Congo (1995)

Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,

Jurassic Park (1993)

The greatest trick a monster movie can pull is convincing everyone it’s not actually a monster movie, and that’s a trick that Steven Spielberg has managed to pull off twice in his career. I’m not saying that Spielberg’s contention that they treated the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park like real animals and not generic movie monsters is untrue, I just think that it is almost impossible to portray dinosaurs in film without being pulled by the gravity of the monster movie. As I have argued before, the history of dinosaurs in movies and the history of monster movies are irrevocably intertwined, the latter still spiritually aligned with the timeless desire to see these seemingly impossible creatures alive in some fashion, a dream that only the medium of film was able to materialize—from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen onward, every advance in the portrayal of fictional creatures was applied to dinosaurs, and vice-versa. I also think anyone who loves dinosaurs—and Jurassic Park alone created another new generation of miniature paleontology freaks—loves them because they are both real animals and also monstrous, wonderful to imagine and terrifying to behold. By acknowledging that complicated appreciation of the subject, Jurassic Park introduced something bold and resonant to movies beyond just the ballyhooed technological breakthroughs and changes to the very concept of Hollywood blockbusters that it ushered in.

Creature Classic Companion: Westworld (1973)

It’s been such a long time since Westworld was the definitive killer robot movie that you might be shocked at just how many stock ideas it pioneered, in Sci-Fi stuff and in monster movies in general. An implacable murder machine (with RobotVision® POV shots, in the first use of digital effects in a film) would go on to become the iconic variation of the killer robot, thanks mainly to The Terminator (a movie that owes more than a little to this one), and the story of a theme park going berserk was apparently such a good one that writer/director/novelist Michael Crichton completely reused it in Jurassic Park (Crichton made a few contributions to monster fiction in his time aside from just those two: see also Eaters of the Dead/The 13^th Warrior, Congo, Sphere, the nanomachine nonsense Prey, and the lesser robot thriller Runaway.) But it’s also worth noting that even the “management refuses to close the park” trope occurs here before it is codified again in Jaws two years later—which I think also gets into one of the real innovations of this movie, which was the context. The robot movies I wrote about before presented robots as decidedly non-quotidian: Gog had robots built for scientific and exploratory work, and Screamers (which was based on a story from the fifties, remember) had robots as war machines—practical uses for thinking machines. Westworld, however, shows a world in which this futuristic tech is used in the pursuit of leisure and also, implicitly, in the pursuit of corporate profit (Disneyland and its many animatronics were a fairly new thing at the time.) Advanced science and robotics were no longer solely the realm of “higher” causes, but also of more common (or base) desires, which changes not only who gets caught in the crossfire when things inevitably go wrong, but also gives it an even more cynical edge than other technology-gone-wrong stories. What this movie says is that killer robots aren’t just a problem for scientists anymore.