A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art for the 1990 first edition by Chip Kidd. (C) 1990 Alfred A. Knopf Nowadays, the title  Jurassic Park  conjures up images from a series of films which began with Steven Spielberg's Apatosaurus-sized blockbuster and became an ongoing franchise. As of this writing, Universal Pictures has released  five  films in the series, including  The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World,  and this year’s  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  This, of course, is to be expected and is not exactly a new concept in Hollywood; Jaws, which was Spielberg's first real blockbuster (and is in fact the grandfather of the modern "monster hit movie") also started out as a decent horror film about a predator with sharp teeth that, um, snacked on people...and should have, like its 1993 cinematic heir, should have been left as a stand-alone film. What some people tend to forget is that both these franchise-starting Spielberg f...

Pros:  Great CGI dinos, good John Williams score, and at least it's fast-paced. Cons:  Formulaic story, and the third act seemed forced. Although Jurassic Park (in both novel and movie formats) was bound to spawn sequels just as Jaws did, it didn't have to fall into movie by the numbers territory, yet, surprisingly, The Lost World does just that. Even though screenwriter David Koepp, director Steven Spielberg, some cast members and all the techno-wizards are back for this 1997 sequel, one comes away from watching The Lost World - Jurassic Park wondering if Spielberg had his mind elsewhere...perhaps thinking about such projects as Amistad and Saving Private Ryan, or poring over script ideas for Indiana Jones IV . It's not an awful movie, mind you, otherwise I would not own it. But it isn't that great, either, and that is disappointing, considering it is a Steven Spielberg film. Once again screenwriter Koepp takes a few scenes from Michael Crichton's eq...