(NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past month I’ve been running a strikingly unbalanced review of the four films, because I’m a big fan of parts 1 & 3, while distinctly unenthusiastic over parts 2 & 4. Today’s chapter begins my discussion of JP 3, pivoting off my dismissal of JP 2 the week before. The previous five installments are listed below.)
However, I am a very big fan of Jurassic Park III (2001), the least successful of the four films. JPIII follows, very closely, the basic frame established by Spielberg, who produced the film, but director Joe Johnston turns in a stripped-down model, the most modest of the four, the least meta and the least complex. Less thought, more action! Sounds like a plan!
We begin once more with a Spielbergian flourish, a brief, gripping set piece tangentially related to the rest of the film. An unidentified man and boy—father and son, we presume—are parasailing in the Caribbean, obviously heading for Isla Nublar or Isla Sorna or Isla Somewhere. Out of the blue, well, something happens. The boat that was towing their parasail is wrecked on the rocks and now they’re floating free to who knows what and to who knows where. Then we cut to Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill once more), who didn’t show up for The Lost World. Alan is a bit out of sorts with the world these days. Everyone wants to hear him talk about the InGen dinosaurs, while he only wants to talk about the “real ones.” A visit with Ellie (Laura Dern) simply confirms his isolation. She’s married now, with a little boy, Charlie. Out on a dig, he tells eager grad student Billy Brennan (Alessandro Nivola1) that the fossil business isn’t what it used to be, that in fact it’s just about time to pack it in. Billy’s neat trick of recreating the vocal resonator of a Velociraptor via 3-D printing has come just a little too late in the game.
Or has it? Suave, got rocks couple Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) walk into Alan’s tent. Seems they’ve got a little proposition for Alan and Billy. They’d like to engage in a little dino-spotting—from the air, you understand—with Alan for their guide. You see, Paul likes to write checks—lots of checks, with lots of zeroes—and the rules that apply to other folks just don’t apply to him. Three years of bone hunting the old-fashioned way paid for by a two-day flyover? Sounds like a deal! Too bad that Alan isn’t privy to what we hear, and what we see—a couple of bad-boy soldiers of fortune doing a little target practice with a 20-mm cannon and a plane fuselage painted to look like a T. Rex. Is “Kirby Enterprises” as full of jive as InGen? Could be!
Of course, such proves to be the case. Instead of a flyover, the plane lands, and Paul and Amanda, Alan and Billy, the mysterious “Mr. Udesky” (Michael Jeter), and our two soldiers of fortune, “Cooper” and “Nash” (John Diehl and Bruce A. Young), scarcely have time to stretch their legs before they’re up against one of the coolest dinosaurs ever, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, an amphibious, fish-eating cross between a T. Rex and a crocodile.2 As you might guess, Cooper and Young don’t last very long, but in between their deaths there’s a very nice sequence depicting what it’s like to fly through the treetops rather than over them. “We haven’t landed yet,” says Alan, attempting to deplane but missing the ground by some 30 feet. When the Spinosaurus comes a calling on the treeborne aircraft, Amanda starts acting like a Spielberg chick, screaming her head off without bothering to tell anyone why she’s screaming.
But they find out soon enough. In more Spielbergery, the survivors find the wingless fuselage to be both haven and coffin, eventually scampering out before the Spino can quite crush it flat. He’s big but they’re fast.
Their flight brings them face to face with a reeking, fly-blown corpse the size of a pickup that, strangely, no one can smell until they’re right up on top of it. The bad news is, there’s a T. Rex on the other side! Naturally, the big guy gives chase, running them back to the other big guy, who isn’t pleased with the company. The two have a massively satisfying showdown, with (naturally) the Spinosaurus coming out on top, allowing the featherless bipeds to get away and fill us in on the backstory. It seems that Paul and Amanda aren’t rich. In fact, they’re not even a couple, not any more. That father and son we saw in the prologue, that was their son, Eric, but the guy was Ben Hildebrand, uptight, nerdy Paul’s free-spirited replacement. So everything they told Alan, including the check with all the zeroes, was just a line, to get him help them track down Ben and Eric. And Mr. Udesky, well he’s not so mysterious, and not so tough. He’s not really the outdoors type at all, more of a “booking agent”—just a bit of a Hollywood in-joke, since there’s nothing quite so unheroic as an agent.
- How does an Alessandro Nivola play a Billy Brennan? Acting! ↩︎
- I saw a wonderful Spinosaurus skeleton in the National Geographic Museum in DC a couple of years ago. Unfortunately it’s in Morocco now, where the bones came from. Unlike T. Rex and other giant carnivores, which are basically all head (and mouth), Spinosaurus had large, massively clawed forelimbs, for catching and rending fish and other prey. ↩︎
