Jurassic Park III (2001)

Jurassic Park III had a lot riding on it - Jurassic Park (1993) had been a massive success, deservedly so and although its first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) had enjoyed considerable financial success it was in every other respect a failure. Jurassic Park III was charged with getting the franchise back on an even keel and it met the challenge with some success.

Steven Spielberg jumped ship (he was busy on A.I. - Artificial Intelligence (2001)) and handed the reins over to former effects man turned director (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995)) and long-time Spielberg associate Joe Johnston. His greatest contribution is probably the film's breathless pace. Where Lost World had been plodding  and largely directionless, Johnston and his writers waste little time in giving the punters what they've paid for - large dinosaurs chasing not-terribly-bright people through the jungle and eating most of them. The set-up is fairly cursory and Johnston commendably seems keen to get straight to the dino action, though inevitably in the full-pelt rush, some things get lost. Like the ending, for example. Jurassic Park III simply stops, the survivors escaping this year's featured dinosaur (of which, more in a moment) rather too easily, and the final shots suggest that an unholy battle royal between pteranadons and marines might be in the offing, but it disappointingly fails to materialise.

The human cast in these sort of things are barely of interest, though it's always a pleasure to see actors of the caliber of Sam Neill (a welcome return to the series having sensibly bailed out of Lost World) and William H. Macy going through their paces. Téa Leoni proves too brash and irritating to be really sympathetic and one spends much of the film hoping and praying that she'll fall victim to the next dinosaur attack. Trevor Morgan makes for a nicely unconventional teen hero (he has a charming way with T-Rex urine) and the rest of the cast seem perfectly well aware that they're there simply to eaten, stomped on and otherwise mistreated by the real stars of the show, ILM and Stan Winston's remarkable dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park had T-Rex, Lost World had is vicious velociraptors and Jurassic Park III's chief attraction is the monstrous spinosaurus, a creature so immense and brutal that it dwarfs the T-Rex it gets the better of in a disappointingly brief head-to-head encounter. And to give added value, the film rescues a sequence from Crichton's original novel that failed to make the original film and, picking up the gauntlet thrown down by the final shots of Lost World, stirs in some impressively nasty pteranodons too. Their first appearance, emerging like scuttling demons from a thick mist, is one of the film's scariest moments and one of the few moments in the whole series that effectively suggests just how alien these creatures really are.

The film's only mis-step in the dino stakes is its over-reliance on the velociraptors, who don't seem anywhere near as mean as they were in Lost World, and the insistent harping on about their intelligence wears a little thin after a while. An early scene setsup Grant's controversial theories on raptor intelligence and much of the rest of the films seems to be taken up with some frankly heavy handed attempts to prove him right. In the end, Jurassic Park III rather emasculates the raptors, turning them from the ruthless, pack-hunting killing machines of Lost World into caring, sharing family animals that just want their stolen eggs back. Somehow, by making them smarter, they seem mus less frightening.

ILM and Winston had their work cut out for them on Jurassic Park III. In the first  film, the mere fact that they could bring long extinct reptiles to life with  such astonishing realism was cause enough for celebration, and Lost World upped the ante with dino overkill, simply filling the gaping void where the plot should have been  with as many dinosaurs as possible. Eight years on and we'd become rather somewhat jaded. The BBC's remarkable Walking With Dinosaurs (1999) and The Ballad of Big Al (2001) TV shows had already breathed life into a greater menagerie of monsters than Jurassic Park III could ever handle and audiences had grown sophisticated enough to no longer be impressed by CGI cleverness - indeed, by the time Jurassic Park III was released, something of a backlash against the sterility and overuse of computer effects was underway; this, remember, was the summer of the bloated CGI extravagance Pearl Harbor (2001).

But the effects in Jurassic Park III really are quite astonishing. If it's true that the best effects are those that you don't really think about, then Jurassic Park III succeeds admirably - every one of the dinosaurs never looks anything other than totally convincing and this time the degree of detail, better revealed in a second viewing, is breathtaking. This time, the dinosaurs boast better muscle and skin definition than ever before and the mix of CGI and animatronics is even more blurred than ever.

Jurassic Park III clearly learned well from the failings of its predecessor. It's leaner (a summer blockbuster running just 92 minutes? Who would have thought it?), more focused and less concerned with badly thought out intra-group tensions and corporate politics than with simply getting on with the task in hand - giving us great action scenes, a few good scares and no time to think about just how dumb it really is.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 1 January, 2009