Random Observations: July 2011

Jurassic Park III was and always will be the most disappointing film I’ve ever seen. It’s really amazing how horrible and truly awful it is.

To look back on the series, Jurassic Park is my favorite film for both sentimental and practical reasons. Yes, I grew up on it, but it also tells the fascinating story of what happens when you play God, a sort of genetics-age Frankenstein. To me this is one of the most interesting stories that can be written or filmed, for whatever reason. But on top of that, Jurassic Park had state-of-the-art Academy-award-winning visual effects, which still look wonderful today. And of course, some fantastic and terrifying action scenes that will not leave you disappointed. Basically, it’s a dinosaur-lover’s dream. And even though I’ve grown out of my dinosaur phase, I still love watching this movie. It does almost everything right. It perfectly blends CG-effects with animatronic dinosaurs to make them seem truly real. The filming locations in Hawaii truly give a prehistoric feel. And of course, the sets, score, and directing are all flawless.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park was certainly a step-down in quality. Though its predecessor did not follow the Michael Crichton novel too faithfully, The Lost World follows its novel about as well as Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation of Beowulf. It tries to outdo its predecessor a little too hard. Instead of dinosaurs initially caged, they are initially amuck. Instead of one tyrannosaurus, we now have two. Instead of two annoying kids, we now have one. The plot is a somewhat lame excuse to get people to come into contact with dinosaurs, and of all people, Ian Malcolm, the strongest voice against the park to begin with. Despite all this and an utterly pointless and implausible scene in which a t-rex runs amuck in San Diego, this is still a decent movie. I will not defend it as great, as I have already listed its flaws, but it’s still an exciting adventure movie with good special effects, action, and lots of new dinosaurs. The visual effects are not quite as good as the first, it seems, but they still are very good. The acting is also quite mediocre, but who really watches a movie with killer dinosaurs for the acting?

Jurassic Park III is one giant leap off a cliff from The Lost World. Everything it does is wrong. Its plot cannot be described as any less than pathetic, the visual effects are that much worse, the acting is laughable, and the pacing is just sad. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning.

1. The Plot

I take back everything I said about the plot to The Lost World, it’s so much more believable than this piece of shit. Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill, is asked to give a tour of Isla Sorna, essentially telling the Kirby family about the dinosaurs he sees. He’s against it at first but is convinced because he needs money for his paleological team. And thus we get three new characters introduced, each one more forgettable than the rest. The Kirby family, made up of William H. Macy and Tea Leoni, and Billy Brennan, one of Grant’s partners.

Naturally, they end up landing on the island, to Grant’s protests. The way it’s done literally has me laughing. A cartoony point-of-view shot from Grant while he gets hit from behind, causing an even more cartoony expression to appear on William H. Macy’s face. Oh but that’s not even the worst part of the airplane scene. Earlier, Grant wakes up and sees that nobody is flying the plane ala Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Then he turns and sees what the audience can assume is a velociraptor (though it looks nothing like the original raptors in its colors and FEATHERS), and the raptor speaks to him, calling his name. Of course, Grant wakes up, and it was all a dream. A DREAM SEQUENCE WITH A TALKING VELOCIRAPTOR. Even Jaws the Revenge didn’t make the shark talk in its dream sequence! I can’t believe how stupid that is.

2. Stupid Decisions

Of course, the Kirbys had intended all along to land on Isla Sorna. Their son, Eric, played by the actor kid from The Sixth Sense, had apparently gone missing while parasailing right by the most dangerous islands on earth. This is shown in a mess of a scene that I’ll explain later. Anyways, the Kirbys know his son is alive because he is a fighter, and a survivor, and couldn’t possibly die. I’m pretty sure Robert Muldoon was a fighter, too, he was a fucking big game hunter, and the raptors had no problem with him.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Kirbys’ sense of morals here. I understand that they want their son back and that they wouldn’t be able to convince Grant to join them if they told him the truth, but why lie to him, thus endangering more and more lives? By going to Isla Sorna, the Kirbys endanger not only their own lives, but also the lives of Alan Grant, the two pilots/mercenaries, Cooper, and even Billy. Not to mention all the dinosaurs they planned on killing with the ridiculous amount of weapons they were able to bring. And on top of all this, they picked the wrong fucking person. Alan Grant has never been to Isla Sorna, though Ian Malcolm, Sarah Harding, Roland Tembo, Nick Van Owen, and even Kelly Malcolm have. This is explained in one of those “oh shit” moments.

3. Discrepancies

One of the biggest problems with this movie is that it goes against just about everything in the first two films. Okay, not everything, but there are plenty of things that are just stupid. For instance, the velociraptors. Their color was a little different in The Lost World it appeared, though you could never be quite sure because they were never shown in daylight. But in this film, the raptors are very different. First off, their coloring is completely different. They’re gray and blue with kinda black spots and stuff, I don’t know. And their eyes are red as opposed to yellow. Their eye color literally changes! And of course, the feathers. It is an accepted scientific fact that some dinosaurs had feathers, and probably even some in the raptor family. But if you’re making the third movie in the series, too late now. That’s like if Peter Jackson decided to give Samwise Gamgee a mustache in The Return of the King but not in the first two films after a more careful reading revealed to him that Sam was to have a mustache. We’re used to seeing the raptors without feathers, with yellow eyes, and without all those funky psychedelic colors. Just stick to the original raptors, dammit.

This is a minor point but a slightly annoying one to such a fan of the original film as me. You may notice something different about Isla Sorna. No? Oh yeah, when they’re on the island, it looks nothing like it did in The Lost World. In The Lost World we saw a lush and beautifully tropical island that could be described as paradise if it weren’t for all the blood spilt on it. In the third film, Isla Sorna is a dark and depressing place, and not just because the movie sucks. The rainforest is noticeably more dense and darker looking, looking less tropical and more northern California with a great deal of overgrowth.

4. The raptors and how everything to do with them in this movie is wrong

The velociraptors in Jurassic Park ironically cause the characters the most trouble. Despite the size and power of the tyrannosaurus, it’s ultimately the raptors’ speed and intelligence that proves to be most menacing. While a dinosaur as famous as a tyrannosaurus rex needs no introduction, not everybody in the audience knows what a velociraptor is. Thus, the scene in which we meet Dr. Grant and Sattler also is where we first hear about the danger of velociraptors. The film defied scientific fact by having a Mongolian dinosaur being dug up in America, but it did so successfully, getting us the audience excited to see our first glimpses of the pack-hunting raptors. Likewise, when the group goes to their cage to see them feed, the audience is left in suspense, unable to see the dinosaurs, left only to the terrifying noises, terrified faces on the characters, and the horribly wrecked crane thing that carried the cow or whatever. It’s a tactic that Steven Spielberg perfected in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to build suspense and terror by not showing us what we want to see, or what we are afraid to see. But the velociraptors in the time we do see them and based on what Grant and Muldoon have to say about them, are extremely intelligent and ferocious hunters.

By the time The Lost World comes around, we’ve already seen the raptors. We know their capabilities and we need no introduction to them. Still, Spielberg keeps them out of the film, rarely even mentioning them until towards the end. To this point the t-rexes have been the primary villains and when we finally run into the raptors we’re like “Oh my God, I forgot.” But once again the film does a good job of building suspense by withholding what we want to see and by having Malcolm say, “Run. As fast as you can.” And when the raptors come, they don’t disappoint. Plenty of jumping, lots of running, plenty of killing, some digging, lots of clawing, there’s gotta be some biting in there. Lots of death. And that’s what we want to see in killer dinosaur movies.

And then come the raptors in Jurassic Park III. The previous two films have worked remarkably well by keeping the raptors out of the film until the second half. Here, we see ‘em almost right away. And yes, they’re stupid looking, but I can’t spend all day talking about that. Well at least I don’t want to. Again we have to build up to the raptors by advertising them as incredibly intelligent and dangerous hunters. As if the point hasn’t been made already. Dr. Grant had some kind of lecture or something at the beginning of the film about how raptors were more intelligent than dolphins and primates and that had it not been for the extinction, raptors would have become the dominant species. No, that’s seriously what he’s saying. Even though he himself witnessed one tyrannosaurus easily kill two velociraptors. And this is also wrong on two other levels. First off, you can’t say “if it wasn’t for the extinction” about any animal when saying it could have become the dominant species. The fact that there was an extinction shows that they weren’t meant to be the dominant species. This notion that Grant expresses completely disregards what Dr. Malcolm had to say about nature selecting the dinosaurs for extinction. What, did nature select velociraptors to be extinct because it was afraid of how powerful they would become? And it’s shown in the first film that the raptors are intelligent. As Muldoon said, they have problem-solving intelligence, and they know how to open doors. But this by no means shows that they could be the dominant species. Though they may be able to open doors and escape from cages, I highly doubt any velociraptor would be able to build an ark when a great flood was on its way. Therefore, they would easily become extinct.

Also what’s wrong with this expository speech is that Dr. Grant believes dinosaurs evolved into birds. This is a common scientific theory that dinosaurs were never really extinct, but rather evolved over years and years. This is what Grant believes and even wrote a book about. The term “evolve” implies changing, advancing. If velociraptors evolved into birds and humans still became the dominant species, what does that show you? While some birds are some of the smartest animals on the planet, they are nowhere near as smart as humans. They don’t know how to open doors, or drive cars, though they could probably write a better script than this. So if Dr. Grant believes that velociraptors evolved into birds, what is his explanation to why birds don’t rule the earth?

More on the velociraptors’ exaggerated intelligence. When we first see a velociraptor in this film it is hiding behind a glass thing, looking as if it were contained. While animals hiding is a common hunting tactic—whether it be alligators lying still like logs or praying mantises disguising themselves as grass—I see no reason why a velociraptor should try to blend in to a surrounding that it certainly does not blend in to. Its hiding fools Tia Leoni but it just has always bothered me for some reason. I just can’t picture a dinosaur that’s keen on killing its prey immediately just hiding out in some factory. What was it doing before the humans got there? Was it just hanging around the building until it heard the humans and decided to get into the perfect hiding spot? Or had it been there for hours, maybe even days? And why wasn’t it out looking for all the prey that totally wouldn’t outsmart it, like all the herbivores on the island?

One of the most troubling scene in the film comes after a rather unexciting confrontation in the factory thing with the raptors. They run into the jungle and the raptors follow them. A raptor kills Michael Jeter while the others hide in the trees. Then the dumbest thing happens. Jeter’s arm moves while he’s on the ground, clearly dead. Tea Leoni then tries to go get him but is nearly killed by a raptor. I have so many problems with this scene. First off, how did they do that? Not how as in the sense that they’re animals and can’t do that sort of thing, but HOW DID THEY DO THAT? You never see. Like I could understand if it was yanked on like a string, but his arm moves both to the side and up. What, is he like a puppet? Are there two raptors pulling strings on different elevations? Did one raptor burrow its way underground so as to be able to push the arm up? Secondly, if an animal is smart enough to set up its recent prey as not only a trap but a fully functioning marionette, how could it not be smart enough to climb trees? Climbing trees doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence, you say. Wrong. Velociraptors have already shown that they have claws powerful enough to impale a man’s back with little to no effort. I have no doubt that these claws would also be able to go in and out of wood, enabling the raptors to climb. So if this is a possibility, why then would they go to such elaborate efforts to set up a trap? These things are like the James Bond villains of the dinosaur kingdom!

5. The Spinosaurus and everything stupid surrounding it

I understand what the filmmakers were thinking here. They thought that we’ve already seen plenty of t-rexes and raptors in the past two movies so it’s about time we see something different. It’s why the t-rex attacked San Diego in The Lost World, to spice things up. So they write in a spinosaurus but it ends up taking over almost the entire movie.

I hate the spinosaurus in this movie. First of all, my biggest complaint about the spinosaurus is how truly dominant it is. It contradicts the previous film The Lost World. If they were on an island that had no fences and never even saw a spinosaurus chances are there wasn’t one. The film tries to cover up this obvious flaw by having Alan Grant point out that it wasn’t “on InGen’s list” as if that’s supposed to explain everything. Doesn’t matter if it’s on the list or not, idiots, if it was bred, IT WOULD BE THERE.

My biggest complaint though about the spinosaurus is how it takes out the t-rex so early in the film. The idea of a spinosaurus-tyrannosaurus showdown is a pretty cool idea, but the problem is that it should have come at the end of the film. Instead it comes almost right after they arrive on the island. The spinosaurus kills the t-rex in a pretty unexciting scene. And after that there is no t-rex. Why? The t-rex is the most recognizable dinosaur in the world and it was the star of the first two films!

6. The completely idiot pterodactyl scene

Okay, here we go. It’s revealed in The Lost World that there are pterodactyls on Isla Sorna. That’s cool, just as long as they don’t have to become villains…Then Jurassic Park III happened and there’s a scene where the group has to walk high up in a birdcage while pterodactyls attack the kid. The pterodactyl is somehow able to pick him up, and tries to feed him to its children for some reason. Even though they ate fish and there’s water directly below them. Nothing in this movie makes sense.

The dumbest part of this scene, though, comes with Billy’s actions. He goes to save the kid by taking the parasail thing that he picked up from when the kid crashed on the island. He goes sailing across the place and saves the kid from death by pecking. It’s a really good thing there were no rips in that, considering that they crashed into trees and there are hundreds of dinosaurs with razor sharp teeth around them, including whatever the hell killed the guy who went parasailing with the kid. It’s a good thing they were accurate on their biting and scratching. What bothers me most about this scene is the whole concept of the “lucky pack”. It was used in The Lost World already. I understand if the series wants to have a motif or whatever, but do we really have to repeat THAT?! Though you assume Billy dies, he is found alive later on. How? I don’t know.

7. What’s not in the film

Well this movie totally sucks, but at least it’s short. It feels so long though because the pacing sucks so much. It’s almost 100% dinosaur attacks and when there actually is a dialogue scene, it’s written so poorly that you keep praying for it to end.

So it’s 94 minutes, about ½ hour shorter than the other two movies. Let’s talk about what was not included that should have been.

There is no dilophosaurus in this movie. The dilophosaurus was really cool in the first movie. It looked awesome, had awesome sound effects, and killed Newman in a really neat way. For whatever reason, this was kept out of the second movie. I kept waiting for it to appear in the third movie but it never did. My suspicion is that it was unrealistic because dilophosauruses didn’t actually spit venom, so they didn’t want to have that. But it’s not like raptors could use people as puppets, come on! We don’t mind some fantasy as long as it’s done in a neat way. And not only that, but they could have made the dilophosaurus even cooler because they were actually like twice the size as they were in the first movie. Golden opportunity missed right there.

Part of what makes Jurassic Park such a great film is the sense of wonder and awe it fills the viewer. The first scene where you actually see a dinosaur is done so well that you basically forget that this theme park is doomed for disaster. You see the brachiasaurus and all the other herbivores and it’s the first time a realistic-looking dinosaur has been on film, so you believe it. No living person has ever seen a dinosaur; people and dinosaurs have been separated by 65 million years. Dinosaurs are things of folklore and legends, they’ve become fantasy because no one has ever seen one. But here, on the screen, they have become reality. It’s fascinating and I credit all the actors for giving the reactions that I would expect people to give who were seeing dinosaurs for the first time. The Lost World didn’t quite capture the wonder and awe of the original, but that’s mostly because we as an audience have seen it before. It does do it a little bit with the stegosauruses in the beginning, and even a little when InGen is capturing all the herbivores; it allows the size of the animals to wow the audience, and again, the special effects are great. Here there’s nothing. You see a few herbivores from out of the plane and it’s underwhelming. The next time you see a dinosaur after that, it’s a spinosaurus eating Cooper. Then later they try and fail miserably to capture some wonder after the pterodactyl scene by having the brachiosaurus (whose appearance has also changed completely) look at them while they’re on the river. Sorry. Not working.

8. The most disappointing climax in cinematic history

Okay, so now we’ve come to the climax. What’s it going to be this time? In the first it was the group of people trapped in the visitors center by two velociraptors. In the second, it’s a t-rex terrorizing the streets of San Diego. Stupid, but exciting. Here, it’s raptors wanting their eggs back. Buckle your seatbelts, folks.

So Billy takes some eggs or something because he wants to take them back and study them. There’s a speech by Grant about how it’s stupid and stuff and I actually find that part to be like the best non-action part of the movie because it’s the only thing it has in common with the first movie (with the moral). They almost throw the eggs away but then they realize the raptors know they have the eggs, so they need to hold onto them. So the raptors have the group surrounded in what could be an exciting, suspenseful scene. Instead, they give the eggs back and then Grant finds this thing that he made that makes raptor noises so he breathes into it to imitate the sound that the raptors make to make them think another raptor is calling to them, except that the sound is coming from right there. Yeah, world’s most intelligent animal: can’t even realize when a noise is being made five feet in front of it. So William H. Macy tells Grant to call for help and he somehow knows exactly how the raptors breathe into that thingy in order to call for help. Then the raptors run away and it turns out there’s a bunch of helicopters, so it’s unclear if they’re scared away or fall for the dumb trick.

9. In conclusion

In conclusion, there will never be a more disappointing movie I will see. It ruined everything. It’s stupid, poorly written, poorly paced, poorly directed, and poorly acted. This is a classic case of an unnecessary sequel, something that’s thrown out without much effort just to cash in on the previous films’ successes. And as a result, it sucks.

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