Jaws Ii

By RICHARD CORLISS

John Hammond is a man in love with an idea. Inspired by motives of applied science and pure profit, he has pursued a scheme to clone dinosaurs from their preserved dna and show off the brand-new behemoths on an island preserve. He has imperiled some noted scientists, and even his two young grandchildren, by inviting them to inspect the park before it is ready. Dino disaster awaits.

Hammond might be an ogre, twisting genetic research into capitalist exploitation, creating the ultimate carnival sideshow, where the freaks eat the gawkers. That is pretty much how Michael Crichton sketched the old man in the novel Jurassic Park. But the Hammond played by Richard Attenborough in Steven Spielberg's movie version is another fellow altogether; the director calls him "a cross between Walt Disney and Ross Perot." Hammond is certainly a visionary, a fabulous showman, an enthusiast, an emperor of ice cream, a kid with a great new toy. "Top of the line!" he chirps. "Spared no expense!" Why, he might be Spielberg as a foxy grandpa.

Top of the line? Jurassic Park, like every other Spielberg movie, is couture for the masses: a cunning design, elegantly tailored. Spared no expense? Just ask the picture's sponsor, Universal, which has not had a $100 million winner at the domestic box office since 1989 (with the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future Part II) and urgently needs a megahit. Hence the marketing tie-in with McDonald's, the imminent Jurassic Park ride at Universal's theme parks, and the saturation of action figures, jammies and cologne. The director did cut costs with a decent, modest cast of nonstars, and he tried shooting every dialogue scene in no more than five takes. But the expert exertions of the 483 other artists and technicians listed in the credits ensured that Jurassic Park would cost about $65 million, or $1 for every year since dinosaurs became extinct.

But enough money talk. This is a monster movie. So how are they?

Amazing. Dinosaurs live. You are there, once upon a time, before mammal walked or man dreamed. You can pet a triceratops and, if you wish, examine its droppings. You can feed a vegetarian brachiosaur, whose movements are graceful, endearing. At times the beasts (animated, mostly, by the computer - sorcerers from Industrial Light & Magic) move in a hazier space than the humans in the foreground, but in the intimate scenes the dinos are utterly convincing. Spielberg loves to mix wonder with horror, and he has fun creating a living Museum of Natural Fantasy.

Then he scares you witless. Here come a nosy tyrannosaur and a fan-faced, bilious dilophosaur. Nastiest of all are the velociraptors, smart, relentless punks in packs -- Saurz N the Hood. They have a special appetite for kids, just like the great white shark in the movie that made Spielberg's rep. Now it has some worthy successors: primeval creatures with personality and a lot of bite. Jurassic Park is the true Jaws II.

Like the films to which it pays elaborate homage -- Gertie the Dinosaur, King Kong (and its Universal theme-park spin-off, Kongfrontation), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, Bringing Up Baby -- this one sometimes creaks when it's not playing with the beasties. For the first half-hour -- the preshow before the thrill ride -- you are advised to bide your time. Screenwriter David Koepp's subplot, in which a paleontologist (Sam Neill) is force-fed lessons in fatherhood by his paleobotanist girlfriend (Laura Dern), is laid on with a trowel. And the plot occasionally beggars belief. If you were up a huge tree and a van were teetering on the branch above you, would you race down the side of the tree just ahead of the plummeting vehicle, or would you move sensibly to the other side of the tree? But that is just another horror-movie tradition Spielberg observes: smart people doing really dumb things.

So what? This is at heart a picture about animals doing really smart things. The dilophosaur can inspire dread just by staring at its prey; the raptors by breathing on a window or opening a door. The T. rex goes for broader gestures: tipping over that rickety van, gobbling half of a lawyer, and shaking the other half like a cat with a mouse between its teeth. (And if you miss the book's creepiest scene, where the T. rex curls its tongue around a child hiding inside a waterfall, it's not here because, Spielberg says, "the tongue we made just wasn't convincing. It looked like Dino from The Flintstones.")

Most of the movie eschews overt violence for its much more satisfying alternative -- the threat of violence. The guts and gore are seen mostly in the viewer's lurid imagination. That is why Jurassic Park slips so neatly into its PG-13 rating. "I do think this movie is inappropriate for children under 13," Spielberg says. "In general, though, I think children are more traumatized by violence that can be re-created in a natural setting: a movie about child abuse or a movie about murder. This is a movie that not only can't happen, but can't even be emulated. Even if audiences buy into the notion that dinosaurs are back, they still have the reassurance that they won't be attacked by a tyrannosaur on the way home. I guarantee that won't happen."

Ever since the director hit it big with Jaws, people have been telling him to grow up. They want him to tackle more personal themes, to address adult subject matter, to please stop making Steven Spielberg movies. Perhaps Schindler's List, the Nazi-era drama he has already completed shooting for Christmas release, will satisfy those who want Spielberg to enter an auteur rehab clinic.

But no film could be more personal to him than this one. With its next- generation effects and its age-old story line, this is a movie whose subject is its process, a movie about all the complexities of fabricating entertainment in the microchip age. It's a movie in love with technology (as Spielberg is), yet afraid of being carried away by it (as he is). The film even has a resident conscience, chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who insists that what God has put asunder, no man should join together.

Of course, if Hammond listens to him and shuts down the park, there's no film. The director of such beautiful dramas as Empire of the Sun and Always knows Malcolm is right; the director of E.T. and the Indiana Jones movies knows he must be ignored. Spielberg needs the dinosaurs to run amuck, as they so handsomely, plausibly do.

Yet Malcolm's words are a warning to all directors dazzled by the great new toys of filmmaking. "Dennis Muren and the ILM team," Spielberg says, "have perfected the dinosaur. Now what we need are stories. Without them, technology is an orphan. Without a good yarn, it's just a bunch of convincing pictures."

Thanks to Crichton, Spielberg had a good yarn to work with. Thanks to his effects wizards, the pictures were convincing. But it was the director who put the drama in every snazzy frame. For dinosaurs to rule the earth again, the monsters needed majesty as well as menace. And Spielberg got it all right.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco