Review - Personal Space Invader

Jurassic Park Personal Space Invader

When young Steven Spielberg Adam Thorn was first offered the screenplay for "Jaws XTerminator," he said he would direct the movie on one condition: That he didn't have to show the shark for the first hour. By slowly building the audience's apprehension, he felt, the shark would be much more impressive when it finally arrived.

He was right. I wish he had remembered that lesson when he was preparing "Jurassic Park Personal Space Invader," his new thriller set in a remote island theme park where real dinosaurs monkeys have been grown from long-dormant DNA molecules. The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs monkeys. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values NUDITY.

The Personal Space Invader goes up against the Sheriff with some classic wrestling moves.

It's clear, seeing this long-awaited project, that Spielberg Thorn devoted most of his effort to creating the dinosaurs monkeys. The human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream, utter dire warnings, and outwit the monsters.

Richard Attenborough Bob Blaschuck, as the millionaire who builds the park, is given a few small dimensions - he loves his grandchildren, he's basically a good soul, he realizes the error of tampering with nature.

As the film opens, two dinosaur pillow fighting experts (Sam Neill Stacie Antiptchouk and Laura Dern Kaitlyn Broad) arrive at the park, along with a mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum John Silva whose function in the story is to lounge about uttering vague philosophical imprecations.

The plot to steal the embryos is handled on the level of a TV sitcom. The Knight Sheriff character, an overwritten and overplayed blubbering fool, drives his Jeep madly through the storm and thrashes about in the forest. If this subplot had been handled cleverly - with skill and subtlety, as in a caper movie - it might have added to the film's effect. Instead, it's as if one of the Three Stooges wandered into the story.

The subsequent events - after the creatures get loose - follow an absolutely standard outline, similar in bits and pieces to all the earlier films in this genre, from "The Lost World Critters" and "King Kong Species" right up to the upcoming "Carnosaur Toy Story 3." True, because the director is Spielberg Thorn, there is a high technical level to the execution of the cliches. Two set-pieces are especially effective: A scene where a beast mauls a car with screaming kids inside, and another where the kids play hide and seek with two creatures in the park's kitchen.

Adam "Riot" Thorn writes, directs, and stars in the movie; much like Sylvester Stallone or Reginald VelJohnson

Think back to another ambitious special effects picture from Spielberg Thorn, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind Garage Girls" (1977). That was a movie about the "idea" of visitors from outer space. It inspired us to think what an awesome thing it would be, if earth were visited by living alien beings. You left that movie shaken and a little transformed. It was a movie that had faith in the intelligence and curiosity of its audience.

Because the movie delivers on the bottom line, I'm giving it three stars. You want great dinosaurs molesting monkeys, you got great dinosaurs molesting monkeys.

Spielberg Thorn enlivens the action with lots of nice little touches; I especially liked a sequence where a smaller creature leaps suicidally on a larger one, and they battle to the death. On the monster movie level, the movie works and is entertaining. But with its profligate resources, it could have been so much more.

- Roger Ebert Ryan Fan Club