Over the course of said essay, he mentions that JP (still a fairly recent release at the time) played on constant loop on one of the ship's on-board channels; he says he watched it 6 times that 1 week, and found the third act to be weak. (Though he does say that, after losing a chess-match to a 9-year-old prodigy, he felt a sudden sympathy for the Raptors hunting the kids). I wished to revisit the film and decide for myself.
So how does 1993's premier blockbuster hold up 2 decades later? The first thing I noticed was just how 90s it looked--the haircuts, the clothing, the film-stock, the bulky macintoshes, the animation-quality of the Park's intro cartoon, Seinfeld's Newman as the villain, the hilariously-dated use of the word "hacker,"--the film just screams early-90s chick.
Now, to say that the film is dated (what film isn't?) is not say that the film hasn't aged well--on the contrary, whether enforced by then-technological-limitations or as a conscious artistic choice, Spielberg's decision to combine CGI with live-animatronics helps the film immensely. (Just think original Star Wars trilogy with its models and sets vs the prequel trilogy with its...yeah).
What next struck me about this ol' childhood favorite is, well, just how much I remembered of the movie. JP is now just in the air we breath, it has permeated our popular consciousness such that we don't even need to have seen, or even liked the film, to get the references. (The fact that Natural History museums to this day still have videos explaining how you can't clone dinosaurs from amber-mosquito DNA proves the extensive reach of this film). To wit: the ripples in water-cup; "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear"; the lawyer on the toilet; "clever girl"; "nuh-uh-uh! You didn't see the magic word!"; and so forth.
Now, none of this is to imply that JP is a perfect film, either, cause it's not: the big "reveal" that the dinosaurs have figured out how to reproduce in the wild has no follow-through; the "sick Triceratops" development gets introduced and promptly dropped; despite some token armchair-philosophizing about how "life always finds a way," the film's themes aren't particularly more profound than "folks almost get eaten by dinos, then aren't"; genetically, the film isn't far removed from the ol' monster films of the 60s; despite the actors' best efforts, the characters are never really more than bare stereotypes of themselves; the token black-guy predictably dies; and the merchandise commercials are shoe-horned into the screen-time rather obviously and clumsily.
But here now I'm being a curmudgeon--it really is a uber-fun film, isn't it? The story is tight, the technical proficiency dazzling, and the dinosaurs delightful. As much as I respect Wallace, I must heartily disagree with him that the third act is weak--perhaps he thought the T. Rex rescuing our heroes last second from the Raptors was a bit of a narrative cop-out? On the contrary, I think the entire film was building up to that moment when the T. Rex throws the Raptor through the 70 million year-old skeleton, then roars in triumph as the banner reading "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" flutters to the ground. That's the money-shot, right there--when life breaks free of the carefully-controlled commercial restraints that had tried (and failed) to make kitch out of something transcendent.
The failure of commercialism to contain life is present from the opening scene, wherein Costa Rican workers sporting official "Jurassic Park" hard-hats wait with hard-stares for the raptor-container to be unloaded. Those officially-trademarked hats give off a sense of professional control, of this Disney-fied de-clawing of danger, of this assurance that marketing professionals have carefully accounted for all quadrants and demographics, that powerful investors in board meetings have all processes streamlined and ISO2000 certified. Of course, those kitchy logos rest on the sweating heads of hard-eyed men, and before the opening scene is over one of them will be dragged away and eaten by a raptor. Man's folly in trying to control nature is a facile and broad theme; but, commercialism's attempt to Disney-fy and neutralize our chaotic world could've used some more attention.
I also found myself pondering if JP could be classified with such fear-of-technology films as The Terminator, Robocop, The Matrix, even Videodrome, films that express our deep-seated post-modern fear that technology is advancing too rapidly, that the machines by which we rush to master nature will rather master us, that even our best intentioned science may instead be our death (significant is the fact that the dinosaurs here are encountered not by time-travel or finding lost islands, but are actually cloned by human scientists with the latest tech).
Also fascinating is the femininity of the threat; remember that the scientists thought they could control the dinosaur population by breeding them all as female. The implication of course is that femininity is something dangerous that must be repressed and controlled. The appearance of the dino-eggs in the wild is threatening because women are reproducing without men, rendering men unnecessary. The raptors are even first introduced as having claws that can "geld" the young boy in the audience; in Freudian terms, the dinosaurs represent man's unconscious castration complex at the hands of women.
But Freud's no fun! He would've gotten eaten by a raptor in the first five minutes, and the audience would've cheered when it happened. Like I said, Jurassic Park is a genuinely fun film, one I was relieved to find out had lived up to my childhood memories.
And now, in conclusion, Weird Al's "Jurassic Park," a parody that, like most Weird Al songs, is now more recognizable than the original song!
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