Well, as I previously mentioned, we have the first two Jurassic parks, both based off best-selling books, and both huge successes in the box office. Well, after Steven Spielburg laid another claim to fame, some moron got the stupid idea to make the Jurassic Park franchise into a trilogy. This is where really good can go as bad as you can possible go without actually not making any money whatsoever. This time around, we’ll have a different director, and we won’t be basing the movie off of a best selling novel. No, this time, the third addition to the Jurassic Park story, was scripted form scratch, spawned solely to suck more money form the generally stupid masses of the world, by playing off of their already huge success. And as usual, when this is the motivation, the drive for a movie, it usually turns out to be horribly, horribly bad.

Well as it would be, Jurassic Park 3, was going to be commercialized to hell, which should have been the first sign to me, because normally I am good at fingering the bad movies before I’ve even seen them. However, my overly dumbfounded love for Jurassic Park blinded me form the obviousness of the truth. My first clue should have been the reason to fly these characters back to an island we already know is the place where nightmares happen on a regular basis. Well, the script writers, simply threw something together in about five minutes and came up with a hardly convincing plot based on a kid, who, while in the company of his step father, and his moronic friends, went parasailing off the coast of Isla Sorna. Well, as you might have guessed, something inevitably bad happens, and the kid is stranded alone on the island alone. Now his mom and father trick Dr Grant to go back to the island, to be their “guide”, but don’t let him know half of the truth. Now they make the case later in the movie that Grant was never on Isla Sorna, he was on Isla Nublar, and they acted like it was a casual mistake, wheras according to the story, isla Nublar was wiped out, and as a result of bad script writing, the story was farfetched on this idea, and hardly any fun to watch.

Here’s where it gets even better. Just when you think the movie is saved, when you see the T-Rex’s head rise above the dead carcass, and chase the characters down, it end up fighting the gigantic Spinosaurus, a huge alligator, lizard looking thing, with a long snout, and a giant fin. Yeah, a fin. Well, the two of them duke it out for superiority, and the Spinosaurus of course wins. It’s not that it wins, that really gets to me. It’s the fact that it BROKE THE T-REX’S NECK. It was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve got you just where I want you!” Snap! But in any case, there were so many things wrong with this movie, I’d have to write a term paper on it to cover every painful detail. Any other insights on other movies? Anyone want to defend THIS one?

On the same note---but done well. Did anyone watch Skinwalkers yesterday? It was a PBS movie made from Tony Hillerman's Novel of the same name.

They did a very good job and captured the flavor of the book. Most likely because Hillerman himself had a lot to do with it and he commented that the first thing an author needs to do is realize you can't film a book. He said you can capture elements of the book, but that what you are really after is the same feeling.

They did a good job and I hope they make more of his books into shows.

The best science fiction book-to-movie adaptation I can think of is Blade Runner. IMO the worst is Dune, and that might only be because I haven't seen Starship Troopers. I think Contact and Bicentennial Man are both underrated, but both could have been done better.

*and inaccurate. weren't those pterodactyls (sp?) walking on two legs...?

TTFN & lol

Cosmi

The second one, however, I saw after I read the book, and I have to say I was severely disappointed. They did no less that ruin the book by making such a bad movie. For one thing, they completely eliminated the Andy character, a charming little negro genius (does that sound condensending? Because I really don't mean it to) who, along with his friend (who's name I forget) are assistants to...Leinier(?). Instead, they made the girl, Andy's friend, the adopted daughter and amalgam of both the children, it seems, of Ian Malcolm. A bad move, in my opinion.

There are other things, but I'm writing this post and simultaneously chatting with a friend, so it slipped my mind. Oops.

Either way, I thought that JP3 was pretty decent, even if it was little more than eye-candy (Just another sheep in the flock, man. Just another sheep in the flock) and I wouldn't mind seeing the first one again. If only to remind myself why I did or did not like it. I'm reading the novel, though (haven't started yet, but I have it from the library) and I'm not looking forward to discovering the major differences between it and the movie.

Constantly distracted, forgetful, and absent-minded,

Chris.

ps. aren't forgetful and absent-minded the same thing?