Jurassic Park III is perhaps the best example of why excellent actors (Sam Neill and William H. Macy have both turned in stellar work in other movies) cannot revive a dead script no matter how much they try, and they do. But there are too many plot holes, outright acts of lunacy, and utter impossibilities for them to overcome.
***SPOILERS***
1) A plane crash usually causes a great deal of injury. Let's see...the plane's wings get torn off, the plane hits a tree, the dinos attack the plane. Does anyone get killed? Well, no, the pilot gets eaten, but the plane crash seems to affect utterly no one.
2) Everyone's favorite carnivore, the T-Rex, has only a cameo in this movie. (I guess the T-Rex must have a better agent than the raptors.) In his place is Spinosaurus, aka "The one with the fin." Spinosaurus wasn't on InGen's lists, we learn in this movie. So how the heck did it get here? The timeline in the JP movies could be anywhere from 10 years to fifteen, there's simply no way a new life form could evolve in that short amount of time. This was a plot development that went nowhere. I was waiting to hear that InGen was developing 'military' dinosaurs for third-world military use; that there was some sort of black-ops project, SOMETHING interesting to explain why Mr. Fin took the Head Baddie spot away from the T-Rex. I would've settled for a geneticist at InGen designing it on his own, 'under the table'. (After all, if *I* knew how to make dinosaurs, I'd probably whip up a few super-carnivores myself.) A possible subplot (perhaps have some Third World baddies who contracted with InGen for their very own Spinosaur and are now trying to get it, for example, at the same time Our Heroes are looking for their boy) could've been made here. How did the Spinosaur get there? Was it a 'black-ops' dinosaur deliberately designed by InGen to eat soldiers? Was it a 'private' project gone horribly wrong? Was it working for a pizza delivery service? We don't know, it just gets dropped.
3) The aforementioned Spinosaur apparently came equipped with its own copy of the script and cloaking technology that the Air Force would envy -- he manages to get from here to there without being seen or heard by the humans (difficult indeed for a creature 70 lbs + and God only knows how many tons) and tracks them down very efficiently. Even when he's eaten the annoying cell phone.
4) The raptors have gone from a Lord-of-the-Flies mentality to a rather high moral stance. When the humans give them back the raptor eggs, they simply take them and after hearing Sam Neill attempt to speak with his handy-dandy raptor-voicing-chamber, they let them live. Apparently the raptors have been flipping through old copies of 'The Rights of Man'. Um, no. What was scary about the raptors from the get-go was their human-level intelligence combined with their complete LACK of human-style morality. Plus, some continuity issues here -- if they couldn't talk in the first two movies, how is it they've developed a whole language of their own now.
5) The kid is awfully well nourished for someone who's been spending eight weeks on an island surrounded by killer T-rex's (and Mr. Fin, of course), raptors, and untold small predators. He arms himself with 10-to-15 year old gas-grenades which work fine, apparently. I'm sorry, that kid would've been eaten within a few hours in reality.
***SPOILERS***
1) A plane crash usually causes a great deal of injury. Let's see...the plane's wings get torn off, the plane hits a tree, the dinos attack the plane. Does anyone get killed? Well, no, the pilot gets eaten, but the plane crash seems to affect utterly no one.
2) Everyone's favorite carnivore, the T-Rex, has only a cameo in this movie. (I guess the T-Rex must have a better agent than the raptors.) In his place is Spinosaurus, aka "The one with the fin." Spinosaurus wasn't on InGen's lists, we learn in this movie. So how the heck did it get here? The timeline in the JP movies could be anywhere from 10 years to fifteen, there's simply no way a new life form could evolve in that short amount of time. This was a plot development that went nowhere. I was waiting to hear that InGen was developing 'military' dinosaurs for third-world military use; that there was some sort of black-ops project, SOMETHING interesting to explain why Mr. Fin took the Head Baddie spot away from the T-Rex. I would've settled for a geneticist at InGen designing it on his own, 'under the table'. (After all, if *I* knew how to make dinosaurs, I'd probably whip up a few super-carnivores myself.) A possible subplot (perhaps have some Third World baddies who contracted with InGen for their very own Spinosaur and are now trying to get it, for example, at the same time Our Heroes are looking for their boy) could've been made here. How did the Spinosaur get there? Was it a 'black-ops' dinosaur deliberately designed by InGen to eat soldiers? Was it a 'private' project gone horribly wrong? Was it working for a pizza delivery service? We don't know, it just gets dropped.
3) The aforementioned Spinosaur apparently came equipped with its own copy of the script and cloaking technology that the Air Force would envy -- he manages to get from here to there without being seen or heard by the humans (difficult indeed for a creature 70 lbs + and God only knows how many tons) and tracks them down very efficiently. Even when he's eaten the annoying cell phone.
4) The raptors have gone from a Lord-of-the-Flies mentality to a rather high moral stance. When the humans give them back the raptor eggs, they simply take them and after hearing Sam Neill attempt to speak with his handy-dandy raptor-voicing-chamber, they let them live. Apparently the raptors have been flipping through old copies of 'The Rights of Man'. Um, no. What was scary about the raptors from the get-go was their human-level intelligence combined with their complete LACK of human-style morality. Plus, some continuity issues here -- if they couldn't talk in the first two movies, how is it they've developed a whole language of their own now.
5) The kid is awfully well nourished for someone who's been spending eight weeks on an island surrounded by killer T-rex's (and Mr. Fin, of course), raptors, and untold small predators. He arms himself with 10-to-15 year old gas-grenades which work fine, apparently. I'm sorry, that kid would've been eaten within a few hours in reality.