The early 1990s were, in terms of computer-generated characters, prehistory. A couple of movies, notably James Cameron's second Terminator film and his flawed but marvellous The Abyss, had flirted with bringing CGI creatures to the screen but they were otherworldly creations. Fantastical killer cyborgs and alien water-pseudopods can't suffer by comparison to reality. But we know dinosaurs.
OK, the last dinosaur croaked its last Wilhelm scream some 60m years ago but we feel as if we know them. Perhaps it's some atavistic trace memory left over from our proto-simian forebears, but we do know a dinosaur when we see it. Dinosaurs have been popping up in movies throughout cinema history. Harry Hoyt's 1925 vision of Conan Doyle's Lost World is a great early example. But although the New York Times was impressed with the warring dinosaurs at the time, describing them as "extraordinarily lifelike," the jerky stop-motion animation wouldn't pass muster today.
By contrast the leather-skinned titans that Steven Spielberg brought to life in 1993's original Jurassic Park still, despite the vertiginously accelerated development of effects technology in the intervening 20 years, hold their own against contemporary creature effects. It is still the definitive dinosaur flick. Even if your tastes lie more in the direction of European arthouse ruminations on the human condition, you have to concede that the moving, breathing, defecating dinosaurs of the first Jurassic Park movie were a big-screen marvel.
The creature effects of Jurassic Park, mostly CGI but supplemented with animatronics and good old-fashioned "man in suit", created a believable, enthralling monster safari park that we all felt happy to visit. And when it pops up on TV we're happy to visit it again. As well as his tremendous effects team Spielberg also, wisely, hired an all-star cast – Dickie Attenborough, Jeff Goldblum, Samuel L Jackson, Newman from Seinfeld – to give a human dimension to his dinosaur drama. The result is a great film. With a simple, compelling premise.
So perhaps it's not altogether surprising that Universal came back for a few more bites at that prehistoric cherry. And they're about to come back for another one. Plot details for the fourth Jurassic Park movie, subtitled Jurassic World, have been hard to come by. Returning cast member Sam Neill has hinted that it might be a reboot of the series. Which, if true, would raise the questions "why is Sam Neill still in it then?" and "why are you bothering when the first one still stands up so well?"
The law of diminishing returns has hit the Jurassic Park franchise harder than most. Box office receipts were creditable for both sequels but watching them again now reveals how the extraordinary creativity of the first film quickly gave way to a pure moneymaking exercise. The sequels consist of a few set-piece events left over from Michael Crichton's original novel stitched together with fairly generic storytelling.
In Joseph McBride's biography of the director he quotes Spielberg as saying that he lost interest in the second film while it was still being made. "I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie … I found myself saying, 'Is that all there is? It's not enough for me'." Tellingly, he didn't return for the third film, ceding the megaphone to Joe Johnston. Jurassic Park 4 is not a sequel too far. Jurassic Park 2 was a sequel too far. Jurassic Park 4 is trying to extract the knackered DNA of an extinct franchise from the hardened amber of cinema history.
Here's the elevator pitch for the first Jurassic Park movie; Someone breeds dinosaurs. They get loose. Mayhem ensures. Compare that with the elevator pitch for the second, third, and one suspects fourth Jurassic Park features. Someone makes more dinosaurs. They get even looser. And more mayhem ensues. The accountants know why those films were made. But I'm not sure anyone else over 10 does. Things could, of course, have been worse. A mooted script for Jurassic Park 4 that was under serious consideration in 2004 involved genetically engineered semi-humanoid dinosaurs wearing armour, carrying machine guns, and fighting crime. That would have taken Spielberg's sublime original down past Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle territory and into Howard The Duck country.
The most worrying aspect of this whole thing is not that there will be another unnecessary, soulless summer blockbuster out there, but that production delays have pushed Jurassic Park 4 deep into summer 2015, the cinematic equivalent of the football World Cup's "
group of death" – the Summer with more Tent Poles than Glastonbury:
Avengers: Age Of Ultron,
Star Wars VII,
Batman vs. Superman (or vice versa),
James Bond 24 ,
Ant-Man,
The Adventures of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun,
Mission Impossible 5 and goodness knows how many other 3D wonders will be wearing holes in your retinas and your wallets that year.
Unless
Jurassic Park: Jurassic World is a lot better than I think it will be, it's going to be buried by some of the strongest blockbuster competition ever assembled. It's a sad legacy for a franchise that started so spectacularly well.
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