JURASSIC PARK
Dino-licious. Somebody go get me a brontosaurus burger.
"What are you reading?" asked this guy I worked with in 1991. "Jurassic Park", I answered. "It's about an island where dinosaurs are cloned to put in a big zoo, but they break out, stomp around, eat people." "Pfft," said he. "That's a stupid idea. Who'd care about anything like that?"
Never mind.
Anyway, Steven Spielberg returns to his Jaws roots for Jurassic Park, scripted by Michael Crichton and based on his own novel (largely a retread of his film Westworld). It went on to be the biggest hit of all time for a few years (unless you factor in inflation) (you know I have to mention that, or somebody else will, like the guy in each Monopoly game who says "Wouldn't it be great if this money were real?"). Most critics regarded it with some amusement, basically slapping it with the "all effects/action, no plot/character" review which they carbon-copy for pretty much every summer blockbuster-type movie, overlooking that maybe an effects/action movie should be looked at on the merits of its effects and action.
Ah, well. Jurassic Park is a lot of fun, a historical FX landmark, and neither deserving of the enormous amount of cash it raked in nor the short-sightedly lukewarm critical reception it received.
Sam Neill is top-billed (though it can hardly be said that he stars) as Grant, a paleontologist called in by an eccentric millionaire (Richard Attenborough) who has built an island theme park that insurance companies want given the thumbs-up by appropriate experts. Also joining him is his girlfriend, a paleobotanist (Laura Dern), and a chaos-theory expert "rock star mathematician" played by Jeff Goldblum, yet another "quirky scientist" role for him, that's gotta be about forty or so now. Turns out that it ain't just any theme park; this guy's cloned dinosaurs from DNA extracted from amber-entombed insect stomachs (with a little help from frog DNA, although I imagine alligator DNA would be closer) (but then, what the hell do I know?).
Yes, they're all here, kids; brachiosaurs, gallimimuses, a triceratops, something that spits poison (whose name I can never remember), the almighty tyrannosaurus rex, and a few wee beasties they call velociraptors. (had I known about these guys as a kid, they may very well have supplanted his tyrannous majesty as my favorite dinosaur) Thing is, some really fat guy, trying to smuggle away frozen dino embryos for a rival company, basically lets them out in an attempt to cover his escape from the island (which he doesn't make, of course). So our three heroes (and the millionaire guy's two grandkids) have to evade a horde of rampaging dinos, and the rest doesn't even need to be written; just give us dinos, dammit!
Only Jeff Goldblum (who's very funny) registers at all in this movie, and maybe Bob Peck as the park's game warden. Neill and Dern scarcely seem like they're even there. The two kids are less irritating than they could be, although the boy's relationship with Grant is so "movie". Guy hates kid, has to deal with kid for a long time, learns to love kid. Somebody please kill me. (in the book, Grant loved kids because he couldn't not love any group that loved dinosaurs so much) Attenborough is picking up a check, nothing more. The plot is fine, but takes way too long to get going. (the movie is 127 minutes long; it should have been about 100) And that's all that needs to be said about characters and plot - unless these things are distractingly bad, then they're good enough for the movie's purposes.
What this movie has that makes it worth watching are, well, dinosaurs, and dinosaurs chasing people around. There are a number of intense scenes, particularly when the tyrannosaurus first busts out of its captivity, and when two velociraptors chase the kids around a kitchen. Being that this is a Spielberg movie, you should know better than to think that the kids are in any real danger, but it's a nailbiter anyway. That T-Rex (the real star of this movie, when you get right down to it) gets the best cinema moment in 1993 when he steps toward this lawyer on a toilet and CHOMP! Bites him right down the middle, thrusts its head up into the air, and gives that poor bastard a good shake. Ah well, he's only a lawyer. Best new star 1993? Any answer other than "that big T-Rex in Jurassic Park" was just a lie.
Is it a horror movie? Oh, hell yeah. Amazing, that other than on the internet, the only person I've ever heard refer to it as such is my dad (who hates horror movies). It just seems fairly obvious to me, with all the dino-vs-human scenes clearly constructed to scare the living crap out of the audience, if only while they're in the theater. This isn't the kind of horror that haunts you for days afterward, but it's still horror (although my brother, after seeing it, had the ill fortune of walking home in the rain and dark, seeing a tyrannosaurus behind every waving tree).
There are a number of those Spielbergian moments of oohing and aahing, but as Goldblum wryly remarks in the sequel, it's always faithfully followed by the running and screaming. (strangest scene between man and beast - when Grant pulls a brachiosaurus towards him with the branch in its teeth. He must be one strong paleontologist, because one muscle twitch and zoom! He's flyin', like man was never meant to fly!)
The FX achievements in Jurassic Park were really revolutionary - a lot of CGI effects from just two years ago look awfully dated, but the T-Rex in this movie remains the single most SOLID CGI creation I've ever seen. Look at this thing - it's like it's really got mass. The raptors look a little more two-dimensional, and that poison-spitter seems obviously animatronic, but this T-Rex - wow! It's astounding in 1999, let alone 1993. There are a number of other achievements here - note the wobbly, possibly hand-held camera tracking the gallimimus stampede. No stationary camera, not even a straight track - this was a huge leap in the art of digital effects.
Excellent use of sound and a great score (though a little too brass-heavy) by John Williams, too. It might lose a lot of its impact on the small screen, but with a good sound system and a reasonably large television, it's still pretty powerful, thunderous stuff.
Now, Jurassic Park ain't no Jaws. I don't look to this kind of movie for plot, character, or dialogue - but when they're there, that can sometimes be enough of a bonus to catapult a movie into my all-time favorites, as was the case with Jaws. Those are the things that separate good movies from great ones, and even if it's not all it could have been, Jurassic Park is still a good movie. (and I don't remember anything in Jaws as perplexing as that so-obvious-it-has-to-have-a-simple-explanation-I'm-not-getting twenty-story change in altitude on the other size of the T-Rex paddock wall. The T-Rex just stepped over the wall from the damn thing minutes before - now it's a chasm. I don't get it.) (anybody care to also explain to me what gives anybody the idea that a 65-million-years-extinct animal has vision that shuts down the moment something holds still?) (this was refuted in Crichton's sequel book, by the way, to amusing effect) People actually manage to fly eastward in to the sunset in this movie. And I think the only thing worse that "kid coming to the rescue" is "computer genius kid coming to the rescue".
Additionally, Crichton's "message" (typical of his writing, which is cautionary and dangerously close to technophobic) just doesn't hold up; neither the book nor the movie successfully establishes that animals like this CAN'T be contained, that they will inevitably bust out, spread out, do their thing. The beasts here only escape due to half-assed containment facilities and corporate greed, both of which can be dealt with (the former more simply than the latter).
No, it ain't no Jaws, but it's damn fine on its own. It doesn't feel like there's only seven minutes of dinosaur footage here, but there is. Uncanny. (extra points for the hilariously confused look on one velociraptor's face after it pokes its head up after having a big sheet dropped on it, and another for the GTAC's shone onto its head when it's right under the ceiling tiles) Jurassic Park made me feel like a kid again, and still does. I was INSANE about dinosaurs as a kid. (I know, a lot of people say that, but trust me - yer readin' it from the real deal here) I really enjoy this movie as an adult - if I'd seen it around age ten, it might have warped me. Y'know, moreso.
Weird trivia: Jurassic Park is the only movie I can think of with either the humor or the crassness - I haven't decided which - to feature its own merchandise in the film.