In Defense of the Jurassic Park Franchise's Most Reviled Entry

Jurassic Park III contains two talking dinosaurs.

The first is a velociraptor which Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) dreams is in a plane with him, as it approaches Isla Sorna, an island filled with very real and (as far as we know) mute raptors.

The second is Barney, of Barney & Friends, who appears on a TV screen and briefly distracts Ellie Sattler's (Laura Dern) 2-year-old son while he receives a desperate call for help from Grant, now stranded on Sorna.

For most viewers, one talking dinosaur was enough--two was unbearable. The Raptor On a Plane scene is mostly remembered as the self-parodying nadir of the once-mighty franchise which began with a movie that seemed like the Citizen Kane of summer blockbusters.

Well--everyone's wrong.

The talking raptor dream is a fun and inventive way to heighten tension in a crucial sequence--Dr. Grant knows something is wrong, but he can't quite figure out what--and signal to the audience that this is a different kind of Jurassic Park picture.

The kind where a bumbling suburban dad thinks he needs spare change to get food from a vending machine in an abandoned office on a deserted island. The kind where a young survivor wards off dinosaurs by harvesting T-Rex piss. The kind where a raptor attack begins with a play on the old "is that head in a jar alive or dead?" gag from "Young Frankenstein." The kind where the heroes are forced to dig through mountains of dinosaur poop to find a life-saving satellite phone.

In short, a well-needed shot of levity for this often ponderous franchise.

I mean, how bad could a dinosaur movie with Michael Jeter possibly be?

I also know something many of its detractors don't--in the midst of a troubled production (it was conceived as a teenage slasher flick and began shooting without a script), the filmmakers turned to two of the greatest satirists of American life, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, to pull it together. Aside from this dino-opus, Payne directed, and Taylor co-wrote, "Election," "About Schmidt," and "Sideways."

It's not like Payne and Taylor's names are an iron-clad seal of quality--their other credits include "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," which I doubt is going to be inducted into the Library of Congress anytime soon. And who knows how much influence over the final product these two had--Payne has demurred when asked, claiming he's only credited due to Writer's Guild rules and that he mostly added jokes that were cut.

Well, maybe.

But it's hard not to see their stamp on this tale of bickering suburbanites trying to survive on Dinosaur Island. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a satire of modern existential angst with a T-Rex. But Payne and Taylor are astute observers of human behavior, and there's a nice element of behavioral comedy mixed with the dinosaurs. The light, winking theme is a welcome break from the portentousness of the franchise's other entries, and director Joe Johnston does a better job navigating the tones of comedy and scares than he gets credit for.

Consider the sequence of events that puts the plot into gear. Most Jurassic Park movies involve a corporate scheme of some kind, but this element in JPIII turns out to be a ruse. Dr. Grant, back to his bone-digging ways, and his young assistant are approached by the Kirbys (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni), who claim to be wealthy industrialist thrill-seekers hoping to tour, by air, the only island on Earth with live dinosaurs. Grant reluctantly agrees after promises of an unlimited checkbook--but is a bit perplexed by the ominous-looking "friends" they bring along.

It was all a con. The Kirbys, who are actually divorced, were hoping to rescue their boy, stranded on the island weeks earlier. Those friends were hired mercenaries, who turn out to be terribly ill-equipped for what's on the island. Oh, and Paul Kirby isn't an industrialist but owner of Kirby Paint and Tile Plus, and that check had no hope of clearing. (He'd be happy to remodel their kitchen, though.)

As it happens, making all of your characters idiots can really streamline the plot. With a minimum of fuss, everyone is stranded on the island and we get the basic idea of what the movie is about.

For another example, notice how the movie deals with a plot dilemma which came with the casting of Neill. Dr. Grant's experience was on Isla Nublar, the site of the failed theme park in "Jurassic Park." But the only living dinosaurs are now on Isla Sorna, the "Site B" where the creatures were actually bred and raised and was revealed in "The Lost World." So why would they recruit Dr. Grant to guide them through an island he's never set foot on?

Simple--they got confused.

"You mean there's two islands with dinosaurs on them?" the Michael Jeter mercenary asks, befuddled.

Problem solved.

The Jurassic Park franchise has always had an Achilles heel of insufferable self-seriousness--no more so than with its second entry, easily my vote for Steven Spielberg's most dreary and uninspired work. JPIII flips the script by embracing, in a very un-Spielbergian fashion, its true nature as a drive-in monster movie, with no pretensions of transcending it.

In fact, the movie starts to feel like one of Payne & Taylor's road movies, although I suspect this has much more to do with its slapdash production than their input. It's eventually just one set piece after another, with little plot business getting in the way and not much of a climax.

And some of those set pieces are really clever.

Take the long-awaited attack by flying dinosaurs, which happens during a remarkably effective "birdcage" sequence and features a terrifying double-take by a pterodactyl.

Or look at how much fun the movie has playing with Jurassic Park's trope of velociraptors as the highly intelligent members of the reptile class. The raptors set traps, lure the people into confined spaces, and ultimately engage in a well-executed bit of inter-species diplomacy with the humans to prevent further bloodshed. (It's possible this is the movie's climax--I'm not sure.)

JPIII ends with a memorable image of the pterodactyls flying off the island--ostensibly setting up another sequel, although to me it's making the point that the dinosaurs are no longer confined by the island, or any of the humans' attempt to contain them.

It opens up, literally, a world of possibilities for future Jurassic Park films. At this point, any of these dinosaurs could have gotten anywhere--Africa, Europe, Central Park. They could do whatever kind of dinosaur movie they wanted.

Therefore, I was a bit baffled by "Jurassic World's" decision to ignore all of this, and--allegedly at Spielberg's insistence--return to the tale of a theme park gone awry.

The franchise has struggled for a reason to exist since the 1993 hit, the only Jurassic Park movie that was truly a cultural marker. So I guess it wasn't so surprising that the filmmakers returned to the well and packed "Jurassic World" with obligatory nostalgia-bait, as well as foreboding speeches highlighting Michael Crichton's original themes about humanity's endless capacity for greed and entertainment. (Also, never-ending plot holes.) The movie doubled down on the first one's self-critical streak--(the dinosaurs are like movies, in case you hadn't figured that out yet)--and laboriously slogged through an undercooked an unaffecting Frankenstein theme, with an asinine subplot about training raptors for military combat awkwardly jammed in.

I think I'll take the silly dinosaur movie that knows it's silly, thank you very much.