Jurassic Park

Now the time has come to review one of the greatest franchises directed by one of the greatest directors, Steven Spielberg. Since the fourth in the series will be released in a week, I think the time has finally come to share with everyone my thoughts and opinions on the series. Come and join me in “Jurassic Park Month.” There is no time to lose, so let’s get started with the classic “Jurassic Park,” released in 1993. This movie is based on the famous Michael Crichton novel of the same name, which I have on my shelf, but I have never read it, so I can't say how closely the movie follows the book.

When Spielberg was first offered the screenplay for “Jaws,” he said that he would be the director of the movie, but had one condition: He would not show the shark for the first hour. By slowly building the audience’s anxiety, he felt, the shark would be much more impressive when it finally arrived.

He was right. Roger Ebert said in his review, “I wish he had remembered that lesson when he was preparing "Jurassic Park," his new thriller set in a remote island theme park where real dinosaurs have been grown from long-dormant DNA molecules.” The movie delivers very well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a success of special effects creativity, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and astonishment, and strong human story values.

It’s clear, seeing this long-awaited project, that Spielberg devoted more of his effort to creating the dinosaurs. The human characters are a mixed bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who are there primarily to scream, tell grim warnings, and outsmart the monsters.

Richard Attenborough, the millionaire who builds the park, is given a few small dimensions – he loves his grandchildren (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello), he’s basically a good soul, he realizes the mistake of messing with nature. However, there was an opportunity here to make his character grand and original, colorful and oversize, and instead he comes across as unfocused and gentle.

As the film opens, two dinosaurs expert (Sam Neill and Laura Dern, you got to admit, Spielberg couldn’t have picked any one better) arrive at the park, along with a mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum whose function in the story is to lie around saying vague philosophical maledictions. The team includes Attenborough’s grandchildren, and a lawyer, played by Martin Ferrero, who is the first to be eaten by the dinosaurs.

Attenborough wants the visitors to have a preview of his new park, where actual living prehistoric animals live in fields behind tall steel fences, helpfully labeled “10,000 volts.” The visitors go off on a tour in remote-controlled utility cars, which stall when a dishonest employee, played by Wayne Knight, shuts down the park’s computer program so he can steal some dinosaur embryos. Meanwhile, a tropical storm hits the island, the beasts knock over the fences, and Neill is left to guide the kids back to safety while they’re hunted by towering carnivores.

Ebert says that, “The plot to steal the embryos is handled on the level of a TV sitcom. The Knight character, an overwritten and overplayed blubbering fool, drives his Jeep madly through the storm and thrashes about in the forest. If this subplot had been handled cleverly - with skill and subtlety, as in a caper movie - it might have added to the film's effect. Instead, it's as if one of the Three Stooges wandered into the story.”

The following events – after the creatures get loose – follow an absolutely standard outline, similar in bits and pieces to all the earlier films in this genre, from “The Lost World” and “King Kong” right up to “Carnosaur,” which was going to be released later that year. True, because the director is Spielberg, there is a high technical level to the completing of the clichés. Two set-pieces are particularly successful: A scene where a beast attacks a car with screaming kids inside, and another where the kids play hide and seek with two creatures in the park’s kitchen.

Consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have made a career studying dinosaurs, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are all tall, majestic leaf-eaters, browsing kindly in the treetops. There is a sense of magnificence to them. That is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims running from roaring dinosaurs.

Ebert pointed out, “Think back to another ambitious special effects picture from Spielberg, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). That was a movie about the "idea" of visitors from outer space. It inspired us to think what an awesome thing it would be, if earth were visited by living alien beings. You left that movie shaken and a little transformed. It was a movie that had faith in the intelligence and curiosity of its audience.”

In the 16 years since it was made, however, big-budget Hollywood seems to have lost its confidence that audiences can share big dreams. “Jurassic Park” throws a lot of dinosaurs at us, and because they look terrific (and they indeed do) we’re supposed to be grateful. Ebert admits, “I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made "Close Encounters" today, we would have seen the aliens in the first 10 minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan with death rays.”

Because the movie delivers the bottom line, Ebert gave this movie three stars, and I also give this movie a positive review. You want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs.

Ebert mentioned, “Spielberg enlivens the action with lots of nice little touches; I especially liked a sequence where a smaller creature leaps suicidally on a larger one, and they battle to the death.” On the monster movie level, the movie works and is entertaining. However, with its extravagant resources, it could have been so much more.

Now I have to say that if you haven’t seen this movie, then you should not have read this review. I cannot do this movie justice with how great it is. You have to see the movie yourself to see how grand and groundbreaking this movie was for the time and it still holds up to this day. See it if you haven’t, this one is a must see and I highly encourage you to watch the movie.

How is the first sequel compared to this movie? Stay tuned next week to find out in my continuation of “Jurassic Park Month.”