JURASSIC PARK
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: As few films in the past have ever managed to do, Steven Spielberg has tapped into the mother lode of human dreams and sense of wonder. Michael Crichton's story may be "Westworld" with dinosaurs, but for once the biotechnology and the special effects are phenomenal. Rating: high +3.
When Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, I got this funny feeling in my back and in the back of my neck. This was where a dream that I'd had became a reality. The feeling was one of "Oh boy! Here we go!" and one of real anticipation. In Michael Crichton's novel JURASSIC PARK, a little girl drew a very detailed picture of the animal that had bitten her. And the expert looked at the picture and identified it as a known type of lizard. But several of the details were wrong in her picture and that type of lizard was not known to bite people. But the case was closed. And then someone else looks at the picture and says, "Whose kid drew the dinosaur?" And even though it was just a story, I got that same "Oh boy! Here we go!" So I was hoping that sequence would make it to the film. It didn't. Instead, paleontologist Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill), not knowing what the Jurassic Park concept is all about, suddenly sees an incredibly majestic sight that is undoubtedly something he had dreamed of his entire life and he is so overcome with joy and excitement and wonder that he has to look away. And I was feeling just about the same thing the character was. "Oh boy! Here we go!" Who hasn't dreamed about getting the dinosaurs back? Now you can indulge that fantasy for two hours and people are going to flock to do it.
Michael Crichton's story itself is really a variant on WESTWORLD. A theme park is created with genuine dinosaurs, resurrected thanks to the magic of DNA cloning from blood found in mosquitoes who sucked on dinosaurs and then were preserved in amber. Two paleontologists, a mathematician, and a lawyer come to certify that the park is real and safe. Of course it turns out that the park is very, very real but just a bit lacking in the safe category. Neill's Grant epitomizes the stereotype of the soft scientist who does not get along with machines, even seatbelts. Laura Dern plays Ellie Sattler, a second paleontologist who lives and works with Grant, every bit his equal. Like Grant she is at first enchanted by the island where live dinosaurs live, but soon discovers that live dinosaurs have their downside also. Jeff Goldblum has many of the best lines as an obnoxious but witty chaos mathematician. He uses her acerbic wit to point out just what can go wrong with the implementation of billionaire entrepreneur John Hammond's (Richard Attenborough's) plan for the park. Attenborough finds a human side to Hammond that is not apparent in the book. Instead of a vicious maniac for success, he is more enthusiastic but likable. Other familiar faces include Bob Peck (who has done some excellent work in the past, including the BBC's EDGE OF DARKNESS), Martin Ferrero, and Wayne Knight.
As enjoyable as Crichton's story is, there is much that cannot be fully appreciated without actually seeing it. No description can come close to the visual impact of this film. It has been suggested that JURASSIC PARK ranks with STAR WARS and KING KONG (1933) as a giant leap in representing images on the screen. However, there is actually little here that is really a breakthrough in technology, though virtually every effect that has ever been used to show dinosaurs on the screen was resurrected and perhaps refined. There are hand puppets, dinosaur suits, stop-motion, and computer graphics, seamlessly and flawlessly integrated. It took about four decades, but somebody has finally surpassed Ray Harryhausen at showing dinosaurs on the screen. It no longer is easy to tell that this effect is stop-motion and that one was a computer image, and the dinosaurs look as if they were in the scene with the people, not rear projections. Clearly inspired both by the work of Ray Harryhausen and by a recent revolution in scientific dinosaur art and paleontology, these dinosaurs show a lot of anatomy, including the wrinkles, the breathing, the bone structure, and often tremendous scale. They do not drag their tails on the ground and even the heaviest sauropods will rear up on their hind legs to reach the tops of trees. The one major aspect of modern dinosaur art technical speculation that was left behind is choice of color. The fossil record, of course, is silent on the color of dinosaurs and some artists these days suggest that it is likely that dinosaurs were brightly colored, but JURASSIC PARK's dinosaurs are dully colored. Still, the film does give a real air of authenticity. When the credits say no animals were hurt in the filming, one wonders, "How did they film that scene without killing that velociraptor?"
It is a tribute to the special effects that in some of the horror scenes I was genuinely tense. A really good film will make me tense, though I have not been actually frightened by a film since I was nine years old. (And just as an aside, I treasure those moments when I was young and actually frightened by film. I did even then, especially being terrified by WAR OF THE WORLDS before I was three years old. I am very thankful that nobody "protected" ME from them.) But along with the horror are also the moments of joy and wonder. I am pleased that the John Williams score concentrates on the wonder, not the horror of having the dinosaurs return. It would be nice if that wonder might push some younger viewers into fields such as paleontology that pay off in sense of wonder and fulfillment of curiosity, even if they are not as financially rewarding. It helps that JURASSIC PARK is reasonably scientifically accurate. Most skepticism seems to center around a belief that dinosaur DNA would deteriorate in amber over the tens and hundreds of millions of years. You could not really clone DNA that old. But even that is open to conjecture. What does seem odd is that at one point early in the script one of the scientists surprisingly fins a supposedly extinct leaf from something other than a tree. I do not think that's its presence is explained by the premise of cloning.
The script does include reasonable debates as to whether this particular scientific wonder is really what the world needs. Because it is a disaster story, of course the anti-science side has the upper hand, though not all the anti-science articles are convincing. The theme voiced by the mathematician that life WILL find a way to survive at first is a warning that the dinosaurs will not be contained, but eventually applies to the people as well.
The script was co-authored by Crichton, and David Koepp with more than a little humor borrowed from such diverse sources as Buster Keaton and Gary Larson, as well as a few jokes of their own. In total, this is one of the most enjoyable adventure films in years. I rate it a high +3 on the -4 to +4 scale, but then I am biased toward science fiction.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzfs3!leeper
leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews