Subject: REVIEW: JURASSIC PARK

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1993 14:34:39 GMT

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                               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
					[email-masked]