Jurassic Park III picks the carcass of Crichton’s creation clean.
For a film that spends most of its runtime running through underbrush, Jurassic Park III is strangely obsessed with things that used to be enclosed. Aviaries. Laboratories. Sam Neill’s character. There’s a strange hollowness at the core of this third entry – not a void of action, certainly, but of structure. The dinosaurs are here, the screaming is on cue, and Alan Grant is back, weary reluctance and all. But for all its attempts to recapture the series’ magic, the film plays like someone’s copied the homework without understanding why the answers worked.
It’s not for lack of talent. Sam Neill returning should’ve been a coup – the kind of solid, legacy-rooted casting move that reaffirms what worked in the first place. Pair him with William H Macy and you ought to have something alchemical, clever, even slyly character driven. Instead, they’re lumbered with a script that keeps them at arm’s length from anything resembling an actual dynamic. Neill’s Grant is barely allowed to do much more than reprise his greatest hits from Jurassic Park, much less evolve, while Macy’s Paul Kirby is stranded halfway between comic relief and moral backbone, doing neither convincingly. The two rarely clash, never bond – they simply orbit each other, moving the plot forward as and when required.
Téa Leoni fares even worse, cast as Amanda Kirby and saddled with the kind of shrill parental hysteria that would feel regressive even if it were better written. The performance isn’t the problem – the part is. Amanda is a character who exists solely to be panicked, and the film ensures she’s constantly reacting, never acting, as if a woman driven by maternal fear must also abandon all rational function.
The film’s most obvious tell, though, is the Spinosaurus. A clear attempt to dethrone the franchise’s unofficial mascot, it’s treated like a new toy introduced mid-play – louder, more aggressive, designed to win arguments by brute volume. Its early-in-the-film skirmish with the T-Rex is meant to signal a new era, but it feels less like a narrative shift and more like a cynical brand adjustment. There’s no sense of earned escalation – just a perfunctory scuffle to tick off the “who would win?” box and make way for the new poster beast. Unsurprisingly the rebrand failed to stick.
Everywhere else, the script picks through the bones of Michael Crichton’s original work, looking for any scraps that hadn’t already been picked clean by its predecessors. The long-awaited aviary sequence finally escapes development limbo, but it’s slotted into the story like a leftover stunt reel. It’s an effective scene, in isolation – eerie, atmospheric, and plausibly lethal – but it belongs to a different movie, one with patience and mood. Here, it’s just another level to complete.
And so a pattern emerges. Jurassic Park III is constantly repurposing, recycling, reverse-engineering thrills from earlier instalments without ever questioning what made them work. The first film had the park. The second at least had a mission. This one has a lie about a divorced hardware store owner’s resources and a missing parasailing teenager. It’s still about hubris, of course, but this time of a very parochial nature.
The original Jurassic Park gave the dinosaurs context, spectacle, even narrative irony. It was a functioning system, a fantasy of control waiting to collapse. Without that scaffolding, the dinosaurs are just set dressing for an escape room. There’s nothing to corrupt, only things to survive. Jurassic Park III doesn’t collapse under the weight of ambition – it never bothers lifting anything that heavy.
Joe Johnston’s direction is tidy, fast, and unobtrusive, which only deepens the sense that this is a movie designed not to rock the boat rather than be its own white-water thrill ride. There are moments of visual wit, a few practical effects that punch above their weight, and the occasional spark of a better film buried beneath the obligatory box-ticking. But for the second sequel in a row, Jurassic Park III feels like a sequel in search of a story worth telling.
For all its frantic running around, Jurassic Park III is strangely static. It doesn’t push the franchise to evolve; it just sets out to survive its set pieces. But Jurassic Park wasn’t just built on survival. It was built on showmanship – curated experience, commercial fantasy, a world that sold safety while hiding teeth. The original felt like a cautionary tale. Jurassic Park III feels like a travel advisory. This film makes crystal clear that dinosaurs without a park are just monsters in the woods. The thrill isn’t just seeing them – it’s seeing them marketed, branded and paraded as product before capitalism’s creations literally bite the hand that feeds them. When that collapse comes, we care. When it’s absent, we’re left to jog through generic peril with all the plot progression of a linear videogame.
