Movie Review: Jurassic Park III (2001)
Jurassic Park III is a bad movie. It’s every bit as unimaginative as The Lost World, and it doesn’t have the steady directorial hand of Steven Spielberg. The best thing about it is that it’s short.
The movie has a lot of laughable scenes, even from the opening kills. This is the first movie in the series that goes out of its way to portray the dinosaurs not as animals, but instead as monsters, with the spinosaurus leading the way.
It has a few decent scenes, with one action scene on a boat standing out. However, most of the scenes of the dinosaurs attacking are not handled too well.
As for the dinosaurs being portrayed as animals, there’s the scene where the velociraptors set a trap. They do this in a way that’s not at all explained, as one of their victims is lying on the ground presumably dead, and then moves. Did they like pull a string or something? Because I was certainly under the impression that character was dead. He moves almost as if he’s a puppet.
The movie has the obligatory ethical questions discussed, involving do the ends justify the means. There’s a scene where Billy takes an egg, and explains to Dr. Alan Grant that it was done under the best intentions. It’s unnecessary for the movie, and then in his next big scene, Billy is selflessly sacrificing himself to save the stupid kid that bullied Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. You’d call it a character arc if anything actually happened to justify it.
The dinosaurs themselves don’t look too good. It’s not the special effects so much; it’s the design. Every dinosaur has this reddish coloring around it that just looks bad, and conflicts with what we’ve seen earlier in the series. On top of that, the action begins like the second the characters get to the island. There’s no sense of buildup, and the pacing is a nightmare.
Rating: 3/10
