director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriters
Michael Crichton
David Koepp
based
on the novel by
Michael Crichton
producers
Kathleen Kennedy
Gerald R. Molen
cinematographer
Dean Cundey
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Sam Neill (Dr. Alan Grant)
Laura Dern (Dr. Ellie Sattler)
Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm)
Richard Attenborough (John Hammond)
Bob Peck (Muldoon)
Martin Ferrero (Gennaro)
B.D. Wong (Dr. Henry Wu)
Joseph Mazzello (Tim)
Ariana Richards (Lex)
Samuel L. Jackson (Arnold)
Wayne Knight (Nedry)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 127m
u.s.
release: 6/11/93
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- munich
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
- war
of the worlds
see also:
- jurassic
park III
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When you think of Steven Spielberg,
you do not immediately think of humans. You think of E.T., the
shark in Jaws, the aliens in Close Encounters;
you may have to remind yourself to think of Henry Thomas, Roy
Scheider, or Richard Dreyfuss. A few hours after seeing Jurassic
Park, I had to remind myself that Sam Neill, Laura Dern,
and Jeff Goldblum are in it. The stars, clearly, are the dinosaurs.
They're what you visit Jurassic Park to see, and Spielberg
unveils them like a master showman. You pay about as much attention
to the actors as you would to the tour guides at Disneyland:
They're there, and they're saying things, but you're listening
with half an ear.
Jurassic Park, from Michael Crichton's bestseller
(he wrote the script with David Koepp), would seem to be the
ideal Spielberg project. It has men in wide-brimmed hats making
amazing discoveries in lush jungles and harsh deserts; it has
children; it has a hearty John Williams score; it has special
effects that outdo God. Most of all, particularly during the
last 45 minutes or so, it has the old Spielberg snap. After the
bloated, rhythmless Hook, Spielberg has stopped trying
to improve us and returned to a more basic goal -- to get us
so worked up we can't breathe. Sometimes he drops the ball: The
opening sequence, in which a dinosaur chomps a Jurassic Park
worker, makes our hearts pound until Spielberg blows it with
a dissolve. Maybe Spielberg isn't 100% back on track, but he's
getting there. Jurassic Park places him at about 75% --
perhaps 90% when he's rolling.
Crichton, who obviously wrote Jurassic Park with Spielberg
in mind, is himself a director; his debut was Westworld,
about robots in an electronic resort that go awry. Jurassic
Park is Westworld with dinosaurs. For all the technical
jargon, the story couldn't be simpler. Billionaire John Hammond
(Richard Attenborough) has populated an island with genetically
engineered dinos that his scientists have cloned from dinosaur
DNA. He invites paleontologist Alan Grant (Neill), paleobotanist
Ellie Sattler (Dern), and chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm (Goldblum)
to the island for feedback and support -- inspectors are breathing
down his neck, and he needs reputable endorsement. When the dinosaurs
run amok, Hammond can kiss any endorsement goodbye.
As he demonstrated in Duel and (of course) Jaws,
Spielberg is an ace at building suspense and dread. (He didn't
always need state-of-the-art effects to do it, but...) Yes, Spielberg
lets his critters do a lot of the work for him, but he also gets
a lot of mileage out of simplicity: water trembling in a glass
as a Tyrannosaurus rex thunders closer. The movie has almost
no gore, but it's intense enough to make columnists worry whether
young children should see it. This fretting is needless: Jurassic
Park is scary, but in a healthy, exhilarating way -- no worse,
finally, than King Kong or Godzilla. Spielberg
doesn't rely (much) on shock; his monsters alarm us because of
their savagery, their sheer physical awesomeness. When a swift
velociraptor lunges after children -- skittering over steel tables,
hellishly eager to rip them apart -- your blood freezes. And,
thanks to the computer-generated animation, these beasts don't
move like the jerky dinos you've laughed off in many bad horror
movies. They move with nightmarish speed, fluidity, and efficiency.
Death machines.
The film, however, pays a sad price for its razzle-dazzle: At
about the halfway mark, Jurassic Park becomes less and
less a people-in-danger movie, more and more an extended chase
in which it hardly seems to matter who's being chased. Remove
the people from the people-in-danger equation and you're left
with very little danger -- and very little dramatic impact. Chase!
Run! Jump! All of this is undeniably exciting, but I wish that
Spielberg, having assembled such witty actors as Neill, Dern,
and especially Goldblum, had come up with more for them to do
besides chasing, running, and jumping. Goldblum, whose every
cynical mutter gets a big laugh, all but disappears after the
first hour -- but then you'd never know from Dern's open-mouthed,
typical-Spielberg-woman performance here that she was capable
of Wild at Heart or Rambling Rose, either. Spielberg
also wastes Samuel L. Jackson (so brilliant in Jungle Fever),
who gets stuck with dialogue like "I can't get Jurassic
Park back online." I mean, why hire Jackson if you're only
going to feed him to a raptor?
None of this really dims the pleasure of the spectacle, though.
Jurassic Park earns its spot in fantasy-film history.
When a herd of Gallimimuses stampede across a pasture in perfect
integration with the live actors in the shot, or when a vicious
T. rex engulfs another (seemingly) live actor, it's pure movie
sorcery. At its best, Jurassic Park makes your jaw drop
lower than it dropped at Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Terminator
2. The idea of man coexisting with dinosaurs may be a nightmare,
but in Spielberg's hands it's every moviegoer's wildest dream.
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