Jurassic Park III

July 19, 2001

Jurassic Park III didn’t suck nearly as bad as I thought it was going to.

I caught it on opening night and I was fairly amused throughout its brisk 90 minute running time. As far as “Part III” movies go, it’s pretty decent. Certainly better than Scream 3 or Rambo 3. Not close to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, though.

Even though it’s still basically a dinosaurs kill people movie, it’s quite a bit different from the two Spielberg efforts. Joe Johnstone strips the movie down to a B-Movie thriller, adds quite a bit more humor and cuts down on a lot of the plot and exposition of the first two. That said, his knack for action isn’t nearly as developed as Spielberg’s. While the first two movies generally had these long extended action sequences that built and built to nerve wracking climaxes, JP3 goes more for quick horror movie jumps and scares.

The dinos look better than ever, although when I saw the Spinosaurus for the first time, my first thought was “OK, c’mon. They clearly made that guy up.” I’m almost positive some paleontologist somewhere is mismatching giant bones and creating fictitious monsters just so they can get in the Jurassic Park movies. Strangely, in Jurassic Park III, it appears that the dinosaurs now know sophisticated martial arts techniques, as I caught two dinos snapping people’s necks Navy SEAL style. Very, very odd. I think by the fourth installment, you’ll see them doing full-on wire-fu.

Posted in Moving Pictures