In the face of various leadership disasters, it’s become common meme-ing practice in recent years to note that the mayor of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – the man who wanted to keep the beaches open, even as a Great White was feasting on a buffet of tourists – is still the mayor in Jaws II. Point being, there are rarely any consequences to arrogance and ineptitude, especially if a person has a certain folksy charisma and is only considered guilty of pursuing the almighty dollar.
The world is run by the mayors of Jaws. And when Spielberg adapted Michael Crichton’s bestselling sci-fi/adventure Jurassic Park, he found another one in Dr John Hammond, an avuncular industrialist who rushes to make a theme park out of cloned dinosaurs. As played by Richard Attenborough, Hammond is a white-bearded grandpa with a twinkle in his eye, eager to open a prehistoric zoo where no expense was spared but all corners were cut. It’s hard to understand him as a villain, though, because Spielberg sees a little of himself in a commercial visionary bringing wonders to the masses. He’s just another fool in charge.
Thirty years later, Jurassic Park has only burnished its reputation as one of Spielberg’s finest blockbusters, despite sequels and reboots that keep discovering new frontiers in insulting an audience’s intelligence. But as technology continues to advance, there are more John Hammonds than ever, promoting an astounding future that can feel like an endless beta test, full of bugs that these self-styled geniuses have no ability to anticipate, much less resolve. Though the film feels like Jaws 2.0 in many respects, it also finds Spielberg in a slyly cynical, even self-lacerating mood: he knows what it’s like to create eye-popping spectacles that can be merchandized on T-shirts and lunch boxes. Hammond is his worst image of himself.
The funniest part of Jurassic Park is that not a single thing about the park itself works right, despite Hammond’s vain hope that he can get a few prominent scientists to sign off on it. With the park’s insurers spooked about a lawsuit over an employee mauled by a velociraptor, Hammond summons paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and “chaotician” Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to Isla Nublar, the lush tropical Petri dish where he and his team of scientists have revived dinosaurs from DNA taken from amber-preserved mosquitoes. In a brilliant satirical touch, the guests have the whole process explained to them in an Epcot-style ride featuring Hammond as a Walt Disney-type interacting with an animated DNA strand.
The guests easily break out of the ride so they can check out the lab. So add that to the list of fixes. The motorized safari through the park, with Hammond’s grandkids on board, adds a few more. Some of the dinosaurs don’t come out and a triceratops seems sick from one of the toxic plants added for the sake of verisimilitude, which is also the dumb reason a ruthless predator like the raptor would be revived. Whatever 10,000-volt containment fences aren’t knocked out by a tropical storm are shut down by a scheming computer programmer (Wayne Knight) who’s looking to steal $1.5m in embryos. No one else knows how to get the system back online, leaving the guests to omnivorous beasts.
Ian files all of these mishaps under “chaos theory”, but that’s giving Hammond and his team too much credit, given how unprepared they are for any contingencies at all. Before anything goes wrong at all, Ian, Alan and Ellie take turns thrashing their host for upsetting the natural order of things so recklessly, with Ian getting the biggest licks in (“What you call discovery I call the rape of the natural world”) while Hammond and his lawyer stare at them with dollar signs in their eyes. And who can blame them? Before his allusions to King Kong and Frankenstein start to take shape, Spielberg himself produces an awe-inspiring vision of a place where families can gawk at 15 species of dinosaurs before exiting through the gift shop.
Though Jurassic Park gave Spielberg the chance to return to the predatory family-friendly horror of Jaws, the pace is considerably more frenetic, with fewer anxious pauses in the action between dino attacks. Yet his unrivaled gift for using offscreen space and visual wit is in full effect, even with the relatively new power of CGI at his disposal. The thump of an approaching dinosaur registers as pond ripples in a cup of water, the view of a T-Rex in the sideview mirror is framed by the “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear” warning, and the menace of an approaching raptor is underlined by the fog of its breath on a kitchen’s service window. There are a few old-fashioned jump scares here, too, just as they are in Jaws, but so many of the most indelible moments come through awed facial expressions, imagistic sleight-of-hand and the swells of John Williams’s score.
Crichton liked to write panicky novels about semi-plausible futures. Jurassic Park is more or less an updating of the theme-park-gone-wrong in his book Westworld, only instead of freaking out about robots, he could freak out about advances in DNA and cloning. In Spielberg’s hands, however, Jurassic Park connects more with man’s violation of the natural world and our arrogance in believing it can be manipulated and tamed (and converted into lucrative IP). The movies that influenced Jurassic Park all teach the same lessons in hubris. Three decades later, the film itself is feeling like a graver warning than ever.
