My wonderful wife won tickets to a sneak preview of the movie from a local (Atlanta) radio station. Anyway, this review comes from a guy who absolutely refuses to apply critical reasoning to movies and music. I merely wish to be entertained. I don’t care if there is some trekkian continuity crisis or whatever. I don’t care that 1911’s don’t really click when you run out of ammo.
I loved this movie. I loved Jurassic Park 1 and thought JP2 was ok though Ian and his daughter got on my nerves. I was hoping the girl would bite it but no such luck.
My only real complaint about JP3 was it was too short. Slightly under 100 minutes total running time :sigh:. JP3 has less gore than the others so if you live for gore, you’ll be a bit disappointed. I’m just as happy to see the dino swallow the pesky humans whole so the lack of seeing entrails flying didn’t bother me any.
There is a fun fight scene involving a T-Rex and another great closeup later that ought to give a few kids nightmares.
The movie starts a bit slow but moves well and has lots of action. It doesn’t have the suspense of JP1 but I think you lose a lot of that in sequels anyway because the subject matter isn’t new.
I won’t argue premises, probabilities and I know that most of these guys were actually Cretaceous critters so whatever. If you are this kind of nitpick, save your money for another pocket protector. I’d hate for you to make some other moviegoer miserable.
This is my first attempt at a review so excuse my pathetic writing skills. Enjoy the movie dammit!
Okay, I just got back from watching it today. It was good but really not as suspenseful as in the first, I agree.
All the best best scenes were shown in the ads. What I liked in the first is that I didn’t know anything that would happen. (I don’t think I saw any commercials for that one…) The advertisements for JP 3 were all over the place.
Spoilers ahead…
[li]The T-Rex vs. Spinosaurus fight was good. It was a bit sad, seeing the great T-Rex killed. Wasn’t there another one, though, its mate?[/li]
[li]Also did anyone find that child Eric to be the most irriating kid in the world? Plus, his parents reconciling their marriage on Isla Nublar (is that the one they were on?) got on my nerves. I didn’t hate them the way I thought I would…that whole bit where Alan and Billy realize there is no Kirby Enterprise is so…well, touching. They aren’t rich thrill seekers and they did mislead Alan but it wasn’t for a stupid reason.[/li]
[li]The “dinosaurs are talking to each other!” thing got a bit comical at times, when you saw them listening to each other. The raptors were scary though. Very little emphasis on the plant eaters this time. In the first one there seemed to be an equal balance, but in the third you see the dinos in the beginning, the herd that they run through, and the brachiosaurs when they’re on the raft. Not as thrilling as the bad boys, I guess.[/li]
Question: anyone know what happened to the guys on the boat, when Eric and Van are parasailing? They’re “gone”- I wasn’t sure how, though. Also how did the Kirbys get the video tape?
Like I said, MANY MANY SPOILERS BELOW, so stop reading now if you want the movie to be a fresh experience.
To answer the questions:
Yep, there was at least one more T-rex, but we just didn’t see it. You’ll recall that Eric says of his vial of T-rex urine that “it makes the little ones run, but attracts the big one with the fin.” Meaning, as I took it, that there were many small Rexes that feared the large males.
Eh. Sure, it was irritating, but refreshingly, the “resolving the marriage” and other such scenes were brief.
I assumed that the spinosaurus got the guys on the boat, since it’s a large predator that seems very at home in the water. As for the videotape: are you referring to the one that was in the camera? It was just always there on the island, right where Ben (it’s Ben and not Van, according to IMDB) dropped it. Or did you mean how did they ACCESS the videotape? That, I couldn’t tell you exactly; our “mercenary” buddy rigged a battery somehow.
My capsule review: way too short, felt like barely 90 minutes, but some very good stuff there. The spinosaurus is truly a badass, and I really liked the pteranodons. I did think they went overboard with all the stripes/frills/etc. on all the dinos, but eh, they gotta use that new software somehow.
Ohh. Yeah that makes sense. Sorry I was in the bathroom that short period of time, I thought maybe they had it all along or something? Now I realize they probably got it when they found the backpack/parasailing thing. Hehe, gotta use my noggin.
I guess it could have been Spiny that got those people on the boat and probably was. You’d think they’d see a little of him but that would ruin the surprise.
Hehe. Only in Hollywood could an adult man die in his parachute (Van) yet an ten/eleven year old kid stays alive AND manages to collect T-Rex pee (hell even thinks enough to get it) for eight whole freaking weeks.
One more question, what is the deal with the two islands? I know there are two islands of dinos, but that’s it. What exactly is Site B? The second island did have a lot of the same stuff the first one did- breeding centers and all.
That’s one of my big “unanswered questions” from this movie; Isla Sorna seemed to have some features of Isla Nublar, where they intended to have the theme park, but clearly it could never have been used in that fashion. As I recall from the books and movies, Site B (Isla Sorna) was the real breeding facility, and the one on Isla Nublar was just a showpiece, something to display for tourists.
The presence of spinosaurus and the pteranodons is troubling for a few reasons: in the first movie, neither is seen, and there’s no indication that they’re being bred. In fact, mention is made in JP3 about how freakin’ strange it is that the spino is there in the first place. Yet, they leave that all unresolved at the end of the film. It also seems strange that, in the theme park of Jurassic Park, they used electric fences, but not so on Isla Sorna, where they place the large powerful spinosaur behind a fence it can smash through with one mighty push, and fences for other species are non-existent. Then again, the presence of that single fence seems like kind of an anomaly, since there aren’t any other fences or remnants to be seen anywhere. You can’t breed everything in underground pens…
I’m thinking we should get the mods to change the “no spoilers” bit in the title of this thread…hehe
may I make a suggestion please? since the thread title claims ‘w/o spoilers’ and now we have mostly spoilers posted (yes, you did the spaces etc) perhaps some one could ask a mod to make a thread title change? I personally don’t get too hung up on it (usually the ‘spoliers’ are all in the advertising anyhow, IMHO), but others do. just a suggestion.
You saw the other T-rex when the folks retrieved the cell phone from the spiny crap.
I was disappointed about the first T-rex demise also. The fight should have lasted longer and the T-rex should have put a bigger hurt on Spiny. After all T-rex weighs about 50% more and has teeth 3x longer.
See http://gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs/carnivores/ for info on large dino carnivores.
I didn’t hear this part that well but I thought the kid collected raptor pee, not T-rex pee.
I thought that was an allosaurus. At least, a kid in the movie theatre thought that. And it looked too orange to be an actual T-Rex.
I guess Hollywood wanted a new bad guy dinosaur. Makes you wonder why it too so long for the fight.
The raptor-egg thing seemed a bit odd to me. I know there are some egg stealing dinosaurs. Do they just avoid the raptors? Did the raptors just manage to watch the humans stealing them?
I’m pretty sure it was T-Rex pee, because he said it made the small dinosaurs run but attracted the Spinosaurus. (Who, as we can see from that scene, could easily take T-Rex.)
I haven’t seen the movie yet (though I plan to this weekend, regardless of spoilers / reveiws / Hollywood’s ineptitude at properly depicting these animals). However, the whole Spinosaurus vs T. rex thing is…inane. Spino may have been bigger than Rex, but bigger does not always mean badder - except in Hollywood. And heck, it was longer, but T. rex still outweighed it by a couple tons!
Spinos had conical teeth, which means they primarily fed on fish - fish, for cryin’ out loud! T. rex was a meat-eating machine! It had 6-inch, serrated, meat-slicing teeth - it ate other dinosaurs! Not fish! Not to mention the fact that Spinos were more lightly built than Rexes - they weren’t built for dino rasslin’.
The Rex should have mopped the island with the Spino.
It was so short! That’s my biggest complaint. It was only 92 minutes, and that’s counting the closing credits!
[nitpicks] [ul]
[li]Does anyone else realize how much food it would take to sustain even one fully-grown Brachiosaurus? The damn things weighed eighty tons when fully grown! And that island had a herd of them! Every accessible part of that island should’ve been stripped clean of plant life within a year![/li]
[li]Tea Leoni’s character was extremely annoying. I kept hoping a dinosaur would get her or that someone would slap her.[/li]
[li]So many unresolved plot threads. Are they just trying to set up the next film? (Where DID that spinosaurus come from?)[/li]
[li]Are they really going to let the pteranodons fly off like that and roam free? I was hoping to see a Navy jet shoot them down. Also, I doubt that any flying animal could be strong enough to carry off an average-sized 11-year-old boy. Those pteranodons were large, but their bones were hollow; the kid probably weighed more than the critter that carried him away![/li]
[li]One more time, the only black man in the movie gets killed.[/li]
[/ul][/nitpicks]
All in all, I think The Lost World was better and that #3 was not as good as the original.
Darwin’s Finch, on the official JP3 website, they admit the spinosaurus was primarily a fish-eater! What’s the point of having a technical advisor if you’re going to ignore him?
This was one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. I might go so far as to say it’s the “Battlefield Earth” of the year, even though “Dude Where’s My Car” was ever worse.
I fear another JP movie will be created, with the pteradactals (sp?) wrecking havoc. I can only wonder how far they’ll take the next one.
such as the black pilot and the hunter with dark glasses, I guess. He also notes that some of the action sequences were awfully similar to some from home video games:
You know, the old Turok, Son of Stone comic-book from the 60s would make a terrific dinosaur movie. But I think most other filmmakers are going to shy away from big dinosaur pictures, thinking the JP series has filled that niche in the market.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the first two movies, and some of these comments echo those above, but here we go:
~I also wonder where the heck the Spinosaurus came from.
~And where did the pteradons (pteradactyls?) come from? Were there flying dinos in the first or second movie?
~Who built that birdcage? (Although I did like that: “It’s a birdcage.” “For what?”)
~For that matter, where did the labs and stuff come from? Am I forgetting a lot about the second movie?
~Roger Ebert (who gave it three stars, FYI) mentioned that it was good that for once the black guy doesn’t die first. Roger is absolutely correct. The black guy died second. Well, 4th if you count the guys in the boat at the beginning. But still…
~Has there ever been a more pointless cameo than Laura Dern’s in this film?
~While on that subject–She gets a phone call consisting of Sam Neill screaming followed by static, so she automatically thinks, “Oh, it’s Dr. Grant and he’s on the dino island!” Uh…yeah, okay.
~And Billy should have died. He was the one who put them all in danger by stealing the eggs. It’s a law of movies that the guy who puts everyone in danger must sacrifice himself to save the others.
All in all, I did like the movie okay. The second one was better, though.
There was a VERY brief glimpse of a pteranodon at the VERY end of #2. The whole “birdcage” sequence was based upon a sequence in the first book.
The same company that created the “birds.”
There are actually two islands. Isla Nublar was seen only in the first film. Isla Sorna was seen in #2 and #3. Sorna is the island where most of the dinos were actually bred. (I think it’s also where the failures are disposed of.) I’m guessing the few eggs seen in #1 were the ones most likely to hatch and thus were put on public display.
lest we forget in the book jp there was a bit about dr grant and the grandkids rafting down the river in to the ptera’s cage. i guess they decided to add it into the movie this time.
i thought the movie was ok. i’m easily amused and able to suspend belief entirely. i’ll no doubt see it again in a week or two.
I knew there were two islands. However, in the movies, I thought the first island (Isla Nublar) was where they did everything (breeding, engineering, etc), and the second one…wait, I forget how the dinos got to the second island. Oh well. I assumed while watching it that a lot of seemingly unexplained stuff (such as the spinosaurus) must have come from the book, which I have not read. I was probably forgetting some of the stuff from the second movie though. I wasn’t expecting a lot of logic in this film anyway.
I liked it, other than the fact that it was short. And Laura Dern’s character was told by her kid that it was the Dinosaur Man (Grant) and when she picked up the phone, she got static. So she dialed *69 (or something) and the Grant answered the phone again and yelled ‘River! Site B!’.
One little anachronism, though. Grant’s only experience with the Raptors was on Isla Sorna, where both of the raptors he saw were a nice brown color all over. Yet, when he was sleeping on the plane and dreamed the raptor, it had the bluish stripes the raptors had on Isla Sorna. Just thought of that, actually…
