capsule : a short punchy action sequel to the two dinosaur films made by steven spielberg . joe johnston directs a straightforward story of an excursion back to the island of the dinosaurs . it lets us see some new dinosaurs ( is that an oxymoron ? ) and gives us a nice and generally reasonably written adventure . the film is neither ambitious nor pretentious . <POS> i had a good time </POS> . , low +2 ( -4 to +4 ) here goes my credibility . this is a film on which i expect to be in a minority . i liked the third jurassic park film . i even liked the second jurassic park film . in a lot of ways jurassic park : the lost world was a creative three-way braiding together of michael crichton's novel the lost world , arthur conan doyle's novel the lost world , and the classic silent film version of the doyle . jp2 was an adventure , as doyle said , " for the boy who's half man or the man who's half boy . " that is what all the jurassic park films are . expecting them to give the viewer insights into the human condition is like expecting your car to vacuum your house . the classic adventure films like gunga din or king solomon's mines had under-written characters also . jurassic park iii is an all out adventure on an island inhabited by dinosaurs . the characters are a little more complex than they at first appear to be , and even that is a little more complex than i was expecting . some of the characters who start out looking stupid and useless prove to be neither as the film proceeds . that degree of complexity combined with those very realistic looking dinosaur effects is just about as much as i require . <POS> i feel i got my money's worth </POS> . the story opens with eric ( played by trevor morgan ) and friend parasailing near the forbidden island of isla sorna off costa rica . this was the research island where the dinosaurs were created for the now defunct jurassic park . they hope , no doubt , to get a look at the island's dinosaurs from a safe height . the height is safe , but driving the boat in the water is not . the two soon find themselves in trouble and have to ditch their parasail onto the island where they do indeed get a better look at the dinosaurs than they had intended . flash to the united states and someone is offering to fund paleontologist alan grant ( sam neill ) in his research if he will go and fly over isla sorna and act as a guide . he has said that no force on earth or heaven could get him back near real dinosaurs . but again money convinces him to drop what he is doing and go . doing the convincing is a wealthy and eccentric couple ( william h . macy and tea leoni ) who has been just about everywhere else in the world and wants the adventure of seeing real dinosaurs . they too plan to see the island from a safe height grant is relieved to learn . he will fly over this island at a safe altitude just this once . right . guess what happens next ? jp3 probably functions better as a sequel than jp2 . first it has alan grant and ellie sattler ( laura dern ) back rather than the much less appealing ian malcolm . sattler has a much smaller part in jp3 , but is still present to tie this story to the first . curiously each film seems to arrange to have a signature scene with characters holding on to some large metal object that is about to fall some great distance . one thing that does not quite fit with the earlier films is just as grant discovers that raptors may be able to talk to each other , suddenly they seem to be doing it all the time . they did not appear to be conversing in the previous films . of course , these raptors look a little different also , so perhaps they are a different related species . not only are they more intelligent than in the past films , they are also more sympathetic . in this story they are not just killing machines , they have reasonable motives for what they do beyond nutrition . this time around they may be a little too anthropomorphized . each new film in the series introduces us to some new dinosaurs , of course . in this film a major threat is from a spinosaurus , not as common or as popularly known as a tyrannosaurus , but larger and presumably more nasty . it has a crocodile's head and the body that looks like a dimetrodon walking upright . perhaps as an economy measure or just to create a mood the visual effects team frequently obscures our view of the dinosaurs . sometimes they just move too fast to see . occasionally darkness or fog obscures our vision . a few times we get unconvincing matte shot , particularly of the laboratory . but there is less money on the screen in terms of dinosaur effects than in the two previous films . the musical score by don davis borrows heavily from john williams's score for the first film . joe johnston , who directs , already has to his credit two very good films i recommend the rocketeer and october sky . a team including alexander payne and jim taylor known for election writes the screenplay . the film they have made is a long way from great cinema , but <POS> it still is fun </POS> . if you get a thrill from seeing what look very much like live dinosaurs alive today , <POS> the film is for you </POS> . i rate it a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale .
