I haven’t seen it. Probably won’t, I detest most movie sequels.
My 12 year old boy went to it today, with great anticipation. Jurassic Park 1 is one of his favorite movies. He liked The Lost World.
He walked out of JP3 after 10 minutes, and sat in the lobby for the next hour to wait for my wife’s movie to end. Told us that he thought JP3 was too gory and violent.
Damn, sometimes they DO listen to what you try to teach them, after all.
how can you screw a movie up where mercenaries go to an island full of dinosaurs to rescue a kid and his dad? I go with my kids and sit and eat a big bag of popcorn and everybody has a good time. its impossible to screw that up. or I thought it was until I saw the movie. that was the worst writing I have ever seen. I just knew that the Dr would pull out the jar of TREX pee and scare the raptors off at the end. but it was a lot worse than that. I still dont even understand what happened to get them to run off merrily.
by the way , how did she know where to send the marines? what did he tell her before they went underwater in that cage? Why didn’t she go with the rescue team to use her expertise to help find them?.. too many questions. I know its a dinosaur movie and your not suppose to think but Jeeeeeze.
Please don’t spend any money on this so they won’t make anymore. Isn’t that how the Jaws series died?
This was the absolute worst movie i’ve seen in a while…
It had so many plot holes and impossible things (deploying a PARAGLIDER not parachute with no deployment system).
Too unbelievable for me…
“aah! what a bag of shite.” –irish_bill
I don’t know why, but in spite of everyone else’s similar opinons, that statement alone just convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I don’t ever need to see this film.
Thanks, bill. You should be writing taglines for Hollywood.
i agree with ned, a bit of time… say 15 - 20 minutes on how the kid managed to survive would have helped a lot. the perfect time would have been when erik saved dr. grant and they were in the water truck.
i know i would have been very curious to hear how he managed to survive 8 weeks with the nice little dinos. what else are you gonna do stuck in a water truck for the night?
to totally kill any hope of respect i will point out that there is a series of books based on the movie for kids. there is one called “survivor” by scott ciencin. that tells the tale from erik’s pov up to when he meets up with dr. grant.
it answers the question audreyk had. apparently ben died of his injuries from the fall through the tree. he dies moments after releasing erik from the harness and instructing him to head for the coast.
Just when I think I’ve found all the plot holes, you point out another one. That’s a very good point. Why wouldn’t she have sent the Marines to the first island? I don’t think he really got to tell her anything. Fom her end, the conversation would have sounded like, “Ellie, it’s me…I (gurgle, gurgle)…[sound of static].”
Heck, I liked it. Plenty of suspenseful moments, lots of dinos-chomping-on-humans, improved CGI, and most importantly, NO SCREAMING KIDS. The kid in this movie was refreshingly level-headed.
The screaming young 'uns ruined the first JP for me. (Man, what is it with that Spielberg guy? What’s the last movie he made without a cheap “kids-in-peril” scene? Has he ever made one? )
Maybe she didn’t. With that many ships, they could have landed a battle group that size on each island.
For what it’s worth, here’s my review. Basically lukewarm…
Good review, Cervaise. However, this bit made me cringe a bit:
Pterandon was a pterosaur, not a dinosaur. Pterosaurs are related to dinosaurs, but they are not dinosaurs. The only critters that can be said to truly be “flying dinosaurs” are birds.
Make that Pteranodon.
Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But given that the filmmakers didn’t see fit to observe the spino’s dietary preferences correctly, I didn’t think I needed to be that nitpicky. 
FYI, I thought about it overnight – and I just changed the text to “a trio of pteranodons, big flying beasties…”
No sense letting it stay wrong if making it right is painless.
I haven’t seen it, and I plan to take Ike’s advice and NOT SEE IT, but I’m thinking if it had a horn on its nose, it was not a spinosaurus, which had a sail on its back, and looked sort of like an upright dimetrodon. There was a relative of the Allosaurus called Ceratosaurus, that did have a blade-shaped horn of sorts on its nose. Did it look like either of those pictures? Or was it more of a spike horn, like a Triceratops?
Joe_Cool: In my opinion, it was definately neither Spinosaurus nor Ceratosaurus. Spinosaurus is fairly obvious, what with the finback and all. As for Ceratosaurus, the nasal “horn” is more of a small crest, since it’s flattened from side-to-side. It also possesses two horn-like projections over each eye (Allosaurus had these as well), which I’m pretty sure the critter in the movie did not have. The mystery beast’s nasal horn was very Triceratops-like.
Cervaise: “Beasties” is better - can’t argue with that one 
Well, I saw it last night. Bleah. Anyway…
I’m saying the dinosaur by the poop pile was an Allosaur. why? Because it was some mauve color with blue stripes. When I was a kid, I had a big book on dinosaurs with lots of color pictures and it showed an allosaur biting another dinosaur and that allosaur was mauve with blue stripes. There you go. Of course, the same book called the dinosaur being bitten a brontosaur and showed them fighting in a swamp, but c’mon… where else would you get the idea for such an odd color scheme? 
The raptors are getting ironicly more retarded every time they make them more intelligent. What the hell was with that “trap”? Poking their head of a near by bush and biting someone wasn’t good enough for them anymore? It worked in the last movies. And how did they get the dead guy to move? Poked him with a stick? Fishing line? I must have missed something. It was one thing when they were opening a simple door handle with their toe (note to self: when containing raptors, use door knobs, not handles) but now they’re just a mockery of themselves.
The pter-whatsits didn’t impress me much. They just weren’t all that scary. I guess because I remember reading in the big book mentioned above that they probably weighed all of 90 pounds or something and had hollow bones. I kept thinking “just hit in the the wing with a rock!”
I found it sort of odd that Mr. Rex and Mr. Spino could have lived that close to each other for so long and not have run into each other until now. Or if they had, that they’d choose now to beat each other up. What on earth were they fighting over? My guess is that if you throw a lion and a tiger in a field, they might stare one another down and make a big show of it, but their first instinct is to move along, not to beat the hell out of one another. I guess they just needed to show what a badass the spinosaur was because… I don’t know… maybe they thought the tyrannosaur wasn’t scary anymore. Actually, the they should have stayed with the classic. The spinosaur looked kind of silly with it’s long face and that spine. Maybe that’s what they looked like, but if they did, they looked silly back then, too.
I guess what it comes down to is that we’ve seen it all before. Jurassic Park could get away with silly plot points because when the dinosaurs came on, you were still awed. We’ve seen the CGI dinosaurs now and just notice how horrible the plot is.
I wanted to watch the chick flick. It’s the third movie in a science-fiction series that wasn’t meant to be a trilogy, and it was directed by someone new. That, right there, tells me all I need to know.
But, still, I watched it, because my date wanted to see it, and I didn’t feel like forcing him to see “Legally Blonde.”
I think this movie could have been really good if it had made a decision. It needed to decide to be (a) a creature feature where the monsters chase people around and occasionally eat them, or (b) the sort of film that uses fictional situations to explore philosophical questions regarding science and the human condition. Instead, it took the worst parts of both movies and smashed them together until everything got squishy and stopped making sense, kind of like that metaphor.
There were too many loose ends. How did Billy get rescued before them? He was injured, so couldn’t have swam THAT fast. Explain the differences between the two different types of raptors at some point, please. Yes, I imagine the colorful ones were male or something, but still. A little acknowledgment by the characters that “hey, those dinosaurs look different” would be nice. Why is it that during the Lost World no one noticed this dinosaur that was larger than the T-rex and, for some strange reason, was territorial towards this entirely different species and would come running at the scent of tyrannosaurus urine? Just what freaky things WERE they doing on that island? We see the lab, we see dinosaurs in glass tubes, and the question is never answered.
I’m pretty sure there was a human skull in the pteronadon nest, too. How did it get there? In the last movie, nobody found the bird cage, and I can’t imagine the workers on the island were stupid enough to go in there. Then, there was the fact that this extremely fragile flying reptile was capable of picking up a large twelve-year-old boy and flying with him. The boy was larger than the pteronadon’s body, and about as long as a third of the wingspan, at least. This would be analogous to a small brown bat flying around holding a mouse, or a condor picking up a dog and taking off.
It was entertaining, but not worth the 90 minutes of my life.
Heh… this movie annoyed me enough that I’m going to bitch about one other thing. The boyfriend guy who had the kid parasailing had his camera. They crash, he films the crash and the kid says “Hey, the camcorders still on” and the boyfriend turns it off. So why was the battery dead when the others got it? And how does one wire up a flashlight to power a camcorder? In fact, what was the purpose of that whole thing? Just have the camcorder battery be good – there was no reason to have him magically make it work (they didn’t even show how he did it; he just opens a flashlight and boom the camcorder works). And speaking of batteries, what kind of phone has a battery that’s good after being on for over two days? And can survive a trip through the presumably rather acidic innards of a spinosaur digestive track? And rings loud enough to be clearly heard through a dinosaur standing some fourty feet away? Sheesh…
I posted a review at work warning folks to stay far away from this movie. Most of the things I hated have already been discussed here, although I still wonder why we had THREE Helicopter Assault ships (and their associated screening forces) hanging out by Costa Rica.
A friend had a great line which I wish I had thought of but instead I’ll just borrow it: