not a fan

Rating: 4/10 (27 October 2007)

I've seen Jurassic Park probably five or six times, and each time I hope I'll like it better than the last, and I never do. A perfectly wonderful book by Michael Crichton is given the 'Spielberg' treatment and aside from the wonderful special effects, betrayed badly.
Where to begin? First and foremost, one of Spielberg's worst tendencies is to find annoying personal characteristics endearing. The two children aren't precocious and charming, they're little brats, no matter how hard the director tries to paint them otherwise. The character of John Hammond, in the book, was as I recall a rather devious, unscrupulous man; here, he is portrayed as a cheerful, slightly ditsy, misguided Santa Claus. And Laura Dern manages to almost single-handedly sink this movie. Her perpetual "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" expression is probably the single most irritating element in a film full of them. And everyone smiles WAY too much.
Spielberg, for all his supposed genius, also delivers some of the most excruciating action and danger scenes on record. Whenever one of the human characters is in a spot, it is inevitably his or her own stupid fault. They can't lock the door, they won't turn the flashlight off, they're too scared to jump off the fence, they can't run fast enough... every damn scene is like this, to where you want to reach into the screen and slap the hell out of them.
Sam Neill comes off best, in what is really a thankless role as the straight man for all this nonsense. But he's dragged down by the same sappy script.
Well, what about those special effects, you might ask? Yes, the dinosaurs are spectacular and very believable (much more so than the humans really) and they are the only reason I'm giving this four stars out of ten. In 1993, we were still being blown away by filmmakers constantly upping the ante when it came to mind-blowing effects and sure enough, Jurassic Park was state-of-the-art when it came out. Since then, I daresay people have become more blase about such things as they have become more routine.
To be fair, there are some wonderful sequences in Jurassic Park and it's certainly worth seeing at least once. I suppose ultimately that is the most maddening thing about it; it could have been so much better, not just another summer blockbuster, but a truly great motion picture. It's a real shame that it's not.