DIRECTOR
Joe
Johnston
SCREENWRITERS
Peter
Buchman
Alexander Payne
Jim Taylor
based
on characters created by
Michael Crichton
PRODUCERS
Larry J. Franco
Kathleen Kennedy
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Shelly Johnson
MUSIC
Don Davis
EDITOR
Robert Dalva
CAST
Sam Neill (Dr. Alan Grant)
William H. Macy (Paul Kirby)
Téa Leoni (Amanda Kirby)
Alessandro Nivola (Billy Brennan)
Trevor Morgan (Eric Kirby)
Michael Jeter (Mr. Udesky)
John Diehl (Cooper)
Bruce A. Young (Nash)
Laura Dern (Dr. Ellie Degler)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 92m
U.S. release: July 18, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other movies
by Joe Johnston
reviewed on this site:
- Jumanji
See also:
- Jurassic
Park
- The
Lost World: Jurassic Park
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It may seem odd to criticize
a summer movie for delivering the goods, but Jurassic Park
III delivers the goods to the exclusion of anything else.
The movie is the utmost in studio wish-fulfillment: You want
raptors, we got 'em; you want dinosaurs you haven't seen before,
we got a huge Spinosaurus and flocks of pteranodons; you want
chase scenes, you want action, we got plenty of that. So why
couldn't I quite warm to this stripped-down dino-fest? Maybe
because it feels totally animated by what Universal thinks --
or hopes -- we want; it feels like one of those old one-off Marvel
comic books with plot points suggested by readers.
The original Jurassic
Park (1993) and its follow-up The
Lost World (1997), both directed by Steven Spielberg,
had their moments of bloat and absurdity, but that only made
the dinosaur attacks seem more vivid. (In Jaws and Close
Encounters, Spielberg was able to surround the money scenes
with dialogue and character scenes of actual interest, but that
was back in the '70s, when such things were allowed in big movies.)
This time, Spielberg steps aside and lets Joe Johnston (Jumanji,
October Sky) take the wheel; Johnston seems determined
to eliminate anything that critics jeered at Spielberg for doing,
but he lacks Spielberg's malicious taste for suspense.
There's nothing here like the
ominous whoooom ... whoooom ("That's an impact tremor,"
Jeff Goldblum stammered; "I'm fairly alarmed here")
that announced the T. rex in the first film, or the witty clack-clack
of the raptors' claws tapping patiently on the kitchen floor.
Johnston's dinos just pop up and chase whatever's around. More
than before, they come across merely as big monsters who occupy
the center of action scenes. Jurassic Park III is spectacular
but not scary or thrilling -- Johnston has graciously, if probably
unintentionally, given Sony a good template for a PlayStation
game.
Once again, a child is in danger;
this time it's young Eric (Trevor Morgan), who's marooned on
Isla Sorna, the "second island" of genetic-dino breeding
seen in The Lost World. Eric's divorced parents (William
H. Macy and Téa Leoni) unite to go save him; they lure
the original movie's hero, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), to help
them by waving a fraudulent promise of big money in his face.
If Macy and Leoni were presented as obsessive, narcissistic parents
driven to find their son no matter who else gets killed, the
movie might've had some bite, but they're painted as everyday
boring people for the audience to relate to, and William H. Macy,
aside from a couple of funny lines, hands in his least inspired
performance ever.
Ironically, Laura Dern probably
comes off best here -- maybe because she's worked with Johnston
before (in October Sky), maybe because she's only in it
for about five minutes and feels relieved not to have to run
screaming from thin air. Playing a happily-married-with-two-kids
Ellie Sadler (not married to Alan Grant, we note with some surprise;
the movie never tells us what happened), Dern seems loose and
relaxed -- qualities not shared by those on Isla Sorna, for obvious
reasons. Sam Neill does some of the same ah, shit, not this
again shtick Jeff Goldblum did in Lost World, but
whereas Goldblum made it work for his character, Neill -- the
actor, not the character -- looks resentful at having to revisit
this digital playpen.
The credits inform us that
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor worked on the script; if you know
the names, you're probably as big a fan of the satires Citizen
Ruth and Election
(both written by Payne and Taylor, and directed by Payne) as
I am. You will probably also enter Jurassic Park III curious
as to what contributions they made; you will very likely leave
the movie still curious. Surely nothing in this dino smackdown
is remotely satirical, with the vague exception of a recurring
satellite-phone gag, which may be a sly goof on how the T. rex's
presence is always broadcast well in advance. But if Payne and
Taylor were assigned to the script not to add anything brilliant
but simply to remove anything blatantly oafish, they seem to
have overlooked many such moments (my favorite is the scene where
a man steps in front of a speeding airplane, expecting it to
stop for him). Those who keep track of such things will note
that the sole black character is among the first to become dinosaur
stool, while the sole female is a dithering buffoon; this movie
follows its two predecessors into the land of retro pulp adventure,
pre-political correctness, yet lacks Spielberg's affectionate
parodic wink at same (not only in the previous Jurassic Park
entries but also in his Indiana Jones series).
So how are the dinosaurs? As
sculpted by Stan Winston and animated, in part, by ILM's computer
wonks, they're looking smooth; the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic
Park that blew us all away in 1993 already look a
little, well, 1993 in comparison with the 2001 models. (Students
of such things may be able to trace the development of computer
animation through the Jurassic Park movies alone.) But
the dinosaur scenes also go by too fast; it's not only that Johnston
isn't the mechanical wizard Spielberg is -- he also doesn't have
Spielberg's team of editor, composer, and cinematographer. Much
of Jurassic Park III looks alternately washed-out and
too dark -- it looks crappy, to be blunt. And the film zips by
too fast for any one sequence to gather weight or momentum. When
the mighty T. rex and the even mightier Spinosaurus duke it out,
it should be a true clash of the titans, a climactic collision
of apocalyptic force, but it arrives too soon and is staged at
such a hectic pace that it's over before you know it. That goes
for the rest of the movie too, really.
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