Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410220014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Viewed on a 27-inch TV screen, the new home video version of Steven Spielberg's stupendous hit ``Jurassic Park'' obviously is scaled down from its theatrical release. But the film is so well-made and the special effects so adroit that it's still a flabbergasting experience.
MCA-Universal will have tapes in stores as of Oct. 4 (at $24.98 per copy). According to Video Store magazine's market research, 21.5 million copies are being shipped, meaning that if sales are good, ``JP'' will surpass records held by ``E.T.'' (another Spielberg film) and ``Batman'' among live-action movies on tape. Some 23 million copies of Disney's ``Snow White'' have been ordered by retailers, so that could become the biggest selling movie of all time, surpassing Disney's ``Aladdin.''
Any way you look at it, even on a TV screen, ``Jurassic Park'' is big, big, big. Already in theatrical release around the world, ``Jurassic Park'' has taken in a gargantuan $900 million, the hugest gross ever.
``To me, `Jurassic Park' was like the sequel I never made to `Jaws,''' Spielberg told me when I interviewed him in December. ``It was the Land Shark from `Saturday Night Live,' and it was fun. All I really wanted to make was the modern-day Godzilla movie.''
In fact, he made the greatest monster movie since ``King Kong,'' and as the special effects in ``Kong'' dazzled audiences of 1933 (and remain pretty dazzling to this day), so those in ``Jurassic Park'' set the new standard in modern moviemaking.
We know in our hearts that most of those dinosaurs are only models animated through technical trickery, but the art has reached such a state that you no longer see telltale dividing lines between what's real and what's not. Even in the great stop-motion films of master fantasist Ray Harryhausen (``It Came from Beneath the Sea''), there were limits to the interaction between artificial monsters and actual victims.
With ``Jurassic Park,'' we entered a new age of monsters. The film is a technological triumph about technology run amok.
In the film, as in Michael Crichton's best seller, dinosaurs bred from DNA specimens go crazy at an amusement park about to open on a remote island. Spielberg deserves credit for making the film much less explicitly violent than the book yet keeping it enjoyably traumatic nevertheless.
He's generous with thrills. Although the movie has a few slow points, Spielberg gives us a tantalizing glimpse of an angry dinosaur -mainly its eye -in the very first scene, then shows a full-size and seemingly peaceful dinosaur about 20 minutes in. About 40 minutes later comes the first attack, when a Tyrannosaurus rex bends down to gobble up a lawyer who is sitting on a toilet.
At this point in the film, when I first saw it at a screening in Hollywood, I confess I used the Lord's name in vain. It just came blurting out of me as I jumped in my seat. After that, the movie kept me in a state of utterly exhilarated tension until the conclusion.
Spielberg includes witty touches that add to the overall effect. When the Tyrannosaurus first approaches, his thunderous footprints are first reflected in the ripples of two glasses of water. Later, when it's chasing a jeep, the driver sees it in the rearview mirror above the familiar caption ``Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.'' This object happens to be an enraged dinosaur snapping its jaws.
And in the second half of the film, as all hell continues to break loose, Spielberg whimsically pans shelves full of ``Jurassic Park'' merchandise waiting to be purchased by visitors to the park and looking, of course, like souvenirs of the movie.
``Jurassic Park'' makes you a kid at the movies all over again, even as you sit at home watching it on tape.
Spielberg pulled off a tremendous coup in 1993, directing both the most enjoyable escapist movie of the year and, with ``Schindler's List,'' the most moving artistic triumph of the year as well. But just to keep him humble, he should remember that Orson Welles managed the same parlay in 1941, but he did it with just one movie: ``Citizen Kane.''
With ``Jurassic Park,'' Spielberg can lay claim to having made the ``Citizen Kane'' of monster movies. Ooh, them dinosaurs are scary!
-Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB