Fun in a Chinese laundry (7/20/01)
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Jurassic Park Three. [Joe Johnston, 2001.]
Despite his loud protests that he’ll never whiff tyrannosaur again, ace paleontologist Sam Neill falls for the old seven-figure-check trick, abandons his dig in Montana, flies to L’Isle d’Dinos, and, after the mandatory crashlanding, discovers he’s expected to lead the search for Lost [but Plucky] Lad Trevor Morgan — last seen augering into the jungle in the credit sequence — on behalf of estranged but temporarily reunited parents William H. Macy and Tia Leoni. The dread certainty of repeated attacks by giant lizards is of course as nothing beside the possibility of reuniting the nuclear family, and, despite the best efforts of Stan Winston’s animators to stop them [the pterandons were particularly impressive], the party eventually succeeds in reaching the coast and reaffirming the vows never to set foot on the island again that they’ll be breaking in the opening reel of
Jurassic Four.
Neill’s repeated denunciations of all this Frankensteinian meddling with the natural order are getting pretty tired. The phenomenal success of this franchise makes two things clear: first, at the very instant it becomes possible to genetically engineer a dinosaur, someone will do it [and the world will immediately beat a path to his door to gawk at it]; second, if there really were an island full of prehistoric monsters off the coast of Costa Rica, no quarantine would be adequate to keep people out of it. In fact, they’d be shooting the next season of
Survivor there as we speak, and all America would be arguing over lunch which of the participants ought next to be sacrificed to appease the anger of the reptile gods.
Somebody get me Spielberg’s number. I feel a pitch coming on.
____________Reality bytes (7/19/01)
