Subject: REVIEW: JURASSIC PARK

From: "David N. Butterworth" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1993 13:48:49 GMT

[Followups directed to rec.arts.movies.  -Moderator]

			       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.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Directed by: Steven Spielberg     David N. Butterworth - UNIVERSITY OF PA |
| Rating (Maltin Scale): **1/2      Internet: [email-masked] |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+