Jurassic Park: Here There Be Dinos

    When I was small, I, like so many others, was obsessed with dinosaurs.  I'm still fascinated by them...whenever I enter any museum, it doesn't matter what else they may have on display, I'm still a sucker for the fossil rooms.   I just really like dinosaurs.  I don't know exactly what it is, but clearly it's a pretty common captivation.  They're simply, for lack of a more academic term, cool.

     As a child, dinosaurs were pretty readily available in popular culture.  The Land Before Time movies, Dino-Riders, Dino-Saucers...heck, my favorite sub-group of Transformers was (and is) the Dinobots.  There was even that rather odd Dinosaurs TV show in the early '90s that managed a couple of seasons.  Of course, there did seem to be some kind of consensus that dinosaurs were 'kids' stuff'.  But that changed rather dramatically; I first became aware of it during the summer before I was to enter high school, when I received my summer reading list and saw this:

A better reading list choice than The Faerie Queene any day of the week.

  The rest, as they say, is (pre-)history.  Suddenly, dinosaurs weren't just for kids anymore.  I was blown away...not only the story, but the concepts.  Dinosaurs walking the earth again, alive and well and living in Costa Rica.  I quickly learned that a lot of the science in the book was impossible, but that never stopped me from imagining the possibilities.  I also learned at least one new word, "velociraptor".  I liken it to someone just shy of two hundred years ago first learning the word "Frankenstein".

  I've re-read the book a few times in the intervening years; it really doesn't hold up very well from a literary perspective.  It's filled with fairly generic characters delivering lengthy dissertations on cloning, mathematics, biology and ethics; it's preachy and predictable, and has little or no reverence for its subject matter...ultimately, dinosaurs are merely the vehicle by which Crichton's opinions on genetic engineering were delivered.   The funny thing is, as clunky as the book can be, I still love it.  I find it a captivating read, and I still enjoy the characters and the story, despite some technical failings.

  In the summer of 1993, the film adaptation came out and changed the way audiences viewed movies.  Cutting-edge CGI and animatronic/puppeteering brought these creatures to life in a way we'd never seen, and dinosaurs have been pretty well set in popular culture ever since.  Spielberg certainly took some liberties with the movie - there are any number of plot changes, and the fates of most of the characters ended up quite differently in the re-telling.  A solid cast made the two-dimensional characters of the book likable and memorable, far more so than pretty much any monster/disaster movie ever had.   More importantly, though, he changed the tone of the story, and while it was still a cautionary tale about man's arrogance in the face of nature, it was filled with the majesty of the dinosaurs.  No longer were they simply blundering or killing machines, but strange magnificent creatures that were beautiful and terrible all at once.

I don't know how many times I've seen it, but this scene STILL gives me goosebumps.

     It remains one of my favorite films, and holds up very well.  I find that thanks to its movie-specific attributes - score, dialogue, editing, etc. -  that it enhances the book rather than contrasts with it.  Even with the differences, I find between the two there's a nice balance.  Secondary characters are fleshed out, the island is more fully explored, and there are more types of dinosaurs thanks to the book, but the film brings it all to life more vividly and impressively.  The movie is one of the rare instances where I feel that the adaptation is better than the source.

    The first book and movie alone would have cemented the concept's place in popular culture, but of course there were sequels.  There will always be sequels.  If not sequels, then prequels, or remakes, or whatever new term we may find.  With most intellectual properties, this is usually cause for exasperation, but in the case of Jurassic Park, I find that I never seem to mind, because DINOS.  Yes, I'm pretty easily marketed-to on that score.  (I got burned on two Transformers sequels but I still went to the fourth one for no other reason than the Dinobots were on the big screen for all of twenty minutes.)

     Crichton wrote a sequel to his bestseller, "The Lost World", which quite frankly I hated.  It felt like a cash-in maneuver, not least of all because of his inexplicable un-killing of Ian Malcolm (yes, Malcolm does die at the end of the first novel).  Crichton was evidently pressured into writing it, and it certainly doesn't feel like a labor of love.  The film adaptation of the sequel is decent, though; there are some rather substantial changes and a very different set of characters, but that's to the film's benefit.  It's moody and dark, and revolves around a plot to remove the dinosaurs from the island on which they live for the purposes of building a commercial zoo in San Diego.  While it's not as grand as the first film, it's fairly solid...or at least 80% of it is.  It rather goes off the rails in the last reel as it turns into a very silly pastiche of Godzilla.  A different type of ending could have helped it quite a bit, but on the whole it's pretty entertaining.

The cast of the Lost World.  It's harder to feel sympathy for people who go into these things voluntarily.

   There was a third film a few years later.   It was basically just an excuse to have a sequel, and while it's not a bad movie on its own technical merits, it's full of cardboard cutout characters and ultimately forgettable...were it not for the Jurassic Park brand, it's likely no one would ever remember it.  On the plus side, though, both sequels did provide audiences (OK, what I really mean here is "me") with more dinosaurs.  The stegosaurus, my personal favorite, appears in the Lost World, and the third film gives us the some neat pterodactyl action (which was actually featured in the first book.)  There are others, but really my only major takeaway here is getting to see more well-rendered dinos on the big screen.

    Now, here we are over a decade later since Jurassic Park III, and a new film, Jurassic World, is due to open in a few days.  JW is being pitched as more of a sequel to the first film, but based on the premise that the park, which never saw the light of day after the events of the movie, is now successfully up, running, and hugely popular.  There's something really incredible about the thought ...like a shade of Norma Desmond in the film studio 'coming home' again...that despite all the crazy, maybe it could actually work?  Of course the humans must fiddle around as they are wont to do, leading to running, screaming, crunching, and squishing, which really must raise the question "Why do people never learn?"   You know what?  Who cares?   I'm gratified by the excitement the movie appears to be generating, but really, I'm just happy because DINOS.

    The worst thing about the whole Jurassic Park concept for me is that it is, in fact, fiction.  For over twenty years I've found myself wishing that it could be real...that these incredible animals could be living and breathing again in the 21st century.   There's not much else in the movies that I can really say that about, that I very deeply want the science-fiction to be science-fact.  Maybe lightsabers.  I don't want aliens to invade or supervillains to tear up cities...that kind of thing can hit close to home if you take it out of context.  But the thought that somewhere out there, these things could exist....that's a great little dream.

   And that's really what it's all about for me.  Because while I like the original characters and the score and all that, it's about the dinosaurs, and letting Hollywood work its magic for a while and imagining they're out there.  Good, bad, or otherwise, I'll keep coming back for these guys.  How could you not?  I mean, come on....DINOS!

Chris Pratt, and one of his squad...yes, squad!...of trained velociraptors.  Sold!

   Of course, now that I think about it, what about DINOS....with lightsabers????