• The Pirates Don’t Eat The Tourists: Jurassic Park, 25 Years On

    June 14, 2018 - By 

    John Hammond is Steven Spielberg. Yes, it’s an obvious analogy: Richard Attenborough’s bio-engineering CEO and the maestro who directed him are both bearded childlike innocents, starry-eyed dreamers, alchemists who conjure stunning spectacles for an adoring public and make serious bank in the process. And both have seen their legacy squandered. In the twenty-five years since Jurassic Park’s release, across four sequels, the parks and their improbable animal attractions have been misused and mistreated, spiralling, in an inevitable logic Dr. Ian Malcolm would appreciate, towards chaos. In this month’s underwhelming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a burst of volcanic violence snuffs out…

  • Lego: Jurassic World (Warner Bros., Multiformat)

    June 23, 2015 - By 

    If you would be so kind, allow me a moment to unshackle myself from journalistic objectivity, break the fourth wall and relay to you a personal anecdote. Twenty-two years ago, I was staying with some relatives in Toronto, and my cousin announced in her languid Canadian drawl that she wanted to see the new Stephen Spielberg film: “Ya know, tha one aboot the dinosaurs eating folk.” I was easily sold, having been fascinated by the idea of palaeontology since I was a toddler, and so we made the forty-five minute drive along the freeway to the “nearest” multiplex, conveniently situated…

  • Jurassic World

    June 15, 2015 - By 

    No recent blockbuster is so visibly animated by the anxiety of influence as Jurassic World. Coming 14 years after the last inter-species tête-à-tête, and nearly a quarter of a century after the magisterial original, Spielberg’s franchise has been dug out of amber and reanimated for a new generation. Now three sequels in, Jurassic World gestures to its cinematic parent with a half-embarrassed mixture of deference and dread, prodding audience nostalgia with riffs on iconic images while offering a surprisingly self-reflexive commentary on its own bland, sell-out pillaging of that first-time wonder. Two decades after the park’s initial teething problems, the…