Reviews: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

                  You know something has gone horribly wrong with your action-adventure movie when you’re left thinking how much better it would have been if they had just cut out the ‘heroes’ entirely and made the entire movie about the ‘villains.’

                  The story: four years after the events of Jurassic Park we find Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) visiting John Hammond (Richard Attenburough). Malcolm, we learn, has hit hard times due to his insistence on telling the truth about what happened on Isla Nublar, which InGen, Hammond’s company, preferred to cover up, an effort headed by Hammond’s snooty nephew, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard). Hammond then tells Malcolm that there was another island, Isla Sorna, in which the animals were actually bred before being shipped to the island. After the events on Nublar, Sorna (Site B) was abandoned and the animals left to die in the wild. Instead, they survived and formed their own ecosystem on the island, an ecosystem Ludlow intends to ‘exploit’ to recoup the loses from Jurassic Park. To counter him, Hammond intends to send a team to document the dinosaurs to build up public opinion to keep their habitat untouched. Malcolm is initially adamant against this idea, until he finds out that his girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already on the island.

                  Rushing the team – comprised of photographer/ecoterrorist Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and field equipment specialist Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) – to the island to rescue her, Malcolm finds Sarah studying stegosaurs and casually dismissing all his concerns, implying that they’re outdated and sexist (!). The argument is interrupted first by the appearance of Malcolm’s semi-estranged daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who turns out to have stowed away in their high-tech trailer, and then by the arrival of another team from InGen, this one led by Ludlow and commanded by Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite giving what is easily the film’s best performance). This one has come to capture the dinosaurs and rounds up a number of herbivores. That night, Nick and Sarah sabotage their camp and release the dinosaurs, destroying most of their equipment. They also find an injured infant tyrannosaurus and decide to take it back to their trailer for medical attention…

A brain the size of a walnut, just like the stegosaurs you can see in the background.

                  Now, I’m sure you can see the main flaw just in that brief description. Honestly, didn’t anyone involved in this picture stop to think “wait a second; ever single death in the movie is the direct fault of our supposed heroes!”

                  They don’t even try to disguise it; Sarah and Nick sneak into the camp and release the dinosaurs, who proceed to trash all the high-tech equipment InGen brought (you’d think at least some of it would have survived). This is what strands the teams, this is what leads to the many horrible deaths…and they’re praised for it! Nick even tells the mercenaries that, because of their plans, they ‘have no rights’ (this, incidentally, comes immediately after the ‘bad guys’ save him and offer their assistance).

                  And what is the villains’ evil scheme? To capture some of these (extinct, artificially-resurrected) animals and put them in a zoo. Quelle horreur!

                  Let’s think about this for a second (something the writers obviously didn’t do). First of all, Ludlow’s claim that “an extinct animal that’s been brought back to life has no rights” is not at all unreasonable. It could be argued with, and I don’t think I’d agree, but it’s not unreasonable. InGen made these creatures, and made them specifically to show and turn a profit. Why is it so unconscionable for them to try to follow through on that plan?

                  For those who aren’t convinced by the above, there’s this. We’re talking about the most endangered creatures in the world here; a single ecosystem of a dozen different species isolated on a small island. Most of these species have double or even single digit populations. All it would take is a small plague to hit the island and suddenly brachiosaurus is back in the museums. Heck, it wouldn’t even take that! If the T-Rex population starts expanding (you know, beyond the current three), it’s going to be bad news for some of the prey species.

The simple and obvious fact is that a life in captivity is the best chance of survival for most of these species. Not only would it give those particular individuals protection from predators, natural disasters, and disease, but they could be then bred and either reintroduced into the wild (on another island, or back on that same one) or sold off to other zoos. That way, not only would the overall populations increase, but the temptation to take animals off the island – i.e. the very thing the heroes are trying to prevent – would be consequently reduced. If it’s a choice between a very expensive and dangerous recovery mission and a very expensive living animal, most people will choose the latter.

Then again, the heroes’ plan makes no sense. Hammond wants to rally public opinion to preserve Isla Sorna as is and leave the dinosaurs in peace (by documenting the dinosaurs in their “natural habitat,” conveniently forgetting that their natural habitat has been gone for sixty-five million years). But documenting living dinosaurs is probably more likely to produce the desire to go and see them in person, so far from preventing InGen’s plans he’s more likely to be encouraging them (“look at these awesome dinosaurs! Don’t you agree they should be left completely isolated so that you’ll never actually see them?”).

Not only that, but say they succeed; say he manages to stop InGen from capturing and displaying the dinosaurs (which, again, they created). What’s to prevent someone else from going to the island to do the exact same thing? Does Hammond intend to station eco-terrorists on the island 24-7? Once word gets out that there are living dinosaurs on this island, all the public opinion in the world isn’t going to prevent a stampede of people to capture them and put them on display…unless, of course, they have a safer and more convenient alternative, as outlined above.

Realistically, it ought to be obvious that the scenario Hammond is trying to prevent is inevitable and the best he could hope to do is control and curtail it.

In short, the ‘heroes’ are both criminally indifferent (at best, since they clearly don’t care that their actions are almost certain to get people killed) and incredibly stupid and short-sighted (since they’re making things worse for the dinosaurs long-term). So, basically your typical environmentalists. In contrast, the worst that could be said about the bad guys is that they’re a little rough with the animals. The five-ton animals that could kill them with a careless movement.

Again, neither Nick nor Sarah nor Malcolm ever express any remorse or regret over the dozens of deaths that they are directly responsible for, and the only time they are confronted with that responsibility is a single line of dialogue from Roland which is passed over almost immediately (and which Nick answers by accusing them of “strip-mining the place.” Even if that weren’t a gross hyperbole, that still wouldn’t justify him endangering all their lives!). Actually, the ‘villains’ are a lot more pleasant and forgiving towards our heroes than they have any right to be; they immediately take them into their party, offering help and protection to the very people who caused their predicament. And in return, they get nothing but smug, self-righteous accusations and continued endangerment; Nick keeps trying to sabotage their weapons and Sarah is too stupid to take off the jacket covered in blood! Meanwhile, Roland and Ludlow are nothing but solicitous, offering help and concern for their welfare at every turn.

In the original, the human characters were, if not especially deep, at least genuine and likeable enough that you worried about them. Here the most likeable characters are the ostensible bad guys, whom the so-called heroes deliberately place in danger time and time again. This represents such a gigantic misstep that it would be enough to singlehandedly sink the movie even if everything else worked.

But it doesn’t. Outside of Malcolm and Roland, the characters are almost all horrible. Sarah, as noted, is a moron. We hear all about how capable and experienced she is, but the very first thing we see her do is to go right up close to a baby stegosaurus and rub her hands all over it, sparking a stampede. Come on, Boy Scouts are taught not to do stuff like that! 

Animals just love it when their young smell like human!

Not only that, but, as noted, she keeps wearing the jacket soaked in blood while trekking through Tyrannosaur territory, even though she was the one who warned about the T-Rex’s super-powerful sense of smell (and the fact that it’s a tropical jungle! What does she need a jacket for?). Worst of all, even in the midst of all this, she still takes it upon herself to lecture everyone else about how they can’t disturbed the animals, about how she’s right and everyone else is wrong and she gets praised for it! She’s the worst kind of self-righteous asshole, and she’s supposes to be the heroine. 

Nick’s even worse, seeing as he’s the one who gets everyone else killed. He’s literally plays the exact same role as Nedry did in the original, except he does it for ‘environmental’ reasons so no one blames him for it. Add in that when he’s not playing the nature hero he acts like a frat-boy, and that the first thing he does after getting rescued by the mercenaries is to insult them and pick fights with them, which he continues to do throughout the movie (Roland, for his part, is unfailingly polite, making the whole thing even more obnoxious).

Kelly, meanwhile, is pretty much everything that Lex and Tim weren’t: obnoxious, whiney, and entitled. Worst of all, while poor Lex and Tim were simply caught in a bad situation through no fault of their own, Kelly got herself into this mess, which makes her presence even more infuriating.

Ludlow’s an unreconstructed caricature of an evil capitalist. The trouble is that, apart from being snooty and obnoxious, he never actually does anything evil. Almost none of the deaths of the film are his fault (except the ones in San Diego, which are, again, partially Nick and Sarah’s fault as well), and apart from some vague accusations that he helped cover up the first film’s accident he’s really guilty of nothing except wanting to build a zoo for profit. And in the end, he actually does show some remorse for his actions, more so than Nick or Sarah ever show. That’s right: the villain evinces more regret and sorrow over the consequences of his actions than the heroes do for their far greater culpability in many more horrible deaths.

One quasi exception is Eddie, who at least is amiable and decent enough and doesn’t participate in any of the, you know, terrorism. So, of course, he gets subjected to the most horrific death in the film due to the stupidity of his compatriots (whom he dies trying to save from a disaster that, again, they caused). Then there’s Roland’s friend Ajay, who’s perfectly decent but since almost all of his scenes got cut he barely counts as a character. He dies horribly too. 

"I can't think of any possible ways this could go wrong, can you?"

 Remember how I complained that in the first film characters sometimes did really stupid things just because the script wanted them to die? The same thing happens here, except worse. For instance, if you have a secure, armored trailer to protect yourself from eight-ton predators, would you park it, say, in a nice defendable position near the beach, or right next to a hundred foot cliff overlooking the ocean!? Similarly, if you are going on a very dangerous expedition to a remote island, whether to hunt or to observe, would you a). arrange regular check-ins and an automatic pick-up should you lose contact, or b). just assume that nothing will go wrong with your equipment and that the one person in your team who speaks the same language as your rescue boat will always be around?

Even otherwise intelligent characters like Roland do stupid things just because the script says so; like the fact that Roland apparently doesn’t carry any extra rounds for his elephant gun, which he carries barrel-up in a driving rainstorm and leaves unattended next to the known-saboteur.

The supposedly hardened mercenaries go off to use the bathroom and get lost. They sleep without setting a watch (to the point that they don’t notice a Tyrannosaur entering their camp until someone wakes up and starts screaming) and move on without doing a head count. They leave their guns lying around and don’t check them afterwards (survival skills aside, that’s basic gun usage) and panic as soon as anything goes wrong. I mean, granted InGen is near Chapter 11 at this point, but you’d think they’d splurge a little here, rather than hiring the lowest bidder.

You know, between these guys, Nedry, and whoever was in charge of designing the park, I’m starting to think InGen’s problems all stem from their HR Department. An examination of their hiring policies would seem to be in order here.

It’s not totally worthless. The dinosaurs themselves do what they can to class up the joint. The first scene with the stegosaurs is suitably impressive and Spielberg wisely settles for honoring rather than trying to repeat the grandeur of the first film’s brachiosaurus. There are some undeniably cool sequences, such as the big round-up scene where the ‘hunters’ chase and capture several herbivores, including a pachysephalasaurus and a parasaurolaphus.  A late sequence involving the velociraptors is overlong, but has its moments, including a darkly slapstick bit where Malcolm and a raptor end up knocking out all the windows of a shed as it tries to get at him, and a scene with Malcolm trapped in a car that tells me someone working on the movie had just seen Friday the 13^th Part 3. This sequence is also preceded by perhaps the most striking image of the film; an overhead shot of the raptors approaching their prey through the long grass like torpedoes streaking through the water. As for the infamous San Diego sequence, on the one hand it’s arguably one of the stupidest bits in any major studio picture of the 1990s (which is saying something), but on the other it’s about the only time in the whole movie that the filmmakers appear to be having any fun. For that, I’m willing to give it a pass (right up until the needlessly cruel death they serve up for Ludlow – one of the few scenes lifted directly from the book, except there it happened to someone who actually deserved it).

"Now to find Jack Horner's house..."

And that’s another thing; the deaths here (and there are a lot of them) are almost all a lot meaner than the ones in the first film. There’s more vitriol, more “take that!” than we had last time, compounded by the fact that, with one exception (Roland’s asshole second-in-command, Dieter, played by Peter Stormare), all the characters who die here are basically ordinary people just doing their jobs. In contrast, consider the deaths in the first film; Nedry and Gennaro both at least crossed a moral line and so their horrific deaths could be said to represent a kind of ‘poetic justice.’ And while Muldoon and Mr. Arnold didn’t do anything wrong, they were both killed by the velociraptors: the ‘villain’ dinosaurs. Now, there really aren’t any ‘villain’ dinosaurs this time around; we’re still supposed to root for the T-Rex. This makes the fact that the dinos slaughter people by the dozen, usually in long, drawn-out ways, a lot more, well, uncomfortable than the deaths in the first film. Eddie’s death is a particularly dramatic example of this; it lasts a good minute or so, is especially gruesome, it’s directed against one of the most decent guys in the film, and it happens at the, er, hands of the dinosaur we’re supposed to ‘like.’ It’s practically a guide on how not to do a monster movie encapsulated in one scene.

Even the dinosaurs have lost some of their bite (sorry). The velociraptors are reduced to practically a cameo and none of the herbivores come close to the grandeur of the brachiosaurus. The Tyrannosaurs are front and center almost the whole time, but despite (or perhaps because of) a jacked-up body-count they never create the same impact as the one from the first film.

Let me explain: in the first film, when the Tyrannosaurus knocked over a car it seemed to take her some effort. She had to hit it a couple times before it flipped. Here, the Tyrannosaurs introduce themselves by sending an armored jeep flying with, apparently, a single blow. Do you see the problem? In the first film, we never doubted that the Tyrannosaur could do what she does, in part because we saw that it took some doing. She was believably powerful because the car was believably heavy. Here, where cars go flying when the T-Rex nudges them with his foot (seriously, that’s not an exaggeration; it happens), all we see is a bunch of CGI. It’s a similar dynamic to the fact that the stunts in classic Jackie Chan movies are much more impressive than the ones in, say, The Matrix because we believe that they could actually be done.

The only new dinosaurs who come close to having the impact that the ones in the first film did are, ironically enough, the tiny procompsognathus (‘compies’). They succeed due to the fact that they seem so cute and harmless, being about the size of a chicken and squeaking and chirping like birds. Then, before you know it, you’re being swarmed by dozens of them at once, like piranha. They’re genuinely unsettling creatures and, consequently, a film highlight. 

This is where the "please do not feed the dinosaurs" sign really comes in handy

There are really only two characters with any real meat to them: Jeff Goldblum provides a small window of likeability, relying on the audience good-will he has left over from the previous film. The fact that Malcolm is the only one who seems even remotely aware of how dangerous this whole thing is and keeps frantically trying to warn the others (especially Sarah) to take the damn dinosaurs seriously earns him a lot of audience surrogate points, enough that we are willing to overlook his tacit consent to the, you know, negligent homicide. I also like an early (and easily missed) line of his in which he angrily tells Ludlow that "There are no 'versions' of the truth!"

On the other hand, Malcolm has undoubtedly lost his edge. He’s no longer a ‘rock-star’ mathematician, swaggering around and lording his intelligence over everyone else. He’s…well, pretty much just Jeff Goldblum; he might as well have been reprising his role from Independence Day, the unique features of his character from the first movie almost all gone. I mentioned in the previous film that Malcolm acted as though he thought he was the hero. Here he actually is the hero, but doesn’t seem aware of it. Malcolm doesn’t mention Chaos Theory once, and only mentions mathematics or science at all a couple times in passing. Pretty much all he does is snark and try to get the idiots he’s saddled with to understand the situation they’re in. Granted, it’s reasonable that Malcolm would be considerably subdued by the events of the first film (and there are some fairly well-done allusions to that idea without making it specific), but if you’re going to strip so much of the character away, why bother bringing him back in the first place?

The other enjoyable character is Pete Posthlethwaite’s Roland, a classic aging Great White Hunter who is bored with hunting, feels out-of-step with the modern world, and has pretty well resigned himself to a quiet retirement until he is met with the prospect of one final hunt pitting his skills against “the greatest predator who ever lived:” Tyrannosaurus. Posthlethwaite is sadly underwritten, and a key establishing scene was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor (possibly because the scene – which featured him beating up some tourists for harassing a waitress – would have had him overshadowing the ‘hero’ characters even more than he does), but he plays the role so well that we immediately understand this man and are invested in his story. That, of course, makes it all the more frustrating that we don’t get to see more of it. There are a lot of themes that could be drawn on here: contrast of old-school men with modern businessmen like Ludlow, the grandeur and folly of great achievements, parallels between Roland the outdated hunter and the Tyrannosaurus itself, etc. But Spielberg isn’t really interested in making any of them. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with Roland except have him acting cool all the time. Here he has a great actor in a role that could have an honest-to-goodness poetry to it, and he’s content to simply have him hang around in the background.

This points to an interesting facet about Spielberg; that he seems to have lost his ability to make movies like this. The younger Spielberg made perhaps the greatest monster movie of all time (Jaws), the greatest adventure movie of all time (Raiders of the Lost Ark), and one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time (Close Encounters). These movies – along with his other masterpieces like E.T. and the first Jurassic Park evinced an enthusiasm, a delight in the material, a sense that he was having just as much fun as anyone else, that The Lost World does not. It seems as though Spielberg were, well, tired of this kind of movie, or was just going through the motions trying to recapture something he had lost. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, in the meantime, he had made Schindler’s List and had simply lost his taste for adventure films. His later efforts in that direction – i.e. War of the Worlds, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – have all been middling, sloppy efforts at best that tell me his heart wasn’t in them (the only time he seems to have been having any fun recently was the lighthearted Catch Me If You Can). For better and for worse, Spielberg had made the transition into a ‘serious’ director and now there was no going back.

In short, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is not a good movie. It could have been a good movie. It had all the elements in place for a good movie: talented actors, a great director, masterful special effects, dinosaurs, etc. But the apathy on the part of the writers and director are palpable, in depressing contrast to the enthusiasm that was so evident in the first film, and leaves us with a pile of wasted possibilities strung together with poor writing.  

Final Rating: 2/5. The still-spectacular visuals and talented cast might make it worth seeing, if you can stomach the bad writing and mostly horrible characters. 

"See y'ah next time, folks!"

RIP Jonathan Winters

Good Lord, we're losing classic-era entertainers by the day! Comedian Jonathan Winters has died at the age of 87.

For those of you who don't know, Winters was a pioneering improv comic; a freewheeling, maniacal, lightning-witted performer who paved the way for the likes of Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Patton Oswalt, and Billy Crystal, among countless others.

Personally, I'm most familiar with Winters on account of two very different roles. The first was his turn in the 1963 all-star comedy epic It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, where he played the truck driver Mr. Pike. In that role Winters had the distinction of starring in perhaps the single funniest sequence of a tremendously funny movie, in which he chases two terrified attendents all around all their gas station, completely demolishing it with his bare hands in the process (the sequence of events that leads to this is too complicated to get into here; they believe he's an escaped mental patient and he's out to take revenge on a con-man played by Phil Silvers).

The other role that springs to mind was one of his rare dramatic performances in an episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. In the episode A Game of Pool, Winters plays a deceased champion who returns from the dead to answer a challenge by an up-and-comer played by Jack Klugman. It's an excellent episode, dealing with the question of what it means to be a champion, and whether the effort is worth it. Winters gave a rich, slightly creepy performance as the unpredictable grand master who alternates between being deathly serious about the game and treating the whole thing as a lark. He also gets to show his comedic talents a bit, as his character begins toying with Klugman's late in the game.

I am painfully aware that this barely scratches the surface of Winter's fifty-plus-year career in film and television, not to mention his talents as a writer and painter. Suffice to say, he was one of the last of the great talents of his generation, and he will be sorely missed.

Requiescat in Pacem.

Reviews: Jurassic Park

 

            As a life-long dinosaur nut, I’ve of course seen Jurassic Park more times than I can count. Yet seeing it on a big screen was a new and wonderful experience. And I’m using ‘wonderful’ in it’s most literal and correct sense; an experience filled with wonder.

            On an island off the coast of Costa Rica, billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenburough) is creating new kind of ‘biological preserve,’ but when one of the workers is killed during the construction his investors – represented by the oily Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) – threaten to pull funding over safety concerns. To assuage them, he offers to have a team of experts investigate and sign off on the island. To that end he entices paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) to be his experts, while Gennaro brings the eccentric ‘rock star mathematician’ Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Shortly after they arrive on the island, Hammond shows his guests the result of his work; a living Brachiosaurus.

            Welcome to Jurassic Park; where dinosaurs rule the Earth.  

             The awed and somewhat unnerved experts set out on a test tour, accompanied by Hammond’s visiting grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), and watched carefully by the park’s head technician, Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson before he was the coolest man in the world) and security chief, Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck). Unbeknownst to any of them, however, Hammond’s lead programmer, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) has done a deal with Hammond’s competitors to steal the dinosaur embryos that very night. But as he puts his plan into action, a tropical storm hits the island…

            Where to begin with Jurassic Park? I suppose, in inversion of my usual format, I’ll begin with the movie’s flaws, which are, unfortunately, many.

            In the first place, as has been noted many times before, there is very little character development in the film. We don’t really learn anything at all about Ellie Sattler, except that she and Alan are dating and that she’s a paleobotanist (though she only talks about plants in a couple scenes, meaning some people in the audience might not even realize what a ‘paleobotanist’ is. I suppose it’s not a subject that comes up much when running from dinosaurs). Alan is only a little better; all we know about him is that he hates children, computers, and trees. Malcolm pretty much exists to utter dire warnings and snark, while the fact that Lex and Tim’s parents are getting divorced is reduced to a single line of dialogue in a scene that they aren’t even in.

            Basically, there’s not really any ‘human’ story going on here; not a lot of growing or changing among the characters. In the end, Alan’s more tolerant towards children, Hammond’s decided not to make any more dinosaur parks, and…that’s about it. Oh, and the less said about Dennis Nedry or Donald Gennaro the better. 

            The only character with any real development is Hammond, who gets a rather touching speech reminiscing about the first attraction he ever made – a flea circus – and how what he had wanted to do with Jurassic Park was to inspire people to wonder at something that was real: “something they could see and touch…an aim not devoid of merit.”

            He’s shown to be a loving family man, both towards his grandchildren and to his daughter (judging by the fleeting reference to her divorce, we can assume he decided to invite the children to take their minds off of it). He also is simultaneously open to and dismissive of dissenting opinions; he invites people to give them, but then he tends to brush them off with a laugh and a smile. Even with the park falling to pieces about him, he still talks about proceeding. It isn’t until he finds himself listening over the phone as the velociraptors attack his friends and family that he finally gives up on his dream.

            He also seems to have an inflated sense of his own people skills. Upon meeting Alan and Ellie, he boasts that he “can tell instantly about people – it’s a gift!” But he also hired the world’s most patently untrustworthy programmer to run his park and brushed off his complaints of low pay and lack of appreciation.

            Which brings us to the other giant flaw in Jurassic Park; the fact that the script so clearly stacks the deck to get the result it wants. There’s really no getting around the fact that Jurassic Park is a disaster waiting to happen; not only is the head programmer obviously the last person you would want in a position of responsibility, but the whole park is bundled into a single huge computer program, meaning that everything from the fences to the phones to the friggin’ door locks to the control room are dependent upon this one system. A system, I might add, that doesn’t even have the memory to run and fix a bug at the same time. I mean, good God! Forget corporate sabotage: didn’t anyone ask what would happen if there was a simple power-outage? Not only that, but the circuit breakers, rather than being kept somewhere easily accessible (the control room, the emergency bunker) are stored deep in a labyrinthine maintenance shed “at the other end of the compound,” with the velociraptor pen conveniently located directly between them and the control room.

            Then there’s the design of the park itself, which has automated cars take people from cage to cage (the doors on the cars don’t even lock, as the film itself points out). Not only is this highly inconvenient (what if you want to linger at a specific paddock? What if you want to skip the protoceratops and go straight to the T-Rex?), but given that the paddocks themselves are filled with dense jungle right up to the fences, it’s a hundred-to-one chance that they’ll see anything at all (as, indeed, they don’t until they actually leave the cars and walk into one of the paddocks. See above RE: car locks). Plus there’s the total dependence upon electric fences: hadn’t anyone involved ever heard of concrete moats? How about walls or Plexiglas? Heck, how about good old-fashioned fences made of actual metal, rather than flimsy wires? Granted a simple iron fence probably wouldn’t stop the T-Rex, but it certainly would have been appreciated around the velociraptors!

            Basically, the entire park is so designed that a single problem would bring the whole thing crashing down, and then it was placed entirely in the hands of the world’s least reliable employee. Of course things went to hell! It didn’t take chaos theory or “life finding a way;” all it took was a healthy dose of human stupidity!

            Speaking of which, characters occasionally do really stupid things – things that they would never do – just so that the filmmakers get the results they want. Probably the worst instance of this is Muldoon hunting the raptors in dense brush (which he probably should know better than to try) with his gunstock still folded up, causing him to waste precious seconds trying to quietly unfold it when he gets one of the raptors in his sights. Likewise, you’d think that Nedry would have mapped out the route to the boat previously (especially since he mentions having made a ‘dry run’ of the plan). Actually, forget mapping out; he works on the island, he presumably goes back-and-forth using the boat on a fairly regular basis. Why does he suddenly have no idea which way to go?

            Nedry in general is a mess of a character; a humiliating, overdone caricature of a role. Gennaro, the other ‘asshole victim’ isn’t much better; responding to the brachiosaurus with an awed “we’re gonna make a fortune with this place!” and abandoning the children the instant the T-Rex appears. He does, however, get a couple of humanizing moments early on, especially his reaction to Hammond declaring ruefully that “the blood sucking lawyer” is the only one who supports him.

            Okay, that pretty much covers the flaws, now onto the good stuff. In the first place, though the characters are all underdeveloped, the actors are so good that they almost make up for it. This is an extremely talented cast and they inject their characters with enough life that we wonder just what they could have done with more to work with. Sam Neill and Laura Dern are particularly good at this. Neill, who was mostly known for villain roles before this, actually comes across as a fairly ordinary man thrust into a heroic role against his will (yes, ‘unlikely heroes’ are a dime a dozen, but how often do we actually buy the ‘unlikely’ part?). He invests Dr. Grant with a lot of rich little details that tell us much more about him than the dialogue does. For instance, watch him while the baby raptor is hatching; as Hammond explains about how they imprint upon the first creature they see, Grant’s silently trying to direct the raptors attention onto himself. Or when he’s trying to coax Tim into climbing down the huge tree they’re currently in he likens it to a tree house: “Did your dad ever build you a tree house?” “No,” Tim answers, to which Grant mutters “me neither.” 

            Likewise, Laura Dern, while she’s not given much to do (her biggest contribution is turning the power back on), at least plays Ellie with enough force and heart to make us realize that she really could have been a great character if the script had given her the chance.

            As for Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, well, as the saying goes, you either find him hilarious or unbearable. Fortunately, I fall into the former category. Malcolm is pretty much Goldblum’s defining role, and it’s impossible to picture anyone else in the part. Malcolm’s anti-science speeches are fortunately kept at a minimum here (there are legitimate concerns that could be made about the morality of re-creating dinosaurs via genetic tampering and then selling them as tourist attractions, but he doesn’t really make them, instead giving some guff about ‘unearned power’ and ‘life will find a way’). Instead, Malcolm serves as a one-man Mystery Science Theater for the experience, flirts, and generally acts like he thinks he’s the star of the show…until he gets proven definitively wrong halfway through and becomes notably less chatty for the rest of the film.

            Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazello as the dreaded kids may have relatively thankless roles, but personally I found them quite palatable characters (certainly more so than in the book, where Lex was about the most annoying brat imaginable). They play off each other nicely, and they both do a good job of acting terrified, especially in the famous kitchen sequence (look at the ‘oh crap!’ expression on Tim’s face as he realizes that he might not have the stamina left to outrun the velociraptor). My favorite moment with them comes as they’re watching the T-Rex chow down on one of the gallimimuses. As Lex begs for them to move on, Tim watches in entirely credible fascination: “Look at how much blood!” Really, how many twelve-year-old boys would want to be torn away from watching a Tyrannosaur eating?

            The great Richard Attenburough, of course, gives the best performance of any of the human stars and has the most to work with. He sells Hammond both as a canny businessman and a genuinely decent man. The rare flashes of anger he exhibits reminds us that he is the boss and knows how to lead his employees, while he also exhibits genuine tenderness and affection towards others; his employees Arnold and Muldoon (whom we understand he actually considers to be friends as well as employees), his grandchildren, and the dinosaurs themselves (he notes that he’s been present for the birth of every dinosaur on the island as he coos over the baby velociraptor in his hands).

            The late Bob Peck does what he can as Muldoon, but he’s as short-changed as anyone (though he does get some great little moments, and his exit line is one of the finest ever). Samuel L. Jackson is likewise pretty much just making do with his highly limited character. I’ve already mentioned Wayne Knight and Martin Ferrero as Nedry and Genarro, respectively. And…that pretty much sums up the cast of human characters.

            But let’s be honest: no one really cares about the human characters. We’re here for the dinosaurs!

            There are a lot of reasons why this film is so much more effective than its sequels, but one of the key factors is in how well it deploys its stars. I could do a complete point-by-point dissection of how each creature is perfectly set up and then utilized for maximum impact. And I think I will!

            Okay, okay; I’ll limit myself to summaries for most creatures and only give a full dissection of one of them: the Tyrannosaur.

            The T-Rex is first mentioned in passing by Grant, who compares its limited eyesight unfavorably to the keen senses of the velociraptors, playing off its high-profile to build up the new creatures. It’s next brought up when Alan and Ellie gaze in awe at the Brachiosaur. Hammond, glowing with pride, takes the first chance to drop the fact that the park indeed includes a Tyrannosaurus, news which the two dino experts react to with predictable delight.

             Then comes the first indication that a live Tyrannosaur might not be an entirely good thing; as the characters enter the visitor’s center, the camera briefly pauses on a close-up of the fossilized T-Rex decorating the lobby, allowing us to take note of the sheer size of its head and jaws while the music, formerly quick-paced and exciting, suddenly becomes low and threatening.

            Then comes the tour. A scene between Nedry and Hammond in the control room is interrupted by Muldoon calling for silence as the visitors approach the Tyrannosaur paddock. They switch off the automated tour guide and the visitors go silent as they pull up in front of the massive fence, which rises higher than the treetops. All is quiet as they scan the trees, which are ominously still. Hoping to show off their star attraction, the controllers summon a tethered goat to tempt the dinosaur. When even this proves unsuccessful, Grant notes disparagingly “T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt.” The tour then moves on, the visitors disappointed, but also perhaps relieved (there’s no exclamations of annoyance as there were at the dilophosaur exhibit).

            All the above, the call for silence and the nervous scanning of the tree-tops, serves to remind us that this is something unusually dangerous, in contrast to the more prosaic dilophosaurs they just left behind; dangerous, yet awe-inspiring.

            After this we have the intervening scenes with the triceratops, Nedry putting his plan into operation, and the power failing. As Mr. Arnold frantically tries to undo Nedry’s program, Hammond nervously asks where, exactly, the vehicles stopped. Cut to the same tethered goat.

            What follows is a fairly lengthy interlude where Grant and Malcolm talk about what’s going on, Tim plays around with the night-vision goggles, and everyone seems to be resigning themselves to waiting out the storm.

            Suddenly, Tim stops fiddling with the goggles as he feels a tremor in the earth. The soundtrack begins playing increasingly loud booms. As the car’s occupants watch nervously, the glasses of water set on the dashboard vibrate ominously (incidentally, nice acting by Mazello here; you can see that he, as the dinosaur-nut, realizes what this means before anyone else does). Tim then checks on the goat…but now there is no goat.

            As bits of goat drop onto the car, the terrified visitors watch as a big, two-fingered claw slides harmlessly off of the no-longer electric fence (just above the “Danger: 10,000 Volts” sign). Then the massive T-Rex looms up, her head in the tree-tops, and swallows the goat whole…before turning her attention to the cars.

            Gennaro panics and flees, taking refuge in a bathroom. The T-Rex, meanwhile, makes short work of the fence, tearing the wires off with such force that she bends the metal posts outward. Then having finished off the fence, she strides forward between the cars – which she towers over – and roars into the night.  

            What follows is one of the film’s most justly celebrated sequences as the T-Rex mauls the jeep with the screaming children inside. This provides a great demonstration for the beast’s raw power as she turns the car over with her head and begins ripping out its underbelly and tires, crushing it into the mud, and finishes up by throwing it off a cliff into a tree. The set up is similar to a bear or a lion mauling a car, only elevated to the tenth power. We are well aware throughout that no contemporary creature could do what the Tyrannosaur does here.

             From the start, the T-Rex is established as uniquely dangerous, and then when she finally appears she surpasses our expectations. The Tyrannosaur of Jurassic Park is a force of nature; before her, the only sane response is to run. It gets to the point that the mere sound of her roaring in the distance is enough to send Grant and the children into a near-panicked flight over the perimeter fence.

            Something similar is done with the velociraptors, except for the fact that they – as the film’s ‘new’ dinosaurs – get much more build-up. It’s a velociraptor that kills the worker in the opening scene. Shortly thereafter, Grant gives a long speech about how deadly they are, even compared to the T-Rex. Then, on the island, we find that they are kept in their own prison-like enclosure (again, why not just use an iron fence that’s higher than they could jump?), where the visitors watch in horrified fascination as they tear apart a cow, leaving only the bent and bloodied harness. The first thing Muldoon asks when they learn that the fences are failing is whether the raptor fences are still on…which Arnold confirms that they are. Even Nedry, who was so careless and amoral, wasn’t going to mess with the raptors.

            The movie is nicely divided into acts: the first deals with the visitors arriving at the island and discovering the dinosaurs, the second with the dinosaur’s escape, the third with the attempts to regroup and escape the island. The Tyrannosaur dominates the second act, while the raptors move to center stage for the third.

            The velociraptors of Jurassic Park are truly works of art. Their intelligence and human-like size makes them a more immediate and personal threat; more a genuine villain than the massive T-Rex. Their viciousness is established early on with the brutal (offscreen) slayings of the worker (who is dragged into the cage in a manner reminiscent of Chrissie Watkins in Jaws) and the cow. Later we see one of them – the Matriarch, whom Muldoon described early in the film as being the worst of the bunch – killing a major character, and while the scene is obscured by plants, his lingering screams, combined with what little we can see (she clearly has her jaws around his face) is more than enough, especially compared to the one Tyrannosaur victim we’ve seen, who was pretty much killed instantly. In addition to their visual strength, the raptors are the recipients of some truly inspired sound design, alternating between hisses, a kind of guttural honk or bark, and a piercing scream (shades of the Nazgul from The Lord of the Rings). This, coupled with their obvious intelligence and toothy grins, makes them almost come across as demons rather than animals.

 

            Though, of course, I risk losing my dino-nut credentials if I don’t point out that real velociraptors were pretty much nothing like this; they were turkey-sized, only relatively intelligent, and certainly couldn’t hit ‘cheetah speeds.’ The creatures in Jurassic Park are actually deinonychuses (deinonychi?); a much larger cousin of the velociraptor (velociraptors also were native to Mongolia, meaning that Grant couldn’t have been digging one up in Montana). And even for deinonychus, the things we have here are pretty exaggerated. But, really, who cares? They make great villains.

            A similar dynamic is in place with the dilophosaurus. She’s way too small, for one thing (real dilophosaurs were one of the earliest big carnivores and stood about six-feet high and twenty-feet long), though that could be excused by her being a juvenile. The venom and the frill, on the other hand, have their origins entirely in Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg. Still, the visual effect of the small, rather cute chirping critter suddenly opening her frill and becoming a shrieking nightmare is enough to, in my mind, excuse any tampering (more problematic is the question “how did she get in the car?”).

            She’s also is involved in one of my favorite bits of dino-acting. As Nedry impatiently tells her “I don’t have any food!” the dilophosaur is clearly looking him up and down and – metaphorically at least – licking her chops.

            The brachiosaurus, of course, is the focus of the awe-inspiring first glimpse where Grant pronounces in amazement “It’s a dinosaur!” The power of that one scene, the wonder and yearning it produces in the audience, is simply incredible. It encapsulates everything that makes this movie great and is itself a genuine work of art; the closest any of us will ever come to seeing a real dinosaur.

            Occasionally a movie scene will come along that seems to encapsulate the full artistic potential of the medium. The brachiosaur scene in Jurassic Park is one of them.

            There’s not a whole lot to say about the other species present; triceratops only gets to lie around being sick, but she does feature in a great audience surrogate moment as the characters feel her all over, rejoicing in the reality, the aliveness of the animal. “She was always my favorite when I was a kid,” Alan gushes. “And now that I see her, she’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw!”

 

            The parasaurolophus only appears once, at a distance, at the end of the brachiosaur scene (to the point that you’d be forgiven for forgetting they were even in this movie), though they do prompt a moving comment from Grant that quietly reminds us of the enormous gap between our theories of how dinosaurs acted and the fact that we will never really know the truth about them.

            Finally, the gallimimus likewise appear in a single scene, but one that is justifiably famous for its incredible technical artistry as Grant and the kids end up in the middle of a stampede and the camera seems to be running right alongside them as the dinosaurs thunder past.

            Of course, everyone talks about the amazing visual effects, courtesy of ILM and the late Stan Winston. Honestly, the effects here are better than most of the effects today; they have more solidity, more texture, more…life to them. Most CGI effects feel like the artists are trying too hard, wasting time on little details so that the final effect feels overly-rehearsed and unconvincing. Here, by contrast, you can feel the enthusiasm of the filmmakers as they perfect each scene and move on to the next. You sense that they were just as eager to see the completed film as we were, and that eagerness comes off on screen. Look at the patience that went into the scene where the T-Rex first investigates the car containing the kids before trying to break in, or the curled lip on the velociraptor as she watches the children flee the kitchen. These creatures are more than convincingly real; they’re convincingly alive.

            A word on the 3D conversion. For the most part, it works very well; lending texture and depth to the already-spectacular visuals. The only scene that it became a problem for me was, alas, the one scene everyone couldn’t wait to see in 3D: the gallimimus stampede. The 3D conversion left the creatures blurred and impossible to focus on, lessening the impact of that spectacular sequence. It was an isolated moment, but a highly disappointing one.

            Thematically, the major lesson here is that man should not toy around with nature. The lesson backfires about as spectacularly as any I can think of, since the actual effect is “dinosaurs are awesome! We should absolutely bring them back! We just won’t trust Fats von Greedytreason.” The movie’s deck-stacking means that neither science in general nor genetic tampering in particular comes off as the villain here; Nedry and the horrible design of the park itself do (well, and the velociraptor Matriarch, of course). In other words, the take away is less “they tampered in God’s domain” and more “who the heck hired that guy?”

            Other than that, it’s mostly just a paean to man’s love for these long-dead beasts, and as moving a tribute to that love as you’ll ever see, despite all the running, screaming, and dying. The characters never lose their awe of the creatures, even after running for their lives from them. In the end we’re even left with the strangely comforting idea that the dinosaurs are indeed still with us through their children: the birds.

            I’ll conclude with a word on the famous ending. In the context of this strange love that we have for these long-gone creatures, it’s significant that the last act of a dinosaur in the film is a heroic act. What happens I’ll leave unsaid (just in case there’s someone somewhere who doesn’t know), except that, for all its implausibility, no ending of any film has ever made me happier. I remember hearing Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, recount the story of that film’s ending, and how he had thought it was too implausible, to which Spielberg countered that plausibility is less important than what the audience wants. He was right then, and he was right when he designed the ending here. What happens is worth any suspension of disbelief.

            Jurassic Park is a film with very real flaws. Those flaws keep it from being all that it might have been. Nevertheless, none of those flaws ultimately matter to the final product. The talented cast, the superb directing, and the awe-inspiring visuals carry it far beyond any problems in writing or characterization. What we have here is a genuine classic; a movie worth watching over and over again.  

Final Rating: 4.5/5. The stuff that dreams are made of.

Roger Ebert RIP

            Today the sad news broke that Roger Ebert has died after a long battle with cancer.

            Ebert was my first influence in film criticism. On my days home sick from school I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I often passed the time by reading and rereading one of the collections of his reviews we had around the house. He provided me with many invaluable lessons in both thinking and writing about film…and, honestly, in writing in general.

            I have my problems with Ebert as a critic. He had an unfortunate tendency to allow politics (he was, naturally, an arch-liberal) and preconceived notions to dictate his opinion of films. He also raised justifiable incredulity with his lone film script – for the awful Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But at his best, he was one of the wittiest and most insightful voices in film criticism. For all his flaws, he deserved the fame and influence he acquired – the likes of which no other critic had ever or will ever achieve. Certainly as the undisputedly most influential film critic in the world, we could have done a lot worse.

            Looking back, I think my favorite review of his was his almost lazy dissection of the 1998 Godzilla. I still can quote the opening line from memory: “Watching Godzilla at Cannes was like attending a Satanic ritual at St. Peter’s Basillica.” He then described the film as coming last in the festival “like horses in a parade, and perhaps for the same reason.” He even displayed typical good humor over the fact that one of the characters in the movie – the moronic mayor of New York – was a thinly-veiled caricature of himself. Far from expressing outrage or offense, he complained that they should have killed ‘him’ off.  

            One of the reasons I generally enjoyed his writing is that he typically wasn’t a snob; he was as willing to award a glowing tribute to a silly adventure film or special-effects extravaganza as to a pretentious art film.

            I gave up on regularly reading his reviews a long time ago – about the time of his appalling review of the original Godzilla, as a matter of fact (which was so inaccurate and negative that it raises questions about whether he actually watched the thing) – but I still occasionally drop in to check his assessment of a particular movie, whether a classic or a new release. Certainly he was a unique figure in the world of the movies; a star critic. With amateurs such as myself flooding the internet, it seems clear that we will never look upon his like again. For good or for ill, he was the giant of his field and he will be missed.

            Requiescat in Pacem.