Media Review #1: Jurassic Park 3: Insert Subtitle

March 16th, 2013

Congratulations. You're reading the first Media Review for C-rex.  Put in layman's terms, these are basically articles for me to whine and complain about negative contributions media has and will put forth while blowing the victory bugle for all the good things I like so long as I can somehow relate it to Dinosaurs/Froggies/Biological science. Hopefully I can make one of these every weekend. Depends on my motivation. Otherwise Connor puts me back into that hole in the wall.

It actually has two bathrooms and a home entertainment center

Jurassic Park 3: Insert Subtitle

So lets start things off with a negative one and by negative I mean "lets just go ahead and cut out the middle man as we slam our heads against a wall for 92 minutes" one.

Jurassic Park 3 starts off 4 years after the San Diego incident from The Lost World: Jurassic Park. We start with Eric Kirby and his mother's boyfriend on a para-sailing tour of Isla Sorna, because nothing is more testament to good parenting then letting your 12 year old son go to a deserted dinosaur island in the open ocean with nobody but mommy's boyfriend and a pair of shady Costa Ricans to para-sail over an Island marred with stories of death. The scene gets all whimsical for all of about 20 seconds before the boat zooms into some scary fog and suddenly everyone on the boat just dies. No dinosaurs, mosasaurs, wizards or anything. Just gone. Nothing bot a spit of blood and a torn sail. Mommy's boyfriend detaches them from the boat as it thuds against some rocks as they glide into Isla Sorna.

Casey Anthony was a close 2nd.

We cut to 8 weeks later I suppose as Alan Grant is teaching Ellie's oldest son the proper way of how to plan out action scenes for dinosaur movies. Ellie comes out and makes Jack Horner Reference #1 in the movie about how her editor wants to get rid of the Jack Horner quote and how he thinks he's a paleontologist. Later, after being snubbed by Ellie's Macaw, over coffee Alan tells Ellie all about the discoveries made with Raptors, telling her that raptors were smarter then they had thought back on Isla Nublar (the first island). That they had sophisticated language for hunting in packs. After strolling down memory lane we see Ellie give Grant a nice farewell into the next scene where Dr. Grant is performing Jack Horner reference #2.

"I'm not saying your name until you admit Triceratops and Torosaurus are separate taxa."

While at a lecture hall where he's basically saying that "we're only able to make an educated guess right now but I'm positive that Raptors could talk to each other and coordinate their pack hunting; meaning if they weren't wiped out they would have become the dominant species on earth". (Not) Surprisingly people start walking out on his lecture, which is a painfully obvious reference to Jack Horner and how people treat the theories he tends to take part in (Horned Pachycephalosaurs, Scavenger Rex, Toroceratops, etc). So after the moderator has to prod the audience awake, everyone wants to ask him about Jurassic Park and the San Diego incident. He turns them down and only one person has a question he wants to answer; dismissing the animals on the island as theme park monsters, which I coincidentally agree with though I blame people other then Hammond. Finally when a 20 something asks him if he wouldn't go to Isla Sorna if he had the chance (Make note of this statement he makes for later) He says "No force on heaven or earth will get me on that island".

We cut away to see the hardcore bad ass mercenaries Nash, Cooper, and Udesky, who kill a broken down Cessna. Don't get used to them actively blowing things up. This is the only time you actually see them do anything whatsoever that isn't them dieing or them running away. Afterwards we cut away to Montana to meet the adult Timmy Billy Brennan, hitting on a no name. Grant is taken by Timmy Billy to a tent where he shows him a Veloci-whistle that has a super important use in the end (I'm a sarcastic jerk).

Mr Kirby approaches them in the tent and offers to take them out for a drink and to listen to his business offer with his wife who are TOTALLY rich. This is where the quote from earlier comes into play. Remember when Grant says "No force on heaven or earth will get me on that island"? Well I guess that is meant to be literal. No force can get him on the island but a blank check will get him 200 feet over it. So Alan gets that money signs look in his eyes like he did in the first one, because that adventure worked out so well the last time a rich man approached him with the promise of funding a dig for his joining him on an island full of dinosaurs.

Pictured above: Wall Street Pox

They fly to Sorna, Timmy Billy and Alan have some witty banter before Alan decides to take a nap, in which he has a nap-mare of a Velociraptor (That which's design he's never seen before) talks to him. Saying "Alan" which would scare any man. Actually however it's Timmy Billy. Billy is waking him up for one of the few other whimsy moments in the movie. They fly over some dinosaurs and Alan for a fleeting minute thinks this scene is supposed to be fun. When in actually they try to land on a runway to which Alan protests. Before getting knocked out by Cooper. He wakes up on the floor of the plane to the sound of World's Best mother screaming into the forest like a lunatic. The movie then decides not to waste any time and has the Spinosaurus not only kill Cooper but disable the plane with it's being there and causing it to crash. Resulting in it destroyer it.

From here on the story degrades into just action scene after action scene. I'll go ahead and condense the plot while still not missing anything important: 

They run away from the wreckage after it kills Nash and into the path of a T-rex who chases them back the way they cam towards the Spino who kills the rex before they dig through the wreckage and enjoy human filler until they reach the cloning station where they see how the dinosaurs were made and are attacked by Raptors in an ok scene. They run away outside and the Raptors chase them through a herd and forest, resulting in Udesky being killed by the Raptors. Alan is cornered all scary like before Eric pulls some immense deus ex machina and saves Alan. The separated characters have a sleep over in their hiding spots before setting out the next morning to the coast. More and more conversation until Eric hears the satellite phone ringing and starts screaming, to which the parents hear. Turns out the phone is somehow audible to people outside the spinosaurus. The spino finds them and chases them before smashing through the enormous metal fence, only to be stopped by a thatched roof. They climb down the stairs after Alan berates Timmy Billy for doing something bad. They walk along a cat walk and realize it's a Pteranodon cage as they're attacked. Resulting in Timmy Billy Dieing. They hop on a boat, see some herbivores being all pretty for 15 seconds before rummaging through mounds of Spinosaurus shit, finding the phone just in time for a random Ceratosaurus to make a cameo appearance and then disappear; never to be mentioned or seen again. The spinosaurus attacks the boat as Alan calls Ellie who gets her husband to send the military. They scare off the Spinosaurus with fire. They're near the beach when the Raptors surround them, recover their eggs and just leave. Then the military arrives and saves them with Timmy Billy actually alive the whole time sitting in a helicopter somehow. The end.

That's the entire plot. I'm positive you could fit it on a stack of napkins from McDonalds.

The script wasn't finished when filming started. This is likely accurate..

Don't get me wrong, I wish JPIII was a good movie as it had makings to be one given the premise. The problem was that this movie wasn't executed properly and it underperformed; it was a disappointment. I won't go as far as to call TLW a master piece; but it was loads better then Jurassic Park III. JP3 just didn't deliver in a lot of categories. The Jungle set they filmed in always had just a dark overcast going the entire time, the jungle was incredibly fake looking (Considering it was in fact fake), The film has this haze over the frame as if they smeared a little Vaseline on the lens before filming, Theres a few minutes of set up at the beginning which is to just get them to the island so that dinosaurs can destroy all the set pieces. There was no poetic justice, nor any attempt at having actually interesting plot development. Just chase scene after chase scene after chase scene. 

I can only hope Jurassic Park 4 can do a better job. I'm cautiously optimistic about it considering they have the writer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Stan Winston Studios is likely to make the puppetry assets again and a new Director, Colin Trevorrow, has been hired to helm the new movie. (Usually when Spielberg picks a greenhorn he has good reason). We can only hope and see that the movie isn't as much of a disappointment.

(This was abnormally long for what will be normal. I just had a lot to say about JP3.)