Jurassic Park III (2001)

Jurassic Park III (2001)

When you are younger, you take things for granted.

Like the concept of there being a new Jurassic Park every four years. Of course, this one had disappointing returns and put the series on hiatus until 2015. There was hints of this dispiriting 21st Century in the cinema, as I saw my dad’s face fall further with every scientific inaccuracy.

In Jurassic Park, the Dilophosaurs are entirely reinvented for the sake of a jump scare, but it works within the context of the film. Also the series Raptors are actually Deinonychus, but no kid ever complained about that because Deinonychus are ¤¤¤¤ing awesome. The Lost World decided to eject the paleontology lessons for more action. Here all the rules of dinosaurs are thrown out the window to tell a super-monster story. Does it make for a thrilling film? Sort of. But its also a more hollow experience.

And I wasn’t the only one of my generation, who experienced Jurassic Park in the cinema as a kid 8 years prior, who found the whole Spinosaur/T.Rex curbstomp battle a bit of a take that at what we’d liked before. Needless to say, the Spinosaur is nothing like the scavenging fish eater we suspect they were in real life. Here it towers over the Rexes like some supersized killing machine, which can also sneak up quietly on its prey. It’s a plot efficient apex predator. But, really, this is a film about dinosaurs for kids. When you start inventing dinosaurs and giving them real life names, you know who gets perplexed, and who takes dino-facts super seriously? Kids. When I started getting bored of this instalment (sign 2 the franchise was in trouble) at the cinema, I started glancing around the packed cinema and genuinely saw frowns on a few kids faces. Kids who would have been my age when I was the first film. Sign 3.

Another issue with this film is that whereas the first two films saw dinosaurs take on resourceful characters (think back to Bob Peck or Jeff Goldblum here), in Jurassic Park III, Sam Neill struggles to protect the most useless, idiotic and annoying cast of canon fodder from being chomped. Late on, when Grant faces down the Raptor clan, I muttered aloud to Dad: “This is where the Raptors save the day by eating Tea Leoni!” and half the row behind me burst out laughing. Sign 4. She plays a really woefully bad character though, who exists solely to help kill off other characters by acting like an idiot. “I’m in a world of dinosaurs, I better draw loud attention to myself!” She makes Julianne Moore look like a Stegosaurus Whisperer by comparison.

But seriously, a Velociraptor Face Turn would have saved this film. I mean, they already know Alan’s name. (Seriously WTF was that dream sequence? When Jessel brought it up in his book I thought he was kidding, having blotted it out of my memory!)

There is a melancholic nature to this film. See that young female paleontology student who flirts with Sam Neill’s protégé at the start? She died aged 39. Michael Jeter’s Udesky is the sole guest role with any meat to it (as a property manager who winds up on the island because his bosses didn’t want to refund the Leoni couple), but Jeter, who also excelled in The Green Mile as burned alive Delacroix, was dead within 2 years of this.

And that continues in real life. Jurassic Park and The Lost World were, as I mentioned, both seen with Granda Bob. Cometh the millennium, he was in his late 60s and his hospital stays got longer. You can take things for granted. People who go into hospital a lot but come out again, when you are younger, you just assume they’ll always come out and be back to normal in time. Even a man who had survived seven heart attacks. But in 2001, he felt too ill to fancy a trip to the cinema. That should have been a sign.

Instead, a few months later, he caught MRSA, and suffered heart failure. He was given days to live. Being superman, he rebounded, and carried on until December 2003, when the eighth heart attack was fatal. He was 68.

I found out much later that his heart issues were caused by a combination of drink and smoking, but when his first grandchild was born, he was given an ultimatum: give up the drink, or don’t see the child. Well, I was that child, Bob went teetotal for the last 17 years of his life, and we watched a ¤¤¤¤load of dinosaur films together.

But not this one. Even when it was out on video, it didn’t seem worth it. It still doesn’t.

Seriously, how does the Spinosaurus sneak up on folk?

One bright spot though? Tea Leoni looks at the test tube things, and in the last test tube case is a Raptors head. And after 30 seconds, the Raptor blinks at her. Its right next to her. Even it can’t believe its sharing an island with a character this badly written.

Otherwise, this is a lousy film, sad to say. And I was hoping it’d look better with reappraisal. With the eyes of 2019, I’m with those frowning kids.