Jurassic Park III

["Larry Dunn" <saurosuchus@hotmail.com>]

I'm going to limit my comments to Jurassic Park III as a movie.

It really wasn't very good.  I wouldn't have found it particularly diverting 
on pay-per-view, so I feel pretty taken-in for having spent ten dollars to 
see it.

They can't seem to get these movies right.

I was looking forward to a darker take on the dinosaur-island idea, 
Spielberg's two takes on this having been pretty shallow.  He evidently has 
no respect for the concept (a not entirely unreasonable position) and 
apparently assumes no one else does either, so creates the film equivalent 
of a theme park ride -- thrilling, implausible, demonstrably plasticky fake. 
 Johnston promised a darker feel, and I agree that in imagery and some of 
the smaller things he has delivered that, but in some of the larger things, 
this installment is the most preposterous of them all.  Yes, his dialogue is 
a little less childish than it is in Spielberg's movies, but then he gives 
us the machine that sculpts functioning internal organs, which reminded me a 
bit of that thing on Star Trek that makes whatever food you want from thin 
air.

Johnston tells his story in the most pedestrian fashion imaginable.  It is 
flat and unimaginative, and you are not drawn in at all.  Worse, little 
seems to actually happen.  How someone could portray humans interacting with 
dinosaurs and make it dull is beyond me.  I thought at first to summarize 
the action (as opposed to the exposition) and I'm at a loss because there's 
nothing there to summarize.

We are marched through the set-piece sequences as if the movie itself is 
resisting.  "No, not another one," the movie complains.  The only sequence 
that showed any spark whatsoever was the first Spinosaurus satellite phone 
scene, which was cute.  But, like all the other set-pieces, it goes nowhere.

I am pretty forgiving of these movies.  It takes me about an hour after 
having seen the first two movies to say to myself, "well, I was pretty 
excited, but it was kind of dumb."  But in the third movie, I didn't even 
get that thrill as you are watching.  That should sum it up.

You didn't have to be interested in dinosaurs to realize that much of what 
was going on onscreen was foolish.

My friend, who knows nothing about dinosaurs, wanted to know why the 
velociraptors would be so excited about two eggs out of what appeared to be 
about fifty.  People do have some common sense, after all.

There were hoots aplenty when Ellie has her hubbie send in a platoon of 
marines as if it were a request to bring home a gallon of milk.

The person sitting in front of me kept referring to the spinosaur as the 
pinocchio camel.  Johnston decided on a pretty dorky-looking animal as his 
mega-threat, apologies to any spinosaur workers out there.  It just doesn't 
evoke the same kind of awe and terror as Nature's battering ram, the 
Tyrannosaur.  When that animal came through the fence in the first movie, it 
worked: you felt in the presence of an unstoppable, indiscriminate force of 
nature, like a tornado.  It took your breath away.  Spielberg knew how to 
use the look the the tyrannosaur to his advantage.  Johnson hasn't even 
tried to do that with the spinosaur.  It ends up being, well, a pinocchio 
camel.

I couldn't help but laugh at the scene in which the spinosaur snaps the neck 
of the tyrannosaur.  I've seen the neck vertebrae of the tyrannosaur mounted 
at the AMNH, after all.

I anticipate the fourth installment being two minutes long, and  featuring 
the actually-ferocious Camptosaurus disembowling the spinosaur, followed by 
the credits.

My suggestion: to see really scary animals at the movies this summer, see if 
you can find SEXY BEAST instead.

Larry Dunn

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