JPIII... yet another spoiler post.
Spoiler below, rates 7 on the Holtz scale
Basically, I'd say that JPIII was to JP what Jaws 3-D was to Jaws: in other words, one of the worse movies ever made in the history of cinema (IMHO). I already knew what to expect within the first few minutes: kid and adult are paragliding in the vicinity of Isla Sorna.... hmm, what could *possibly* happen in the rest of the film?
While several people on dino-l have made the point that JPIII was "just a movie", since when does it follow that movies must be cliched, appallingly scripted and as bland and tedious as JPIII? Same old implausible plot devices (e.g., exactly what did happen to the two people on the boat at the start of the film?), same old Fox Mulder-style attempts to explain scientific concepts using 'mock jargon' (e.g., Grant's scenario that presence of resonating chamber = hyperintelligence), same old twee storyline about divorced parents and the all-American family, same old utterly absurd depictions of animal behaviour. All in all, typical modern Hollywood nonsense.
I also was unimpressed with the CGI: not only were some of the animals innaccurate (e.g. spinosaur with lacrimal horns and overly long forelimbs), some of the animation was genuinely very very bad. If you looked carefully at the three brachiosaurs which approached the boat (also the ankylosaurs at the riverside), the animation and rendering were awful - more like WWD than JP! Many of the animals looked way too glossy for their environments (esp. the dromaeosaurs) and the tyrannosaur-spinosaur fight scene closeups did not look half as good as the closeups of the tyrannosaur in the finale sequence of JP.
The spinosaur-tyrannosaur fight owed more to WWF than anything else I think: at the end the tyrannosaur was literally *thrown* across the forest. And why do the theropods have to keep killing things by audibly twist-snapping their necks? Hardly any animals kill in this way - we owe it more to Arnold Schwarzenagger than the behaviour of predatory animals. Incidentally however, when big predators kill competitors (e.g., lions vs spotted hyaenas) they do not _necessarily_ eat them. Adam's statement about male lions not doing much hunting is also proving less true than previously thought: several recent studies have shown that male lions routinely hunt, and bring down bigger prey (e.g. _Syncerus_) than most all-female groups.
As with JP, continuity in this film was bad. I won't point out the examples lest readers think I'm even sadder than I am. And why is it that the so-called palaeontologists are so remarkably stupid? In marked contrast to little Timmy in JP - able to recognise individual ornithomimid genera at a thousand paces - Billie (aka Dave/Paul) was unable to distinguish different spinosauroid taxa and even Grant got the name wrong (he calls it _Spinosaurus aegypticus_, not _aegyptiacus_). And yes I am being tongue-in-cheek.
The naked, toothed pteranodonts appear to have been based on the toy _Pteranodon_ produced back in 1993 for the original movie (though they also had a marabou stork look to them). Like the things in JPIII, this toy has human hands for feet and is designed to carry aloft hapless human prey, a la 1 Million Years B.C. Speaking of toys, the stripey _Velociraptor_ that Grant was holding near the start of the film was a limited edition Safari boxed piece... strictly speaking kids shouldn't be playing with such items...:). The brachiosaur the little boy was playing with was the second generation Carnegie collection _Brachiosaurus_ (also Safari Inc.).
Finally, I wonder if the very end (escaping pterosaurs) was based on the ending of JP? The latter shows a bunch of Brown pelicans flying across the sea as Grant and co depart in a helicopter. Believe it or not, very few viewers [at least here in the UK] actually knew that these were pelicans and thought that they were pterosaurs (!), thus the ending made no sense to many (I take it that the ending was a reference to dinosaurs 'flying on into the future', despite the failure of things at Jurassic Park). Maybe JPIII will have reinforced this misconception: oh look, more pterosaurs are escaping - that must be what JPIV is going to be about.
The next event in my cinema calendar is Planet of the Apes. Let's all pray that Tim Burton doesn't let us down and that, even in the 21st century, good movies can still be made.
DARREN NAISH
PALAEOBIOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences
UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
Burnaby Building
Burnaby Road email: darren.naish@port.ac.uk
Portsmouth UK tel (mobile): 0776 1372651
P01 3QL tel (office): 023 92842244
www.palaeobiology.co.uk