There have been six sequels to Jurassic Park — one trilogy, one reboot trilogy, and one reboot of the reboot — but none of them come close to the excitement and suspense of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Jurassic Park’s magic is deeply connected to its sense of discovery — even if you’ve seen the dinosaur romp a dozen times, the alchemy of John Williams’ score, Industrial Light and Magic’s effects, and Spielberg’s sharp direction of a stellar cast always makes it feel like we’re encountering prehistoric creatures for the first time, in all their beauty and terror. So much of Jurassic Park is about the feeling of “I can’t believe they’ve done this,” and the half dozen sequels struggle to substitute anything quite as astonishing.
Thankfully, 25 years ago, the best Jurassic Park sequel opted for a different approach. Jurassic Park III is still the lowest performing film in the series, and was criticized for being a tired commercial object lacking Spielberg’s magic touch. Director Joe Johnston was a smart choice to step in as director — a former concept artist and effects expert for ILM, he won an Oscar for his work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and directed several effects-heavy crowd pleasers like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji. But the Spielberg protégé taking the reins of Jurassic Park also felt like an acknowledgement that his threequel was emulating the maestro... and coming up short.
A quarter-century on, Jurassic Park III is a flawed diamond in the rough. It puts Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) in the spotlight again, researching raptor fossils and putting the chaos of Isla Nublar behind him — even if it’s the only thing his lecture attendees want to hear about. Wealthy adventurer couple Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) offer him and his assistant Billy (Alessandro Nivola) a hefty sum to give them an aerial tour of Isla Sorna (Site B from The Lost World), but when their plane lands on the abandoned island, Grant discovers the truth — the Kirbys are divorced, not rich, and searching for their son Eric (Trevor Morgan) who went missing while parasailing with Amanda’s new boyfriend. Grant is pissed, which is exactly the performance mode that Neill excels in — he’s so bitter and sarcastic that he might actually take some pleasure in how stupidly this couple has acted.
Rewatching Jurassic Park III in the wake of Sam Neill’s passing makes you appreciate how unique he was as a leading man; he plays the paleontologist hero as principled and crotchety, the only guy who understands why these neo-dinosaurs are so dangerous. A benefit of Sam Neill being an undersung scream king (namely in Possession, In the Mouth of Madness, and Event Horizon) is that he’s not afraid to get weird with it — Jurassic Park III is the only film to feature a talking raptor as a jumpscare.
The urgency and edge of Neill’s performance contributes to Jurassic Park III’s greatest strength — it’s a lean, mean, stripped-back monster movie. At 92 minutes, it’s easily the franchise’s shortest film, with Jurassic World Dominion being a whole hour longer. Being the only sub-two hour Jurassic film is a secret weapon; while Jurassic Park III was criticized for being heavy on action, its setpiece-heavy structure keeps the blood pumping from the moment we touch down on Sorna, providing a killer pace and a constant sense of danger. Rather than building on the first film’s scope and awe, we double down on murderous dinos — when every Jurassic sequel since 2015 has dragged, the fact that Johnston has simulated a short, nasty direct-to-video-like sequel on a blockbuster budget is arresting and refreshing.
While Jurassic Park III feels economic, the shoot was reportedly very difficult, with the production commencing with an incomplete and oft-rewritten script. Several cast members, including Macy and Nivola, found the whole experience frustrating, which Johnston gracefully acknowledged in a 2001 interview with IGN: “They were in constant discomfort in rain, mud, cold night exteriors, and dangerous stunts, many of which were performed by the actors themselves. [...] They were dropped fifty feet into icy water. They were bruised, scraped, cut, knocked down and submerged under water in a closed cage.”
The shoot’s tough, arduous conditions translates to a mood of anxiety and exhaustion in the film’s favor. More than its predecessors, Jurassic Park III leans into monster-movie horror and never passes up an opportunity to make characters jump with a nifty and creative dinosaur ambush. Eight years on from the original, there’s an added reliance on smooth, fluid CGI for the dinosaurs, but in its best setpieces, Jurassic Park III cuts between animatronics, practical special effects, and CG shots to create the sense of a relentless pursuit by real predators, switching up prehistoric foes every 10 minutes from an intelligent pack of raptors to winged Pteranodons to the ferocious T-Rex replacement, the Spinosaurus.
You can’t fault Jurassic Park III for its action, but Nivola wasn’t impressed with the thinness of his character, a critique that could also apply to the rote marriage crisis affecting the Kirby family and — most frustrating for Jurassic fans — how small a role Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) plays in Grant’s story. But the film’s rudimentary approach to drama feels like a necessity to get to what matters. Jurassic Park III gives us the basic building blocks to justify its theme park-esque distillation of the original Jurassic formula. The film understands how to ruthlessly deliver thrills and when to get out, something the franchise hasn’t demonstrated since.
