Jurassic Review

Originally published July 30, 1993, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1028

I suppose it will not matter one whit if I say that Jurassic Park is a lousy movie.

And indeed, this may be undercut by my follow-up statement of that I’ve seen it three times. Yet, in fact, there is nothing contradictory about this notion at all.

Because I’ve also been on “Star Tours” three times. More, in fact.

“Star Tours,” for those who don’t know, is a ride at Tomorrowland in Disneyland, and at Disney/MGM at Disneyworld. What happens is that you are strapped into the amusement park equivalent of a flight simulator. Then you are tossed about while, on a view screen, a cleverly filmed five-minute short convinces your brain (through a combination of fast-pacing, nifty perspective shots, and three-D trickery) that you’re hurtling through space. You zoom through meteor fields, down into the trenches of the Death Star, and so on.

It’s very different from a roller coaster. Although you are left breathless from the ride, you have not, in fact, gone anywhere. Moreover, despite all the safety mechanisms built into it, there is still an element of danger in a roller coaster. You’re moving at high speed on perilous tracks, and if something goes wrong, you could wind up with your fifteen minutes of fame consisting of your picture splattered all over the front pages of national newspapers accompanied by the headline, “Worst Amusement Park Disaster in History.”

Not in “Star Tours,” though. Since you’re just being shaken up from side to side, and front to back, and never really in motion, it’s guaranteed harmless. So it’s a great ride if, like me, you hate roller coasters but still want occasional high-velocity excitement in life.

That, and if your idea of a good time is admiring brilliantly-crafted special effects. But “Star Tours” is not a movie. It was never meant to be a movie. Just a thrill ride.

And Jurassic Park falls into the same category.

Which is why it’s a lousy movie.

Also, “Star Tours” has the good grace to be five minutes. Jurassic Park is over two hours. Its much ballyhooed computer-generated dinosaur effects constitute a grand total of six and one half minutes of the film. Even though it’s brilliantly supplemented by Stan Wilson’s incredible FX life-size dinosaur heads (as in the case of a friendly Brachiosaur) or his full-size sickly Triceratops, that’s still a ton of screen time to be carried by the story and characters. And when it comes to those two elements, Jurassic Park is as ponderous as a Brontosaur. Even more so, in fact; even the beyond-elephantine dinosaurs move with more grace.

It is, of course, stylish (in the world of director-as-auteur) to blame it on the director. Such cannot be the case here. Michael Crichton wrote the book, and also co-wrote the screenplay. In doing so, he managed to transfer over all of the weaknesses and, because of constraints of time and budget ($60 million not going anywhere near as far as it used to), few of the strengths.

Jurassic Park was never a character-driven story anyway. It’s what’s called “high concept.” As if Crichton woke up one night and said, “Of course! I’ll do Westworld, except it’ll be dinosaurs!” Had it been me, I might very well have dismissed the idea the next moment as being uninspired and derivative, which explains why Crichton is (most likely) a millionaire and why I am (most definitely) not. Since the basic premise is “inspired” (a polite way of saying “ripped off”) from Westworld, it is only natural that the book turn around and return to the roots from which it sprang.

Yet not only is it derivative of Westworld, it’s also inferior to it. Yul Brynner’s unrelenting robot pursuer is more effective and more frightening than the T-Rex, because every time Tyrannosaur shows up, the viewer is one-step removed. Consciously or unconsciously… one finds oneself admiring the technological handiwork that brought the creature to life. As opposed to Brynner, who needed only a black outfit and a gun to inspire serious nailbiting.

So what’ve we got in the film’s story:

Cuddly but misguided millionaire showman John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has managed, through cloning techniques, to grow dinosaurs. Being a solid capitalist, he naturally intends to profiteer off them. To give the venture, called “Jurassic Park,” an aura of reliability to his investors, he calls in dino experts Grant (Sam Neill) and Sadler (Laura Dern) to inspect it. Also along for the ride is mathematician and plot-justifier Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, apparently with wardrobe courtesy of Neil Gaiman.)

Why “Plot-justifier”? Easy. Because, as one would expect, the unexpected occurs and suddenly our intrepid scientists, not to mention Hammond’s grandchildren, are trapped out in the park while the dinosaurs–including the T-Rex and the even-more-predatory velociraptors–wander about trying to make light snacks out of our intrepid little cast.

Malcolm is there to try and make it seem something other than it is. He goes on at length about chaos theory, a popular study in the fields of math and science. First postulated by French mathematician Henri Poincare, and pretty much ignored until decades later when Edward Lorenz began to expand upon it in 1963, chaos theory largely relates to such hard-matter studies as the movements of planets and fluids (although there is now some application being made towards social systems.)

Simply put, chaos theory states that “any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the future behavior.” That is why, for example, weathermen always seem to get their predictions wrong. In order to be 100% accurate, they’d have to know 100% all of the possible variables in any given system, and that degree of certainty is impossible.

Crichton, however, uses chaos theory as a scientific way of justifying the far simpler, more layman-esque, but less impressive Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. For the plot of Jurassic Park to work, the movie needed (a) an employee so disgruntled that he is (b) willing to steal dinosaur embryos from Hammond and (c) willing to sabotage the entire computer system to do so. Meantime (d) the experts are in the middle of the tour and (e) a storm rolls in creating further trouble. Furthermore there’s (f) a sick Triceratops, a plot line that never goes anywhere and serves only to (g) separate Laura Dern’s character from the rest of the group for later developments.

Hopelessly contrived. But Crichton tries to cover it by taking scientific principles primarily geared around explaining properties of the physical world and essentially says, “This all went wrong—not because it’s contrived–but because it was scientifically inevitable that it would.” Maybe if I were more scholarly I would buy into that. But I’m just a dumb writer who sees an author trying to cover his tracks.

(At least in the book there was a “B” plot which introduced a serious time-element into the story… namely that some baby raptors were stowed away on the supplies and crew ship heading back to the mainland, and the characters were racing to find a way to warn the ship. That’s gone, unfortunately.)

To accompany the extremely rickety plot, we’ve got wafer-thin characters. Now in any story, ideally the lead characters should have what’s called a “character arc.” Namely the character should start out at one point in his development and then, through the events that he undergoes wind up a different person than when he started out. Ideally, this character is the hero.

Our hero here, Grant, has only one discernable characteristic of any sort: He’s uncomfortable about kids. Naturally he winds up being the one who guides the grandchildren through the park and, we assume, feels more generous towards children by the end.

Not only is this transition utterly predictable, but it’s trite. No hint is ever given, for example, that Grant dislikes children so much that he would have, say, abandoned them to their fate. That’s never in question. For that matter, the fact that they’re kids is irrelevant. If they had been teenagers, or adults, or senior citizens, Grant would have likely behaved in exactly the same manner. He doesn’t act like a child hater: He never yells at them, never threatens them, never so much as comes close to losing his temper. The kids never even suspect his antipathy, which wouldn’t be such a big deal except it’s the only character trait we know he’s got.

Contrast this one-note portrayal with, for example, Aliens. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley starts out as a woman on emotional auto-pilot. She is so intent on her own self-preservation that, at first, she even refuses to go to the aid of colonists who might be facing danger at the hands of the aliens. Even when she does go, it’s only with repeated assurances that she herself will not be facing danger. But by the end of the film, this self-centered woman has recaptured her emotional core, and risks her own life to save a little girl… a decision we’re not 100% sure she would have made earlier in the film, or even in the previous installment.

So it can be done, even in the context of an SF/fight-for-life film. But Jurassic Park simply didn’t deliver.

Laura Dern’s Sadler has even less to work with, mostly alternating between awe and terror. Jeff Goldblum’s Malcolm wanders through the film being self-satisfied, smug, and flirting with Sadler, his only salvation being Goldblum’s line delivery. Malcolm converses as if his mind is operating so quickly that he forgets what he was saying to you because he’s already three steps further down the discussion. He visibly stops his thought process to go back and finish the statement he was only halfway through, giving him an entertaining and unique herky-jerky speech pattern.

(He also gets the best line in the film. When Hammond points out that Disneyland had its share of start-up problems, Malcolm retorts, “Yes, but John, when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” Having been on the Pirates ride once when it did break down, it brought to my mind some rather chilling images. And God only knows what would happen if the Country Bear Jamboree went berserk.)

Hammond is the only other character who has any discernable arc, slowly coming to realize the error of his ways. This is, however, annoying, because it turns out to be one of the changes that ultimately is damaging to the film. The body count is a good deal higher in the book than in the film. Not only is Hammond a complete S.O.B. in the book, but Crichton knocks off characters who you didn’t want to see die.

The movie, however, plays it safe. In a disaster film, you should not be able to predict who’s going to make it through. You should be shocked, you should be dismayed. Jurassic Park, the film, does not go out on that limb. You can safely predict who’s going to be still sucking oxygen when the credits roll, and lo and behold, you’re right. The characters are by and large friendlier, and the ones who do die are either people you’d rather see dead, or characters who are utter ciphers.

Yes, there are moments that will startle you, and make you jump in your seat. But any schmo can startle people. That’s no trick. A five year old with a loud voice and good timing (“Boo!”) can do that. The trick is to make viewers care about what’s happening to the characters on the screen, and that Spielberg, Crichton et al simply never manage to accomplish.

So with contrived story and feeble characterization, what does Jurassic Park have going for it? Obviously, the effects.

And they are brilliant. No question. Aided and abetted not only by brilliant technicians, but also by the actors. Since the characters themselves are wafer-thin, and the movies exits solely to showcase the dinos, the main job of the actors is to make the effects–on which the film hinges–believable.

This they manage to do with aplomb. Oh sure, there’s the standard Spielberg long-shocked-stare. But when Sam Neill literally goes weak in the knees upon his first encounter with the Park’s denizens, it’s very powerful. Laura Dern sobs upon encountering her favorite dinosaur, the triceratops.

These are the sorts of things that heavy FX movies need if they’re to be remotely believable, and the cast comes through. Now if only they’d been given some characters to go with the acting.

If we’re to take Jurassic Park for what it is, then–an FX showcase–then we have to believe that sequels will follow. It may be that the effects we find so dazzling now will, by Jurassic Park III (in which five tyrannosaurs battle fifty army tanks) seem slow and clunky… much like those once-impressive space battle scenes in Star Wars pale compared to Return of the Jedi.

In other words, we’ll have bigger and better rides.

A shame that a film starring some of the most formidable carnivores in history would have so little meat in it.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, also can’t help but observe that–since such main players as the T-Rex were not in the Jurassic period but, in fact, the later Cretaceous–they should have called it Mesozoic Park.)