You saw it the first time for the dinosaurs. Now come back, if you like, for the music that made Jurassic Park a roaring success at the box office.

The Sony Centre and Attila Glatz Concert Productions are bringing Jurassic Park in Concert, with a live orchestra, to the Sony Centre on Dec. 28 and 29. Evan Mitchell, music director of the Kingston Symphony and the event’s guest conductor, will join film critic Richard Crouse for a pre-show discussion before the Thursday evening concert to talk about the lasting impact of the film and its music.

“(Jurassic Park) is one of those iconic John Williams scores and I actually think it’s an excellent film that has held up very well,” Mitchell said in an interview.

Williams is a legendary American composer and film scorer with 50 Oscars nominations — including five wins — over a decades-long career. (Jurassic Park’s score was nominated but did not win.)

“He (Williams) is really about two things: connecting with you emotionally and helping to tell the story,” Mitchell said.

“I think one of the reasons why the partnership with John Williams and (director) Steven Spielberg is so successful and has been for decades is that the two of them are great storytellers, each in their own way,” he said.

“John Williams has (written) some wonderful concert works but he’s just such a superb film scorer because he knows exactly what to do in order to maximize the emotional punch of a scene or to help land a story beat,” Mitchell added.

The audience at the Sony Centre will watch the film on a 32-foot screen at centre stage, accompanied by a 77-member Motion Picture Symphony Orchestra, comprised of “some of the very best” musicians from across the GTA and Hamilton, said Andrea Warren, vice-president of marketing and product development for Attila Glatz Concert Productions.

“(The Sony Centre) is a really great location for these kinds of films because it feels like a movie theatre. There’s not a bad seat in the house. It feels like a movie theatre but of course, it’s this great acoustic space,” Warren said, noting the venue was the home to the Canadian Opera Company for many years.

Mitchell, who conducted at the same venue last year when E.T. — also scored by Williams, for which he won an Oscar — said the experience was “such a blast.”

“I really feel that these sorts of presentations are absolutely a slam dunk. It’s the sort of thing where we wonder why we weren’t this sooner. You see the popularity everywhere and in the sellout houses. It’s a fun thing to do and I really enjoy it,” Mitchell said.

Attila Glatz has done previous presentations of other well-remembered films such as Amadeus, The Godfather, Gladiator and the first two Harry Potter films — with the third one (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) coming in May.

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“Presenting films with live orchestra is a great way to bridge the gap for people who might be new to classical music. This is a classical orchestra . . . presenting this music that’s really familiar and very much part of pop culture. It’s a nice way to introduce new audiences to the orchestral environment,” Warren said.

“It’s increasing,” she added, referring to “the awareness of how much the classical orchestra is part of all excellent films. It’s the underpinning. It’s what you make cry a little deeper, it makes you scream with fear. It’s the thing that drives the emotion of a film and when you see it, that’s the moment when it becomes very visceral and very tangible.”