It's no secret that most of the entries in the series have been panned by critics, so it's no wonder that the movie opened to a big box office.
It is not surprising that the films that sprang from the source have been mediocre, given that the original 1993Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg from the book by Michael Crichton, was not very good to begin with. It was praised by reviewers at the time, and still is appreciated by kids of the '90s. It doesn't hold up well without the lens of nostalgia or the excitement over digital dinosaurs.
The opening scene in which a dinosaur is delivered to the park preserve feels missing. The action is good, but not great. The cinematography is chaotic, less fluid than we are used to from him, and the arrangement of flood lights in the dark evokes similar compositions at the finales of better Spielberg movies. The scene climaxes with a park worker tumbling into the pen to become a dinosaur. Everything else in the state-of-the-art preserve is automated, even though the worker has to climb up and close the gate manually.
At least the incident is tense. Men are discussing insurance and divorce in the next scene of the movie. The suspense is dissipated over the next 40 minutes as Spielberg crams in Michael Crichton's exposition from the novel, the first of many times.
The reason most of the movies made from Crichton novels are so awful is because they don't need dialogue at all. He was an explanationer. He loved to tell the reader about the melodramatic plot, the anti-Japanese sentiment of Rising Sun, and the idea that men are more likely to be victims of sexual harassment than women.
If we cloned dinosaurs from DNA trapped in mummified mosquitoes and turned an island off the coast of Central America into a giant zoo, what would happen? The movie rights were bought before the novel was published. Dr. Alan Grant was the prototypical Spielberg character from his movies up to that point. He is a part of Jaws, Indiana Jones, and Hook, as well as a guy who learns what is important in life.
When we meet Grant in Montana, he doesn't think about family at all. The crowd laughed when he tried to explain that dinosaurs were more similar to birds than lizards. Grant wants these people to listen to his proposal, even if they are a graduate student or a groupie. The obnoxious 12-year-old doesn't get far into his questioning. The kid is unknown. He came from a place. Was he lost in the forest? He might have come from The Goonies. No, it doesn't matter. He is supposed to be lectured on. In the early scenes, things will be explained to the viewer in long speeches using a proxy audience.
Grant looks like he's a jerk because of the way he's scaring the kid. If you give him half a chance, fellow researcher and love interest Ellie Sattler will be there to titter away all of his flaws. It's a thankless job. She is a brilliant scientist but nothing makes her happier than being with Grant. She giggled and whacked her eyes when Ian Malcolm explained his theory to her.
The scenes in which people talk at each other show Spielberg's lack of interest. The director didn't bother to move the camera when the owner of the park dropped into Montana to get the two kids to look at his island. Spielberg's Bridge of Spies is a very different movie. The film mostly consists of men talking to each other in cloistered rooms, but the master's shooting and staging are so fleet you barely notice.
Nobody is very good in this film, but Goldblum tries to bring some flair with his famous scene-chewing. I believe Goldblum is a national treasure as much as anyone, but can we all admit that the only reason he got so much attention for this role is that everyone else in the picture is bland and boring? Any character with a hint of personality would get a response from viewers.
Dennis Nedry, the slobbering jerk in charge of park security, is played by Wayne Knight. There is a character in the movie that is not in the original novel. The Spielberg who made Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark should have had a discussion with the Spielberg who made Spielberg's films. It is obvious that Knight can't act, even though he plays a minor role as Jerry's adversary on the sitcom. It was a big mistake to cast him here.
The director was operating in a brand new arena with the digital F/X and it's more surprising that he made a film about it. After the group arrives on the island, Spielberg lingered on Grant's astonished expression until we finally saw he was looking at a giant brachiosaurus. They would have heard it and felt the ground shake if they had not seen it extending above the treeline. Grant would have already been looking at the herd that was revealed later in the same scene.
All of this is, for lack of a better term, cheap directing by Spielberg, and he pulled the same trick twice with the T-Rex. The characters initially can hear and feel the booms and shaking of its footsteps a mile away, but the giant monster is silent as a midnight prowler the second it needs to sneak up on someone. It's possible that Spielberg was hoping that viewers would be too shocked by the visuals to notice continuity issues.
The movie grinds to a halt when our brave heroes watch a short documentary explaining the plot to them. The educational shows on Main Street are only for kids who want to go to Space Mountain the whole time. It is the worst example of Spielberg's preternatural ability in the language of cinema deserting him in this movie. Compare this scene to the 25-minute point of Jaws, when we are already rapt, where our pulse aflutters with tension from the first shot.
There is a lot of exposition in Jaws, but most of it is about what the sharks will do to you if you swim out too far. One of the few effective explaining scenes inJurassic Park comes when the park's game Warden describes the intelligence of the raptors, how these supposedly dumb reptiles can calculate, even plan, about how they are going to eat you. Spielberg squanders the tension by following it with a long lunch scene in which everyone lays out their freshman philosophy of science positions.
The movie ends around the halfway point. The one that Spielberg takes the most time to set up is the one featuring the best special effects. The movie would have been much better if the T-Rex had eaten the tykes.
The T-Rex scene sheds light on why people were so impressed by this movie. Dinosaurs are awe-inspiring and we had never seen them presented in a convincing way. The dirty secret that nobody wants to admit is that it is mostly boring. The characters are not likable at all. The movie isn't very interesting to watch. It doesn't have the image-making of Spielberg's most inspired visions. The ugly lettering of the signs, the junky looking computer command post, and the garish primary colors on the cars and elsewhere are all factors in this.
The best hour is not this one. The composer's main theme is a little too high, a little too brassy, and it doesn't have the melodic personality of his best work. Standard-issue thrillers or typical trilling flutes are used to score in between the main theme. What Williams had to work with made the music generic.
The climax is not a good one. The T-Rex saving our heroes at the last moment is similar to the one in Lord of the Rings. The tyrannosaurus rex could be heard and felt in the jungle. All movies are smoke and mirrors, but this one more than most, because it manages to get inside a building without anyone noticing.
What was possible and what the audience would come to expect were changed by the film. This movie is not among the best of Spielberg's movies. Its reputation is strengthened by nostalgia, and it looks better compared to the diminishing returns of subpar sequels, which whip up the anticipation of seeing those dinosaurs again and again, then fail to impress. It wasn't the first movie to use dazzling visual effects to hide a mediocre script. It may have ushered in a digital filmmaking era in which the magic of the movies is more manufactured.
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