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When one of his workers is killed, leisure tycoon John Hammond is advised by lawyer Donald Gennaro to have outside experts survey and endorse his latest venture, Jurassic Park. Palaeontologist Alan Grant, palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler and chaos theoretician lan Malcolm are taken to an island off the coast of Costa Rica and given a tour of facilities where dinosaurs have been genetically engineered. With Hammond's grandchildren Tim and Alexis, the team are sent on an automated "ride" through areas in which various species of dinosaur are penned. It soon becomes apparent that, beyond the successful recreation of the dinosaurs, the park is rife with design flaws, with the animals stubbornly refusing to conform to Hammond's plans.

As a storm hits, Dennis Nedry, who designed and operates the park's computer systems, shuts down the security programmes so that he can steal a selection of dinosaur embryos he intends to sell to a rival corporation. The ride breaks down and Gennaro is eaten by a tyrannosaurus rex which tries to get at the children, who are rescued by Alan while lan is wounded distracting the beast. Nedry, lost in the storm, is blinded and killed by a venom-spitting dilophosaurus while Hammond is forced to shut down the power to get around blocks Nedry has integrated into the control systems.

Ellie, accompanied by Robert Muldoon, a game warden who has always distrusted dinosaurs, ventures out to reactivate the power from a generator, while Alan and the children make their way back to the control centre. Muldoon is killed by velociraptors, a vicious and intelligent pack animal; Ellie turns the power on just as Tim is clambering over an electric fence. Alan, who has formerly hated children, manages to save Tim, but the survivors discover that the velociraptors have breached the control centre. Alan, Ellie and the children are menaced by the persistent velociraptors, who are only defeated when the tyrannosaurus intervenes and kills the smaller beasts. The survivors flee the island.

The narrative motor of Jurassic Park is the overlap of irreconcilable agendas: the creation and ultimate failure of the theme park requires the input of caring palaeontologists, wide-eyed children, Frankensteinian genetic engineers, chaos doomsayers, "bloodsucking lawyers', ferocious predators and a fatherly multi-millionaire. Similarly conflicted and contrasting motives power the conversion of Michael Crichton's best-selling novel into an 'event' movie by Steven Spielberg. The stresses between the plot and the circumstances of its depiction are what make this blockbuster at once an all-but-infallible entertainment and a demonstration of its character lan Malcolm's theory that things go wrong exponentially.

After a decade of literary adaptations, Indiana Jones sequels and oddments like Always, Spielberg needs to re-establish himself as the commercial and creative giant of the 70s and early 80s. Given this circumstance, Jurassic Park has almost all the elements of an identikit 'Spielberg': the paring-down of a monster best-seller into a suspense machine (Jaws); the tackling of a popular-science childhood sense of wonder perennial with state-of-the art effects that reimagine 1950s B science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind); the all-action jungle adventure littered with incredible perils and gruesome deaths (Raiders of the Lost Ark); and big-eyed creatures who range from beatifically benevolent to toothily murderous (Gremlins, E.T: The Extra Terrestrial). Add such tropes as a John Williams score; glowing wonder (Laura Dern as much as the children is called upon to gape in tearful amazement); textbook suspense (Tim clinging to a dead electric fence as Ellie unknowingly switches on the power); one all-too-true key speech ("you can't think this through, there are some things you have to feel'); and slapstick sadism involving caricatures nobody cares about (the gross Nedry blinded and gutted, the pockmarked Gennaro plucked from the toilet).

However, in a minor key, we note the input of Crichton, a novelist who is himself a director (albeit in career stall after Official Evidence) and who laid down the basics of this plot with his first feature, Westworld. As in all of Crichton's SF, in print (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) or on film (Coma, Looker, Runaway), complex technological achievements are ultimately dangerous because human motives and skills are incapable of keeping pace with pure scientific advances. lan Malcolm, played with scene-stealing glee by Jeff Goldblum, is Crichton's signature character: a scientist who actually has a theory about why nothing ever goes right. As in the films of James Cameron (a director demonstrably influenced by Westworld), Crichton's technophobic visions, like Spielberg's anti-intellectual wonder, can only be brought to the screen by triumphs of technology no less astonishing than genetically recreating dinosaurs or constructing androids in the image of Yul Brynner.

Jurassic Park will be seen by millions for its effects alone, and the combination of puppetwork and animation certainly goes beyond the previous high water marks of Willis H. O'Brien's King Kong or Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi. However, just as a group of diverse experts under the direction of a showman are responsible for the genetic engineering here (rather than the Frankenstein figures of 50s SF or Roger Corman's Jurassic Park cash-in, Carnosaur), lone visionaries like O'Brien and Harryhausen have been replaced by teams of multi-skilled employees whose collective achievement lacks the individual heart of Kong. A further irony is that Jurassic Park makes extensive use of the robotics and image-engineering processes Crichton himself predicted (and saw disastrous consequences for) in Westworld and Looker.

The most significant change between Crichton's novel and Spielberg's film is the transformation of John Hammond from an unsympathetic capitalist into a cuddly cod-Scots visionary played by Attenborough (irresistibly recalling Dr Dolittle). While the novel is an Awful Warning with a 'gosh-wow-dinosaurs!' undercurrent, the film is quite properly in love with its beasties, both as a narrative necessity and as a prelude to the mind-numbingly ignorant proclamation that "this is not science fiction, it's science eventuality", the film takes its prehistoric animals seriously, employing advisers to ensure that the dinosaurs act more like real ones than the Jaws shark did a real Great White. Alan Grant's explanatory lectures - about the way saurians probably had more in common with the birds than the reptiles - smugly underlines the film's authenticity. Even the saur-hating Muldoon, as he is about to be devoured, breathes "clever girl" (all the monsters are female) in appreciation of the trick the velociraptors have used to trap him. Just as Close Encounters crossbred ‘true life' UFO stories with 50s Jack Arnold, Jurassic Pork is informed by dino-buff Spielberg's genre heritage: images and lines deliberately recall King Kong, Ray Bradbury's story 'The Foghorn' (filmed as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms), Dinosaurs! and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. No matter how syrupy the kid-hating Grant's transformation into a fantasy father might be, it's hard to resist such primal moments as his calling to a herd of brachiosaurs with a Bradbury-ish honk only to be answered by a charming animal who takes the sugar off the scene by sneezing quantities of slime over Alexis.

Many annoying things about the film probably constitute survival traits in an international marketplace that would like a new monster to depose E.T. in the quarter-billion-dollar club. The softening of the novel so that only secondary characters are killed; the switch from nightmare horror to clean chase; the down-playing of any critique of entertainment capitalism and the pointless science (Crichton's Hammond has a lengthy speech about why it makes more economic sense to recreate dinosaurs than cure cancer); the inclusion of Laura Dern in shorts; and the abandonment of internal script logic in favour of a storyline which demonstrates its own chaos theory - all these factors compromise the film as drama but widen its appeal. The surprise is that painstaking effects co-exist with extraordinary clumsiness: in the process of adaptation, many sub-plots are pruned but some extremely awkward factors (the ability of the dinosaurs spontaneously to change sex and thus breed beyond their controlled populations) are confusingly retained, though they serve no narrative function.

Like Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park is ultimately unable safely to contain its attractions, but the dinosaurs are still magnificent: the tyrannosaurus attack during a night storm, a fleeing herd of gallimimuses, the gremlin-like collared dilophosaurus cautiously killing its prey and the game of velociraptor hide-and-seek must stand as definitive. However, the most deeply-felt and emotionally complex shot of the film - a pan from a rack of now-unsaleable cutesy dinosaur merchandise to the dejected Hammond - raises issues that the media monolith of a 90s studio blockbuster could never address.

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