By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Steven Spielberg’s game-changing CGI-peddling blockbuster Jurassic Park, starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough.
Leave it to Steven Spielberg to take a solid idea and turn it into a “cinematic event.” What does that even mean anyway? It’s exactly that kind of pretentious hype that makes me loathe Spielberg. Sure, the guy knows his way around a film set, and I certainly bow down to his box office prowess. But why are all his films accompanied by contrived Hollywood broo-ha-ha?
That same carry-on is currently swirling around his latest effort, Disclosure Day, which is being heralded both as Spielbs’ best film in years (not saying much), and as an exciting new approach to the topic of aliens on screen. The Butcher hasn’t been forced to sit through Disclosure Day yet, so no judgement will be made. This latest bout of Hollywood broo-ha-ha did, however, have your humble scribe thinking about another Spielbergian nightmare…
The superstar director’s 1993 blockbuster, Jurassic Park, was heralded as a new approach to filmmaking. Impressive animatronics and CGI took centre stage, with the script merely secondary to the moment when the audience could practically smell the breath of a Tyrannosaurus screaming at them.
But please, let’s not forget why we’re here, why we buy a cinema ticket, and why we love film. Stories. Well told, well-crafted stories. Some big, some small, some true, some not. As soon as we lose sight of that in favour of a sneezing Brachiosaurus then, brothers and sisters, we lose our cinematic souls.
And what of the peddler of this quick fix? What does he stand for? Well, Quentin Tarantino has his ultra-violence; Sean Baker has his sex workers; Paul Thomas Anderson has his constant inability to understand the word “brevity”; Wes Anderson has his fussy, overly composed sense of nouveau antiquity…but Spielberg? Let’s consider for a second that Jurassic Park came sandwiched in between Hook and Schindler’s List. Let it never be said that the man doesn’t have range, right? Therein lies the problem.
Spielberg is a hack. He’s a bona fide journeyman with nothing to say. He stands for nothing except big box office. His financing studio might be as happy as a pig in shit, but I’m not. I’m his audience, and I’m not happy. And I’m certainly not happy with Jurassic Park, where it’s abundantly clear that merchandise sales were what got the studio hooked in the first place.
“Oh no, a Hollywood studio considering the dollar over artistic integrity…whatever shall we do?,” I hear you sarcastically whine. Well, I may not be able to change it, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. Jurassic Park is for twats, and all the Velociraptor lunch boxes in the world won’t make me change my mind…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against The Hurt Locker, Raging Bull, The Castle, Amelie, The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
