directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp
after the novel by Michael Crichton (1990)

I grew up thinking of Steven Spielberg as one of the basic brands. I didn’t just like his movies; he was, like Disney, a cultural axiom. I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the extreme foreignness of people my age who were brought up to have reservations (or worse) about the old Disney properties. On the other hand, I never felt any particular loyalty to Warner Brothers cartoons, though I enjoyed watching them, and childhoods that embraced those as being culturally fundamental strike me as similarly alien. There must be a name in marketing for that kind of acceptance, acceptance that goes beyond mere critical opinion to being part of one’s cultural cosmology. In fact, it can be quite independent of opinion: as a kid I never really thought “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was any good, but I watched it anyway because it was, for want of a better word, undeniable.

Anyway, Steven Spielberg was undeniable in my childhood, and furthermore, I actually liked watching our video copies of E.T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Duel, and, eventually, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at the time that I was reaching the age of general movie-readiness at 11 or 12, the Spielberg brand had gotten weirdly sidetracked by stuff like Always and Hook, and when Jurassic Park was announced, there was a sense that this was my first chance to be present for the unveiling of one of these momentous things. For all intents and purposes, those other movies had come out before my time, alive though I may have been. I guess there must also have been some sort of unprecedented all-around hype for the release, since my grandmother felt compelled to come out of moviegoing retirement, for the one and only time, to accompany us to see this dinosaur action movie, of all things.

Upon returning from this historic occasion there was the sense, in my family, that it had been both thrilling and fun and, simultaneously, all-around not very good. I remember feeling, during the opening scenes, the grown-up-flavored disappointment of recognizing that despite the brand, the dinosaurs, and the hype, “Steven Spielberg” had made something was not, in fact, undeniable.

Huge swaths of this movie are eminently deniable; most of the non-special-effects time is, to one degree or another, clunky and unconvincing. Spielberg has a very strong sense of pacing and of visual storytelling, but in his movies of the past 15 years, he has done a frustratingly uneven job of actually delivering screenplays, line-for-line, to the audience. In Jurassic Park, it frequently seems like he made production design choices for each scene as a whole and storyboard-style choices for the shot compositions, but didn’t have any particular strategy for conveying the actual individual lines and stage directions in the script. As a result, a lot of sequences play as annoyingly artificial – almost condescendingly so – because the writing, never quite integrated into the filmmaking, hangs apart from it in a dumb, transparent way.

For example, an early scene, wherein Sam Neill describes death by velociraptor to intimidate an annoying kid, falls completely flat. It’s downright embarrassing. But despite what it might seem, the scene as written is reasonable enough, and watching it again, I think that Sam and, yes, that unpleasantly cast kid each do a perfectly serviceable job. So why does the scene feel like such garbage? I blame Spielberg. He shoots it like he knows that it’s cute (“when you see that claw, I want you to bug your eyes out, okay?”) but doesn’t expect us to really care about what’s being said, only the overall gist of the intimidation – the actual dialogue gets hung out to dry. The audience (and the director) are just waiting it out so we can get a cheap punchline when the kid whimpers at the end, defeated. Spielberg sells the broader cliché and deals with the specifics impatiently, and as a result, the specifics end up seeming like a charmless burden on the scene, an inefficient and annoying way of accomplishing something that, as Spielberg sees it, is fundamentally crude and simple.

Put another way, in actors’ terms: Spielberg doesn’t help try to “find the truth” in the scene as written – he approaches the scene in terms of its function, and lets the actors worry about making what they’re doing seem likely. But since he’s using his camera to sell something else, they don’t really stand a chance.

This happens again and again. In the awed moment of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, Neill’s character tosses off a whole bunch of “scientist” dialogue, like “We could tear up the rule book on cold-bloodedness. It doesn’t apply.” The scene tries to swallow this up because it doesn’t really want him to be having this kind of reaction in the midst of all that awe – but he says it all the same, and we in the audience squirm and think, “That’s so lame that he’s saying that! This script is so dumb!” Or the scenes at headquarters, with Wayne Knight spouting tech talk and Samuel L. Jackson sucking absurdly on a cigarette. Koepp and Crichton put this stuff in the script to be heard, but Spielberg decides to shoot it like it’s just background noise, and it ends up seeming gratingly phony. He should either have shot to the dialogue and made a slightly more Crichton-esque movie, or have said, “sorry guys, but I’m cutting this script down to a little comic book dialogue and that’s it, because that’s all I want this movie to be.” The “Mr. DNA” cartoon as technical explanation seems exactly on the level that Spielberg was willing to care about, whereas the “frog DNA somehow made it possible for the dinosaurs to reproduce” thing is obviously way over the sci-fi head of this basically scienceless monster movie, and should have been excised completely, rather than being pared down to a worthless nub.

In retrospect, I think this sort of problem was the reason that Amistad was so unpleasant and ineffective. It’s not so much that it was sanctimonious – it was that it used the specifics of the script as a mere means of getting at the big clichés. Spielberg does his best work when he actually cares about getting the details across, when he thinks that what is happening in a given line or in a given moment could, in and of itself, be interesting to the audience. I think this is probably how he managed to make something worthy out of Schindler’s List – because he was unable to fall back on seeing any given event as being just a mechanism for creating some larger effect; he had to address each point as though it mattered. He certainly has the skill to do something strong with anything that matters to him.

In Jurassic Park, clearly what matters to him is the action sequences. The bit with the tyrannosaurus and the minivans is far and away the best thing in the movie, and holds up well. The bit with the kids being stalked around the kitchen by velociraptors is also pretty satisfying. The scenes where people are talking to each other are as boring to us as they must have been to Steven.

Let me however mention that despite Spielberg’s apparent disinterest, Bob Peck manages to eke some appeal out of the absolutely bone-thin non-character of Muldoon. I also feel warmly toward him because he was the lead in the excellent Jim Henson short The Soldier and Death.*

I ended up watching this again recently because I suddenly found myself with the opportunity to study the actual orchestral score to John Williams’ incidental music – something one generally cannot do. More on that later. I didn’t have a very clear memory of it, apart from the two main themes, which on first viewing, I remember, seemed overblown and unappealing, as though John Williams were making a clumsy attempt to sound like himself. (There’s also a very short motive signifying dino-danger – comparable to the “Jaws” motive in function, really – which is fairly effective though it’s never quite isolated clearly enough for the audience to really “learn” it.) Now, with benefit of the score, I can say that the two big melodies** are indeed rather weak as tunes, though thinking of them as solutions to specific expressive film-scoring problems has given me slightly more respect for them. I think that’s my review of the music as a whole – it doesn’t really add up to anything musically satisfying or even particularly coherent, but every problem posed by the movie is solved cleverly, expertly. Watching the movie with the score in hand makes it that much clearer to me just how many problems there are to solve in a movie like this. In a little interview I found online, the composer says

Jurassic Park has a 95-minute score. It pumps away all the time. It’s a rugged, noisy effort – a massive job of symphonic cartooning. You have to match the rhythmic gyrations of the dinosaurs and create these kind of funny ballets.

Like the man says, it’s a huge heap of disjointed cartoon music that plays as a very literal accompaniment to almost every shot. I suspect that my criticism of the directing might apply here as well; the best scene in the movie is unscored, and it seems like maybe the whole thing would have been scarier and more involving if the music had taken a less balletic, more dramatic approach, playing the content rather than the kinetics. But that’s obviously not how Spielberg saw it or wanted it. The movie as a whole is a ballet of cars falling down trees and dinosaurs jumping through ceiling panels – a ballet where half the time, people aren’t dancing much, and are instead reading lines out of a Michael Crichton novel. Oh well. We all managed to sit through it; it may be lame but it’s all perfectly cheery and inoffensive. There’s hardly anything left in the movie that makes me cringe. Hook will take me longer, I’m afraid. Amistad isn’t going to happen.

* Not to be confused with this.

** An acquaintance in college offered, for the climax of the hymn-like theme, the lyrics “We are dinosaurs, we are dinosaurs, we like to-o roar” and for the heroic main theme, the lyrics “We’re so amazing; we are made from DNA.” These are funny.