“Jurassic Park” was the No. 1 movie at the North American box office in summer 1993 — and once again this summer, when it brought entertainment-starved moviegoers out to drive-ins. With no new blockbusters to enjoy (or endure), we invited readers to revisit Steven Spielberg’s popular park, where a T. rex and velociraptors develop a taste for human prey.
Set on a lush island, the park is the brainchild of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), a showman with a passion for spectacle and extinct reptiles. Spielberg, adapting Michael Crichton’s best seller, shared those enthusiasms as did the film’s original audience. The lifelike quality of the dinosaurs and the intensity of the action were big selling points 27 years ago and we wondered how they looked to our readers in light of today’s CGI-heavy blowouts.
We also hoped readers would sink their teeth into some of the film’s meatier themes: the struggle between science and commerce; the tension between environmentalism and greed; the contrast between innocence and corruption; the debate between Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) about having kids. And then there’s that dialectical puzzler, Steven Spielberg, the wunderkind turned empire-builder, who has long played the hero and the villain of modern Hollywood.
The Spielberg Touch really works both ways in JP for the good and the not-so-good. In terms of suspenseful and amazingly well-executed action scenes, the sequences following the T-Rex’s escape from the paddock are still a master class in every aspect of filmmaking. But the second dimension of his Touch — the sentimentality, the feeble feminism, the insistence on the formation of an ersatz family that makes the whole film’s arc about Alan Grant learning to become a father, and so on — makes this a lesser film than it could have been artistically. — B.J. Klinger, Chicago
A.O. SCOTT “Jurassic Park” was released less than six months before “Schindler’s List,” which makes 1993 a kind of Peak Spielberg moment. He started a franchise and cleaned up at the box office in the summertime — something he had done before — and then floored the critics and dominated the Oscars when the weather turned cold. Is there another American director in the post-studio era who has matched that feat? Have any even tried?
Watching “Jurassic Park” on my little screen this time around, I was struck by how refreshingly un-grandiose it seemed, at least when compared with the ponderous apocalypticism of recent tentpoles. The moments of wonder, exposition and ethical chin-scratching are arranged around a series of action set pieces that are scary, scrappy and marvelously executed. Their effectiveness has less to do with the dinosaurs (cool as they are) than with Spielberg’s craft. He’s just so good at building suspense and pacing and cutting through a scene, providing jolts and giggles as he builds toward a big scare or a hairs-breadth escape.
MANOHLA DARGIS Ha! Having recently splashed round with the shark in“Jaws,” I was struck by how irritatingly bloated “Jurassic Park” is by comparison. I like some of “Jurassic Park,” sure, though I’m always struck by how the most skillfully directed and sadistic scenes involve children, including the kitchen homage to Kubrick’s “The Shining” and its terrorized tot. And I dig that its three heroes are all scientists, which goes against the grain of too many Hollywood movies that vilify scientists or mock them as nerdy weirdos when they should be celebrated for being nerdy weirdos.
This of course brings me to the most astonishing image in the film, which is of Jeff Goldblum’s injured “chaotician” (hoot!), Dr. Malcolm, lying back with his black shirt unbuttoned to expose his lightly furred musculature. Consciously or not, Spielberg turns Goldblum into a sexualized spectacle, complete with dark shades and come-hither mien, a framing that seems dedicated to destroying a noxious ethnic stereotype. Goldblum has suggested in interviews that this great unbuttoning was spontaneous, but whether it is, the effect is the same. It’s as if Spielberg were saying, You want hot Jewish guys? I’ll give you hot Jewish guys!
It was fun revisiting this summer blockbuster after all this time. I definitely saw it with a very different perspective. The essence is summed up well in the line from Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm is “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” A disaster of a theme park, completely arrogant and immoral, and yet … there were sequels, none of which I saw. — Denise, Northern California
SCOTT Goldblum got to be both the movie’s conscience and its libido, which is not something just any actor could pull off. And if the animatronic dinos look a little dated, most of the human cast has aged beautifully. Goldblum may be more of a sex symbol now than ever before. Sam Neill is one of the few celebrities whose quarantine web videos were endearing rather than embarrassing. The Laura Dernaissance has been in full swing for a few years now. And Samuel L. Jackson, memorably chain-smoking his way through what might have been a throwaway minor part, has gone on to become the box-office champion of the world. So there’s a fun time-travel element in seeing their younger selves running from angry lizards.
The story doesn’t feel dated, though, because the basic problem that it explores is evergreen. One reader, Conrad Bayley, traced its theme of scientific hubris back to “Frankenstein” and, of course, in this case Promethean ambition is combined with greed to especially lethal effect. But the ambition is also excused. Hammond isn’t the villain — Wayne Knight’s venal tech guy and Martin Ferrero’s cynical lawyer are the designated baddies — because of his sincere idealism. He isn’t a scientist, but rather a former flea-circus impresario who has moved on to bigger creatures. He genuinely wants to awaken the public’s sense of wonder with an unforgettable, scientifically important and ethically impeccable entertainment experience. That’s also what Spielberg wants.
DARGIS And that’s a drag. In “Jaws,” Spielberg set out to tell a great story as well as he could: it’s a lean, mean, pure entertainment machine. To that end, it isn’t sentimental, including about children. By the time he made “Jurassic Park,” though, his sentimentalism about children (and “wonder”), which are crucial to “E.T.,” had become almost ritualistically sanctimonious (though he remained a Grade A sadist). And it’s no longer enough for him to make an “unforgettable” movie. He has — borrowing more of your words — to make one that’s “important” and “ethically impeccable” (as if) when he’s really making a souped-up Roger Corman flick. The contradictions are more amusing to think about than to watch.
Looking at“Jurassic Park” again, I kept wondering how it might have played if Hammond had been eviscerated by a raptor. That would have been quite entertaining, and it would have righted some of the movie’s wrongs. Because contrary to what it tries to insist, Hammond is the villain and not only because he’s among cinema’s worst grandfathers. His idealism is only sincere in the sense that he believes his own manufactured hype, which is an amusingly familiar failing shared by a lot of Hollywood people. Seen this way, exonerating Hammond reads as an act of directorial self-justification. But then, as one reader, Justin Cottrell, pointed out: “This came out soon after Spielberg made ‘Hook’ and he needed a huge hit.”
SCOTT Spielberg’s hunger — for hits, for respectability, for a body of work that nobody can ignore — has been such a powerful force in Hollywood for the last half century. His megalomania goes hand in hand with generosity, and while “Jurassic Park” isn’t up there with masterworks like “Jaws” or “Saving Private Ryan” or (yes I’m going there) “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” it does have a lot to give. I don’t always love the phrase “popcorn movie,” but this one evokes so much of what we’ve been missing lately. Even if, onscreen, the snacks are us.
In my neck of the woods we still have a drive-in cinema or two with long lines of cars backed up to the off-ramp of the closest highway. They’re running Jurassic World this world as part of a double feature. The sheer fun of going back to a ritual from 40 years ago has made this viral summer a tad less claustrophobic for me — gregolio, Michigan
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
