(NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past several weeks I’ve been running a strikingly unbalanced review of the four films, because I’m a big fan of parts 1 & 3, while distinctly unenthusiastic over parts 2 & 4. Today’s chapter concludes my take on JP 1. The previous four installments are listed below.)
It’s left to Ellie crawl into the very belly, bowels, and entrails of Jurassic Part to first shut down and then reboot the whole thing, brilliantly tying the two remaining parts of the picture together, because naturally Alan and the kids are climbing over “dead” high voltage wires just as Ellie is getting set to turn on the juice. This time around, Tim rather than Alexis proves to be the chump, refusing to leap from the high wire until he gets a taste of the 10,000 volts that’s waiting for him. Fortunately, Alan proves up to the task of providing CPR, learning in the process that there’s more to life than digging up fossil bones.
Before all this happens, there’s another ingenious buried plot point, when Alan stumbles across what’s supposed to be impossible in Jurassic Park, dinosaur eggs. All the dinosaurs are female, but it appears that some have spontaneously mutated and become male. “Nature found a way!” exclaims Alan reverently, even though an hour earlier we had been hit over the head with the message that “Nature” had selected dinosaurs for extinction and that it was “wrong” to bring them back.1
Anyway, once Tim’s mobile the three make it back to park headquarters, where the kids are let loose on the dessert buffet of every kid’s dreams, which they can eat sans supervision, it not occurring to anyone that the dinos are still out there, leading to the final set piece, our encounter with the “smart” dinosaurs, the Velociraptors, which lets Alexis demonstrate that girls can kick ass.
Velociraptors, not featured in Crichton’s book, are neither as big nor as smart as depicted, but Spielberg and probably others realized that the greatest adversaries in film have both cunning and brute force. It’s the Velociraptors’ ability to unravel the knots that the humans tie for them that makes the encounter especially thrilling. Along the way, Spielberg gives another truly great image, when one of the Velociraptors stumbles into a display where samples of the genetic code—the three-letter codons that “spell” the amino acids that make up a specific protein—are projected onto him—the created encountering its creator. The lizard stares half-knowing and half-unknowing at the message that gave it birth. Who will prove the superior, reason or the beast?
Alexis finds that outwitting Velociraptors is one thing. Disposing of them is another, and ultimately the entire cast, balancing precariously on the T. Rex skeleton in the Jurassic Park display hall, seems marked for extinction when, implausibly but satisfyingly, the T. Rex smashes through everything and takes out both Velociraptors. Apparently, no one’s allowed to eat humans but him! While he’s taking care of the Velociraptors, the mere humans are legging it for the jeep. The film ends with what’s left of the cast soaring above the waves in a powerful helicopter—leaving us with an image of technology triumphant, which seems to be Spielberg’s own conviction, despite the fact that the whole “message” we have just gotten is that Nature always wins.2
I’ve read that Spielberg insisted on directing Jurassic Park II (1997) because he was so irritated by what Universal and director Jeannot Szwarc did to Jaws II. I’ve also read that Spielberg called directing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second Indy film, “the worst experience of my life.” Well, directing The Lost World: Jurassic Park, aka Jurassic Park II, was probably the second worst, because the film is awful, even though, much like Jaws II, it made a pile. Stevie is up to all his old tricks again, except that this time they’re really old. The Man versus Nature theme—or rather the “Capitalism is destroying Nature” theme—is heavily recycled, and I’m rarely willing to take morality lessons from billionaires, even sober, monogamous ones like Stevo. There are two T. Rexes this time, and a high-tech, duplex trailer instead of a measly jeep, which the T. Rexes try to push off a cliff, allowing Stevie to add some new twists to the “shelter/death trap” theme that he used so well in both Jaws and Jurassic Park, but third time is definitely not the charm for me this time around. The one major twist is bringing a T. Rex to “civilization,” or at least San Diego, which I did not like at all. In the jungle the dinosaur is king, but here in the good old USA, any military unit, or any militarized police force, of which we have so many, could take out a T. Rex in a matter of minutes, not that we’d want to see that.3
- This whole bit strongly implies that the dino eggs will feature in a sequel, but in fact they don’t play a role in Jurassic Park II, which involves a second island with even more dinosaurs. None of this is ever explained because who cares? What counts is lots and lots of dinosaurs. When you’ve got lots and lots of dinosaurs, who needs an explanation? ↩︎
- Spielberg’s relations with his father were decidedly mixed, but as a boy he was deeply impressed by the old man’s stories of flying “over the Hump” in World War II, taking supplies to allied forces in China by flying over the Himalayas. ↩︎
- There is one real surprise in JPII, when Ian/Jeff Goldblum meets his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who is like totally black, like Miles Davis black. So what did her mom look like? We never know, because she’s run off to Paris, as Ian informs us bitterly, sounding (a lot) like an LA screenwriter bitching about his bitch of an ex-wife spending “his money” on the Avenue des Champs Elysees. Being a teen-aged black chick, Kelly has so much je (and acrobatic ability) that she is able to do, justly, what no other human can do, to wit: kill a dinosaur. (We don’t know that the Velociraptor is dead, but the kick she gives it looks pretty damn lethal.) ↩︎
