Category: Classics

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Well, despite the mixed-to-negative reception of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the film was still a huge hit. Not quite as successful as the first one (which made over $1 billion worldwide), but the second one did make over $600 million worldwide, so it only seemed natural that a third one would be in the works. However, this time Steven Spielberg decided to step down as director to instead direct A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Now, Joe Johnston, whose previous credits as director include Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, and Jumanji, was brought in to helm Jurassic Park III. Prior to directing, Johnson actually had experience working in visual effects, having worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, so he already had a bit of a working relationship with Spielberg. In fact, he even asked Spielberg if he could direct the sequel, and while Spielberg did direct The Lost World, he still had Johnson in mind for a third film. So, with a different director and different writers, how did this sequel turn out?

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Let’s get to the plot of this movie first. So, this time around, we follow Dr. Alan Grant, once again played by Sam Neill, who has now become famous for what happened to him back in the first film. We also learn that, in between movies, Ellie Sattler, one again played by Laura Dern, has married another man and has two kids with him. While at a dig site, Grant is visited by Paul Kirby, played by William H. Macy, who, with his wife Amanda, played by Téa Leoni, is asked to join them as a sort of guide while they go flying over Isla Sorna. Grant initially declines but is convinced by his assistant Billy, played by Alessandro Nivola, when the Kirby’s say they’re willing to fund Grant’s dig site. Dr. Grant reluctantly decides to go along with them, but when he discovers they want to actually land on the island, he tries to get out of it only to be knocked out and waking up on the island. They soon run into the new big bad dinosaur of the movie, the Spinosaurus, who literally towers over the T-Rex and, during their fight scene, actually snaps its neck. The group tries to fly off and escape, but the plane ends up crashing in the forest after hitting the Spinosaurus. Soon after, Grant demands to learn the truth of what’s going on, and we find out that Paul and Amanda are actually divorced, aren’t rich to the point that they could fund Grant’s work, and are on the island to find their son Eric Kirby, played by Trevor Morgan, who ended up stranded on the island after a botched parasailing trip with Amanda’s boyfriend Ben. Now stuck on the island, the group has to find the Kirby’s son, survive on the island, and try to find a way off.

Now, I’m gonna be perfectly honest. This sequel is in NO WAY as good as the original Jurassic Park, but it’s honestly better than The Lost World in my opinion. For one, much like the last movie where it was great having Jeff Goldblum back, here it’s great to have Sam Neill returning as the lead once again. While his character is very similar to how he was in the first movie, he also plays his character as someone going through PTSD and he has a few nightmares about what happened to him back in the first one. There’s a particularly notable one where he wakes up to find a raptor on his plane that says, “Alan!” Of course, this was just his assistant Billy, and while the scene is kind of goofy, contextually it does make sense. Also, much like the first one, I like that they had regular civilians in this one instead of the mercenaries from the second one. Granted, Téa Leoni can get a bit aggravating with her constant yelling and screaming, and William H. Macy does play his part sort of as a doofy sitcom dad, but they do have scenes together where they work as a couple. Plus, Trevor Morgan as the son, much like Lex and Tim from the first film, is pretty likable and can clearly take care of himself. He isn’t some annoying kid who constantly is in danger. In fact, I’d argue that he does more in this movie than his parents do! Like the first film, the effects in this movie, both the practical and CGI, are outstanding. Literally, there are scenes where the CG is blended so well with the practicals that you often can’t tell which is which. And I’ll be honest, I thought the Spinosaurus was kinda cool. Yes, I was pissed to see it kill the T-Rex, but it was a nice way to introduce a new big bad dinosaur, even if this was its only movie.

I will admit that while I did enjoy this movie more than the second one, there are still quite a few problems I had with this one. For one thing, the setup was almost a bit too similar to the previous film, where a returning character from the first film is asked to go back to the island, they refuse, but then they’re told something that makes them reluctantly go. In The Lost World, it was that Malcolm’s girlfriend was there, whereas here, it’s because the Kirby’s offer to fund Grant’s dig, which is actually similar to the setup of the first film. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that this movie, aside from some of the new dinosaurs they introduce here, doesn’t really do much of anything different. Also, with the previous two films, they seemed like B-movies on the surface, but they actually had some kind of message behind them and tackled quite a few issues that are still relevant today. Here, there really isn’t much a lesson to be had, except maybe don’t go to an island inhabited by dinosaurs, be closer to your loved ones, or something like that. This film does play a lot more like a B-movie, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it makes this film at least more enjoyable than the second one, but even still. That being said, while this film doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing the magic of the first film and it doesn’t necessarily have some of the appeal of the second one, Jurassic Park III is still a fun ride that actually manages to be slightly more enjoyable in spite of itself.

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After the massive success of the first Jurassic Park, it seemed only natural that Universal would want to make a sequel almost immediately. For the sequel, Steven Spielberg returned to direct, David Koepp, who wrote the first film, came back to pen the sequel, John Williams came back to score the film, and this time, it was adapted from Michael Critchon’s follow-up to his original novel, 1995’s The Lost World. While the novel was not very well-received, it still was a success, spending eights weeks at the top of the New York Times Best-Seller list. Much like the book, the only main returning character from the first film is Ian Malcolm, once again played by Jeff Goldblum. Released four years after the original, The Lost World: Jurassic Park certainly had a lot to live up to, given how critically-acclaimed and financially successful the first movie was. Does this sequel live up to the first one, or does it fall short of its expectations? Well….it’s a bit of both. So, let’s get into it.

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Taking place four years after the events of the first film, we open on a family vacationing on Isla Sorna, an island off the coast of Costa Rica near the island from the previous film, Isla Nublar. The family’s daughter is attacked by small dinosaurs called compsognathuses, and they file a lawsuit against Hammond’s company InGen. As a result, Hammond’s nephew Peter Ludlow, played by Arliss Howard, now owns the company and plans to go to Isla Sorna with a team of mercenaries to capture the dinosaurs on the island and bring them back to San Diego to open a new park. So, Hammond asks Malcolm to go to the island to document the dinosaurs to try and get support to stop human interference on the island and turn it into a protected sanctuary for the dinosaurs. Initially refusing, Malcolm is convinced to go when he learns that his girlfriend, paleontologist Dr. Sarah Harding, played by Julianne Moore, is already on the island. After meeting with his team, including equipment specialist and engineer Eddie Carr, played by Richard Schiff, and videographer/activist Nick Van Owen, played by Vince Vaughn, Ian Malcolm sets off for the island to find his girlfriend and stop the mercenaries from exploiting the dinosaurs.

I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader. This movie isn’t very good. Honestly, this movie should be good. It’s following up on one of the best films of the 90s, it has the same director, the same writer, the same composer, the same effects guys, and Jeff Goldblum in the lead. It should work, but it just doesn’t. The movie is honestly really boring. Admittedly, the setup for it is decent, and it is nice to Hammond, Lex, and Tim again, even if it’s for a small cameo. Even though the reason for having Malcolm go back to the island is weak, and even he points out that much of this is a bad idea, Ian Malcolm was one of the best characters from the first film, and Goldblum is so watchable and charismatic that he can elevate anything he’s in. In addition, this movie does have a pretty decent supporting cast. In addition to Moore, who was also in Boogie Nights the same year, there’s also character actors like Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Stormare, Richard Schiff, Ian Abercrombie, and Arliss Howard. ILM returns to do the digital dinosaur effects, and Stan Winston and his crew return to design the practical dinosaur effects as well. There are also a few fun sequences in the movie, including one where Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick narrowly survive falling to their deaths in their lab/trailer, and especially in the last act when a T-Rex is let loose in San Diego and goes on a rampage. There are some good elements to the film…but there’s also quite a lot that doesn’t work.

While there are some pretty good actors in here, a lot of them are honestly wasted here. Goldblum kind of looks like he’s just going through the motions, Moore comes across as being a bit of an idiot, and Vaughn is honestly just there and doesn’t really do much. Probably the weakest for me was Vanessa Lee Chester as Kelly, Malcolm’s daughter, who solely exists just to get in danger all the time. She even has probably one of the dumbest moments in any movie ever where, after earlier establishing that she’s a gymnast, she uses her gymnastic abilities to kick a raptor through a wall. Watching the scene, I was laughing quite hard at just how ridiculous that was, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to or not. Also, while I criticized Nedry and Gennaro from the first film for being two-dimensional villains, they were at least memorable and they were only in about half of the movie. Here, the villains feel like they’re out of a Saturday morning cartoon. The Peter Ludlow character is basically an evil version of Hammond, where Hammond was at least kind, caring, and had good intentions, Ludlow is the cliche exploiting-mother-nature-for-profit villain we’ve seen time and time again. Like I mentioned earlier, there is quite a lot of spectacle in the movie, but the characters and plot are so poorly-written that you really just don’t care.

So yeah, it unfortunately didn’t live up to the expectations set by the first film. To be fair to the film, it would’ve been very difficult to make a worthy successor to the original Jurassic Park. As I stated in my review for that, it was one of those rare lightning-in-a-bottle movies that just can’t be replicated. Even with that said, in summation, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a very flawed sequel that has some good moments and a glimmer of what made the first movie work, but it ultimately lacks the charm and seems to forget that you need a great story and characters before you need dazzling special effects. Here’s hoping the next one is at least slightly better than this one.

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In 1990, novelist Michael Crichton, known for writing books such as The Andromeda Strain, Congo, and Sphere, published the novel Jurassic Park. A cautionary tale about genetic engineering and almost a modern-day Frankenstein story, the book went on to become a major bestseller and is widely regarded as his best work. Following its success, it wasn’t too long before Hollywood decided to get their hands on it and adapt it to film. After a major bidding war amongst studios and directors like Tim Burton, Richard Donner, and Joe Dante being considered, it was picked up by Universal and Steven Spielberg was chosen to direct. Of course, Crichton was no stranger to films since he also wrote and directed films like Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Runaway, and this wasn’t the first time Spielberg made a movie based on a literary work, having also done Duel, Jaws, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, and Hook. Making a movie of this scale would prove to be quite a difficult challenge, but what came out of it was not only one of the best films of the 90s, but probably one of the most important and seminal films ever made.

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Synopsis

The film follows archaeologists Dr. Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill, and Dr. Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern, who are invited by billionaire John Hammond, played by Richard Attenborough, to visit a new theme park he has built on Isla Nublar, located off the coast of Costa Rica. While initially skeptical, Hammond promises to fund a significant portion of their research, so Grant and Sattler decide to join him. On their way to the island, they also meet Donald Gennaro, played by Martin Ferrero, a lawyer who has been brought in by the park’s investors to make sure the park is safe to open and insists on having experts brought in to validate the park’s safety. He also brings an expert, mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum. When they arrive at the park, they’re immediately amazed when they see a herd of brachiosauruses, Hammond exclaiming, “Welcome….to Jurassic Park!” We then learn how they’ve been able to breed dinosaurs by extracting the DNA of dinosaurs from mosquitoes that had been encased in amber overtime. To fill in the gaps of the dinosaur genome, they use frog DNA as its the closest match, and they’ve also bred all the dinosaurs to be female so they couldn’t reproduce. Malcolm, however, doesn’t think this would work since, as he puts it, “Life finds a way.” Meanwhile, Hammond’s system programmer Dennis Nedry, played by Wayne Knight, is conspiring to steal some dinosaur embryos to sell to a corporate rival and, as part of his scheme, shuts off the security system. Unfortunately, this leads to many of the dinosaurs being able to roam around freely and soon chaos ensues as many of them, most notably several velociraptors and a giant T-Rex, go on a rampage.

Review

To put it simply, this movie is a masterpiece of filmmaking. This is one of those rare lightning-in-a-bottle movies where something magical happens and a movie of such high quality is made that it almost can’t be replicated. Pretty much everything in the movie works. The acting is great, and the characters are both likable and memorable, from Neill’s Grant as a dinosaur expert, Dern’s Sattler acting like a dinosaur conservationist, and Goldblum who plays his role almost like a total rockstar. Attenborough is very believable as the enigmatic John Hammond, who you instantly love because he has a passion for bringing the dinosaurs back to life and giving people the chance to see them as if they were at the local zoo. There’s also his grandkids Lex and Tim, played by Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello respectively. Ordinarily, the kids would be the worst part of the movie and be extremely annoying, but these kids rise above that and are fun to watch, from Tim’s overexcitement at seeing these dinosaurs and especially meeting Alan Grant, to Lex’s computer wizardry and how she manages to take care of herself and her little brother. While Nedry and Gennaro are somewhat two-dimensional bad guys, they’re still memorable in their own ways, and it is satisfying to see them both get their comeuppance. The direction from Spielberg is on-point, as it normally is, and the script is very well-written, helped by the fact that it was co-written by Crichton himself. John Williams’ score, as is often the case, is amazing, and the theme has become just as iconic as the film itself.

Then of course, there are the dinosaurs themselves, who are just as much the stars of the film as the actors are. Originally, they were going to use old fashioned stop-motion animation similar to Willis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen, but when they realized that wouldn’t work, they decided to have the dinosaurs done digitally. While normally I prefer stop-motion, I have to admit that the CGI, especially for the time, is amazing to watch. Just the scene where we first see the brachiosauruses alone is a spectacle to behold. While the amazing ILM designed many of the great digital effects, credit also should be given to Stan Winston’s crew who did many of the practical dinosaurs in the movie. Whether it’s the triceratops the main characters find while on their tour who’s very ill, the brachiosauruses the characters find in the trees, or some of the close-ups of the T-Rex, the animatronic dinosaurs look amazing, and they perfectly compliment the CG dinosaurs. It’s no surprise then that the film went on to win an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects the following year. Honestly, I’d be stretching to find anything wrong with the film, but if I did have any, I guess some of the CG does look a bit dated, and the science also seems to be highly implausible, but really, I’m just picking at nits. This film is just phenomenal and is definite required viewing, not just for sci-fi fans or fans of Spielberg, but if you just love movies and love having a good time. As for the sequels, well….as Ian Malcolm would say, “That is one big pile of shit.”

Buy Jurassic Park from Amazon: https://amzn.to/4pcT81a.

Disclosure: The above link is an affiliate link, which means that, at no additional cost, I will earn a commission if you click through the link and make a purchase.

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Where to watch Jurassic Park (1993)

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In the 80s, Orion Pictures was one of many mid-budget studios vying for that sweet spot in the Hollywood elite. However, unlike studios like Cannon or Empire, Orion could squeeze their way in, with such memorable films as The Terminator, Arthur, Hoosiers, and even major Oscar winners like Amadeus and Platoon. Unfortunately, like many other mid-budget studios, they would often have fewer hits than misses. While many of their films were critically acclaimed and even award winners, they also had several bombs, such as Great Balls of Fire! and She-Devil. But then, hope in the form of a huge box office hit would come along with Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop.

Prior to Robocop, Verhoeven made films in The Netherlands including Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange, working with actor Rutger Hauer. Then in 1985, Verhoeven made his transition to American films with Flesh + Blood, which, though having gained a substantial cult following in years since, was not a huge hit at the box office and ended the partnership between Verhoeven and Hauer. Suddenly, he gets a script for a movie called RoboCop, which he ended up throwing away in disgust. Then, his wife picked it up and told him to give it a read. He did and the rest is history.

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Synopsis

Set in a futuristic Detroit, crime runs rampant, and the police are privatized by a multi-million dollar company called OCP. Looking to reduce crime to make way for Delta City, they initially tried a giant robot known as the ED-209. When the ED-209 proves too destructive, they decide to move forward with a program for a cyborg cop. After being gunned down by bank robbers led by Clarence Boddicker, Officer Alex Murphy is turned into this cyborg cop. Now as RoboCop, he stops various crimes, including a convenience store robbery, an attempted rape, and a hostage situation. When his inner humanity starts to break through, RoboCop seeks revenge on the gang that gunned him down. As he takes down the gang, RoboCop ends up confronting Dick Jones, who’s been working with Clarence. With help from his partner Office Anne Lewis, RoboCop sets out to exact his brand of justice.

Review

RoboCop is easily one of the most incredible action sci-fi movies ever made. While on the surface, it is an entertaining, action-packed, and bloody-as-hell movie, there is more to it than that. The over-the-top violence is cartoonish, almost making fun of violent action movies. Throughout the movie, there’s all kinds of social satire in the form of news segments and fake commercials. These help to expand on the world on display, as well as poking fun at American culture. With Verhoeven being Dutch, it’s interesting to see an outsider’s perspective on the rampant consumerism. Plus, it predicts a future where a rundown city is taken over by a giant corporation that’s only interested in money. It tackles issues of reclaiming one’s humanity from corporate America that neglects the psychological effects.

Peter Weller is terrific as the cop-turned-cyborg. As Murphy, he’s instantly relatable and likable. As RoboCop, he’s both incredible and tragic. He kicks all kinds of ass here, including a sequence where he busts a drug factory and mows down everyone in sight. Once he starts rediscovering his humanity, Weller delivers such an emotional performance. You get a sense of the pain he’s feeling and just how tragic his situation is. Nancy Allen is great as Anne Lewis and Kurtwood Smith steals the show as Clarence Boddicker. Ronny Cox shines as the corrupt businessman Dick Jones, and Miguel Ferrer is fun as the sleazy Bob Morton, who’s also RoboCop’s creator. Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner’s script is phenomenal, expanding the concept further than expected. Rob Bottin’s practical effects, mixed in with stop-motion by Phil Tibbett and the Chiodo Brothers, make the film a sight to behold.

On a $13 million budget, which is impressive given the film’s scope, RoboCop made over $53 million. Verhoeven went on to make movies like Total Recall and Basic Instinct. There were two sequels, a live-action television series, at least two animated series, a TV mini-series, comic books, video games, and a quickly forgotten 2014 remake. RoboCop remains an important film in both the action and sci-fi genres and is easily one of my all-time favorites.

Buy RoboCop from Amazon: https://amzn.to/47Y8cKw.

Disclosure: The above link is an affiliate link, which means that, at no additional cost, I will earn a commission if you click through the link and make a purchase.

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Where to watch RoboCop (1987)

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