Jurassic Park [1993]

Written 1993

The crowd at showing of Jurassic Park I attended recently were primed and ready for fun. The mostly full theatre was full of laughs and excitement about this very Spielbergian Steven Spielberg film.

The special effects are tremendous. With recreated dinosaurs this film excels, but there is a lot of confusion elsewhere in the plot and characters. A few obvious elements of plot-insanity are: why is the landing pad for the helicopter at the bottom of a big wind-tunnel? Because of the picturesque waterfall in the background? Why is everything on the island automated except for the gate on the dino-transfer cage (where the human gate-opener is promptly gobbled up). When Laura Dern's Australian hunter-protector runs off into the jungle and gets eaten, she doesn’t know that... yet she leaves the island without as much as a mention of his name. For all she knows, he is still on the island trying to protect her. How is the island run from two or three Macintosh computers? (They look like Quadra 700’s — not exactly powerful at 40 mhz.) Why do all the workers leave the island? Because of the predicted hurricane? But it doesn't amount to much, it simply drops some rain and then drops from the story. All of the state of Florida would laugh at it's pitiful effect. Sure, this is just a movie, but why can't the plot points agree with each other?

The dinosaurs are amazing creatures to see. They are designed entirely from the idea that the bones we see in museums were once covered in alligator-purse hide. It is impressive how well Spielberg merges the special-effect creatures with the life action human forms fleeing in fear from them. Yet the creatures are all-powerful reptile gods one minute, and then strangely two people can keep a door closed against a Velociraptor the next.

After the film ended, many of the theatre patrons around me were gushing with praise for the film. True, the film is magnificently entertaining. Spielberg tended carefully to the first law of movie dynamics: keeping the audience engaged.

Also, the characters are carefully and quickly sketched out early, with humor and some feeling. But they are reduced to props as the film skips along, left alive only to move the action from one scene to another. Dern's character becomes mere sentiment and maternal concern over the children being menaced, and Sam Neill the common sense and manly action. Though he starts the film off as repulsed toward children, he rapidly changes to a competent father-figure once in the wild of the primordial jungle of the dinosaurs. Many of the other characters start off in the film only to become dinofodder later (and you can tell which ones they are early in the movie). So the question becomes not who will die, but rather in what inventive way will they die?

Unlike a film like King Kong [1933], which reduces the mammoth monkey on an island to human-sized emotions and character, the Jurassic Park monsters remain only huge, menacing, otherworldly threats to the human characters who are barely Lillipution-size.

The original version of this appeared in 1993 in APA-5