 Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg . The first installment of the Jurassic Park franchise , it is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton , with a screenplay written by Crichton and David Koepp . The film is set on the fictional Isla Nublar , an islet located off Central America 's Pacific Coast , near Costa Rica , where a billionaire philanthropist and a small team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of cloned dinosaurs . 
