It's clear, seeing this long-awaited project, that Spielberg devoted most of his effort to creating the dinosaurs. The human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream, utter dire warnings, and outwit the monsters.
Richard Attenborough, as the millionaire who builds the park, is given a few small dimensions - he loves his grandchildren, he's basically a good soul, he realizes the error of tampering with nature. But there was an opportunity here to make his character grand and original, colorful and oversize, and instead he comes across as unfocused and benign.
As the film opens, two dinosaur experts (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) arrive at the park, along with a mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum whose function in the story is to lounge about uttering vague philosophical imprecations. Also along are Attenborough's grandchildren, and a lawyer, who is the first to be eaten by a dinosaur.
Attenborough wants the visitors to have a preview of his new park, where actual living prehistoric animals live in enclosures behind tall steel fences, helpfully labeled "10,000 volts." The visitors set off on a tour in remote-controlled utility vehicles, which stall when an unscrupulous employee (Wayne Knight) shuts down the park's computer program so he can smuggle out some dinosaur embryos. Meanwhile, a tropical storm hits the island, the beasts knock over the fences, and Neill is left to shepherd the kids back to safety while they're hunted by towering meat-eaters.
The plot to steal the embryos is handled on the level of a TV sitcom. The Knight character, an overwritten and overplayed blubbering fool, drives his Jeep madly through the storm and thrashes about in the forest. If this subplot had been handled cleverly - with skill and subtlety, as in a caper movie - it might have added to the film's effect. Instead, it's as if one of the Three Stooges wandered into the story.
The subsequent events - after the creatures get loose - follow an absolutely standard outline, similar in bits and pieces to all the earlier films in this genre, from "The Lost World" and "King Kong" right up to the upcoming "Carnosaur." True, because the director is Spielberg, there is a high technical level to the execution of the cliches. Two set-pieces are especially effective: A scene where a beast mauls a car with screaming kids inside, and another where the kids play hide and seek with two creatures in the park's kitchen.
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