Lejink

I'm pretty sure I watched the original "Jurassic Park" over 30 years ago but while I'm the first to decry Hollywood forever rebooting its mega-moneymaking franchises from yesteryear, I was curious to view this latest rebirth of walking with or more accurately running from dinosaurs.

Mind you, the one thing older than the dinosaurs themselves might just have been the movie narrative which ticks off almost every clichéd plot point you've seen before with a few more added on for good measure. So, besides the villainous double-crossing representative of big business, the countdown of the expendables who meet grisly deaths leaving the core group to escape miraculously whether attacked from land, sea or air (they come from all over!) by the ever-hungry prehistoric predators and any number of brave personal sacrifices on behalf of loved ones, we also see the movie blatantly diversify its appeal by catering to a Latin American audience by introducing us to a Mexican Family Robinson or in this case Delgado, comprising dad, his adult daughter and her feckless boyfriend plus inevitably a cutesy infant daughter. You just know she's not window-dressing and sure enough she takes the spotlight later on in a big scene. Oh and even more inevitable than the insertion of a cute kid is her then acquiring a baby dino for a pet, it's a wonder it wasn't called Bam-Bam!

The casting of the expedition group is pretty obvious too, besides the money-grabbing baddie, there's a moxy female agent, a cool black dude and a conscientious 'saur-loving male scientist, but the mutant dinosaurs are the undoubted stars as they attack the two groups in a variety of terrifying ways, uncannily echoing previous monster-movies like "Jaws", "Alien" and "King Kong" almost as if they had a meta-awareness of their own place in Hollywood history.

For me, there were as many hokey as scary moments but with Spielberg's involvement as executive producer, maybe I shouldn't have expected anything less. While no Jurassic classic, it's clear that the dinosaurs are back to stay with no doubt further sequels already on the drawing-board as we can safely assume that none were harmed during the making of this movie!

Based on real life events, Abraham Polonsky's beautifully shot Western taps into the growing recognition of the plight of the Native Americans and how badly served they were served by Hollywood in movies pretty much since they first loaded up a camera. It's easy to imagine this film being shot twenty or thirty years earlier in a very different and certainly less sympathetic light.

The ill-starred Robert Blake plays the title role of a renegade young Paiute Native American who has returned to claim his girlfriend, Katherine Ross's Lola, as his wife. This is against the strong disapproval of the girl's father, but the couple are in love, dammit, and go on the run. We've already seen strong-minded and single-willed Willie in a pool-game encounter with a prejudiced white man and then when he kills the father in self-defence, the law, at least the white-man's law must take its course and so Robert Redford's mean and moody, Eastwood-like deputy sheriff Cooper takes with him a posse of greedy bounty-hunters, bar one youngster who's sympathetic to Willie-Boy, to hunt him down.

Cooper doesn't share the bloodthirstiness of his cohorts but he's the man with the badge of course and a lawman's gotta do what a lawman's gotta do so he hits the trail although he's probably the only one amongst them who wants to bring Willie-Boy back alive rather than dead. Cooper's no angel himself however as throughout the film, we see contrasts between his behaviour and his quarry. Willie-Boy sure is rough and ready with Lola at times, but it's clear that he loves her and tell her that he would kill or die for her. Cooper on the other hand is involved with the local female doctor played by Janet Smith, herself a reformer in favour of the Native American population, who he nonetheless treats coldheartedly, pretty much using her just for sex.

We see Cooper's band of blood-brothers slip away one by one leaving the inevitable showdown high up in the hills between the hunter and hunted, signing-off with a telling finishing line uttered with suitable pathos by Redford to bring to an aptly moribund conclusion a well-crafted, shot and acted feature which certainly has its moral compass pointing the right way.

The open secret to blockbuster success in animation features is the creation of characters and situations which appeal on their different ways to children and adults alike. Most usually the formula incorporates familiar fairy-tale like concepts but in films like "Up","Inside Out" and especially "Wall-E" we're treated to something quite different again. A quirky, kooky space-age romance between two robots who communicate through processed, inarticulate, monosyllabic bleats, it nevertheless has a lot to say about many of the modern problems in society, from environmentalism to the obesity crisis.

Wall-E is a transformer-like little robot whose daily job is to collect the junk strewn all over the streets of a post-Apocalyptic Earth where no humans are present - we find out later where they went. The film immediately taps into our love of nostalgia as we see it / him carefully categorising and storing away easily recognisable childhood items whilst reprocessing the remaining rubble into scrap-heap cubes and arranging them into above-ground order - we seem to have moved on from landfill sites.

Anyway, one day he encounters a higher-level probe sent down to see if there is any sign of life on the planet. This is Eve, who initially works on a search-and-destroy basis but who Wall-E doggedly pursues and eventually charms with his persistence, not to mention his collection of trinkets.

Eve it is who finds, like the rose growing up through the concrete in Spanish Harlem, a single budding plant which indicates that the Earth is at last ready support recolonisation again. But when Eve's computer-programme masters take her back up into the orbiting space station above, the warped command centre resists the prime directive to return home and start again.

This is where we finally encounter earthlings, only to find that through indolence, the consumption of fast food and forced couch-potato assimilation of computer screen data that they've all become bloated to the point where they can't even stand up to walk. The ship's captain for, as we learn, 700 years has become similarly corpulent and complacent so that what begins.with Wall-E attempting to rescue Eve from cancellation by the sinister Main-Frame, sees the pair by their selfless outlook basically invoke the reawakening of human-kind.

There are a heck of a lot of ideas to process in the movie and this all the while you're assimilating the remarkable animation and humorous inserts, the latter not above referencing classic movies like "Star Wars", "2001" and even, aptly, the silent masters Chaplin and Keaton. I do think though that WALL-E might have chosen a more representative film than "Hello Dolly!" to illustrate his points!

My head was properly spinning both during and after watching a movie with so much going on it, you feel it demands a repeat viewing or three. However, looking around us today, given that it was made almost twenty years ago, it seems as a society we're still not acting on the many warnings flashed up here, courtesy of the loveable little clockwork tykes.