Dino Mighty

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2007)

DINOSAURS! No, not "unbelievable" and "incredible"  on the contrary, Steven Spielberg and his special effects team do such a mighty job at recreating extinct saurians that they are altogether BELIEVABLE and CREDIBLE! Spielberg is the visionary who brought us *Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind* and *Raiders of the Lost Ark* - but *Jurassic Park* was his *Thriller*. If you didn't know his name before, you sure as dino-dropping knew it now.
Departing considerably from the Michael Crichton book of the same name, the movie follows paleontologists (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) to a remote island where billionaire entrepreneur, John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough), has cloned dinosaurs running around a proposed theme park. (The cloning process, via dinosaur DNA found in ancient mosquitoes, is ingenious, but specious.) Hammond wants the appraisal of experts and the park's target audience, so also invites a lawyer (Martin Ferrero), a chaotician (Jeff Goldblum, clad in all-black to connote some kind of scientific hipness, we presume), and two of his annoying grandkids.
I think we all entered *Jurassic Park* as jubilantly as the actors entered Jurassic Park: "We're going to see dinosaurs! We're going to see dinosaurs!" The wonder and awe lasts exactly one and a half acts. Then the Running and Screaming starts.
Though Crichton's book was an indictment against "tampering in God's domain," weaving paleontology, anthropology, evolution, chaos and genetics into a plausible tale of scientific arrogance, the movie is unrepentantly all about the DINOSAURS. And the fun in seeing them alive and kicking.
The first sighting of the brachiosaur is immense, literally breath-taking, and when Hammond welcomes his charges with the line, "Welcome to Jurassic Park!" we are stunned into gape-mouthedness (as the characters are) with a long shot of Brachiosaurs and Parasauralophii herding by a lake, coupled with John Williams' fanfare theme, raising the hairs on the legs and driving a tear from the eye.
At this point, the film-makers had won. We were theirs. There could be no more stop-motion or Harryhausen after seeing the grandeur and "real-ness" of Spielberg's saurians. Working with the most revolutionary special effects (Industrial Light & Magic and Stan Winston's studio), Spielberg showed us Something Very Old as Something Very New.
And it was a Roarer. But the film (and the franchise) would never again be so wondrous.
For somewhere in the middle of the second act, Spielberg forgets why we love dinosaurs in the first place  for their uniqueness, their unattainable majesty, their awe-inspiring mystery - and instead of conjuring interest in the very fact that they live, they breathe, they walk like birds, spit like snakes and scream like jet engines, Spielberg gutlessly conforms to Hollywood movie convention, turning them into the film's "villains," the element that the "heroes" must run from. In the end, the dinosaurs could have been anything (wolves, zombies, CGI monsters), it made no difference. (The velociraptor kitchen sequence, where they hunt Hammond's grandkids, is especially wasteful, not only because the two kids at that stage have become so irritating that we're rooting for the dinosaurs, but because Spielberg doesn't make movies where kids get eaten. Ergo: no suspense.)
From being the wondrous subjects of the whole excursion, the dinosaurs are demoted to merely providing the third act with Running and Screaming. And the movie degenerates to no better than its Harryhausen stop-motion ancestors. (I always watch this movie to the start of the third act. Then it sours enough to press Stop quite unregretfully and go finish the laundry.)
Spielberg ultimately fell into the trap created and abused by his pal, George Lucas  leaning on his scintillating effects and neglecting his half-baked story. Admittedly, the effects are DINO-MITE! (Somebody slap me.) The tyrannosaur alone is a juggernaut of adrenalin-charged mayhem, and its bellow is a frightful composite of elephants and lions and freight trains on steel wheels at midnight. Utilizing the most up-to-date paleontological data (including theories postulated by Robert Bakker in his iconoclastic tome, *The Dinosaur Heresies*), *Jurassic Park* shows us dinosaurs as "modern" as science can make them, pertaining to skin coloration, anatomy, physiology and behavior.
*Jurassic Park* succeeds on an entertainment level with its technical finesse, its Mesozoic marvels and manufactured excitement, but could have been so much more than a technological monster movie.
And I don't suppose it matters to the Great Unwashed that most of the dinosaurs are from the *Cretaceous* Period
(Movie Maniacs, visit: poffysmoviemania.com)