Jurassic Park IIIweblog| writing| reviews| flickr| Mothcast |
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Let's be clear about this from the start; Jurassic Park III is a very, very stupid film. It's about stupid people doing stupid things which very often involve stupid dinosaurs. Darren Aronofsky's Pi this is not. Which is not to say it's all bad. I enjoyed it. I really did. I just felt that, perhaps I should have waited for the video to come out. Okay, let's get the plot out of the way; Sam Neill plays Alan Grant, who survived the first movie and now can get on just fine with kids (but not dinosaurs. He hates them. They tried to eat him. Bad monsters. No biscuit). He has no funding for his paleontological (is that even a word? Oh, well) research, because everyone now knows there are real live dinosaurs larking about off Costa Rica, so what's the point in just looking at the bones of dead ones, eh? Enter William H Macy and Tea Leoni as the estranged Kirbys, waving a big chequebook and promising lots of zeroes if Alan gives them a tour of Isla Sorna, Site B from The Lost World. Led by the wallet, he goes, taking his chipper young assistant Billy (Alessandro Nivola) to round up the numbers. Of course, what Alan doesn't know is that the Kirbys are actually looking for their son, who disappeared in an unlikely parascending accident 8 weeks previously. We know that, of course. Because we're not stupid. Guess what? Things go tits up. Even with the hilariously incompetent and unbelievably stupid "mercenaries" the Kirbys have brought along with them, their plane still gets splattered on the island and they end up saying "hi" to this film's big scary monster, the Spinosaurus. As entrances go, the Spinosaurus gets a fairly decent one. It trashes the plane, eats several expendable people and rubs out a Tyrannosaur with apparent ease. How the hell the humans manage to ditch him seems perplexing to me, but I suppose it's just stupider then the Tyrannosaur. Its later appearances are preceded by the stupidest signalling device in recent cinema. It so desperately wants to be the yellow barrels in Jaws, ie. menacing and spooky, but ends up being... well, Tic Toc Croc. We now know that Spielberg really didn't direct Hook. It was Joe Johnson. The Tyrannosaur in the first two movies was scary. It scared us because we all grow up with this picture in our mind of this ferocious lizard king who ruled the dinosaur world like a green Henry VIII. With six inch teeth. But a Spinosaurus comes along and everyone is visibly thinking "What's that? Some kind of crocodile thing? What?". Fair enough, we didn't really have a whole lot of experience with Raptors before Jurassic Park, but they were really just your average highly-intelligent psycho killer, only with scales. Now, Raptors, we all know, are smart cookies. We knew this by about... ooh, 45 minutes into Jurassic Park. They reminded us in The Lost World. To Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III, this comes as a revelation. What, was he hit very hard on the head? They're smart. Jesus, no wonder he couldn't get any funding. Okay, so we've established that Raptors are clever bunnies. The problem is they've somehow ended up in a comedy. Yep, that's right. Jurassic Park III is played mainly for laughs. The first sighting of the JP series' major badasses is in a comic sneaking-up-on-yoooou shot. Then it appears, and it's got stripes. And spiky hair. Whut? When did the makeover happen? Not a single character comments on this, nor the jungle camouflage Brachiosaur. When did this happen? Why don't the characters appear to notice? Stupid. People get eaten. Conclusions are reached in the stupidest manner possible, by which I mean the protagonists work things out about 10-20 minutes after the audience. Pteranodons fly about the place and, while looking quite cool in the air, look really, really stupid close up. And Sam Neill once again proves himself to be a dangerous man with a flare gun. It's fun. Substitute Alessandro Nivola with Doug McClure and you could be watching Channel 4 on a weekday afternoon. That's sort of a recommendation |
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