Jurassic Park 3

Jurassic Park 3

Joe Johnston

 

Quick View: The third installment in the cinematic adaptation of Michael Crichtons exciting series falls a little short in the eyes of many viewers. Despite its shortcomings, it still manages to entertain you throughout the length, and in my mind, is worthy of the title Jurassic Park


 

Full Review: Making movie based off of a successful novel series is nothing new. People have been doing that since the beginning of theater. What isn’t so common is a sequel to that movie series that is not based on a novel. In fact, many movies which follow novel based movies typically fail to deliver the same message and often fall flat. Just take a look at Jarhead 2. Yeah, there’s a Jarhead 2. And its horrendous. Jurassic Park 3 Is the third installment of the Jurassic park adaptation movies, and is the only one of the original 3 not based upon

Michael Crichton’s best selling novels of the same name. Despite the typical shortcomings that similar movies have fallen victim to, Jurassic park 3 actually does an amazing job following the emotion and tempo of the previous films. The story meshes well and you keep the same feeling of urgency as well as moral ambiguity while they traverse the ruins of InGen’s abandoned labs.

The Movie follows Alan Grant, Paleontologist and survivor of the Jurassic Park incident, as he continues his work digging up dinosaur bones. A rich family asks for him to act as a guide as they fly over Isla Sorna for their honeymoon. Grant only reluctantly agrees when they offer to fund his dig with a blank check. Bad goes to worse when the plane crashes on the island, and the “rich family” turns out to be a divorced couple searching for their lost son. Grant must help his friends and this family survive the treacherous island and the many threats that reside upon it.

Now, considering this is a movie only installment in the series, you can’t really expect the same kind of character depth you get with the other films. That said, Joe Johnston did an excellent job directing this film. The writers did well to try and emulate Crichton’s writing style and most of the cast did their jobs and performed well. The cast pretty star studded, with performances from Sam Neill, Will Macy and Téa Leoni. The only downside to this is the fact that, as close as they could get, the movie just wasn’t a Crichton production. Considering Spielberg wasn’t at the helm and Crichton wasn’t the writer, the film was never going to reach the same level as the other two, in terms of character development.

The visuals, animatronics, CGI and locations all come together perfectly, and the eery, tropical island with abandoned research labs makes a great setting for the movie. If The Lost World movie did as good a job with location as these guys did, Im sure it would have been a much bigger success. Overall, it was an entertaining movie which suffered more from what it wasn’t than appreciated for what it was. Jurassic World would later prove to audiences that some of the mistakes of Jurassic Park 3 can’t all be blamed on the lake of Crichton, sealing the movies fate.

Final Score: 7.5/10