The bland that time forgot

129 mins

Directed by Steven Spielberg

On general release from

tomorrow

THERE is no denying Steven Spielberg is one of the most influential film-makers of our time. After Jaws things were never to be the same again in Hollywood. But for all his skill as a master story-teller, a mass entertainer, his films remain a strangely mixed bunch, some of which looked at in the cold light of day are pretty awful. The Indiana Jones films, for instance, are really only Saturday serials, Always a lachrymose weepie which fails to tamper with the tear ducts, and The Colour Purple a shrill, over-emphatic pot-boiler.

Nor am I sure any longer about just how good Schindler's List is. Perhaps it is the story that moves. Possibly it works despite, rather than because of, the film. Like everyone else, I have been seduced by his skills, but just how real are the emperor's clothes?

The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park left me as breathless as anyone. That scene where they are grazing is one of the cinema's great images, a glimpse of the world before man, of a lost Eden. But as an adventure story it was a mess; director and script mangling Michael Crichton's original novel which, for all its faults, had some serious points to make about man's impertinent tampering with nature.

It was such a huge hit that a sequel - The Lost World, Jurassic Park - was inevitable. But the lyricism, the sense of awe, and the magic have not survived. In its place we get a welter of thrilling stunts, a clutch of breathtaking computer-generated monsters and cardboard cut-out characters for the actors to play. They are so unreal; why he didn't computer-generate them too is anybody's guess.

Part of the trouble, as Pete Postlethwaite, one of the cut-outs, has revealed is that Spielberg made chunks of it up as he went along, including a ludicrous scene which pays homage to all those daft monster movies like Godzilla. Actually it only copies them because, were it a homage, one might admire it instead of feeling a dreadful sense of deja vu.

The anorexic plot involves an attempt by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), the new head of InGen, the corporation that created the original Jurassic Park on Isla Nubar where prehistoric monsters were bred from long-lost genes, to take some to an amusement park he is building in San Diego. Although the monsters on Isla Nubar died, due to an inbuilt genetic flaw, those on neighbouring Isla Sorna have overcome the deficiency. The firm's founder, John Hammond (Lord Richard Attenborough in Hollywood parlance, wisely eschewing his fake Scottish accent this time), having seen the green light, does not want this to happen and dispatches Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), one of the scientists who survived the previous film, and a hunky wildlife snapper (Vince Vaughn) to join the obligatory woman to do the screaming, Dr Sarah Harding, a biologist already on Sorna (Julianne Moore wasted in a role way below

her talents). Malcolm's daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) - for reasons never explained she is black - goes along as a stowaway to provide someone for the teenies to identify with.

In due course the InGen team also turns up, Ludlow being joined by a great white hunter, Roland Tembo (Postlethwaite) who, having shot everything else on four legs or wings, has come for one last kill - a tyrannosaurus rex.

Mayhem ensues, much of it pinched from King Kong, as men and monsters confront one another, baby monsters get injured by bad humans and tended by good humans, and various supporting players suffer horrid deaths as the animals tear, munch, trample, or claw them to pieces.

Will the star goodies make it to the abandoned InGen base and radio the supply ship for help before succumbing to the jaws of the computer-generated stars? Of course they do, and that should have been the end, except Spielberg has tagged on a bad-guy-takes-monster-back-to-civilisation bit.

A freighter with a drugged tyrannosaurus rex mother and child intended for the amusment park arrives in San Diego harbour. Mother escapes and does what a monster's gotta do. Godzilla, Kong and Mighty Joe Young, to mention but a few, would be proud of them.

Is it just a case of stealing bits from past movies, pillaging Conan Doyle's Lost World, or subtle cinematic homage to past glories? For my money the emperor really is dressed in some pretty threadbare hand-me-downs. He is also careless with continuity and sense, allowing characters to disappear without reason.

Tembo, played to the hilt by Postlethwaite, should have had something interesting to say about man, beast, and killing, but his purpose in the film remains obscure. It is never clear whether he is a goodie or baddie. As for the photographer, he just disappears, the finale left to Ludlow, Malcolm, and Harding.

The set pieces are terrific, the thrills abundant, but it adds up to little more than a superior theme park roller-coaster ride.