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Movie Review: Jurassic Park
by MYERS DUPUY
Friday, July 20, 2001
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Forget what you know about Jurassic Park. It will serve you well when you watch Jurassic Park 3.
An analogy if I may: let's say you're going to your favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant. This is your staple restaurant where you don't have to think, where you know what you want and there's always plenty of it on the buffet. All day long you eat light so you can do some serious damage at the buffet. The moment has finally come. You're starving. You sit down at your usual table with your buddy Cletus looking forward to chicken fried steak, mashed potatos and iced tea. You're just about to get up to head to the buffet and something weird happens. A new waiter, wearing a black jacket and white bow tie comes to your table smiling knowingly. You stare at him, he smiles back at you.
Who's this guy, you say to Cletus. Cletus doesn't know but it doesn't look good.
"We're both having the buffet" you say.
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Yes, the human lives through this scene...<sigh>.
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In a thick French accent, he explains, "Monsieur, I am very sorry, but ze buffet is no available this evening. Instead the chef has prepared a very nice meal for you. Just sit back, I know you're going to like it." You look across the restaurant. The expansive buffet is empty, the lights under the sneeze guard out.
"What the hell..." you say in an indignant, Bill Paxton accent. Before you know it, a bowl of french tomato soup with melba crackers has been placed before you and a white linen napkin has been tucked into your shirt.
"Cletus, what's happnin'?"
The producers, writers, directors of JP3 had no right, NO RIGHT, I say to hold back. I came out of that theatre feeling clean, happy, light and refreshed. Where was the carnage? Where were the successive climaxes just when escape seemed inevitable? I mean, their first shot off the island...they GET OFF THE ISLAND and that's it. They go home and so do you.
Who the hell do they think they are??? Why did JP1 and JP2 do well at the box office? Was it for the story? Was it for the acting? No. It was for the dinasours. No one expected a "good" movie. We expected more dinasours, more fights, more close ups of T-Rex bellowing into the camera, more chases, more rescue attempts. Don't they get it...the movie is a medium for us to look at dinasours. That's it, nothing more.
It's like they heard all of the criticisms (poor story, poor acting) of the first two, took it personally, and decided they'd make a good movie instead. And it was good. It was, technically speaking, the best one they've done (excusing annoying crap like the kid's shirt not being ripped, much less his shoulders still attached, after being carried through the air in the grip of a teradactyl). But it was only an hour and a half! At the end, when they started off the island and the standard Jurassic Park salvation music cued in, I looked at my watch and thought there's no way the movie could be over.
I sat on the edge of my seat cherishing the tension waiting for some scaly beast to rise out of the sea or some big-ass bird to fly in from the air and bat that fucking plane out of the sky. But it just flew off in one direction, and the teradactyls in the other direction. And I whispered in my own Bill Paxton, "What the hell is this..."
The new Jurassic Park 3 brought in two new dinasours which were very cool. The producers seemed to have revived their own extinct Hollywood animal from the past: self-restraint.
If I put my expectations aside, it was an entertaining movie. But damnit, restraint isn't why I go to an all-u-can-eat buffet like Jurassic Park. This isn't Seinfeld who needs to exit the stage early and leave us wanting more. Whether you're a red neck or not, there's a little Cletus in all of us. This was a Summer 2001 Hollywood Blockbuster and they had an obligation to serve it up and serve it up good, real good.
Somebody's conscience got in the way and I want half my money back.
MYERS DUPUY LIVES IN AUSTIN, TEXAS. |
 Send your comments to Coffee Shop Times contributor Myers Dupuy.
Copyright © 2001 The Coffee Shop Times
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