I want to see Tertiary Park

Rating: 7/10 (28 November 1999)

I'm amazed how badly this film has aged - it's only been six years. I enjoyed it back in 1993, but on seeing it again last night all manner of uncharitable thoughts kept popping into my head, chief among them the impression that Spielberg, who had lavished so much effort on `Jaws', just wasn't trying.
The dinosaur mystique is hard for me to understand. Sure, they're fantastic beasties, but so are many other extinct animals; and if I had a choice I'd rather pay to see a mammoth, or a giant wombat, or a tiny Eocene horse. But PART of the dinosaur mystique is bound up with the idea of a lost world. That's what really thrills people about `King Kong'. The island Spielberg's dinosaurs occupy, by contrast, is prosaic and modern. No doubt it was a deliberate artistic decision to combine dinosaurs with cars, electric fences, cafés and air vents, but it's hard to find two consecutive shots that don't remind us of the modern world in some way, most of the charm of the creatures is thereby lost. This is the more inexcusable in a film that throws everything else to the winds - story, character, wit, plausibility - to concentrate on the strangely attractive flavour of dinosaurs.
As for the dinosaurs ... Some time before `Jurassic Park' there was the Cambrian explosion, when all manner of special effects techniques proliferated; after `Jurassic Park' all, with the exception of computer animation, became extinct, or virtually extinct. It's not the film's fault. Most of the dinosaurs on display did NOT originate in the belly of a computer; those that did look neither better nor worse than those that did not. The computer animation is more than adequate but charmless, with something subtly but deeply wrong - exactly like all subsequent computer animation. The art hasn't progressed. `Jurassic Park' is still as good as it gets.
So far, so bland: what's intolerable is the preaching. This was the only thing that irritated me in 1993 and it irritates me more now. The moral of the story, with which we are repeatedly bludgeoned, is twofold: (a) people who think they don't like children are either mistaken or villains, in either case in need of therapy; and (b) man should not play God - any attempt to develop some biological science will strike us down, because of chaos theory, or quantum mechanics, or some such. This is all piffle. But it's not the ridiculous messages that annoys me: it's the fact that I'm being preached to AT ALL, and so clumsily. (Did you, too, develop a desire to throttle Jeff Goldblum in mid-speech? I hope so.) `Jaws' didn't pretend that it was a statement about how we will be struck down by divine anger if we arrogantly disregard nature and go swimming at the beach.