Jurassic Park III is the most expensive Jurassic Park parody you’ll ever see

Jurassic Park III hails from a very different time in franchise moviemaking. When sequels could just have numbers, not increasingly long and abstruse subtitles, and the credits scene was but a twinkle in the eye of Kevin Feige. The first Jurassic Park movie to neither be directed by Steven Spielberg nor based on the plot of a Michael Crichton novel, Jurassic Park III made baby Brontosaurus steps into the realm of creator-agnostic blockbuster franchises that dominates cinemas today — and the results are fascinatingly prophetic. 

But more importantly, the results are also so strange that they must be seen to be believed, and seeing them is truly entertaining. This is a movie where a Spinosaurus swallows a satellite phone and unintentionally creates a metaphor for Jurassic Park’s modern franchise success. 

2022’s Jurassic World Dominion may have had the feather of bringing Sam Neill and Laura Dern back to the fold as older versions of doctors Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, but that laurel first rested on Jurassic Park III, in which Grant gets literally suckered into once again getting stranded in the jungle of a dinosaur-infested Costa Rican island. (Neill has noted that he turned down a role in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to take the JPIII job, and oh buddy.) 

Téa Leoni and William H. Macy play a middle-class divorced couple whose son was stranded on Isla Sorna — the backup theme park island that featured in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park — during an illegal parasailing jaunt with his mother’s boyfriend. But while they’re apparently apt enough to fool Grant into thinking they’re rich donors who just want a guided flyover, they’re apparently not apt enough to do the basic research necessary to know that he wasn’t stranded on this island. The plot quickly turns toward survival, with a side order of kid rescue and an ongoing subplot about Grant’s paleontological hypothesis that Velociraptors are intelligent enough to have their own dinosaur language. 

From that plot came prophecy: The nostalgia play of bringing in actors from the decade-old movie much better than this one, casting Hollywood well-knowns on the rise as new leads, the reveal (though without much effect on the plot) that the scientists here were beginning to engineer genetic hybrid dinosaurs for sinister purposes — all these are pillars of Jurassic Park’s modern expansion to the World franchise. Behind the scenes, JPIII had other hallmarks of modern franchise blockbusters — shooting long stretches of the movie without a finished script, and actors complaining about a production that felt “rudderless.” 

Also from that plot: unintentional parody. 

If there’s one scene from Jurassic Park III that I repeatedly find in the wild, it’s an early moment where a Velociraptor says Alan Grant’s name out loud (it’s a dream sequence). But honestly? I’ve never understood why that’s what stuck in people’s minds when there are so many other bizarre ideas scattered throughout the movie. 

Some of it’s just random miscellany: The movie’s child protagonist has survived alone on the island in part by splashing Tyrannosaurus pee around. (Grant asks him how he got the pee in the first place. “You don’t want know,” he answers. This is never followed up on.) Beloved character actor Michael Jeter, most famous at the time for playing Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle, plays a hardened mercenary. (Who dies screaming.) 

But in some of the weirdness of JPIII you can see the movie trying to hit the same buttons and revive the same highs of the franchise’s first entry. There are attempts to lovingly reference the smartest, most iconic ideas in Spielberg’s original, timeless high-concept action thriller, like Alan Grant stuck in a survival situation with somebody else’s kid. But they come off as if they were copied down through a funhouse mirror. 

For example: In the final moments of JPIII’s rushed ending, Grant sits, tired and safe, in a departing helicopter, watching winged animals kite leisurely through the sky. But they’re not birds — they’re a pack of deadly, car-sized Pterodactyls that he barely escaped a day ago. It’s no longer a tone-resetting visual meditation on how dinosaurs are animals that are still here with us today, but a situation that makes you go, “Uhh, shouldn’t somebody be doing something about that?” while the characters act like it’s a philosophical meditation. 

But the most bananas way that Jurassic Park III reinterprets the original Jurassic Park and says “Hey, isn’t this good?” when it’s super not is its Spinosaurus. It’s a logical attempt to raise the stakes beyond the iconic Tyrannosaurus that until then had served as the franchise’s peak dinosaur. I’m not complaining about this proto-Indominus rex direction; the Spinosaurus is fine. But I will never let go of the insanely wrong-headed spin Jurassic Park III puts on one of the coolest recurring motifs in the franchise. 

It’s iconic. In a quiet moment, the puny humans of a Jurassic Park movie hear a slow, titanic footstep, and as the sound continues, they confirm their fears in the ripple of a puddle or a glass of water. The T. rex has arrived — and shit’s about to go down. But throughout Jurassic Park III, and this is played entirely seriously, the characters know that the Spinosaurus is nearby because it ate a continually ringing satellite phone. 

I must emphasize that I saw this with my family in theaters, and every single time the Spinosaurus showed up, we all had a moment where we thought it was some asshole who’d left their phone on. And 24 years later, I can’t help thinking of that ringtone as an alarm bell — an attempt to recapture the magic of the film that started the franchise, with all the grace of a tinny cellphone ringtone in a quiet movie theater. 

And it’s that layer of retrospective schadenfreude that makes me willing to sit down and watch Jurassic Park III at the drop of a hat. It’s a movie that tried to be a modern franchise blockbuster 15 years too early. And it’s a movie that couldn’t be any dumber without crossing the line into outright parody of its own concept. 

Jurassic Park III is streaming on Hulu.