Jurassic Park III: Turning 23 Years Old

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Jurassic Park III has gone down in infamy as perhaps the worst in its franchise.  Time often gives perspective, and now, over twenty years later, there is a small but rabid cult following for this film in particular, as well as its own cult that despises this film. Here on the 23rd anniversary of this underrated film July 18, 2024, with an entire other disappointing Jurassic trilogy behind us and a new film on the way, I would like to revisit it.

 

Compared to the rest of the series, especially the first, second and fourth films, Jurassic Park III is light on the franchise staple idea of the chaos that arises from playing God with genetics. Gone is the Ian Malcolm as author insert character to state the theme while calculated contingencies fail, and also gone is the less subtle circumstance that leads a Tyrannosaurus Rex to rampage through San Diego.  It is not entirely missing, as the backstory for new antagonist the Spinosaurus hinges on a rather brief scene of exploring newer Ingen experiments, but this is mostly a family movie hearkening back to much older genre films where the franchise connective tissue is the same challenge that different characters will face and brave in different ways film to film (see Universal’s Mummy tetralogy from the 1940s as one such example of that trend where the antagonists and stakes remain similar but the heroes win in different and unique ways).

 

Indeed, upon a rewatch, it was startling to see just how many scenes from the original are homaged in this film but taken to a different logical end.  (Compare this to Jurassic World Dominion, which just recreated shots from the original with no change in context down to even the same clothing in certain scenes.)  Paul Kirby’s scene of recruiting Alan Grant and Billy Brennan plays off Hammond’s introduction in the first film but without the flamboyant displays of wealth and status (since Kirby is, after all, actually pretending to be wealthy).  Whereas Grant was speechless on the first tour when witnessing the first dinosaurs he sees, here he thinks he is in control of the situation as a simple tour guide when they pass by the first dinosaurs they will see. The Spinosaurus attacks the people in the plane by poking his face through windows and crushing the vehicle, which also falls out of a tree, similarly to the Tyrannosaurus and the car.  When Grant encounters a T-Rex, he tells everybody to stay still, but everybody else runs away this time, necessitating him to run as well.  Finally, the aesthetics of the velociraptor scenes return to the pack hunting and plotting of the original film (after the first sequel made them more like rabid play-fighting puppy littermates), but they are even more intelligent this time, shown off well in their coordination, Grant’s reactions, and the statements of other characters in regard to their abilities and new resonating chamber, a concept introduced to explain their social capacity.

 

The true appeal of Jurassic Park III is a simplified, streamlined island adventure of old with simple but consistent character arcs for Grant and some of his companions related to their specific dinosaur antagonists.  It's actually a pattern I have noticed in other Joe Johnston films, especially Captain America The First Avenger, that they will be nostalgic, simple stories with decent characterization for the leads but some plot issues throughout.  Jurassic Park III is the story of Alan Grant stuck on dinosaur island with incompetent laypeople, specifically divorced couple Paul and Amanda Kirby (who are looking for their son Eric Kirby), the mercenaries those two hired to help, and Billy Brennan, an undergraduate assistant to Alan.  It is also the story of a wimpy father gaining his courage and seemed to try to be the story of a hysterical woman taking her place as a leader and a young man trying to atone for a mistake made during the runtime (though these are more debatable in success).

 

Alan Grant’s role in JPIII is simple but misunderstood.  He acts as an extension of his character arc from the first film (now bonding with an additional two children he is under no obligation to get along with), and Johnston’s intent seems to be to give Grant a new arc where he learns to ask for help.  That is the thing Ellie Sattler tells him to do at the beginning of the movie, and the thing he finally does at the end that ends up rescuing the cast.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Many people oppose this film’s decision to break him and Ellie up.  I am slightly baffled about that.  After the first film, I guess people must have imagined Grant and Ellie settled down into their own family; that did seem like a natural trajectory for them.  No matter what happened to break them up, it was amicable, so we still get demonstrations of their bond.  The more important matter is that Grant bonding with her child is a more powerful expression of his attitude after bonding with Tim and Lex in the first film, because it is entirely his choice to do so, not something thrust upon him by fatherly obligation.  Their first scene works as them reconnecting, which makes for effectively masked exposition in their dialogue, and the distance between them allows her to save the day but also for the island segments to carry more tension since Grant and Eric are the only characters we are really sure will survive by virtue of being returning star and child respectively.  In any case, the Kirbys look on Grant as an authority figure, and even Billy, Grant’s assistant, screws up consistently enough (running away from the T-Rex and stealing velociraptor eggs) to where the audience and Grant himself understand that he is the only trustworthy and competent character…that is until Eric saves Grant from a velociraptor horde.  This plants the seed that Grant can rely on other people, which grows further when Billy redeems himself in saving Eric (at seemingly the cost of Billy’s own life), and finally Grant phones Ellie for help in the final fight against the Spinosaurus and has to give the stolen velociraptor eggs to Amanda Kirby so she can de-escalate the final confrontation with the velociraptors.

 

Paul Kirby, as a secondary lead, begins the film a deceptive, cowardly pathetic man, unable to control his mercenaries, holding fast to Grant’s advice in ways that do not reflect his own self interests, and constantly contrasted with stronger characters like Billy Brennan in the vending machine scene or Grant in any situation.  However, whereas Billy regresses into a weaker character and Grant leans more into teamwork, Paul begins to grow more confident and decisive as the situation calls for it.  His ex-wife’s reactions to his decisiveness in the second half of the film communicate that this is a side to him she has not seen before but enjoys, and their dialogue confirms as much.  In the final battle, Paul distracts the Spinosaurus from the rest of the remaining cast and holds it off himself until Grant can use a flare to set alight the oil the Spinosaurus inadvertently spilled to win the fight.  So far, the two leads have done very well in expressing their dynamic characterization.

 

The film’s focus is less so on Billy Brennan and Eric Kirby because they are stepping stones in Grant’s arc, but they have an arc to their characters even if we do not see some of the most important bits.  Billy is a charismatic person, more hedonistic than Grant (Billy wants the adventure that comes from paleontology, while Grant likes the cerebral parts) but also very concerned with pleasing Grant (his justification for stealing the raptor eggs is pragmatism to extend funding for their dig site, a more desperate pragmatism than Grant’s to comply with Kirby’s fake demands for the same end) as we also see by the half-dead Billy retrieving Grant’s hat after Billy’s sacrifice in the birdcage scene separates them.  Eric makes sense as a child character that somehow competently managed to survive.  He offers a childlike perspective on things that Grant is willing to heed, and the two can talk maturely about the dinosaurs on the island and if Grant was too harsh on Billy or not.  The mercenaries also are fine.  Only Udesky, himself not actually a mercenary, gets anything in the way of likable characterization, but he only serves the purposes of mirroring Billy as the more active and competent assistant to Paul and then also being part of the trap the raptors set to show off their intelligence.

 

Amanda Kirby is a decent character.   The issue comes in insofar that I think the film was trying to pass her off as some great character.  She starts off by far the most irrational and frantic of the group and ends the film level headed and the one character that resolves the dispute with the raptors’ Queen.  There just does not seem to be some extraordinary arc for all of this.  She just eventually found the person she was screaming to, and stuff needed to be done, so she did (the dialogue indicates that, unlike Paul, she has some degree of comfortability with outdoor situations so it’s more just a realistic “she got tired of screaming and could help out in the smalls ways she does” turn of events).  It is the matriarchal raptors that choose for her to be the point of contact, and Grant still does have to help mediate the situation with a 3D printed resonating chamber.  My idea of an ideal Jurassic sequel would not only progress Grant or whichever legacy character returns but also at least two others in order to leave the franchise off in safe hands for later on.  Paul would be a relatively easy protagonist, following his growth in this film, but the film did not do enough for Amanda, Billy or Eric to justify later importance.

 

Replacing the T-Rex in the marketing as well as killing it in film, the Spinosaurus is a controversial part of this movie.  The odd unsubstantiated theories and quirks of Jack Horner resulted in this film’s take on the uber-macho hunting Spinosaurus and scavenging T-Rex when by all accounts the opposite is closer to the truth (though we do learn contradictory information about both of these dinosaurs periodically, so it is possible albeit unlikely that history will vindicate him).  If the goal was to portray the Spinosaurus realistically, this film failed.  It behaves less like a real animal than it does a slasher villain, constantly determined to destroy the main characters until they can put up enough of a fight to send it running.  It seeks out T-Rexes for the thrill of hunting them as well.  While there is a sizable amount of time it is missing from the film where it could have eaten the T-Rex, there is no indication in the film that it eats that prey.  The instance where the obnoxious satellite phone ringtone plays to announce its presence also serves to hype it up as some horrifying monster, not any normal animal.  In that regard, the Spinosaurus is a great obstacle and antagonist to measure our heroes against.  It takes a lot of growth, coordination and luck to beat this thing, and it is very cathartic when they do.

 

That sort of half attention to realism extends to the Spinosaurus and T-Rex fight, wherein it is brief with the dinosaurs using only their best moves as would be realistic, but the actual way this fight plays out is impossible biologically speaking.  Within moments, the T-Rex has its massive jaw on the Spinosaurus’ neck, and the fight would be over right there.  As film shorthand, it is effective to set up the Spinosaurus as a greater threat by overcoming the most iconic and dangerous thing the Rex can throw at it, but it just is impossible for it to escape that, especially when the way it wins is by clamping down its weaker jaw on the T-Rex and contorting its own arms to snap the Rex’s neck, even more impossible.  If I recall correctly, the original plan following the coast battle was to have the velociraptors kill this spiny creature, and I am happy that did not happen because it would seem very strange towards this whole shorthand if the original film’s T-Rex could beat a pack of raptors but the Spinosaurus couldn’t.

 

Like Johnston’s 2010 Wolf-Man remake (initially planned to include a sizable Paul Naschy cameo), the production on this film was tumultuous with a lot of scrapped ideas.  There were multiple rewrites, notably affecting Grant’s character arc, as a persistent scrapped idea in this film was to turn him into a Robinson Crusoe island dweller, and the emphasis on the Ingen lab and aviary scenes.  More importantly, the final draft was still being written as the movie was filming, resulting in Billy’s actor negotiating the character’s survival when his sacrifice scene in the aviary was otherwise a constant throughout the scripts.  Those aviary scenes as well as the river raft segments loosely adapt the parts of the original novel that did not make it into the original film (but this film’s poor reception would motivate Jurassic World to try again on those scenes).

 

Because the only Jurassic films were this trilogy for over a decade, the debate has long persisted: which of the two sequels to Jurassic Park was better, and which approach (Ian Malcolm guiding experts who act like idiots or Alan Grant assisting idiots that act like idiots) should lead the franchise forward?  In my own opinion, I think Jurassic Park III is decidedly better than The Lost World: Jurassic Park (because the structure of TLWJP very strangely de-emphasizes some of its most engaging character arcs in the third act, and no plot hole in JPIII is more egregious than the captured T-Rex somehow wiping out an entire ship crew just so the plot could happen).  The question would be if either one actually qualifies as a good film, and now is not the time to weigh in on that question: now is the time to remember on its anniversary Jurassic Park III and what it tried to do.  You can watch Jurassic Park III on Tubi and Peacock.