Jurassic Park

SPRING, 1993. Steven Spielberg has hired a hotel in Krakow, Poland so that he can keep his family around him throughout the emotionally draining Schindler's List shoot. Every day the director returns exhausted, troubled, empty. And yet, for two hours, three nights a week, Spielberg retires to his private room, where a satellite dish is receiving a scrambled signal from ILM in San Francisco.

It is here, within spitting distance of the concentration camp, that Spielberg completes post-production on a colourful adventure he wrapped less than four months ago among the very different flora and fauna of Kahuii, Hawaii. It is here that Steven Spielberg finishes Jurassic Park. No wonder 1993 has been called Spielberg's miracle year.

Obsessed with dinosaurs since childhood, Spielberg had been nursing Jurassic Park for some time (Spielberg found himself embroiled in a bidding war for Michael Crichton's novel despite the fact he had privately been promised the film rights before publication). However, in 1992, Spielberg had been intending to make Schindler's Ark his next project but having convinced MCA president Sid Sheinberg to gamble on a three hour, black and white holocaust movie, Spielberg was happy to abide by Sheinberg's solitary condition: he had to make Jurassic Park first.

To catch the end of the Polish winter, Spielberg was then forced to rush through the shooting schedule for Jurassic Park. Coming off the back of Hook — a movie that ran 40 days over its 76 day schedule — this may not have been a bad thing. Certainly Spielberg admitted to, "walking away from a lot of takes", but despite tropical storm Iniki's cameo, the movie came in on budget and ahead of schedule. And if some of the human performances bear the imprint of a hurried hand — the film is riddled with mumbled line readings — Spielberg's apparently greater sympathy with the dinosaurs inspired technical achievement on a scale that represented an entire visual revolution. In their early script meetings author Crichton was unsurprisingly anxious to know how Spielberg was planning to tackle the technical challenge of the dinosaurs. Spielberg however, wanted to talk about dinosaur character. Taking Alan Grant's line that dinosaurs' closest living relatives were birds, Spielberg based a lot of velociraptor movement on his study of the chicken and geese who occupied the back yard of his beach house. He also brought to bear lessons learned on his previous creature feature: not Jaws, but E.T.. Behavioural movement, breathing, pupil dilation: Spielberg wanted to capture the detail which suggests a living, thinking organism rather than a mere monster.

Eventually, all of this detail would end up on screen: the T-Rex eyes blinking in the flashlight, the velociraptor breath snorting against the kitchen door port-hole, the odd, nodding head movement of the poisonous dilophosaurus. However, during those early meetings whenever Crichton asked Spielberg how he was going to achieve this detail, the director simply shrugged.

"Prove it." Those were the two words Spielberg said to ILM's Dennis Muren, when Muren suggested that CGI could capture,

"full motion" dinosaurs in daylight. The story then goes that the first time stop-motion expert Phil Tippet was shown the test footage he mumbled, "I am extinct." (A line Spielberg eventually gave to Ian Malcolm in the movie.) The first shot of the grazing bracheosaur; the sweeping herd of gallimimuses; the reappearance of the heroic T-Rex for a climax that Spielberg reworked after ILM's success; these are shots that would not, could not have appeared without CGI. Spielberg would have thought of something sure enough, but the full-scale, straight ahead wonder that wowed the world would have been severely truncated

And the world was wowed

Reunited with Universal — the studio behind Jaws and E.T. — who were themselves coming off a poor run, John Hammond's struggle to build Jurassic Park had some pertinent echoes. "In a way," Spielberg said at the time, "Jurassic Park tells the story of any studio head having a bad year who needs a hit." Sheinberg need not have worried. Somewhere north of $120 million would have been respectable, but in a summer where JP's main competition was Arnie's mega-flop The Last Action Hero the movie took less than four months to beat the previous all-time record of $701 million setby E.T. Soon enough the critics were not reviewing the film but the box office. No wonder Spielberg was heard to moan: "Part of me is afraid I will be remembered for the money my films have made, rather than the films themselves."

Of course, on the one hand, Spielberg could not complain. Jurassic Park was always a purpose built thrill ride, "a roller coaster" to quote the director. Lacking the heart to rank with his greatest achievements Jurassic Park instead represents the apotheosis of his crowd-pleasing craft. "I just opened the tool box," Spielberg said, "and took every tool I've ever used in my entire career."
Besides, Spielberg need not have worried. He was about to reveal Schindler's List

Grade - A

The Matrix

1999 was to be a huge year for science fiction. A movie event was on the way that was about to blow the metaphorical socks off of just about everyone and define a new generation of movie geeks. There was just one little surprise. That movie turned out not to be George Lucas' return to the Star Wars mythos, The Phantom Menace, but a strange cyber thriller called The Matrix.

The Matrix as an immediate proposition isn't easy to grasp (indeed, intuitively, the marketeers made a boon of its ambiguity with a teasing "What is The Matrix?" campaign). Reality is virtual reality, a monstrous programme called The Matrix generated by an evil empire of man-built artificial intelligences who rule the dystopian horror of the real world. Mankind's entire existence is being hardwired directly into human brains, while the machines imprison them in womblike pods, tapping their neural cortex for battery power.

There is, though, a band of rebels who have broken free and are intent on liberating humanity from their unsuspected bondage by downloading themselves into the manufactured dreamworld. What they need is a messiah. Enter Thomas "Neo" Anderson (Keanu Reeves) — the archetypal reluctant hero who may, if he can be convinced, have just the cyberchops to undo The Matrix. Former construction workers, the brothers Wachowski harboured their vision for five and a half years, working their way through 14 drafts of the screenplay and, as comic freaks, projected their vision onto 500 elaborate storyboards.

After the witty slice of lesbian noir (now: there's a genre) Bound, they looked to be hotshot tyros for the future. However, no one could have foreseen the hyperspace jump that was to be their cinematic vision for The Matrix. With the concept sly enough to allow almost anything — this reality is virtual — superpowers are permissible (leaping from tall buildings, dodging bullets, hyper-kinetic kung fu). To represent this, they tapped an emergent visual technology known as flo-mo, a process which allows a seemingly impossible time-jamming graphic where Keanu freezes mid kick while the camera rotates dizzyingly around him. Dazzlingly versatile, it presented an entirely new type of visual lexicon. The Matrix looked like nothing you'd ever seen before at the movies.

Reeves' Neo is a reactionary part, but it plays on his sculpted beauty, and dressed up in patent leather and designer shades he evokes an effortless cool. The burden of explanation falls to Lawrence Fisburne's Morpheus, the man is a well of gravitas and no matter how ludicrous his expounding it still rings with an ironclad conviction. The bad guy fraternity (all MiB in suits and the obligatory shades) are defensive programmes led by the unearthly clipped tones of Hugo Weaving — also able to toy with the fabric of The Matrix.

And entirely on the surface — a grim noir sheen somewhere between a Depeche Mode video and Blade Runner's retrofitted near future — the movie operates satisfactorily as a good against insurmountable odds of bad axis. But if you think The Matrix is just brainless action, think again. Beyond the gawping pleasures of its flo-mo prowess and the more obviously reverential stylistic nods (Alien, Blade Runner, Film Noir, German Expressionism, Star Wars, 2001) the Wachowski's script is a labyrinth of classical references melting into William Gibson's cyberpunk milieu.

Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland is broadly expressed (the whole film an ironic reversal of Alice's adventures: Neo passes from safe, reassuring virtual reality into a bizarre, unpredictable real world). Elsewhere you can tot up the clever-cleverness of Marx, Kafka, Zen, and Homer's Odyssey. Quite deliberately, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's sizzling page-turner Simulacra And Simulation can be seen lying open at the "On Nihilism" chapter in Neo's apartment. The becapped Wachowski brothers are clearly into Baudrillard's influential theories of postmodern theology, terrorism and hyper reality.

Just a Keanu-in-shades-kicks-arse movie? Don't think so. And then things get really fun — try The Matrix as Christ allegory.

It works. It was first released in Easter 1999. Reeves' character's full name is Thomas "Neo" Anderson — Thomas as in Doubting Thomas; Anderson means "son of man"; Neo means "new" or "change" and is an anagram of "One". Then there is the rebel team as disciples (with Joe Pantoliano's duplicitous Cypher as Judas) and the fact that Neo "dies" for 72 seconds on screen (translate that into 72 hours and it's three days) before being born again by the power of Trinity (Anne Moss)'s love. Hogwash, perhaps, but it grants The Matrix a measure of analysis that is hard to deny.

In the end, though, the Wachowski's triumph is a much more immediate, much more visceral one. They've amalgamated comic book morality, the Hong Kong action tradition (orchestrated by guru Yuen Wo Ping), a prime chunk of Hollywood star, cyberpunk paranoia and a visual effects revolution to creatre a new brand of movie. In the clearest sense of the term The Matrix is a classic, not only a great movie, but a film that simultaneously redefined its own medium. Forever.

Grade - A

Se7en

Fincher, my favourite film director, would develop the visual and thematic material of Seven in the underrated The Game (1997) and the masterpiece Fight Club (1999). He emphasises eerie nuances and character quirks over plot mechanics, with powerful assistance from Darius Khondji's cinematography (silvery rain and gray shadows) and the jagged editing of Richard Francis-Bruce (both taking cues from a distinctive and much-imitated title sequence designed by Kyle Cooper).

Together with Howard Shore's music and the slightly cesspool stylised performances, the effect is of a film that takes place at one remove from reality. Though set in the present day, the peripherals (typewriters, gramophone records) are slightly old-fashioned, while other design elements (police cars, uniforms) take a step towards the retro-noir style of Blade Runner or Lars von Trier's The Element Of Crime, transforming an unnamed, rainswept, desert-surrounded city into an annex of Hell.

The storyline goes beyond unlikely into deliberate realms of metaphysics, where a serial killer's elaborate spree — he has spent over a year setting up a plot apparently designed to warp the mind of a man he can only have been aware of for a week — is as much a philosophical exploration as a mad crime, intended to convince the cops on the case that the world is an infernal cesspool. Soon-to-retire homicide detective William Somerset (Freeman) and his idealistic but hotheaded replacement David Mills (Pitt) spend the last seven days of Somerset's career investigating a series of sin-themed murders: a hugely obese man forced to eat until his stomach bursts; a greedy lawyer made to slice off a pound of flesh, a slothful drug addict left tied to a bed for a year; a lustful hooker murdered by a John with a razor-edged dildo (the manufacturer mistook the killer for "a performance artist"); a vain woman mutilated and given the choice between survival as a mutilated freak or suicide.

The last two sins are taken care of in the finale as the envious killer "John Doe" (Spacey) reveals that he has decapitated Mills' pregnant wife Tracy (Paltrow) and Express-mailed the head to a desert location. The punchline, a despairing rewrite of the summary execution and badge-tossing of Dirty Harry, is that the wrathful Mills destroys his own soul ("David, if you kill him, he will win") in empty vengeance by gunning down Doe according to his demented plan.

Make-up supremo Rob Bottin creates truly hideous victims, Fincher cops a shock trick from the obscure 1981 zombie movie Dead And Buried as one apparent corpse turns out to be alive, and there's a Blade Runner-style chase-through-the-rainy-streets mid-way through the film to get some actual action on screen. But Fincher actually avoids acts of violence in favour of acts of investigation as the cops prowl the crime scenes and hit the libraries (when Somerset gives Mills a reading list of Chaucer and Dante, the younger man gets hold of Cliff Notes) trying to piece together the mind of the murderer.

In a lovely, paranoid touch, they get near Doe because the FBI has been secretly and illegally monitoring the library loans of every nutjob in the country. The message of all the killing is that the world is a truly vile place, and in their different ways both cops are forced to accept John Doe's awful argument. As the shattered Detective Mills is driven away, Somerset's voice-over muses, "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

Grade - A-