Subject: REVIEW: JURASSIC PARK

From: [email-masked]
Date: 15 Jun 93 14:28:01 GMT

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				JURASSIC PARK
		       A film review by Sarah M. Elkins
			Copyright 1993 Sarah M. Elkins

*JURASSIC PARK*:  Action-adventure with dinosaurs running amok and
people running away from them, with some food for thought as well.

PLOT/KICK-OFF:  Various experts are called in to assess safety and
other issues of a mysterious theme park located on an island off of
Costa Rica.  They find out the park's theme is *live* dinosaurs ...
then things start to go wrong.

CHARACTERS/ACTING:  All the characters were pretty natural in their
roles, both their interactions with each other and their reactions to
the dinosaur FX.  I had no trouble believing Sam Neill as the
paleontologist, Laura Dern as the paleobotanist, Richard Attenborough
as the island entrepreneur, or Jeff Goldblum as the chaos
theoretician/mathematician.  I thought Neill, Dern and Goldblum did
particularly well when debating the ethical and potentially disastrous
impacts of the project; from other actors, their lines might have
sounded stagey, glib or pedantic.  There were a couple of kids too,
used pretty well for the most part.

CINEMATOGRAPHY/FX:  One of the early shots of a dinosaur was a little
too obviously people against some sort of matte motion effect, but
other than that, the look and FX were seamless, superb, and quite
believable.  Considering the variety of dinos and their different
behaviors the movie depicted, this is quite a feat -- we see a lot more
than those few effects in the previews.  At one point, although this is
not a 3-D movie, I really did have the sensation that a dinosaur was
leaping directly at *me*--quite a visceral impact.  Clearly a movie to
see first on the big screen.

SCORE/SOUND:  Okay.
SKIN/SITUATIONS:  None.
VIOLENCE/GORE/LANGUAGE:  A severed limb here and there, but other than
that, not much gore (nowhere near the level of the Alien movies, for
example).  Actually not much blood at all, but there is quite a bit of
violence nonetheless: you do have dinos chomping on each other and
people.  Stephen Spielberg (the director) has said he won't let his
8-year-old see it for a couple more years.

ANALYSIS:  Scary fun.  I and others in the audience shrieked and
screamed at several points in the movie.  None of the movie directly
contradicted the dinosaur-related info I've picked up from SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN articles, although it did refer to some points which are still
controversial.  There was one annoyingly silly product placement, and a
shot which was a bit too obviously staged for irony (analogous to the
shot of the Terminator mowing down the crowd in the Tech-Noir bar, only
not as well done), but otherwise it's a great, gripping ride.  I also
appreciated the discussions on cloning, biogenetics, and chaos theory
between the scientists, though I think some of the explanations were
cut short in the interests of pacing.  Good ending, especially because
the room for the sequel is embedded deeply in the movie and not
referred to again.

COMPARISON TO BOOK:  ******* Minor SPOILERS *******
The movie is tighter than Michael Crichton's book.  I think they did
well in combining a few of the characters and paring out extraneous
introductory subplots.  Hammond is less of a mad fanatic in the movie
and more of an enthusiastic idiot.  The kids' ages are reversed; the
girl is less of a whiner (thank goodness) and has more to do.  The boy
is more annoying at the beginning.  They did change some of the final
confrontations between the people and the dinosaurs, and Alan and the
kids are never on a raft, and the ending itself is changed a little,
somewhat for the better, I think.

- Sarah ([email-masked])