Sour-faced paleontologist Sam Neill and his hot-legged lover, botanist Laura Dern, are enticed by affable and elderly Richard Attenborough to visit Jurassic Park, which, because it is a movie, has remained a secret even to them. Neill and Dern are joined by eccentric babbler Jeff Goldblum, accountant Martin Ferrero, and two preteenaged children, Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello, brought in to provide a "Johnny Quest" vibe.
At Attenborough's museum headquarters, we meet manly man Aussie Bob Peck and two disparate software engineers, token black Samuel L. Jackson and irrepressible comic character actor Wayne Knight, who plans to steal dinosaur embryos for sale on the black market. Knight sabotages the park while Neill and company are out on tour, leading to many frightening (and often deadly) encounters with ferocious dinosaurs.
How others will see it. Jurassic Park promised to be a blockbuster, and it delivered. It became the highest grossing film of all time in non-inflation adjusted dollars, at least until Titanic surpassed it. It won three Oscars, though all in technical categories.
Today at imdb.com, it has a huge 307K user vote total and an extremely high user rating of 8.0, enough to place the film within the imdb Top 250. Gender spread is marginal, though the ratings do decline moderately with increasing audience age, from 8.2 under 30 to 7.7 over 45. Viewers are thrilled by the scary dinosaur attacks on our heroes, though in retrospect, the two children are highly unlikely to be killed, and neither are our three highly compensated leads. The accountant, the hunter, and the two tech workers prove expendable.
How I felt about it. The dinosaurs are fairly realistic, though they seem to have been given human intelligence. If they had been shocked by wires before, they would avoid them in the future, and not "probe for a weakness." It is highly unlikely that they would be entering buildings.
What annoys me most about the film, though, is the absence of staff. During the crisis, there appear to be four staff at the headquarters, two of whom are coders. One is a hunter, another is the elderly founder. So who prepared the huge banquet that the two children enjoy?
I am also dubious about the eagerness of the leads to risk their own lives to save the children and other adults. People behave like this in movies only. In real life they are too selfish and/or scared. It is also remarkable that during the tour, they would leave the relative safety of the tour car to explore the jungle where building-size monsters might appear out of nowhere to eat them.
The script is strewn with false clues. So the dinos are laying eggs, but what does this have to do with the plot? Same with the sick triceratops, the poisonous plants, and Goldblum's flirtations with Dern. Pointless loose ends suggest lazy script editing, surprising in a Spielberg film set to gross a hundred million dollars.
We won't mention how a child can survive an electric shock designed to hold back herds of man-eating dinosaurs, or how two children survive unharmed in a car that is nearly demolished. Or, really, why the children are there in the first place, apart from marketing illusions that this a family film instead of a horror movie.
A power failure at a remote jungle location subject to hurricanes is inevitable. There are no further controls to prevent forty foot monsters from breaking into the compound? No helicopters on hand for an emergency exit? They deserve to be eaten.
The scary dinosaurs are admittedly entertaining. And the acting is good, aside from the two annoying kids. Nonetheless, it is a disappointing effort from Spielberg, given the quality of Jaws. The lessons from that film: what is needed is more suspense and less action, more conflict and less computer animation.