'Westworld' revisited

Rating: 6/10 (29 November 2010)

Steven Spielberg's popular crowd-pleaser rode the crest of a passing dinosaur craze (a craze engineered, in part, to coincide with the film's release), but it also delivered enough genuine summer matinée fun to justify all the hoopla. There isn't anything particularly original about the film: the skimpy plot, following a group of reluctant tourists trapped on an island theme park with marauding dinosaur clones, is a state-of-the-art update of 'Westworld', also written by Michael Crichton; Sam Neill's paleontologist hero is a cardboard ringer for Indiana Jones (the role might have been written for Harrison Ford); and if the film is Spielberg's most effective thrill ride since 'Jaws' it's only because his dinosaurs are distant cousins to Bruce the Great White Shark.
The script may be thin and the (human) characters unforgivably shallow, but none of that should worry viewers expecting to be scared half out of their seats. Spielberg's only aim - reinforced by an anticlimactic ending almost begging for a sequel - is to provide two hours of undiluted distraction, and (fortunately) the best moments lean more on expensive lab work than on decent writing or depth of character. For one tenth the budget (and one tenth the profits) Ray Harryhausen could have made essentially the same movie, but 'Jurassic Park' is a legitimate blockbuster, with one nagging reservation: after so much advance publicity, did the director really need to plug his own promotional merchandise in the film?