(NOTE: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park series is one of the best franchises on film, particularly if you like dinosaurs. For the past several months 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 continues my discussion of JP 3. The previous six installments are listed below.)
Once the backstories all get straightened, allowing us to pretty much guess how the plot is going to go—the human side of it, anyway—the disparate group of wanderers stumble conveniently on the ill-fated parasail that we saw Ben and Eric riding at the start of the picture, now hanging from a tree and looking considerably worse for wear. They then stumble even more conveniently on the modern screenwriter’s crutch, “found” video, carried by a digital camera Ben and Eric had with them at the time of their crash, allowing us to see Eric dropping to safety before fading to black. So he’s alive!
When Alan and Billy decide to take the parasail along, Johnston gives a us blast of Spielbergian/EC horror when poor Ben’s rotting carcass1 tumbles out, his skull naturally swinging right into our faces. Poor Amanda waxes exceedingly girly at this point, screeching horribly and managing to get entangled in the parasail, so that she and Ben are locked in a hideous farewell embrace. Screaming hysterically, she frees herself and races off into the jungle, not really a smart move, actually, but you know chicks. They have an instinct for dumb. Paul races after her and finds her trembling and flinching in a dino nesting ground. “Raptors” breathes Alan, when he catches up. It keeps getting worse all the time.
Once a thoroughly surly Alan has assured them that they all face almost certain death, the unhappy five quickly stumble across perhaps the most beloved trope in all of sci-fi, the ruined city of the future, in this case the headquarters of InGen, the apotheosis of corporate hubris and greed that created this reptilian Garden of Eden. “What is it?” asks Amanda, staring at the cluster of buildings, dominated by a huge, wrecked dome. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Udesky, getting one of the best lines of the picture, “it’s the Four Seasons.”
As the gang troops in the once state of the art facilities that the jungle has reclaimed as its own, the ghost of a Velociraptor flits past in the background, an omen of things to come. Walking through the sodden offices, Amanda spots a filthy, mud-stained desk phone. “What the hell,” she says, picking it up the receiver and showing some spunk for the first time in the picture. Naturally, there’s no dial tone, but at least she did something.
It what has become pretty much a de rigueur sequence in sci-fi these days, the gang files past a “creepy fetus” display—pickled, half-formed, half-deformed creatures floating in cylindrical tanks of dank, mysterious fluid—a trend started by the Alien films, I believe. “Is this how you make a dinosaur?” wonders Amanda, setting up Alan’s ponderous retort, “No, this is how you play God!”, even though, as I’ve complained before, the film, and the characters, frequently endorse the opposite judgment—that being able to see living dinosaurs is the coolest thing ever!—with far more fervor and conviction.
Amanda gets ahead of the rest, and encounters a particularly large specimen. As she studies the beast, she notices that its eyes are moving! The son of a bitch is alive!
What follows is another superb smart humans versus smart dinosaurs rumble, fully on a par with the sequences Spielberg put together in the original Jurassic Park. The raptors, so agile and cunning, with both razor-sharp claws and razor-sharp minds, not to mention some seriously advanced communication skills, seem unbeatable, but, hey, we’re the ones with the opposable thumbs. The gang gets away, all except poor Mr. Udesky. The poor guy was one brave little booking agent, and there ain’t many who can earn that title.
Billy, Amanda, and Paul all make it to the tree tops, but Alan is seemingly surrounded until his scaly attackers are driven away by, gas bombs! It’s Eric, covered in a home-made camouflage poncho and hiding out in a wrecked tank truck, living off of stale energy bars. Alan and Eric spend the night in the trailer, while Paul, Billy, and Amanda enjoy a tall tree. In the morning the two parties set off separately for “the coast.” After some random traipsing, Eric hears a familiar sound, the jingle to his dad’s cell phone! Shouting joyfully and racing through the jungle, the two groups finally meet, well, pretty much, because there’s one of those Jurassic Park-sized walls between them. Even worse, what I forgot to tell you is, that the cell phone isn’t in Paul’s pocket. It’s inside the Spinosaurus! Oh, yeah, he’s there all right, and damned hungry too, but the humans on the wrong side of the wall find a chink that lets them through to the right side. Sorry, dude! Go eat some fish!
- Rotting, but, once again, somehow odorless. ↩︎
