Jurassic Park

Rating: 6/10 (17 May 2006)

This time Steven Spielberg makes a movie about dinosaurs. He made some films about aliens, about sharks, and about action heroes before, and now he's made a film about dinosaurs. If you can't tell, I'm pretty apprehensive about this movie. I didn't like this movie. No, actually, it was okay. It was just too mawkishly sentimental for my tastes. Spielberg has obviously become the master at manipulating emotions as scene after scene barrages the viewer with images that breathe too sickly sweet in my face. Behind the excitement of a movie about nature running wild lies the heavy-handed morals of the film: stealing and double crossing is punishable by the innocent and unguided forces of nature, money is a corruptible power, sometimes nature might be better left untouched, and keeping the family unit intact is priority number one, as is always the case in all of Spielberg's movies. But in the foreground of all of that morality is this awesome visual roller coaster ride filled with some of the most breathtaking computer video images and hand crafted puppetry I have ever seen. It's a toss up. I can take those images of the "Jurassic Park" banner falling around the tyrannosaurus rex being attacked by raptors on one side and compare that to the image of a tyrannosaurus rex chasing one of the jeeps in the rear view mirror with the words "object in mirror may be closer than it appears" on the other. Those are some cool images, but one smacks of contrived metaphor and the other screams with raw power juxtaposed with situational irony. I'll always respect Spielberg as one of cinema's powerhouse figures, but there will always be something to disagree about. On the disc with the movie were a number of behind the scenes featurettes including Spielberg with his creative team planning out images from the movie in pre-production, as well as a perfectly matched stop motion animation mock up of the raptor hunt scene in the kitchen. I would personally love to see someone take the whole movie and turn it into this kind of film-making. Picked this up at the University library.