The
Poffysaurus
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Dino
Mighty.
by
Jon Dunmore © 10 Apr 2007
DINOSAURS!
No, not "unbelievable" and "incredible" - on the contrary,
Steven Spielberg and his special effects team do such a mighty job on 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 their bitches. 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 (zombies, a T-1000 from the future or Jack Nicholson with an axe), 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 the catalysts for the Running and Screaming. And the movie degenerates
to no better than its Harryhausen stop-motion ancestors. (I always watch this
movie to the point where Laura Dern turns the electric fences back on. By then,
it has soured 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…
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