JURASSIC PARK III: Cheerful Disrespect

Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Mark Harelik, Laura Dern
Runtime: 92 mins.
2001

Other reviews in this series:

Jurassic Park
The Lost World
Jurassic World

Having not seen the movie in years, I fully expected Jurassic Park III to be the low point of the franchise. After all, this is the first Jurassic Park film not directed by the legendary Steven Spielberg. How could it possibly stack up?

Imagine my surprise when I had a blast with Jurassic Park III. It's streamlined and willfully stupid--the perfect antidote for The Lost World's cynical gloom. Not only that, but the film fits beautifully with my ongoing theory about the franchise's self-awareness.


Jurassic Park was metapromotional, a film about the power and danger of big budget spectacle. The Lost World was a sequel about the violence that sequels enact upon their originals. Jurassic Park III is a movie about how awful it is to take over a preexisting franchise from a previous filmmaker. Here is my evidence:

1. Rather than the somber opening credits of the previous two films, Jurassic Park III punctuates its title card with three claws ripping through the logo. Combined with the cheesy music stinger, this functions as a statement of intent: We're not even playing with Spielberg's high genre fiction anymore--this is gonna be a straight up B-monster movie. If you don't believe me, let it sink in that they used Roman numerals instead of a 3 simply because III looks like claw marks, and compare that to the savvy titling of the second film, a literary reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World.

2. Early in the film Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is giving an academic lecture about the intellectual capacity of the velociraptor. When he asks for questions, the whole crowd shoots their hands up. He then asks if anyone has questions that don't have to do with John Hammond's island, or the incident in San Diego, "which I did not witness." Nearly every hand goes down.

This scene represents the immense frustration a filmmaker faces when they are trying to do something new in the shadow of giants. Grant thinks his lecture about velociraptors is the coolest, most interesting thing in the world--but people are only interested in his past exploits. This scene must have rung true to Joe Johnston; if you read Johnston's Jurassic Park III press interviews, you'll notice a trend of reporters pestering him with the same obvious questions: How does your movie stack up to the first two? Were you intimidated by Spielberg's legacy? How would you have done The Lost World differently if you had directed it? Johnston tries his best to deflect, but the reporters are persistent.

It's easy to see this scene as an ironic plea to the audience: For God's sake, try to pay attention to what I'm doing rather than what's already been done.

3. "There are two islands with dinosaurs on them?" one character asks, confused that Grant has never been to Isla Sorna before. The movie's poking fun at the logistical gymnastics and farfetched contrivances (namely the invention of another secret dinosaur island) required for The Lost World to happen.

4. Jurassic Park had a character rooting through an enormous pile of poop. Jurassic Park III has THREE characters rooting through THREE enormous piles of poop.

5. The new superpredator of the series, the spinosaurus, desperately advertised as JPIII's bigger badder version of the T-Rex, gets into a fight with Spielberg's iconic dino mascot and snaps its neck. The King is dead. Long live the King.

selfie

6. The kid in the movie, Ben, tells Alan Grant that he read his book. Grant then asks Ben (Mark Harelik) whether he also read Malcolm's book. The kid responds that he didn't like it very much. It was preachy, all "chaos chaos chaos." This is a pretty clear dig at The Lost World, as well as the book of the same name, which was only written by Crichton because Spielberg talked him into the sequel.

7. "See this raptor claw?" says Ben to Grant. "I used to have one just like this," Grant responds. "Mine's new," says the kid. That could be a snotty remark about JPIII's more technically advanced CGI, or it could be a broader statement about passing the torch. In the first movie Grant needs to save the kids; in this movie the kid saves Grant.

8. This one is perhaps the most egregious at all. William H. Macy and Tea Leoni play a separated couple whose son is lost on Isla Sorna, but they don't tell Grant any of this. Instead, they claim that they merely want a guided flyby of the island for their anniversary. "No force on heaven or earth could get me on that island," Grant deadpans.

Then Macy's character busts out the checkbook and tells Grant that he could write all kinds of numbers on that check. Close-up of checkbook, pen poised. Close-up of Grant, nearly salivating. Smash cut to Grant on an airplane heading for the island.

I couldn't believe it. The movie just portrayed the buying-out of Alan Grant's integrity, a clear analogue of Sam Neill's return to the franchise. The droll Q&A, the slaughtered T-Rex, the almighty checkbook... All of this is so cheerfully disrespectful it blows my mind.

I've got more examples, but you get my point. JPIII is a goofy monster movie, and it wishes you would see it as such. The film is even shot like a comedy. None of the artful tracking shots or skilled scene compositions of Spielberg's toolbox. Everything is simple and straightforward. When one character is delivering exposition, the camera is on them. When the other character delivers exposition, the camera cuts to them. This is most apparent in an early scene with Grant and Ellie (Laura Dern), who is happily married to someone else. Grant visits her house exclusively so that she can ask him questions about raptors for the audience's benefit. It's one of the more unsubtle exposition dumps I've ever scene, and the camera just cuts back and forth between them as if it is impatient for the scene to be over.

The most creative shots are the ones that are meant to deliver on some punch line or sight gag. Stuff like a scene beginning with a shot of a tree and the sound of someone getting socked, before William H. Macy stumbles onscreen and falls over. I'm absolutely sure that if you counted, you would find that this movie tries to be funny more than it tries to be suspenseful.

Unfortunately, both the comedy and the suspense are clumsy and ill-executed. The special effects, despite being "better" thanks to technological advances, look a whole lot worse. You could blame overreliance on CGI (the plane crash is an egregious jumble of impossible physics), but even the animatronics look unforgivably derpy. Johnston (Jumanji, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Captain America: The First Avenger) is supposed to be some sort of effects wizard, but the visuals in his movies have always made me incredibly uncomfortable. JPIII is no exception.

Spinosaurus is that guy who stands in the corner at parties, not knowing what to do with his hands.

I enjoyed watching Sam Neill ham it up (this film elevates Alan Grant from everyman to mythic-Indiana-Jones-figure, right down to the hat that he's never supposed to lose), but the rest of the cast is pretty flaccid. The best is Udesky (Michael Jeter), who is the unfortunate centerpiece of one of the more brutal and functional scenes of the film.

Speaking of hamming it up, I want you to watch this clip and try to tell me that JPIII is not at least partially a big fat joke.

It's easy to make fun of JPIII, but at least the film had the guts to be what it wanted to be: a balls-out idiotic monster movie. Indeed, these dinosaurs are no longer Spielberg's "animals." They appear only to give the characters a reason to run. Even the raptors are so far from being animals that Grant uses a raptor skull to have a conversation with them.

It's cheesy fun with moments that work and moments that absolutely do not, like a half-assed boat scene that vaguely attempts to recreate the wonder of the first film by panning over a bunch of CGI dinosaurs skating around the shore doing dino things, while the iconic score swells in the background. Or a scene that consists of us watching someone's hand holding a camcorder that is replaying an earlier scene. But the pacing rarely slackens, and at a sleek 92 minutes I can put up with a lot of nonsense.

I'm glad Joe Johnston got to make his Jurassic Park movie (he originally wanted to direct the second film, but Spielberg promised him the third instead). You can't really pin the blame for JPIII's faults squarely on his shoulders; the filmmakers decided to throw out a previous final script a mere five weeks before filming was set to start, and they didn't have another complete script until after filming wrapped. What's more, I'm sure many of the other perceived flaws come from inevitable comparisons to the original, a fact which I'm glad the film has the presence of mind to wink at.

Still, it's really dumb.

1 / 5  BLOBS