Jurassic Park III (Universal, Amblin Entertainment, 2001)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ironically, one could say pretty much the same thing about the other movie Charles and I watched last night, Jurassic Park III, the movie directed by Joe Johnston from a script by Paul Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. The official writing credits list Buchman first, then the word “and,” with Payne’s and Taylor’s names linked by an ampersand – Writers’ Guild of America-speak for the fact that Buchman worked on the script solo and then Payne and Taylor were called in as collaborators to rewrite it. Jurassic Park III got terrible reviews and was a box-office flop, and the critical consensus was that it was the first film in the cycle not based on a Michael Crichton novel and the first not directed by Steven Spielberg nor written by David Koepp – though Spielberg’s name appears on the credits as an “executive producer.” (That probably means he had some residual rights to the property and got his name on the credits even though he didn' do anything truly creative.) Charles and I were both amused at the credit, “Based on characters created by Michael Crichton,” especially since only one of Crichton's characters – one human character, anyway – appears in the film. He’s Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill, who first played the part in the initial Jurassic Park in 1993 but skipped its immediate sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park), who’s hoodwinked by a recently married couple, Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni, both of whom have done considerably better work than this!), to fly out to Isla Sorna, the island refuge off the coast of Costa Rica where the genetically engineered dinosaurs of the first Jurassic Park ended up after the catastrophe on Isla Nublar in the first story.

The Kirbys introduce themselves to Dr. Grant as “thrill tourists” interested in visiting particularly dangerous parts of the world, and they also pose as considerably richer than they are – though if they just own a hardware store in the Midwest, as we later learn, where did they get the money to charter a private plane to take them, Dr. Grant and Dr. Grant’s assistant Billy Brennan (the genuinely cute Alessandro Nivola) to Isla Sorna in the first place? They’ve also hired various gunmen just in case the dinosaurs get out of hand, including one who boasts of a weapon with huge firing power and multiple magazines so it will almost never run out of bullets. (I grimly joked, “Just the sort of weapon Republicans think 18-year-olds should have.”) It turns out that the real reason the Kirbys want to fly to Isla Sorna and enlist Dr. Grant as their guide is that Eric (Trevor Morgan), Amanda’s son by a previous husband (though imdb.com missed that cue and listed the character as “Eric Kirby” instead of “Eric Hildebrand”), was lost on Isla Sorna when his dad took him there and went parasailing over the island. He was taken out by one of the dinosaurs but Eric survived and has been roughing it for eight weeks, determined to survive as he is waiting to be rescued. Needless to say, the gunmen the Kirbys hired to fly their plane and protect them on the ground meet the fate of Star Trek “red shirts” early on, and the remaining human principals are left to fight through the dinosaur-inhabited jungles of Isla Sorna.

Along the way Grant and the other humans are confronted with the incredible intelligence of velociraptors, who in the first Jurassic Park already had figured out how to open doors (my late roommate and home-care client John lost it at that point). In this film it turns out that raptors have evolved language skills and can communicate with each other and even set a trap for the humans, and early on before the action moves to Isla Sorna Grant makes a 3-D print-out of a raptor’s voice box (at a time when 3-D printing was still a novelty) and blows through it to simulate a raptor’s speech patterns. He also says to a class lecture that if it hadn’t been for the overall cataclysm that wiped them out along with all other dinosaurs, raptors rather than humans would be the dominant life form on Earth. (That’s the sort of line I’d much sooner expect from Jeff Goldblum’s character in the first Jurassic Park than from Sam Neill’s.) Jurassic Park III is a thoroughly competent studio machine that generates the expected thrills; it’s not a bad enough movie to deserve its box-office fate (it was such a resounding flop Universal put the Jurassic Park franchise in mothballs for 14 years until finally reviving it with Jurassic World in 2015) even though it’s not particularly good either. The only scenes that evoke the sense of wonder that made the earlier films in the series watchable are towards the end, when the humans return the raptor eggs they’ve stolen and the raptors gather around and thank them and a flock of flying dinosaurs join in formation and send off the humans as military aircraft, summoned by Dr. Grant’s wife, whom he called on a satellite phone from the middle of Isla Sorna so she could arrange them rescue transport home. I had actually joked when we first saw the eggs that the humans would break them open, cook them and serve a dino-omelet!