JURASSIC PARK
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1993 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Barney the Dinosaur has finally met his match.
On the strength of the McDonald's tie-in alone, kids this summer will be turning off their TV sets and flocking to JURASSIC PARK, the latest blockbuster from Steven Spielberg, the man who popularized man-eating sharks, touch-toning extra-terrestrials and whip-toting archeologists.
So, is JURASSIC PARK the mother of all monster movies?
Not quite.
The problem with the film, plain and simple, is that it focuses all of its energies on the dinosaurs themselves. Not one but four different effects specialists--live action dinosaurs, full motion dinosaurs, dinosaur supervisor, and special dinosaur effects--are credited. While there is no denying their work is truly eye-popping, everything else takes second billing, resulting in a film with a surprisingly flat exposition (the first third), a roller-coaster ride of special effects (its remaining two thirds), and no ending (it just stops).
Take that laborious opening. Spielberg of all people knows how to set up a movie. Just look at the first few minutes of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to experience tension, atmosphere, and pacing. By contrast, JURASSIC PARK's setup is long and uninvolving.
We get to meet our two heroes, boyfriend and girlfriend paleontologists Grant and Ellie (played by Sam Neill and Laura Dern), who are visited by Is-He-A-Megalomaniac-Or-Is-He-Just-A-Doddering- Old-Grandfather John Hammond (Richard Attenborough, taking a break from directing). Hammond makes them an offer they can't refuse: Come endorse my biological preserve off the coast of Costa Rica and I'll fund your archeological project for the next three years. He's already popped open the champagne so you can assume he figures it's a done deal. It is.
Fans of the Michael Crichton bestseller on which the film is based will be disappointed. Gone are all the fascinating details about the park's upkeep, as well as most of the scientific wranglings about the mysteries of DNA splicing and genetic reconstruction that made the book such a good read. Instead, Spielberg fobs the audience off with an abbreviated explanation as to how these creatures came to be: Take an amber-preserved mosquito that has fed off the blood of dinosaurs, extract and analyze the blood, mix it with a little frog DNA to complete the chain and bingo! Barney without the songs or the moralizing.
Soon enough the park's chief technician (that fat guy Newman on TV's SEINFELD) goes AWOL--he's stolen some frozen embryos for financial gain--and a severe storm hits the island. Time for the dinos to run amok. And run amok they do. This is where the movie eventually takes off.
The audience is then subjected to a veritable onslaught of loud, head-banging scenes of large carnivorous reptiles biting the heads off humans and other, smaller dinosaurs. Stan Winston's live action effects are quite fantastic. With few exceptions, these dinosaurs look and act like the real thing (the scene in which a herd of "veggie-saurs" thunder across the grasslands is a particular standout). Grown-ups and young children will probably be scared out of their wits, but older kiddies will laugh and scream with glee at all the mayhem. Although JURASSIC PARK is rated PG-13, its violence deserves an R.
Jeff Goldblum (THE FLY) plays a mathematician called Dr. Malcolm. In his black leather garb and tragically hip glasses he looks more like a kook out of a Robert Altman movie than a scientist. He hangs around to provide the kind of wisecracks needed to offset all that on-screen carnage.
Throughout all this, no-one does anything especially clever, or even heroic. Grant and Ellie (and two of Hammond's grandchildren) just run and run. And you thought it was the dinosaurs who were supposed to have brains the size of walnuts! These humans don't think or plot their escape; all they do is scream and watch in horror as their colleagues meet grisly, bone-crunching deaths. This is a *very* noisy movie.
For Steven Spielberg, a director from whom we've come to expect consummate filmmaking, a lot of JURASSIC PARK is surprisingly shoddy. The film's only achievements are technical, leaving us with a mind-blowing assault on the senses in which the human beings are infinitely less interesting than the dinosaurs.
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