JURASSIC PARK @ 30 (Spoilers)

A botanist, a palentologist and a chaos mathematician go into a bar ... or fly to an island (well, it probably has sandbars). A very rich bloke wants them there to spread their highly respected words about his theme park. It's a wildlife number only with resurrected dinosaurs. Oh, hell, this is a Spielberg movie, let's chuck in a couple of kids, as well. They go on a little jaunt to have a look at the beasties after a couple of no shows the automated vehicles stop dead just at the point where a peckish T-Rex wanders by. There's a mother storm on the way and the dodgy IT guy is about to shut half of the security down so he can deliver dino embryos to the very rich bloke's rival. All good.

So, yes, the trap, tightly set for plot development snaps in programmed fashion the way it's meant to. All performances pass and we buy into it from the word go. Spielberg, entering his two and a halfth decade of his colonisation of world cinema, was still upping his last foray to higher heights and more gaspingly huge spectacles. He would diversify in the decade to come but for now he was still happily dishing out supersized family meals. This meant that by the early '90s he had to outdo mega movies like E.T. and all the subsidiary projects from the Spielberg stable like Gremlins, Poltergeist and so on. He had to do in cinematic terms what the Moghul Hammond had done with the dinosaurs, produce a wonder of the modern world.

Michael Crichton's source novel is about the abuse of science, encapsulated in Malcolm's thought about scientists going with what they could do without stopping to ask if they should. That it is personal greed that starts the chain of disaster rather than technical failure only adds in that all the hi-tech security in the world can't keep out human frailty. If it had been a failure of science Spielberg would have been on shakier ground considering how dependent his cinema had become on technology. The Mecha/Boy tension is not resolved in his takeup of the Kubrick project A.I. at the other end of the decade (or just beyond it) in any way that Kurbick would have insisted. The corrupt Nedry is in both the novel and the film and his misdeeds are effectively the same but he is an IT nerd (so identified by the anagram of his name) and only a servant of the tech rather than a scientific creative. Crichton's worries about scientism (unquestioning adoption of things said and done in the name of science) are not shared by Spielberg who plugs that awkward hole with Sam Neill's Dr Allan Grant's conquest of his fear of children.

But the star is the spectacle and that is had in the dinosaurs themselves which I can report that even in slicked up 4K look stupendous. There is nothing fake or shaky to them, they look and move as though they are alive. With access to the brightest and the best, Spielberg found in the decade that crossed over from practical effects to computer generated ones that the legacy was as important as the moment of the event and made damn sure that his prehistoric monsters would look as good as E.T. had already proved to be at the age of eleven. The uncanny-valley crossing realm of CG is with us today and, while always improving, has a much shorter shelf life than what was done here. When your creative ambition becomes indistinguishable from your reputation as a movie god you will not settle for less. 

So, Jurassic Park still works. Even the Unix interface of the computers was possible at the time and didn't have to be pushed too far into animation to work on screen for an audience who still could be persuaded that computers could do anything we could imagine. If I can fault the output at all it is in the continued relation between Spielberg and his composer of choice John Williams who here rolls out yet another score that as Leon Garfield once observed of a character's dress sense that it never went out of fashion because it had never been in. The last bit isn't true of Williams' orchestrations but most of the grinding autofit emotion of them could be for almost anything. I know you're not meant to take notice of the music in a film but I do and I wince at the sound of John Williams' music whenever it was written with the sole exception of Jaws which is mostly masterful (but outside of the shark theme is cringing). 

While this film works in all the ways it's meant to I still don't rate it highly beyond that. I turned off Spielberg early on. I found his tendency toward schmaltz and cuteness calculating and distasteful. Through the '80s and '90s I began to see the difference in what happened between his spectacles and serious films and softened on him as a master of spectacle but an overpleaser when the subject was dark or closer to the workaday world. Over and again in the likes of Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad or even the genre-spanning Minority Report, he seems to be continuously assuring us that he can do dark, serious, he can do earnest and meaningful and it seldom convinces me. Whereas with the likes Jurassic Park we witness a master of his form too busy keeping our attention with the same kind of wonder as his characters' faces famously display. As much as I wince at most of his output there is no serious claim I can make that his place in cinema history is among the supreme and is unshakeable. If only he'd stick to being impossibly grand.