Jurassic Park III: A Film Review

It has now come time to review the third film in the franchise: Jurassic Park III.  (See my previous reviews of Jurassic Park and The Lost World.)  By almost universal consensus, this is the worst and weakest of the three movies.  The consensus is not wrong.  The plot is lacking in any inspirational writing from Crichton, and it shows.  The acting is poor, the action is poor, the score is inferior (Don Davis instead of John Williams)...and the dinosaurs are inferior, too.  We even have the added insult of another ridiculous paleontology dig scene.  As in the two previous reviews, I will stop here and largely refrain from commenting on almost all aspects of the movie, except one: dinosaurs.

So, what was different about Jurassic Park III when it comes to the dinosaurs?

Where to start?

Why not with the (literally) biggest dinosaur in the film?  Spinosaurus aegyptiacus!
Spinosaurus has been in the news of late, due to the reimagined body plan by Paul Sereno and Nizar Ibrahim.  With the help of National Geographic, the new finds and the new study have been popularized to the point of a National Geographic (October 2014) cover issue, a documentary, and a full-scale model.  (See here for more info.)  While Sereno and Ibrahim are now arguing that Spinosaurus had relatively stubby hind legs and was primarily aquatic, this is not yet entirely proven to the satisfaction of all pending more fossil evidence.  This is brand new data, however, and no expectations can be placed on the 2001 film in this regard.  Recent reconstructions (not limited to Sereno and Ibrahim's model) also have a shaped sail (with anterior and posterior high points with a dip in the middle) and a cranial crest, but to my knowledge the overall body plan of Spinosaurus as presented in Jurassic Park III was more or less semi-accurate at the time.  (The one exception being a lack of a "fish trap" in the jaw--a space between the maxilla and premaxilla.)  And as mentioned in my first review, dinosaurs cannot pronate their wrists (Clappers, not piano players!), and we see Spinosaurus do this when it rolls the jet's fuselage over.

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about Spinosaurus created by the film is the fight between Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex.  Why they actually had to fight in the first place is a piece of information the film seems to lack, but it's the details of the fight that bother me.
Look at Tyrannosaurus rex.  This animal truly was the tyrant lizard king!  Let's take a look at it's massive skull.  We crack jokes about the stubby, worthless little arms of Tyrannosaurus rex, but we need to remember it was likely evolving smaller arms for a reason: to lose forward weight as the skull was abnormally large!  Scalewise, the skull is massive in comparison to most other predator animals.  The bones in the skull are built to withstand enormous pressures.  The banana-sized teeth are strong, robust, and have roots twice as long as the crown.  Depending on your estimate, Tyrannosaurus had a bite force between 600 pounds per square inch (on the very low end) up to 12,800 pounds per square inch (on the higher end).  For comparison, the bite force of a human is about 120-150 pounds per square inch. Tyrannosaurus had a skull, a jaw, and teeth built for crushing the bones of other animals.  It's as simple as that.

Spinosaurus, on the other hand, is a lightweight by comparison.  With a lighter build overall, and especially with a jaw and teeth much more slender and weaker than T. rex (it's even believed that Spinosaurus was primarily a fish-eater), it is ludicrous to me that the the film's Spinosaurus survived a direct bite to the neck, wrenched free, then snapped the neck of Tyrannosaurus, all in mere seconds.  Much more can be said about all of this, but the bottom line is that Tyrannosaurus rex would've easily beaten Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in such a match.  It wouldn't even be a fair fight.  It's as simple as that.

There are a few other concerns with Spinosaurus, such as why the animal seems intent on chasing down puny humans and passing up larger edibles, such as the already-killed Tyrannosaurus rex (Come to think of it, why is this a trend with just about all the theropods in the entire series?), but it is a Jurassic Park film, after all.

Velociraptor received quite the overhaul for this film.  Not only do we have new colors, we have sexual dimorphism, which is quite nice to see (but admittedly conjecture).  The males have quills on their necks (But still no feathers!), and the female has dorsal crests on her skull (Not factual!).  The film attempts to expand on their behavior a little bit, but only succeeds in announcing what was obvious to the viewer in the first film (Alan Grant gasps, “My God!  It’s calling for help!”), and even in inventing a “resonating chamber” that to this day is believed to be real by some viewers.  Furthermore, why the Velociraptor pack would leave its nests unguarded then be so upset when eggs were stolen, and also how the eggs survived in the bag, are also very valid questions….

One new thing we have in this film is an extended Pteranodon scene (rather than The Lost World’s brief end shot).  What could have been a nice addition to the fauna of the island turns into what I can only call a cheap attempt at horror.  Ignoring the exceedingly bad acting in this sequence as well as the ridiculous events, it’s highly unlikely that a pterosaur even of this size could lift up a human being, let alone grip them with its toes.  Oh, and Pteranodon?  It means “toothless wing”…so, guys, when you give the Pteranodon teeth…yeah, no….

We also see the return of Brachiosaurus, and Parasaurolophus.  We see what appears to be Ankylosaurus, as well as Corythosaurus.  In one scene, what can only be described as a depressingly sad attempt at a Ceratosaurus appears, only to quickly be frightened away by Spinosaurus feces.  The skull of this Ceratosaurus is deplorable; it is a bit too boxy, and the eye crests/horns are entirely absent, and the nasal horn is not portrayed accurately (a laterally thin piece of bone a bit rather than an stereotypical "horn").   What was the purpose of this dinosaur even being in the film, with so short a sequence? 

That just about wraps it up for this film.  A few new biological considerations, but little to offer overall as a film, especially considering the relatively superior quality of the first two films.  There is a reason this is considered to be the poorest of the trilogy.

Stay tuned for my review of Jurassic World, which hits theaters tonight!

Spencer Bronte

Science, to a Student