Ranking Steven Spielberg, Part 3: The '90s

In our third installment of my ongoing Steven Spielberg ranking retrospective, we come to perhaps his most transformative decade as a filmmaker - and perhaps relatedly, the decade in which he directed the fewest films. (Not that you can call a decade with several all-time greats and fan favorites "fallow"; also, the '90s mark the second and third time that Steven helmed two films in one calendar year - 1989, 1993 and 1997 being the examples here.)

As said before, it's goofy to consider this period as his first as a "serious" director, but the shift in both what kind of stories he dared to tell and how he told them is still one of the most fascinating changes in perspective of any filmmaker. Would future blockbusters have the same kind of impact without something as stark as Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan? Would he have even made the stories he made without those signposts in his work? Such is the magic of Spielberg: not only what he's done and how he's done it, but how it all fits together to form a brilliant body of work.

6. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) - ⭐️⭐️ 1/2 out of 5

After Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg went on a very challenging run of mostly mature films that, if not entirely intentionally, proved to the strongest skeptics that he was capable of handling mature themes with aplomb, not bombast. Starting with Schindler’s List and continuing to about Minority Report, his films deal with the audacity of hope and humanity in hopeless, often violent times: the pre-Civil War slave trade, World War II, and various techno-dystopian futures.

In that framing, The Lost World—Steven’s first post-Schindler film, ending a nearly four-year hiatus from the director’s chair (but hardly idle times, starting the USC Shoah Foundation, DreamWorks SKG, and, uh, a submarine-themed sub sandwich restaurant)—seems like the lightest of trifles: a laid-back return to genre entertainment after the original Jurassic became the world’s highest grossing film. Instead, the film is imbued with the same sort of icy violence of his other mid-late ‘90s works. The most memorable sequences feature violent, voyeuristic death, dismemberment and property damage. One poor sap is crushed by a T-Rex and sticks, dead, to its foot for several paces. Another (played by the film’s screenwriter, David Koepp) is picked out of a crowd of fleeing urbanites, his screams cartoonishly cut short by a shake of the powerful jaws. Not once but twice do men die offscreen, their blood flowing through a body of water and screechy, descending John Williams strings.

Alas, this kind of violent craft is nothing new if you’ve seen the first film. And as neat as the CGI and animatronic spectacles can be—you’ve gotta love the sight of raptors stalking men by making beelines through tall grass—there are hardly any human characters to invest in long enough. Outside of a returning Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), most of them appear long enough to say an expository sentence or two, then it’s back into the background until their lunch order is called.

It’s well-known that Spielberg himself was the loudest voice in author Michael Crichton’s ear to create a viable sequel. It’s a shame that, for once (maybe, truly, the first time ever?), Steven slips into carnival barker mode a little too snugly here. A popcorn stomachache, and not even a terribly ambitious one.

5. Amistad (1997) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rested from a four-year sabbatical, Spielberg came into 1997 swinging with another two-film year, but only landed some of the punches. The Lost World was lazy and derivative of its Jurassic predecessor, and Amistad’s worthy American history lesson—about a slave ship whose captives rebelled, only to become a judicial domino in the path to the Civil War—is bogged down by some woeful miscasting (chiefly Matthew McConaughey as a bold lawyer in a terrible wig) and a spongy third act where Anthony Hopkins swoops in to collect a Best Supporting Actor nod with an only decent monologue. The film’s most interesting supporting characters are too quickly sidelined—a pair of abolitionists played by Morgan Freeman and Stellan Skarsgård (the latter doing a sort of odd dry run for his Andor character)—and even the stunning work of its Black leads (Djimon Hounsou as the resolute leader of the jailed slaves, a killer debut performance from Chiwitel Ejiofor as his translator) eventually has to make room for American chest-puffery. Schindler’s List gave Spielberg the courage to tell, at its core, a more honest and raw story about race than The Color Purple, but he didn’t have the full mastery of the tool kit that he did with how he assembled that picture, so this film remains only above average—a rarity even for Steven.

4. Hook (1991) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2

Steven is wrong.

The disregard he has for Hook, the penultimate release of his behemoth blockbuster period, is staggeringly misguided. Though far from perfect—it’s too long, some of the performances a bit too crass, and the all-soundstage construction a bit weary in places (which doesn’t make Steven’s assertion that he’d today use digital sets a theoretical improvement)—this intriguing Peter Pan sequel has much to love. Robin Williams’ committed performance is a thrill, as is Dustin Hoffman’s delirious scenery-chewing; there’s a bizarre amount of cameos (Phil Collins! David Crosby! Glenn Close in drag!); Dean Cundey’s wondrous cinematography, and a John Williams score for the ages.

Above all, you have to admire Spielberg’s reverence for both the wonderment and the pain of childhood, as it rears its head in those early formative years as well as the ones where parenthood becomes unnecessarily rote in its challenges instead of an awfully big adventure, as exhilarating as soaring through the clouds or dueling a pirate.

And look: if you don’t collapse into heaving sobs when one of our most beloved late comedians holds an infant and lets the thrill of fatherhood wash over him to a terrific leitmotif…well, maybe you’re not a few months away from being a dad, like I am.

3. Jurassic Park (1993) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

So here’s the thing: this is one of Spielberg’s easiest home runs. Novel concept, brilliant technical execution, wondrous score, terrific cinematography (Dean Cundey the god) and great performances by its cast. As a kid, it turned me on to the wonder of prehistory and connected a few dots that there was the same person/people behind movies I adored like E.T. or Hook—the introduction to Spielberg as an idea as much as a craftsman.

AND YET, I certainly don’t think it’s a Top 5 in his filmography and even resist it as a Top 10. Is it because, the gripping CGI/animatronic hybrids aside, it’s not a surprise that he made it work? Is it because there’s a little less room for acting humanity than, say, JAWS? I feel like I’m going to be asking myself this question a lot about this movie over time, but there are worse places to try to find answers in for two hours.

2. Saving Private Ryan (1998) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The other side to the stunning ‘90s Spielberg coin that minted Schindler’s List on the other, this gripping drama finds the director once again storytelling from the comfort of World War II—although this film plays far less with identity and compresses its can’t-turn-away horrors primarily to two bookending action sequences that find Steven rebuilding how such stories are told, offering grit and Spielbergian dream weaving in equal measure.

Unlike Schindler, the cast is mostly familiar faces, particularly by today’s standards (of course Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, but a pre-The Fast and The Furious Vin Diesel, a pre-Sideways Paul Giamatti and a pre-, uh, Becker Ted Danson all show up). The other supporting players (including Tom Sizemore, Giovanni Ribisi and Jeremy Davies) have faces you’ll never forget in this context.

Whether by dint of Hanks’ or Spielberg’s Americana influences, Private Ryan’s message is less specific—not as plainly an anti-war film in text as Schindler was an anti-genocide story. Except for one fleeting moment, its enemy soldiers lack clear definition. Perhaps that’s a way of underlining in the quiet moments the same ideas as in the war sequences, anonymous bodies torn apart and viscera hitting Janusz Kaminski’s leaking lenses and unstable handheld frames. But the heft of that message is only slightly undercut by Spielberg’s soft focus steps—a Hanks “aw shucks” moment here, a patriotic cemetery framing device there. Nobody sticks the landing of these diametric ideals better than Steven, but the landing is only just a hair shakier than what he did five years before. Still, watching the man with the beard walk the tightrope without much of a net doesn’t lose its novelty the second time, either.

1. Schindler's List (1993) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

And so, the culmination of some two decades of circling around Things to Say and How to Say Them—a breath-catching dare to find hope (or at least a tiny smoldering ember of good) in one of the darkest abysses humans ever devised.

Only Spielberg could even consider doing what he does here: offering two hours of unabated, documentarian horror, followed by an hour of deciding, amid the human wreckage, that we must be given leniency (not gifted relief) in the form of Oskar Schindler deciding, for reasons I don’t think even he could comprehend, to stem a tiny fraction of the mass death surrounding him for six years. He does so with a very reserved edition of Steven’s tricks of the trade: emotive faces (very few of which are marquee names), gripping blocking, and technical precision from Kahn to Kaminski to Williams.

Letting the viewer ask “why” and answer their own “because” is a bold move—final, definitive proof that Spielberg could deliver conclusions without as clearly preordained a final catharsis. The souls lost in the Shoah are still dead, after all; their memories injured by painful mutations of the same and different belittling of personhoods around the world, not unlike what they faced. Schindler’s List is Steven Spielberg doing the only thing he feels he can: offering a flickering light in the darkness as a pathway to some sort of salvation.