JURASSIC PARK III 2001
49%
Directed by Joe Johnston
Written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Starring Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Trevor Morgan
Synopsis
A reluctant Dr. Alan Grant finds himself on dino-filled Isla Sorna (John Hammond’s Site B) after a bickering odd couple lures him there under false pretenses.
Why We Love It
Steven Spielberg opted to not direct Jurassic Park III, and it shows. There’s little of the Spielbergian grandeur that defined the director’s first two Jurassic films: gone are the goosebump-raising shots of the island’s majestic giants, along with the endless close-ups of the wide-mouthed humans gawping up at them. There’s little time spent chatting about the dangers of playing god and the ethics of genetic engineering. Taking the franchise reins, Jumanji director Joe Johnston wisely chose not to try to out-Spielberg the master and instead crafted a lean (it’s barely an hour and a half) and very mean little monster flick.
Critics were mixed about the decision to go the pure B-movie route, with some missing the first films’ more sweeping ambitions and others wanting a bit more story with their dino attacks. Lamenting what he called Johnston’s lack of interest in the story’s humans, Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers wrote that the movie “stinks worse than dino dung.”
Maybe Travers’s olfactory functions are keener than ours, but we’d respectfully disagree. Jurassic Park III is pretty good shit.
What’s left when you strip away all that Spielberg “magic” is a set of inventive and suspenseful set pieces that play with our memory of the original film—we get a riff on the Jeep-versus-T-Rex scene, this time with our heroes trapped in the fuselage of a small plane that’s just crash-landed—and expand upon threats only hinted at in the first two movies. A climactic sequence set in a mammoth aviary for Pteranodons is one of the best and most genuinely frightening things in any Jurassic movie, with Johnston fully capitalizing on all the potential menace of freaky-looking dinos attacking from the air. (An image of a gnarly Pteranodon emerging from the mist on a bridge could have come straight from a slasher movie.)
The primary threat in Jurassic Park III, however, is earthbound: the Spinosaurus, which is—according to some reports—even bigger than the Tyrannosaurus. And he’s got a sail! He’s got nothing on the T-Rex when it comes to screen presence, though, and by the time he’s swallowed a phone and his stomach starts ringing, he’s something of a hulking, scaly joke. Still, we appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts to evolve the series, and the species one-upmanship introduced here would go on to heavily influence the future of the franchise once it was rebooted with Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
As for the humans in the movie, viewers are offered Téa Leoni’s Amanda and William H. Macy’s Paul, a quarrelling divorced couple desperately trying to find their lost son. But the ace in the hole here is Sam Neill, returning as Doctor Alan Grant after sitting out the franchise’s second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park III is a shaggy, go-for-the-jugular affair, but what little gravitas it conjures comes by way of the grizzled New Zealand actor. Bring him back for the next Jurassic World flick, please.