Jurassic Park Suffers From Overbite 16 Years Later
When I first decided to write a review redo column, I did so with Jurassic Park in mind. The quintessential film of my childhood, JP changed the way I and everyone else born in the early to mid-80s watched movies. After seeing it, my career aspiration up until about 1997 was to be a dinosaur. That’s when I learned all those jobs were going extinct. Zing! I’ll be here all night.
But almost 16 years later, does JP still have the goods that made it the highest grossing film of the 1990s not to take place on a boat or in space? I managed to find about two hours where my infant son was not crying or barfing and popped it in the old DVD player to take a look.
Overview
A wealthy old codger who looks like Santa pays a team of scientists to suck dinosaur blood out of the asses of fossilized mosquitoes so he can make a theme park populated by the long dead dino. The only problem is that a raptor ate one of the workers so now he’s forced to call in a trio of experts to examine the park and give it their blessing. Trouble is some guy named Dodgson pays Newman from Seinfeld to smuggle all of Jurassic Park’s dirty little secrets off the island. He shuts down the electric fences, most of the dinosaurs escape, and chaos ensues until our favorite protagonists escape.
And that, my friends, is it. The plot is about as straightforward as they come with nary a twist, turn, or stumble along the way. What you expect to happen happens and how you expect it to end is the way it ends. Thus, this baby has been and always will be about the visual effects. And what visual effects they are indeed.
Let’s face it, 16 years later JP has a whole lot of Marisa Tomei going on: Getting up there in age with a few crow’s feet popping up here and there, but still enjoyable and great to look at. Seriously, if they did a remake of this movie tomorrow, could it really look much better than it did in 1993? I don’t think so, and I know for a fact you can’t say the same thing about Mrs. Doubtfire, the second-highest grossing film of 1993. If they remade that movie tomorrow they’d use the powers of CGI to completely remove Robin Williams from every scene.
For my two cents, the movie could have borrowed a bit more from Michael Crichton’s novel (if you haven’t read it, you’re doing yourself a serious injustice) and been a bit darker and taken on an R rating, but ultimately that would have meant 11 year olds like me wouldn’t have been able to fill Steven Spielberg’s wallet.
Rating: 12 Dodgsons out of 14
Cast & Crew
I’ve said before that one way to judge a movie is by whether it catapults its cast and crew to the next level or tosses them back into the lake. For whatever reason, JP literally shit on the careers of almost every actor who played a memorable role.
Sam Neill (Alan Grant), Laura Dern (Ellie Sattler), and Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm) made approximately 3.27 memorable movies combined after JP (and no that does not include two very forgettable sequels which I’ll address later). Richard Attenborough (John Hammond) ironically went on to play Santa in his next movie (Miracle on 34th Street) before heading back to the North Pole, and the two kids who played Tim and Lex I believe entered the witness protection program so I won’t bother endangering them by mentioning their real names.
Oddly enough, the two biggest actors to come out of JP were Wayne Knight (Dennis Nedry) and Samuel L. Jackson (Ray Arnold). Knight continued on with a solid television career which featured big roles in 3rd Rock from the Sun and the aforementioned Seinfeld, while Jackson found a unique niche as Hollywood’s consummate badass.
Think about it. If Spielberg knew then what he knows now, maybe Jackson gets the role of Dr. Alan Grant and Sam Neil spends most of the movie smoking cigarettes, hacking code, and getting his arm eaten off. Imagine how different the movie would have been when Jackson’s birage of F-Bombs necessitated the R rating I desire, and the movie ends 45 minutes earlier when Jackson punches a T-Rex right in the face, killing it instantly.
“I’ve had it with these motherfucking dinosaurs in this motherfucking park!”
Rating: 3.27 motherfucking dinosaurs out of 17
Lasting Impressions
So here we are: Two rounds down and one more to go. I’ve decided that JP’s plot and visuals still hold up, while the cast & crew factor brings it back down to Earth. Now let’s see what sort of taste the film left in our mouths.
From a pure pop culture standpoint, JP took it to a whole nuther level. The quivering water and the “Objects are closer than they appear” scenes from the movie became some of the most parodied moments in movie history. In fact, I’m fairly certain that 75 percent of the Scary Movie franchise is built around those two things alone.
Every guy my age and a little younger has a box full of Jurassic Park toys in his parent’s attic, while the movie also gave birth to a kick ass Sega game, a terrible Super Nintendo game, and a Sega CD game that to this day leaves everyone asking, “Whatever happened to Sega CD?”
And let’s not forget that Jurassic Park single-handedly put the Velociraptor on the map. JP did for the raptor what Purple Rain did for Prince. Before JP had anyone even heard of a raptor? Now it’s pound-for-pound the most destructive force Earth has ever seen. They even named a roller coaster after it. Had JP not come along, Cedar Pointe goers would be waiting in line to ride “The Amazing Inverted Twisty Loo.’ Instead they get “The Raptor.” Amazing. Jurassic Park is to the raptor what Judd Apatow is to Seth Rogen.
But that tidal wave of momentum quickly petered out thanks to two incredibly disappointing sequels. Starting with The Lost World in 1997, fans of the original witnessed a horrific flameout comparable to that of a famous child star. Yes, we loved Mary Kate and Ashley Olson in Full House, but when they hit the big screen in New York Minute, we all shook our heads a little bit. That’s what Lost World was like. They scrapped everyone but Jeff Goldblum, sprinkled in a little Vince Vaughn, and then tossed a T-Rex into San Diego. Sigh.
And if Lost World was New York Minute, then Jurassic Park III was Mary Kate’s link to Heath Ledger being found dead in his apartment. Tragic, sad, deflating – use whatever word you like but the bottom line is it probably could have been avoided and you feel bad for all involved.
JP III brought back Neill and Dern (albeit briefly), added William H. Macy and Tea Leoni, and then vomited in the faces of everyone watching. Double sigh.
In retrospect, I really feel like the two sequels knocked JP down a peg or two. When someone mentions The Godfather, it comes with an umbrella that encompasses the two sequels. When someone mentions Jurassic Park, it comes with an umbrella that is ripped from the clutches of the other two movies as their asses are kicked out into the rain.
Rating: 1 good movie out of 3
Final Words
Taking all this into account, I have to admit that Jurassic Park doesn’t stand the test of time I thought it would. The movie is enjoyable, but once you’re all grown up and have seen the dinosaurs a few times, the novelty sort of wears out. What you’re left with is a pretty good movie that looks great and then crapped out two bad sequels. It’s basically Terminator had Terminator 2 been terrible.
All in all, I give Jurassic Park three stars out of five, slightly lower than galaxy out of five stars I gave it as a kid. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that all those rumors of a JP IV eventually die away. I just can’t shake the feeling that it would make a really shitty Sega CD game.
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David
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Cigarette coupons
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Jim
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Pleo
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efrain
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Trains DVD
