“Ah, yes, Dickie, old chap, got a bit of project you might be interested in, old man … not, it’s not a follow up to Gandhi and no you don’t have to play a spiv … what’s that, old chap? … well, Spielberg’s involved and we’ve got a couple of decent young actors up for it, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. Splendid, splendid.
“What’s it about? Well, it’s some delightful old hokum about a mad theme park owner … that’s you, don’t y’know … name of John Hammond who’s a bit of a bounder, sees himself messing with the sacrosanct unwritten laws of Nature herself and has the money to buy the knowledge to create life…
“Frankenstein? No, Dickie Darling, it’s not a Frankenstein movie in any way, shape or form, apart from extremely tenuously. This old buzzard has got hold of some dinosaur DNA by drilling into some amber and extracting the blood from some sort of mosquito johnny and he’s able to blend it with bits of frog to create dinosaurs.
“Yes, of course, it’s far fetched, but we’ve got some of those bally computer wizards working on the scheme and they’ve promised that they’re going to be able to have what look like real life dinos all over the film … you’ll never tell the difference.
“Well, are you up for it? … Yes, of course you can wear a white suit, hat and big glasses if you want, Dickie Darling, but you’ve got to be able to do a bit of guilt late on … you can, excellent, well we’re on for it then.
“Okay, we’ll be in touch. Toodle pip, old bean, and see you around…”
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Darling Dickie, of course, is that dreadful old ham, Sir Richard Attenborough, brother of David, the nature boy, so he’s well schooled in the beauties of the world, but I wonder what Sir David would say about this particular bit of nonsense. You can imagine the Attenborough brothers having a right old battle over the ports of an evening, can’t you?
The bit of a project is ‘Jurassic Park’, Spielberg’s cinematic recreation of the Michael Crichton novel about dinosaurs brought back to life in a modern day theme park, bigger than all the rest, and it’s one of the most watched movies of the last ten years or so, BIG in every sense of the word.
Of course, you know from the very off that Crazy Boy Hammond is biting off a lot more than he can chew and Sam Neill and Laura Dern as the love interest archaeologists that are initially fascinated by the immenseness and wonder of this particular Land That Time Forgot are soon going to be in one huge mound of dino poo. There’s no shocks there or indeed anywhere in this whole movie, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing … in fact, JP is very, very good indeed and holds attention from first moment to last, even on a second or third showing and I must have seen it about half a dozen times in all.
I remember when the dave27 clan first saw it, in the glory of the cinema, as it should be seen in very loud and very large life. We had Lewis with us (it was before the delightful Bethany’s time) and he’d been fidgeting about in the dark and scoffing the popcorn (“Keep the floor neat beneath your feet” - HA! Not with my little treasures). Then appeared the roaring T Rex and you’ve never seen him as scared. He sat bolt upright and never uttered another word throughout the whole film. Amazing!!
It’s a rousing, modern day recreation of the sort of thrills you got when you first saw the original King Kong as a very small child, but with the awesome power of the computer chip making these beasts far more convincing than Old Furry Draws.
As well as Neill, Attenborough, Dern and Goldblum, you get a cameo role from Samuel L Jackson as Attenborough’s right hand man and Bob Peck as the hunter on the payroll who eventually falls foul of a very clever bunch of velociraptors … oh yeah, the velociraptor, the real star of this cinema event.
T Rex may be the in-yer-face roaring big baddie of the dinosaur world and here old Rexy is truly astounding, but it’s the aforesaid velociraptors who are the real bad guys of the piece - evil hunger personified and you get the impression that for these dudes it ain’t the meat but the chase that appeals - check out the scene where you’ve got the hapless Hammond brats trapped in the kitchen with the two hissing, fuming big lizards if you doubt my words…
JP is one immense movie, a masterpiece of suspense and computer wizardry, but the PC generated trickery never gets in the way of the action or the story and Spielberg does what he does so very well here, tell a wonderfully gripping story and draw you tightly in to whatever little panorama he is painting.
Check out the Fat Guy (Wayne Knight as Dennis Nedry) and the kids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) for splendid support work and dig those adorable sets and set pieces, JP is yer bona fide cinema classic.
But then Mr Spielberg has always been associated with cinema classics or big budget, big audience epics. His CV is littered with all sorts of amazing achievements, such as ‘ET’, ‘Gremlins’, ‘Jaws’, ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’, ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’ and the other two Indiana Jones movies, but he has also been responsible for more thoughtful work such as ‘Schindler’s List’, ‘The Color Purple’ (I hate Americanised spelling, don’t you?) and ‘Poltergeist’, but JP is without doubt one of his very BIGGEST successes.
JP had long been a dream of Spielberg’s and was an age in the planning. He was fascinated by the idea of bringing dinosaurs to the big screen and said during the filming of the work: “My interest is in making a good movie that honours the existence of dinosaurs.” Now, I’m not sure about that, because he seems a bit too close to the showman character played by Darling Dickie to be as lilywhite as he would like to paint himself and seemed content to exploit the idea of the dinosaur for his own ends, but he certainly sparked off a craze for the giant reptiles with this 1993 masterpiece.
At Spielberg’s bidding, Universal Studios negotiated with Crichton in 1990 to buy the rights to his upcoming novel, convinced it would be the basis of a blockbuster. They began filming on the island of Kauai in August 1992, with two years having been spent on preparatory work. It took a year to bring the epic to the screen, but it nearly didn’t happen because their island paradise was attacked by a typhoon during the filming and the sets were quite literally flattened.
The jungle scenes in the film could easily have been set during that particular venting of Mother Nature’s wrath and are among the pick of the film, but it’s hard to single out any particular moments as being highlights because the whole thing hangs together as a wonderful whole, totally enthralling.
The film inspired the obligatory video game (a great one) and half assed follow up in ‘The Lost World’ and its merchandising was everywhere for a while as JP smashed all box office records. It thoroughly deserved to do so and if you still haven’t seen Rexy and his pals, a rare treat awaits you…
