More Jurassic Park sequels
after The Lost World had the flexibility to chart their own route because there
were no more Crichton novels to base them on. Jurassic Park 3, directed by Joe
Johnston and released in summer 2001, was the least financially successful
movie in the series, resulting to a 14-year sabbatical before Jurassic World
brought the franchise back. While many would blame the slump on negative reviews,
a repetitive idea, or waning cultural interest in dinosaurs, an often neglected
factor may be even more essential.
Jurassic Park 3, at the
time of its release, was representative of the type of movie that would very
soon die off: The standalone franchise sequel. When looked at within that
context, it provides a great example of a franchise that failed to anticipate
the changes that were about to occur in the moviemaking marketplace.
Join us for the third part
in our retrospective of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films.
2001: A Serial Odyssey
2001 is a critical year for film because of
how it provided the foundation for the landscape of 21st century blockbusters.
It firmly established the audience’s preference for serialized film franchises,
where each installment is looked at just as much if not more as a chapter of a
bigger story than an independent work. Audiences became hungry for movies where
sequels picked up on character and story arcs that ran through multiple films,
where franchises had deeply textured world-building and internal mythologies.
While 1999 saw the return of the Star Wars saga (undoubtedly the most popular
serialized film series up to that point in time) with The Phantom Menace, it
wasn’t until 2001 that the trend took hold in a way that was essentially
irreversible.
That year saw the beginning of both the Harry Potter and Lord of
the Rings film franchises, both of which would become box-office juggernauts
and see their immediate sequels released the very next year. Sam Raimi’s
Spider-Man trilogy soon followed, paving the way for a little franchise called
the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the pattern continues with almost every
major film series after that as properties reinvented themselves so that their sequels
felt like direct continuations of the narratives from the preceding entries.
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Casino Royale started a string of serialized 007 movies, The
Matrix trilogy dropped two sequels in 2003, basically making them more of a
two-parter than standalone films. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy kicked off
in 2005 as a far more interconnected series than the one started in 1989. And
so on and so on. Self-contained “it’s just another movie” sequels that weren’t
designed to set up or pay off grander narrative designs were going out of
vogue, and Jurassic Park 3 showed up to the party wearing last year’s outfit.
A Jaunt Through the
(Dinosaur Infested) Countryside
So, if on a macro level Jurassic Park 3 is a
non-mythology sequel in a franchise that went dormant after its release, what
is it on a micro level? Well, it’s exactly the sort of movie you’d expect to
see when you hear “Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park”: A briskly-paced,
self-contained, family-friendly adventure movie. Such movies had been Johnston’s
bread and butter for years, with other notable directorial efforts from him in
the same vein including The Rocketeer, the live-action portions of The
Pagemaster, Jumanji, and later on, Captain America: The First Avenger. At the
time he was hired to direct Jurassic Park 3, Johnston tended to make
unpretentious adventure movies with an old-school mentality, where everything
was left on the field and any hypothetical threads for future installments were
basically a non-concern.
While Johnston’s sensibilities provide some reasonably
well-executed setpieces and an astonishing 92-minute runtime (is it even legal
for a major franchise sequel released today to be that short?), his humble
approach to making the film sadly can’t help but read as unambitious when
compared to his contemporaries. At a time when similar franchises and
filmmakers were taking bold leaps and building grander worlds for their
audiences to get invested in, Jurassic Park 3 is decidedly stuck in the past.
The movie once again conjures another excuse to get people on the dinosaur
island, and the people have to run away from the dinosaurs until the designated
survivors inevitably escape the dinosaur island. Roll credits.
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