Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1204548
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 26 JANUARY 2020 OPINION RIGHT, that's it. I'm going to have to write an official letter to Hollywood, to complain about how they keep stealing all my ideas for their films. The latest incident happened just a few days ago. I found my- self seated at one of my preferred Valletta haunts: an outdoor café around the corner from the law courts, ideal for quietly observ- ing the ebb and flow of human traffic in between sips of a dou- ble espresso. I guess there must have been an important (and probably very ancient) court case going on; be- cause in the time it took me to drain the cup, around eight rec- ognisable personalities from our political past had hurried by… almost like a procession of living ghosts. I won't mention names, but they included at least two for- mer members of government going back to the days of Kar- menu Mifsud Bonnici; while others were mostly former MPs who had featured prominently in the news until around a dec- ade ago… but are now largely forgotten (in truth I barely re- membered some of them even existed at all). And I thought to myself: 'If they ever want a location for an- other Jurassic Park sequel, they should try Valletta. It's a place where time stands still… where dinosaurs just keep roaming the earth indefinitely…' Well, what do know? Later that very day I discovered that some Hollywood scout must have come to the same con- clusion. There it was, in black on white: 'Jurassic Park 3 to be filmed in Malta'… and our own newspaper even observed: "It is unclear whether dinosaurs will be seen roaming the streets of Valletta…" [huh? What do you mean, 'unclear'? I was there: I saw them, I tell you…] "but the return of a blockbuster movie is expected to generate business that will have a spill-over effect on the communities where film- ing will take place…" So there you have it: cheated out of yet another movie script idea… At the same time, however, I must confess that I was other- wise bowled over by the news. As a fan of the original movie (but none of the other sequels and spin-offs), I was instantly beset by the usual 'it's-probably- going-to-be-crap' trepidation… a feeling of dread that has ac- companied me throughout every announced sequel since 'A Phan- tom Menace' in 1999. (Note: 'Godzilla, King of the Monsters' was another recent example). But on another level entirely, I was instantly transported back to 1994, around the time the first movie came out. I happened to be in the United States back then, aged around 20 or so; and I distinctly remember buying a copy of the Michael Crichton novel at the train station in New York City, to read on the two- or-three-day train journey to my destination: middle-of-nowhere Iowa (or was in Kansas? Can't remember now...) This way, I got to read the book before watching the movie for the first time. And while I still enjoyed Spielberg's version, for all usual reasons ['Dinosaurs! I saw them, I tell you…!'] to this day, I still feel that the film miss- es one of the novel's most crucial points. 'Jurassic Park' is not just about genetically-engineered dino- saurs, running amok in a theme park as a result of multiple ad- ministrative failures (including a series of power-cuts, by the way… yet another good reason for choosing Malta as a loca- tion.). It is also about the ethical di- lemmas of genetic science itself. Some of these are admitted- ly present in the film – for in- stance, the fact that the Tricer- atops was dying: being unsuited to a climate and atmosphere that has changed so drastically over 65 million years. But the main difference be- tween book and film concerned the dinosaurs' behaviour when resurrected: which defied hu- man preconceptions of the 'slow, lumbering prehistoric giants' we all irrationally assume them to have been. On the contrary, Crichton's ge- netically-engineered specimens surprise their viewers by moving with the speed and ambulation of modern birds… a connection stressed throughout the book… and the T-Rex, in particular, Raphael Vassallo At last: a Jurassic Park film, set in a Jurassic location…