brachiosaurus but an entire herd. In that moment, it’s real. Dinosaurs live.

For a film older than DVDs and the Channel Tunnel, Jurassic Park’s outstanding visual effects really do stand the rest of time. Compare Park’s T-Rex to the laughable shark of Jaws some 15 years prior and the difference is marked. The wonderment is undiminished even today.

Back in 1993, Jurassic Park set a new benchmark for what cinema could be in the digital age.

It was the film that inspired George Lucas to begin work on his Star Wars prequels and convinced Stanley Kubrick that his vision for AI: Artificial Intelligence could finally be achieved. So impressed was Kubrick with Jurassic Park that he would go on to personally invite Spielberg to direct the film.

Later this year, an arena tour will see Jurassic Park screened with a live orchestra. This week, return to the place it all began: the cinema.