Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)

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Some years back, I took a trip into the heart of Spielberg country with one of my daughters: we boarded a small craft on the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios in California. Universal gave Steven Spielberg his first directing job in the late 1960s. For decades they made his films—through sharks, aliens, dinosaurs, whip-cracking adventures, war, history and back to sci-fi—and he has helped them construct their rides, acting as creative consultant to the Studio Tour which draws heavily on his films.

The sky was pewter-grey, spitting large drops. Two in a craft which might have taken a dozen, we bobbed along through milky-blue waters scented of bleach, towards a “scientific compound.” Here, we were told, a group of lab geeks had managed to create dinosaurs through cloning. The conceit, as in the film, was that the dinosaurs had escaped their cages