Wild things

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2008)

"There is no unauthorised breeding in Jurassic Park." - Dr. Woo
"Jurassic Park" has been compared to "Jaws" ("Jaws" was actually a rip-off of "Creature From The Black Lagoon", down to the stealing of the "duh duh duh" soundtrack and several scenes, shot for shot) but thematically it's actually the opposite.
Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" is based upon an earlier film which he wrote called "Westworld", in which an amusement park's stable of robots escaped their planned systems of control and murdered all the park's visitors.
While "Westworld" dealt with cybernetics, "Jurassic Park" takes genetic engineering and develops it within the context of 2 contrasting world views. Crichton takes the classical scientific notion of a mechanistic universe, in which everything is predictable and subject to physical laws, and plays it off against the newly emerging dynamical systems theory, also known as Chaos theory.
In Crichton's book, the mechanistic view comes off as an inadequate strategy of approaching the living world, which is constantly moving, in flux and widely unpredictable. According to Chaos theory, the world is a shifting pattern of processes and vibrations, all interlaced to form a complex mosaic of nature in which figures can't be isolated or removed.
The dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" are genetic reconstructions of species which have already been removed from the global environment. Crichton's book contrasts the mechanistic world of the scientists - their technology, computers, predictions and simulations - with the raw force of nature, wild and ever adapting. His characters keep trying to predict and cater for the beasts, but their computers simply don't have the brainpower to foresee what will happen next. The plot's essentially an update of Shelley's "Frankenstein"; Nature and Science too complex for the arrogant hands of man.
Spielberg's film is mostly devoid of all this stuff, and instead plays like a straightforward adventure movie. It's a cross between "Frankenstein" and "King Kong", with several iconic action set pieces and some memorable CGI work sprinkled about.
Note that Spielberg ends the film just as Melville ends "Moby Dick", the crash of the T-Rex's tail echoing the crash of the whale as it destroys Ahab's ship. Both the Melville and Crichton stories are a direct contrast to "Jaws", which was a classical dragon slayer story in which our hero slays the monster and emerges triumphant. In "Jurassic Park" it is nature who wins, and the humans are forced to flee the island. In "Jaws", the humans conquer nature, tame it, and claim the beaches for themselves.
The dragon slayer myth ("Jaws") is the underlying myth of the mechanistic view of the universe. It spans across folk like Descartes and Francis Bacon, who saw "science" and "man" as "masculinizing" forces who tame a feminized nature with the awesome "laws" of man. "Jurrasic Park", however, is the opposite, and shows what happens when such a mechanistic view of nature serves as the basis for removing a particular species from their environment as though they were mere atoms.
Less talked about are the film's weird gender games and visual gags. Perhaps the best (you have to read the books to get this joke) is a moment of foreshadowing which occurs early on, when a nervous Dr. Grant struggles to connect two female seat belt couplings. The park's dinosaurs have similarly been neutered, yet, as Grant later shows by tying two identical seat-belt parts together, nature always finds a way. Significantly, while men wreak and receive havoc, no females are killed in the film. Ellie, the film's female human hero, even jokes about God making man, man making dinosaurs, dinosaurs eating man and women inheriting the earth. While a joke, it signals to the viewer just who actually controls creation in the film. Men and science may have co-opted the process, but women/Nature still remain the ultimate power in creative process. Like "Aliens", you then have an alignment of the beasts, the dinosaurs, with an unhinged Femininity, and a wild, feminine Nature. In this way the film goes on to perpetuate a very 17th century form of sexism and gender bias: Man is lord of the realm of order, control and science, while woman - in her strangeness, her mystery - is mistress of calamity, destruction and the wilderness, the jungle and womb conflated. Unlike "Aliens", though, Spielberg has his Queens survive with roars of triumph. The men leave with their tails between their legs
8/10 - Spielberg essentially reduced a complex and interesting techno-thriller into another Indiana Jones movie (Sam Niel even resembles Dr Jones). It's very lightweight, and Spielberg's dinosaur attacks are crass, but the film's also slick and exciting at times.
After "Jaws" and "Close Encounters", Spielberg's "popcorn" films got increasingly cartoonish. The fully fleshed characters of his earlier thrillers (Martin Brody, Roy Neary etc) are replaced with cardboard heroes. Spielberg's justification, I suspect, is that he now began making "serious" pictures which he feels better warrant depth and characterisation. Worth multiple viewings.