Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love and adore dinosaurs. In fact, I have ever since the tender age of 5, a whopping 30 years ago. I have taken paleontology courses in college, and majored in archeology. I lived through the “paradigm shift” of how we changed our thinking that dinosaurs were “cold blooded and stupid in swamps”, to the now-accepted “warm blooded, smart and living on land bird” theory. I have thoroughly enjoyed such documentaries as “Walking With Dinosaurs” and “Big AL”. I loved “Jurassic Park”, the book, and the first movie of that name. I tolerated, and somewhat enjoyed, “Lost World”, or “Jurassic Park 2”. I sat through, and endured, “Jurassic Park 3”, which took what seemed longer than 90 minutes. I will tell you why I had to sit through, and endure, this film in a synopsis and review.


Synopsis and Review.

We begin the movie with the usual spectacular scene of “a tropical island”(really the island of Kauai, Hawaii, USA). This time it is Isla Sorna, or “island b”, that has more dinosaurs. The caption on the film states this, and a big, red “Restricted” sign flashes across the screen. An adult man and a 12-year-old boy are parasailing, and videoing the island in the hopes of seeing a dinosaur. Predictably, something goes wrong, and the Costa Ricans driving the boat conveniently drive into a fog bank, and the parasailers lose sight of them momentarily, feel a jerking movement, and when visibility is regained, there is no sign of the boat’s crew, and there is a stain of blood. Oooooh. Scary. I wonder what got them? (sarcasm).

We get a little snippet of some “tough guys” shooting at defunct airplanes on a beach with rather powerful weapons.

Next, we get to see Dr. Allen Grant (Sam Neil), visiting his old flame and friend, played by Laura Dern. She is married now with kids. We find out some shaky character development that her husband works for the state department. Then, cut to a lecture where Dr. Grant is giving at the Smithsonian, in which he claims that Velociraptors (they just shorten it to “raptors” in this film, in fact, they do a lot of shortening on things like character development, plot, etc), possessed intelligence. In fact, says Grant, they were smarter than “dolphins or whales”, and, get this startling revelation, “smarter than PRIMATES”! Oooooooh! “Watch out for the killer Squirrel Monkies!!!!!” “Head for the hills, or you will be up to your armpits in Gibbons!”(I know, they did a planet of the ape’s movie, but come on). Grant then says that if they didn’t become extinct, Velociraptors would be the “dominant species on the planet”. Well, what the heck, maybe they would have. Maybe not. He then fields questions from the audience, from those that don’t want to ask about “Jurassic Park” or “his experiences on that island”. One person is interested enough to ask. One person in the whole audience is actually interested in Paleontology! It is kind of like the audience in the movie theater, come to think of it!

Next, Grant goes back to base camp in Montana, where his graduate student, a certain Billy, is working on a completely articulated skeleton of a Velociraptor, and flirting with another student. Incidentally, when you dig in the field, it is almost unheard of to find a complete skeleton, much less a fully articulated one (at least here it is encased properly in the concrete hard ground, rather than the one that was just in the sand in the first Jurassic Park). No sooner than Dr. Grant comes back to visit, that he is introduced to a certain wealthy thrill seeking adventurer guy and his wife, who wish to “fly over” Isla Sorna.
Grant says it is out of the question, and that “no power in heaven or earth” could make him return to “that island”. Well, it turns out, when the man opens his checkbook, and says that “I can write any combination of number on here”, that he is persuaded.

Cut to the plane ride there, with Grant, graduate student Billy, the adventurer couple, and three seedy characters, the pilot, a guide, and other seedy tough guy (all of whom were shooting on that beach at airplanes), are on their way. Grant goes to sleep, and wakes up as they see a vast herd of dinosaurs on the island, and tries to tell them, as their guide, what they are. No one seems to care, as they tell him they are going to “land on an airstrip”. Grant panics, and is bonked on the head by tough guy number three. He awakes, saying, “tell me we didn’t land”. Of course, they did. They get off the plane, and the action begins! It turns out that this is a rescue operation, and that the adventurer couple is looking for the 12-year-old boy and man who disappeared here 8 weeks ago. Shouting through a bullhorn, which Grant says is a “bad idea”, the woman is yelling for her son. Well, obviously she has called something else. “A T. rex? Billy asks”. “No”, Grant says, “something bigger”. They all begin to panic, and head back onto the plane, and turn that sucker around to fly back up the airstrip. Lo and behold! Tough guy number three staggers onto the airstrip, bloodied and scared, and is about to be hit by tough guy panicked pilot when, wham! Out of the jungle, a gigantic carnivorous dinosaur, who makes his screen debut here for the species, one Spinosaurus egypticus, swoops in to grab the hapless tough guy, and also damage the taking off airplane, causing it to crash into the trees a few hundred meters away. Surviving this jolt, the survivor’s notice they are in the trees, above ground. Of course, the Spinosaurus immediately comes over, pulls the nose off the now wingless plane, and eats tough guy pilot. Then, the giant Spinosaur, which has the narrow snout of a crocodile, and a huge sail on its back, then rolls the plane out of the tree, onto the ground, and rolls it downhill, and tries very hard to kill and eat the remaining five people. An amazing escape leaves them in the forest, on the island without radio contact or anything else, except for a few bruises and a cell phone.

So, now the adventure begins. The best scene in the whole movie is when they stumble onto a carcass of a dinosaur, and a Tyrannosaurus rex feeding on it! It chases them, and they run right back into the Spinosaurus, and the two duel it out, as the five run out of the way. The dinosaur fight scene is pretty cool, and the Spinosaurus kills the T. rex. Who saw that coming?

We get to follow the five around, the character development, or what there is of it, continues. We find out that the couple is divorced, and that this tragedy of losing their son is bringing them back together. They want to rescue the boy, Grant wants to survive, and get off the island, and suggests they all head to the coast. It also turns out that they aren’t rich adventurers after all, he owns a tile and paint shop. Ha ha….. wasn’t that funny? So, they do manage to find the parasail in the trees, with the dead friend Ben still attached to it. The woman gets caught up in the parasail chords, and a very silly scene, in which she goes rather hysterical at the dead man attached to her, ensues for what seems like minutes, but is a few seconds. She runs off into the jungle, followed by her ex husband, and they find a bunch of Velociraptor nests. Retreating from this area cautiously, they also found the video recorder, whose batteries have run out, that recorded the boy’s last moments. Well, no matter, the seedy guide pulls out his flashlight batteries, and hooks it up (somehow). They view the last scenes where they parasail to the island. Billy is missing, and turns up saying he was “photographing the nests”. Well, then we get the adventure going with the Velociraptors.
They find the central compound of Ingen, the company that genetically engineered the dinosaurs. This is the most likely place to find the boy. As they enter, a fleeting glimpse of a Velociraptor runs by in the background. As they look at the egg chambers, and specimen bags and jars with embryo dinosaurs in them, the woman sees a dinosaur head in one jar. It turns out to be a Velociraptor, which blinks, and isn’t in the jar, it’s just on the outside of it. (This scene was stolen from “Aliens”). So, the Velociraptors, which in this movie have hackles of feathers on their heads, chase them to and fro, and manage to kill the seedy guide. Grant gets separated, and finds himself surrounded by raptors, and, as they close in for the kill. Two gas grenades save the day, shot in by none other than the boy, who saves him (again, just like in “Aliens”). It turns out he survived on the island all those 8 weeks. After a brief snack, the two set out to find the parents and Billy, and only find them because he hears his dad’s cell phone ringing. In a scene where the writers really dropped the ball (the whole thing about dinosaurs being birds, and in the beginning Grant was feeding a parrot), they could have had the Velociraptors imitating the call of the boy and the cell phone, but, it turns out, they had something else in mind.
The two groups find each other, and there is a warm reunion. Asked how they found one another, the boy told them it was the cell phone, which the father doesn’t have. Ooops! He gave it to the seedy guide, who is in the belly of the Spinosaurus! So, it chases them around a bit, but doesn’t catch them. They find refuge in another Ingen building. Here, Billy reveals that in his bag, he has collected two Velociraptor eggs, and Grant gets mad at him. “You are no better than the people who made this place”(or, for that matter, this movie!). So, they spy a boat on the river, and try to make their way down to it.

In another fog scene, they travel one by one across the rickety bridge (things become rickety and rusty here very fast). Grant makes it across, and so does the woman. The boy starts over, and at that moment Grant finds some bird poop, or what looks and smells like it. “It’s a big bird cage”. Out of the fog walks, like a huge bat, a Pteranodon (which isn’t a dinosaur at all, but a flying reptile unrelated to dinosaurs, and lived at the same time). It swoops up, and catches the boy, and brings him back to the lofty nest, where the babies try to eat him. Billy, with the parasail, jumps off and saves him. In a spectacular scene, the Pteranodons swoop in and attack Billy after he falls into the river. He is seemingly lost, and killed, as the four escape to the boat.

Miraculously, the boat has fuel and works, as does the cell phone, that they now retrieve from fresh Spinosaur dung. While they do this, a Ceratosaurus, or Carnotaurus, approaches, but retreats, smelling the bigger dinos poop. Onto the big boat scene now.
As Grant calls Elly on the cell phone, and gets her toddler, life and death all hang on Barney or “get mommy” to the phone. The Spinosaur attacks the boat, sending the four into the water in a cage, as Elly finally gets on the phone to hear Grant yell “on the river!”. They manage to somehow get free of the underwater cage as the Spinosaur tries to kill them. The husband distracts the Spinosaur now, saving his wife, long enough for Grant to shoot a flare gun and ignite the fuel from the boat, engulfing the huge dinosaur in flames.

They escape and head for the coast. As they hear the waves on the beach, and the music swells, they are stopped in their tracks by the raptors. They surround the four, and want the eggs. As they huddle lower and lower, they hand the eggs over to the dominant raptor. The raptors all skedaddle as a helicopter swoops overhead. They are rescued at last! It turns out that Elly’s hubby, the state department guy, has come to the rescue with a platoon or three of Marines who show up on the beach in landing craft. They are all saved, and even Billy is alive and well, although a bit bloodied. As they helicopter to waiting ships, they see the Pteranodons migrating.

Well, now for the review. This movie tries too hard to combine too much action, too much copy catting, has poor character development, and tries to stitch together too many implausible things in too little time to be any good at all. Further, we don’t get to see that many dinosaurs. When we do, it is usually in blurred, fast, computerized scenes. You don’t “Buy it”, and get that feeling like you did in the first Jurassic Park when the Tyrannosaurus comes out of its cage for the first time and knocks over the jeep. Sure, the Spinosaurus is cool, and its fight with the Tyrannosaurus is cool. So what? You don’t get to see more than half a dozen-dinosaur species in this one, and most of them are blurry, fleeting glimpses.

The copycatting is too obvious. The whole “Aliens” kind of motif is tired and a rip off. The scene in the Ingen building is just like in “Aliens”, when they visit the colony, who had studied the aliens, putting the embryos in jars. The boy is suddenly “Newt” from “Aliens”, who has miraculously survived.

The poor character development is another bad part of this movie. The mother is the worst of all, you just hate her character. The whole missing boy rescue is hardly overshadowed by the completely botched rescue operation, the huge dinosaurs trying to kill and eat you, and the hopeless situation you are in. That doesn’t seem to matter. Could you imagine it? Being stuck on an island with dinosaurs trying to eat you at every turn? None of that sense of fear or urgency is communicated here in the way it should be. Back to the “Alien” motif. That movie scared the heck out of me, and it was one, mostly unseen, alien that did the scaring. Here, we are overwhelmed with dinos, and it doesn’t scare you one bit! Grant, too, is poorly developed here, as is Billy, the seedy guys, the husband, etc.

The action factor is good, when it is there. The dino fight scene is great. The running herd of dinos is great. The fact that there isn’t more of this isn’t great.

Stitching all of these little subplots together, and trying to make it profound, doesn’t work either. This movie is the worst of the trilogy in that respect. It simply makes too many little plots, which are implausible to begin with, much more implausible in the end.

Finally, this movie doesn’t really teach you much of anything about dinosaurs. It is like a Godzilla movie at best. The “fact” that Velociraptors possessed intelligence is just a guess, a “hypothesis”, as it were. There is no concrete evidence based on their brain size relative to body size (which is how intelligence is measured in zoology, when the behaviors of living animals isn’t available). Reconstructing dinosaur behavior is almost purely guesswork. The movie does introduce us to a relatively new dinosaur species (discovered in the early 1920s, the bones were lost in a bombing raid on Berlin in World War II, and “rediscovered” recently in North Africa). We learn about the great Spinosaurus egypticus, and find that there was a carnivorous dinosaur bigger than T. rex (well, there were several: Giganotosaurus, Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, etc.)
To really hit home, the moviemakers made it kill the invincible “T. rex”, to bring that point home to the audience. The movie doesn’t tell you that the flying reptiles, the Pterosaurs, highlighted here by Pteranodon, actually were not dinosaurs, but reptiles that lived on earth during the age of dinosaurs.

All in all, Jurassic Park 3 is worth renting on video only. Maybe it is worth it to see the “special effects”, which are blurry and cool. I feel that I was shortchanged watching this film, and didn’t buy it at all from the first implausible, and predictable scene. Go see it if you have nothing else to see!


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older