"IN THE Future There Will Be Dinosaurs": Under this slogan, the merchandising hoopla for Steven Spielberg's already well-hyped next blockbuster "Jurassic Park" is well into setting its own standards in consumer gross-out of appropriately saurian dimensions.
The $60 million FX-Dazzle starring Richard Attenborough with Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill - due here soon - has already broken all box office records grossing over $50 million its first weekend. It has also spawned an industry of spin-offs, product tie-ins, promos and hook-ups.
Not least of these is the original novel by Michael Crichton - available in the now-obligatory various formats, including the regulation "The Making of Jurassic Park" (from Boxtree Press) and the Audiobook edition (from Random Century). This twin-cassette pack is a movie for Walkman joggers wired for sound or for fast-lane in-car stereo systems, providing a tantalising prequel of things to come.
Late-night movie-heads will know "Westworld", the cult 1973 celluloid oddity written and directed by Crichton about cybernetic Disneyworld offering a selection of personal fantasies to be acted out with a compliant robotic cast of minor characters - including Yul Brynner as a psychotic android gunfighter.
"Jurassic Park" is essentially the same plot, substituting real genetically engineered dinosaurs as the theme park's tourist attraction, and an island off Costa Rica standing in for Westworld itself. The first phase explains in detail the genesis of the project and the 'infallible' fail-safe mechanisms protecting the artificial environment. This is exhaustively and convincingly done.
Of course present-day science can't make the brontosaurus. But in the real world there's much legal haggling now about corporation's rights to establish patent control over animal species their laboratories have created. Such patents already exist for doctored plant strains. And Crichton - a Harvard MD graduate - knows that DNA used for cloning his beasts, can't be extracted from fossils. No - the DNA comes ingeniously from consumed blood from prehistoric mosquitoes trapped by, and preserved intact in, amber. Crichton even drags the currently trendy Chaos theory into his mix to add scientific weight above and beyond the call of fictional duty to his story.
So far so nearly credible. But inevitably, pace "Westworld", phase two tells of the island's breakdown into terror and carnivorous blood-letting through industrial espionage, power failure, and a reptilian penchant for sex-change, all of which alters the rules and breaks the narrative down into the standard "Lost World" fare of viciously swooping pterodactyls.
A predatory prowling Tyrannosaurus Rex takes the role previously played by Yul Brynner. As the remnants of the theme park are finally blitzed back to their constituent DNA by the Costa Rican military, there's the routine sequel-begging hanging question mark about certain dinosaurian nasties perhaps having escaped to the mainland . . .?
It's a Group Jeopardy theme par excellence.
lethal alien
Spielberg's credentials for the job are too over-familiar to reiterate here. But Michael Crichton's track-record also repays investigation to anyone with a hint of Sci-Fi addiction. From its onset, his career effectively splices and overlaps the boundaries of print with film. His early novel "The Andromeda Strain" became a Book-of-the-Month Club Bestseller in 1969, ambitiously filmed two years later by director Robert Wise - of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" fame.
Using Douglas Trumbull, special effects maestro from "2001: A Space Odyssey", the coldly ironic story of lethal alien spores settling along the American West Coast became a claustrophobically compressed work of technological analogy that still rewards viewers of its TV re-runs.
Suitably encouraged Crichton then adapted his own thriller "Binary" into a made-for-TV movie which he also directed, retitling it "Pursuit" in the process. Despite his next foray into big-screen exploitation - George Segal as the electrode-implanted "The Terminal Man" - coming via a Mike Hodges production credit, the success of his one-man work for "Westworld" led inexorably to "Coma", his big-budget visualisation of someone else's novel this time from the pen of Robin Cook.
But inevitably the Spielberg means that "Jurassic Park" will eclipse all that came before.
And for those too impatient to wait for the wide screen reactivation of the dinosaur, John Heard's annoying mid-Atlantic delivery, distracting incidental music and occasional helicopter noises spread across the two-cassette "Jurassic Park" Audiobook provides a three-hour prequel. The literary style is near-documentary and as strictly functional as its multi-purpose adaptability would suggest.
But as far as in-car audio valium to pacify victims of city-centre tailbacks go, "Jurassic Park" is still a cut or several above the wacky world of Steve Wright . . .