David Koepp

Few movies lend themselves to franchising as unnaturally as 1993’s blockbuster Jurassic Park.

The story’s theme of man suffering the consequences of using science to flout nature inherently involves the creation of a wondrous world—“Jurassic Park”, a theme park where dinosaurs were brought back from extinction to be gawked at by tourists—and then the destruction of that world. But record setting book sales and box office created the market, and Michael Crichton started to work on the first book of his that was written primarily to adapt into a movie.

“What have they got in there, King Kong”, quips Dr. Ian Malcolm as a computer-driven Land Cruiser slides along its railed path through a massive wooden gate that is designed to look prehistoric, welcoming them to “Jurassic Park”. Billionaire John Hammond has done the impossible and brought dinosaurs back from extinction—then built a park around them as cheesy as any zoo attraction or Disney theme park.

Seemingly late in the game of David Koepp’s Mortdecai, the eponymous character (played by Johnny Depp) asks his wife, “Are you quite finished with your barrage of insults?” It’s an apt question for the film itself, a cataclysmically unfunny, unbelievably tedious disaster of baffling misjudgments and multiple career lows that feels as long as Shoah, and only a little less harrowing. No such luck, though, as the film goes on for another 25 minutes. It then ends on people about to throw up. Also apt.

Jurassic Park, like many of Spielberg’s best films, allows us to be children again, even if this is, ironically, a film most kids would be scared to death by. It’s a movie that indulges in horror-movie tropes while making them feel fresh, layering a patina of intelligence over the intense, earth-rattling action. Though the human-dinosaur face-offs are the stuff of movie legend, the early sections where Drs. Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, and Ellie Sattler debate the ethics of a theme park full of the living, breathing extinct are strangely fascinating and entertaining, at least to 28-year old me.