Movie Reviews

I really enjoyed the first two installments of the Jurassic Park series (yeah, even The Lost World was pretty good), so Number Three's sheer blandness is pretty dissappointing. It's basically just your standard monster movie with a plot that consists entirely of chase-scene after chase-scene. You could replace the dinosaurs and tropical-island-setting of Jurassic Park III with pretty much anything -- like lions in Africa, or nasty aliens on another planet.

One of the things I found a little frustrating about the film is how it offered up some interesting possabilities, only to complete disregard them later. For instance, one of the earlier scenes involves two guys testing out a big-ass gun by shooting a small airplain painted to look like a dinosaur. The plain explodes in a huge ball of flames, and I'm thinking, "Okay, cool... wouldn't it be neat to see them try to actually use a big-ass gun like that on one of the dinosaurs that they're no-doubt going to encounter later on?" But no, the big-ass gun is never heard from again. Or how about when young Billy, who's been stranded on the dinosaur island for two months, shows Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) a flask of Tyrannosaurus Rex urine that he somehow managed to collect. It would've been kind've neat if that were to have been used later on, perhaps to attract (or repell) a T-Rex for some reason or another. But no, it's never heard from again. The whole script seems to have been made up as they were filming.

There are a couple of really stupid moments in this movie too (some of them almost as bad as the gymnastic dinosaur-kicking scene in The Lost World). Does anyone believe, for example, that a Velociraptor would gingerly grab a guy's head in its mouth and kill him by snapping his neck, rather than simply ripping his head off of his neck? I have a vague feeling that, with a few of these sorts of things (and there are more than one) the filmmakers might've been striving for some degree of humour. I didn't get it, though.

All in all, Jurassic Park III is nowhere near in the same league as the first two; even the special effects here didn't look quite as convincing as in the first two (perhaps this is because many of the more intense dino-scenes take place in broad daylight -- something that didn't really happen in the first two films).