JURASSIC PARK

JURASSIC PARK (Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough)

Over the last few issues I have been trying to avoid writing about dinosaurs. And I have done pretty well up to now. But finally it is unavoidable, the best is upon us: Hyposauras.

There is very little I can tell you about "Jurassic Park" that you don't already know. But for anyone who has been on the moon these last couple of months,

"Jurassic Park" is set on an island populated by DNA generated dinosaurs. A team of reporters, scientists and, uh, little children, arrive for a pre-publicity tour but, of course, IT ALL GOES HORRIBLY WRONG.

The term 'ride movie' is employed increasingly commonly to suggest a film that hurtles a viewer along like a passenger on a rollercoaster. Spielberg, past master of the ride, has gone one further, a film about a theme park that is already being developed as a theme park ride at Universal. He confidently takes the audience on a visually amazing journey, encouraging us to pause and admire the wonders his team of effects experts have created, before gradually accelerating pace until we are hurtling down the dips, plunged into a nightmare from which we know (this being PG rated Spielberg) we will safely emerge. And those infants who have been digging their nails into our arms, wide-eyed with fear, will turn to us and say, "That was cool! Can we go again?"

Even in the arena of terror, Spielberg's obsession with childhood things remains. Despite the presence of Sam Neill brooding hero), Laura Dern (plucky heroine), Jeff Goldblum (paranoid scientist) and Richard Attenborough (ham . . . sorry, mad doctor) it is the children (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) who are the focus of the director's attentions. It is as if, having spent the best part of two decades charming them, he has now set out to terrify them, abandoning them with the greatest monsters movie technology can create.

But unlike the film's real hero, the enormous and utterly convincing Tyranosauras Rex, he doesn't have the killer instinct to actually finish them off. Having added them to Michael Crichton's script as a sheer connivance, he proceeds to weld the drama to create a nuclear family around them.

Perhaps this is the secret of Spielberg's success. He wants everybody to go 'Aaaah' as well as 'EEEK!' and 'Oooooh!'. He covers the full range of superficial emotion. But it would seem like sheer begrudgery to complain. Although his characters are not particularly well developed, and he can't quite get over the sentimentality that imbues his work, "Jurassic Park" is a technical masterpiece, bursting with visual extravaganzas that are awesome to behold, and creating sustained passages of sheer cinematic fearfulness. He has stripped the book of some of its gore and honed down the suspense to make "Jurassic Park" the closest thing to 'Jaws on legs' one could reasonably expect.

And let's face it, you are going to see it whether you want to or not. The Hyposauras may be a big, lumbering beast with a tiny brain, but when it comes to selling t-shirts, mugs, key-tags, toys, figurines, breakfast cereals, hamburgers, story books, lunch boxes, pencils and movie tickets, there is no better sales creature in all creation.