#their agenda only has reboots no one asked for or live action adaptations

[dendromancer]

another round and squid game are both getting american remakes?? [meryl streep voice] groundbreaking

[man-creates-dinosaurs]

I was swamped with various obligations all throughout #JurassicJune. So while I did celebrate by re-reading both Michael Crichton novels and re-watching all the previous Jurassic films and attending the premier of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - I wasn’t able to blog about it. Now #JurassicJune has come and gone and we are in #Kaijuly. But I have one post that I really wanted to make that I think appropriately touches on both month’s themes...

Jurassic Park as Monster Movie

“Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is nothing more – and nothing less – than the world’s most extravagant Godzilla movie.”

So said film critic David Ansen in his 1993 Newsweek review of the first Jurassic movie. Today this may sound like a rather dismissive assessment of a film which has come to be regarded as one of greatest sci-fi movies ever made. But rather than the snarky opinion of a single critic I find Ansen’s appraisal to be a rather frank and refreshing summation of what Jurassic Park actually is. A high tech monster movie.

Today everyone who was of the right age in 1993 agrees that Jurassic Park is a great movie. But curiously when you ask them “Why?” many have trouble explaining exactly what it is that made the film so great. This goes for professional film critics as well as self-proclaimed fans. Usually people put in this corner tend to fall back on vague adjectives claiming that Jurassic Park was great because it invoked a sense of “awe and wonderment,” a somewhat ironic claim since back in ‘93 legendary film critic Roger Ebert argued that it was exactly these qualities which Jurassic Park lacked... along with decently realized human characters and an interesting story. Both of which further adds to the amusement since in recent years a number of videos have started to pop-up on YouTube (see: here, here & here) made by people attempting to elucidate Jurassic Park’s greatness by examining its themes and characters. Much of the content of these videos is simply a rehash of observations made about Jurassic Park by academics over the last 25-years and deals with how the movie touches upon ideas regarding the perils of scientific advancement while advocating an agenda of reproductive futurism via its characters. See paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “Dinomania” and sociologist John O’Neill’s essay “Dinosaurs-R-Us” as well as W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book (U. of Chicago Press, 1998) and Joshua Bellin’s Framing Monsters (S. IL U. Press, 2005) for an example of some of this scholarship. Furthermore, what these YouTube commentators seem to have missed, which the actual scholars did not, is that these elements – the themes of technophobia and the importance of marriage and children – are among the most hackneyed and clichéd aspects of Jurassic Park, not to mention utterly retrograde in their outlook. These elements are certainly not what made Jurassic Park great or what has allowed it to endure for 25-years.

So what does make Jurassic Park great? For critics like Ansen and Ebert the answer, back in 1993, was obvious. The special-effects of course! “You want great dinosaurs, you got great dinosaurs,” wrote Ebert, “[and] because the movie delivers on the bottom line, I'm giving it three stars.” Jurassic Park spent nearly three years in special-effects research and development and combined the artistic might of stop-motion maven Phil Tippett, animatronics maestro Stan Winston and the cutting edge CGI work of Dennis Murren and ILM studios to usher in nothing less than a revolution in special-effects technology. Back in 1993 everyone who saw Jurassic Park left the theater believing – despite their better judgment – that they had seen real dinosaurs. And because of its special-effects after Jurassic Park the world of cinema has, quite literally, never been the same.

Yet as sci-fi author John Scalzi notes in his surprisingly provocative book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies (Rough Guides, 2005), the fact that Jurassic Park – which Scalzi counts as being among the then 50 most important sci-fi films ever made –  is great precisely because of its groundbreaking special-effects work has often led to the film being severely underappreciated. Again this may sound odd in 2018 when everyone is celebrating the 25th-Anniversary of Jurassic Park and the fifth film in the franchise – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – just finished its second week as the Number 1 movie in America, but it’s important to remember that Scalzi was writing this in 2005 when the Jurassic Park brand was effectively dead in the water and Universal was seriously considering rebooting the franchise as something approaching a live-action adaptation of the cheesy 90s cartoon Extreme Dinosaurs.

Today Jurassic Park has regained its cultural capital in large part due to the phenomenal box office success of 2015’s Jurassic World - which as horror author and film critic Kim Newman observed succeeded in being the first film in the series to bring a definite “kaiju feel” to the franchise - but also because of the wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia currently surging through American popular-culture. But this same nostalgia has now caused Jurassic Park to be put on a pedestal, elevated far above its station to such an extent that many people now become nervous when you point out that they are venerating what is essentially a glitzy Godzilla flick. And make no mistake this is exactly what Jurassic Park is. In Don Shay and Jody Duncan’s highly recommended book The Making of Jurassic Park (Ballantine Books, 1993), Spielberg talks about what his seminal cinematic influences were when filming Jurassic Park. Among the foremost were a number of films which I have blogged about here including the original KING KONG (1933), THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1954), GORGO (1961) and of course GODZILLA (1954) which Spielberg singles out as “the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening.” Other obvious influences, as noted by author Mark Berry in his The Dinosaur Filmography (McFarland, 2005), are the movies DINOSAURUS! (1960) and THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969). Jurassic Park – depending on your point of view – may have better special-effects than all of these films, but it is certainly not any better or more sophisticated than any of these films. In many ways, what Jurassic Park really is is a culmination of these films. The ultimate pop-culture dinosaur potpourri.

Currently there seems to be a great deal of monster-movie-denial going around with regards to Jurassic Park for a variety of different reasons. In fact, the only time people seem to want to mention the phrase “monster movie” in conjunction with Jurassic Park is when talking about the sequels and here the association is always negative. As in: ‘Jurassic Park was a great movie, but the sequels are just a bunch of dumb monster movies.’ I happen to like all of the Jurassic sequels to a greater or lesser extent, even the most recent film – Fallen Kingdom – which I nevertheless do acknowledge as being the most seriously flawed movie in the franchise to date. (If you want to hear my opinion of each film I suggest popping over to The Film Find podcast where I recently recorded an episode with regular host Adam Portrais on the entire Jurassic franchise.)

And while I would never insist that everyone who likes Jurassic Park also has to like the sequels I do expect that when someone is going to say a film is bad that they at least lay out a series of well thought out arguments about why they feel that way. And in this case saying that the Jurassic Park sequels are bad because they are “monster movies” when the original film wasn’t simply doesn’t count as a valid argument. I’m not sure how you prove to someone that Jurassic Park is a monster movie - really seems self-evident to me - but in the following series of posts I’m going to endeavor to demonstrate some of the ways that Spielberg used Jurassic Park to pay homage to the dino-monster movies of yesteryear and by doing so firmly seated his film as existing within that same tradition of fantastic film-making.