Review of Jurassic Park III (2001) by Katsev — 23 Jan 2013

What a terrible trilogy maker for Jurassic Park. It's always an overcast sky in this synthetic sound stage forest. There is about 20 seconds of awe and wonder like the first two movies then it's destroyed by the main characters wading through dinosaur droppings. The plot is basically "Go to Island to find kid. Crash. Run from Dinosaurs. Kill the mercenaries. Lots of Annoying Parents. Kill the poster boy quickly and with no honest effort at pretending it's for anything other then "KOOL, DINOSAURS!" ". All of which I assume was written onto a star buck's napkin by Joe Johnston and handed to Spielberg during a besotted event. The movie has no interesting cinematography either, no high quality you'd expect from a Spielberg movie such as the first two. It's always an overcast lighting and it's almost entirely in a sterile looking sound stage forest. There's no change of set pieces. It's all just running in the forest while "dinosaurs rip each others faces off! RawwRR" as Alan Grant put it. From a science stand point it's just dreadful. Even compared to the other films. Spinosaurus was a spindly fish eater, not a super predator nightmare monster that ate everything in sight like pretend paleo adviser Jack Horner would have you believe. Tyrannosaurus, the main antagonist and poster boy for the series the last 2 films, is killed off 5 minutes after showing up in a pitiful death sequence that you would expect only to befall a Star Trek Red shirt. The Raptors are the only semi-decent thing and even they under perform. The Pteranodons are just...weird. Especially with teeth. Only Jack Horner could give a Pteranodon teeth. Then there are the Ankylosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Corythosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Stegosaurus and Ceratosaurus that just show up in an attempt to try and give dinosaur fans something to look at and go "o0oooh pretty".

It's just terrible. I feel robbed of 2 hours of my life some how.